These arguments constantly devolve into "why would you want an APPLE product that's less good than $_new_shiny_PC_thing" and it's always currently available products being pitched against conceptual products in the heads of Intel's fanboys that may come to market in a year. It's a ridiculous comparison.

I got an M3 Pro Macbook Pro on clearance recently for $1,600, 16 inch screen brighter than any PC laptop's I've ever seen, that's the fastest computer I have ever used, hands down and it's 2 generations out of date already. OR I can have a PC gaming laptop where the fit and finish isn't as nice, where the screen is blurrier, the battery life maxes out at 4 hours if I do absolutely nothing with it, and any time I do anything of remote consequence the fans kick up and make it sound like it's trying to take off.

And that's without even taking into account the awful mess Windows is lately, especially around power management. It makes every laptop experience frustrating, with the same issues that were there when I was in fucking high school.

Like if you just hate Mac, fine, obviously a Mac is a bad fit for you then and I wouldn't try and tell you otherwise. But I absolutely reserve the right to giggle when those same people are turning their logical brains into pretzels to justify hating a Mac when it has utterly left the PC behind in all things apart from gaming.

I have a PC on the other side of my wall from where I'm sitting with a 7800X3D and an nvidia 4090. It's for gaming only most of the time, though I do take advantage of the 4090 for some basic LLM stuff, mostly for local audio transcription and summarizing (I take a lot of notes out loud, I speak faster than I can write). The rest of the time it's playing AAA gaming titles at full tilt at 5120x1440, full res, getting 60fps on basically anything I throw at it, all while sucking down 600W (400 for the GPU alone while playing Cyberpunk). It's a beast. I love it.

I have an M4 Mac Mini on my desk. At full tilt it pulls 30W. It scores higher in benchmarks than my gaming PC. It cost less than my 4090 did on its own, and that's including an upgraded third-party iBoff storage upgrade.

Of course, trade offs and process size differences abound; the M4 is newer, I can pack way more RAM into my PC years after I built it. I can swap cards. I can add another internal SSD. It can handle different kinds of load better, but at a cost of FAR more power draw and heat, and its in a full tower case with 4 180mm fans moving air over it (enough airflow to flap papers around on my desk). It's huge. Lumbering. A compute golem, straining under the weight of its own appetite, coils whining at the load of amps coursing through them.

Meanwhile, at idle, my Mac mini uses less power than the monitors connected to it, and eats up most of the same tasks without ruffling its suit. At full tilt, it uses less power than my air purifer. It's preposterous how good it is for what it costs to buy and run. I don't even regret not getting the M4 Pro.

If you replaced your M4 with an M5 you'd get more performance but the power usage will go up substantially.

OTOH, if you replaced your 7800X3D with Raptor Lake you'll get similar performance for less power.

That was the point I was trying to make: 2025 processors have flipped the script. x86 used to be the power hogs and apple M processors were efficient. In 2025, Apple chose to increase power to increase performance, Intel is the manufacturer with substantially increased efficiency in 2025.

When the Thunderbolt Display came out I was in a raid group and I wanted a display with great refresh rate and low delay (melee character, don’t get stuck standing in the poo). So I researched and researched and the only monitor that had equivalent response times to that dumb Thunderbolt Display was only $60 cheaper, had a plastic shell and I’d have to fight UPS over getting it.

Or I could drive across town and have a monitor today and pay $60 for the aluminum shell that hides dust better.

I think it's sometimes tempting for people to spill logical fallacies trying to argue against Mac lovers, when actually they just have different priors (they just value different aspects of the computer).

Yes, Macs have incredible compute/watt, display quality, and design. However, I like to think of myself as logical, and I would not buy a Mac.

Given the choice between a M5 Mac and a latest-gen ThinkPad, I would not take the Mac. That is fine, and so are people who would do the opposite. We are just looking for different qualities in our computer.

It's all tradeoffs after all - similar to how we value personal freedom in the West, I value freedom to do what I want with the hardware I own, and am willing to accept a performance downgrade for that. (No Windows means that the battery life hit is relatively light. FWIW, there's no chance I would buy a computer locked down to Windows either.)

I also value non-commitment to a particular ecosystem so I prefer not to buy Apple, because I think a significant amount of the device's value is in how seamlessly it integrates with other Apple devices.

However, one day in the future when many of my beliefs have become "bought out", perhaps my priorities will change and I will go all in on the ecosystem. That's OK as well.

I mean you have a much more reasonable and nuanced opinion than the GP so I wouldn't rope you in with the aforementioned mental-gymnastic-ing fanboys. However, I feel the need to take issue here:

> It's all tradeoffs after all - similar to how we value personal freedom in the West, I value freedom to do what I want with the hardware I own, and am willing to accept a performance downgrade for that.

Genuine question: what do you mean locked down? By default the Mac won't run unsigned software, but that's not even today in MacOS 26 an unsolvable issue. I run all kinds of software not signed by Apple daily. There are nuances further still there, like sometimes if you want to install kernel level stuff or tweak certain settings, you have to disable SIP which is definitely a bit of a faff, but that's a Google-able thing that any tech literate person could accomplish inside of 30 minutes.

I would bow to the technical limitations, as you're rather locked to ARM64 compiled software, but I don't recall the last time I saw a piece of software getting current updates that doesn't include a binary for that.

Nit: the M5 Pro isn’t out yet (or even announced). Your system is only one generation out of date :)

Oh I thought we were on M5. Time is a lie, lol.

The M5 is out, but only the base model. The Pro, Max, and Ultra models always take a little longer.

Ohhhh I see what you're saying, okay I thought I did read about the M5 haha!

And even for gaming, depending on what you play it's perfectly serviceable.

Yea, this is how I feel too. I've been hoping that Intel would turn itself around, but Intel has failed at its roadmap over the past few years. Intel canceled 20A and 18A is delayed. It had looked like Intel would leapfrog TSMC, but that didn't come to fruition.

I hope that Intel does well in the future. It's better for us all if more than one company can push the boundaries on fabrication.

I also remember the days when the shoe was on the other foot. Motorola or IBM was going to put out a processor that would decimate Intel - it was always a year away. Meanwhile, Intel kept pushing the P6 architecture (Pentium Pro to Pentium 3) and then NetBurst (Pentium 4) and then Core. Apple keeps improving its M-series processors and single-core speed is up 80% since the M1 and 25% faster than the fastest desktop processor from AMD and 31% faster than the fastest desktop processor from Intel.

I'd love for Panther Lake to be amazing. It will put pressure on Apple to offer better performance for my dollar. Some of performance is how much CPU a company is willing to give me at a price point and what margins they'll accept. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer more cores at a cheaper price, that's a win for Apple users. If an amazing Panther Lake pushes Apple to offer 2nm processors quicker (at higher cost to them), that's a win for Apple users.

But I'm also skeptical of Intel. They kept promising 10nm for years and failed. They've done a bit better lately, but they've also stumbled a lot and they're way behind their roadmap. What kind of volume will we see for Panther Lake? What prices? It's hard to compare a hopeful product to something that actually exists today. Part of it isn't just whether Intel can make 18A chips, but how fast can they produce them. If most of Intel's laptop, desktop, and server processors in 2026 aren't 18A, then it isn't the same win. And before someone says "Apple is just a niche manufacturer," they aren't anymore. Apple is making CPUs for every iPhone in addition to Macs so it has to be able to get CPUs manufactured at a very high scale - around the same scale as the Intel's CPU market.

I hope Intel can do wonderfully, but given how much Intel has overpromised and underdelivered, I'm definitely not taking their word for it.