Apple M2 Posts Single-Thread CPU-Z Bench Score Comparable to Intel Alder Lake

[cvaldes]

The time you are wasting in getting the same operation on a mac equals you more power used.

Clearly you do not understand the concept of performance-per-watt.

Also because gaming is a nono on maca, you are using more power in total .
Arm isn't ready for prime time yet, no matter how appleish its silicon might be

Arm is quite mature for consumer workloads. Things like e-mail, web browsing, photo and video editing, office productivity, etc. You can especially see this in the popularity of Mac notebook computers and battery life in particular.

Remember that Apple isn't using Arm reference cores. They design their own silicon, they are just using the Arm ISA these days. And their GPU architecture is home grown as well. Again, it is heavily optimized for performance-per-watt. The GPU cores aren't specifically designed for gaming library compatibility.

And let's not forget that Apple-designed silicon plays games quite fine on mobile. It comes down to software support and how much game developers want to bend backwards to address a given architecture. To date, most game developers don't think Macs are enough of a market to warrant the extra development cost.

But there are a handful of more modern games that run great on Mac, especially from a performance-per-watt perspective. But no one buys a Mac to game. Better off buying a PS5 or Switch for the larger content libraries.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

The time you are wasting in getting the same operation on a mac equals you more power used.
Also because gaming is a nono on maca, you are using more power in total .
Arm isn't ready for prime time yet, no matter how appleish its silicon might be

These are just generalized claims. While I don't use macOS at work, I am perfectly productive using it at home. I use a Windows machine all day at work, where I'm currently trying the "New Outlook." I know Outlook is not Windows, but if New Outlook is the direction Windows is going, then Windows is about to go in a markedly terrible direction in terms of productivity.

For example, New Outlook's attachment handling is horrible. The preview is nice, but guess what happens when I tell it to open that preview in Excel? "Sorry, don't have that functionality." For opening an attachment? Try to share from Excel to New Outlook? Excel hangs, then an error message saying to restart the mail client. Want to save an attachment to a folder? New Outlook can't do that by drag n drop or "save all." No, you download them as a zip file, then extract that and move them to the folder. What was once a couple steps has now grown to more steps. Simple tasks that I do almost every day at work, and until New Outlook, had worked the same way they always had for my entire 20 year career. Nope. Not New Outlook. And while Office is not Windows, it's from the same friggin' corporation, and just the notion that this is what they have conceived and released to the public, even to "try," is really quite ridiculous. These aren't advanced features, mind you. Open source apps from 10 years ago could do these things. The best I can tell, MS is trying to webify Outlook, which I can assume they'd only do in order to move themselves further from Windows. Yikes.

 

[Beermotor]

Osx reminds me of windows 3.1

It reminds me of NeXTSTEP with a Mac skin on it. More on that later in the post.

Gee, I would hope so. Remember that Windows debuted in 1985 a year after Mac's famous debut in 1984. Windows was Microsoft response to the Macintosh Operating System.


I'll look for this in Windows 11 someday. But "risking" does risky. Dare I try it?

Anyhow as I mentioned, there are both Macs and Windows PCs under my roof as well as Linux devices. I get to see firsthand the pros and cons of all three.

But the M2 Mac crushes my Windows PCs in performance-per-watt. It crushes the performance-per-watt of my older Mac mini 2018 (Intel i7) too. So it's not just the operating system, it has to do with their silicon architecture. The Macs aren't ideal for gaming but I have a PC for that. Horses for courses as they say.

Greetings fellow Mac enjoyer. I'm not singling you out but I wanted to tag off of your post to point out to the thread that modern MacOS (OSX) is just a reskin of NeXTSTEP which saw its first public release 35 years ago in 1989. It was originally a 32-bit Berkley-flavored (BSD) UNIX that ran on the Motorola 68xxx series.

Most of the gripes I have these days with MacOS have to do with the random changes dumbing-down the UI since Mountain Lion. Mountain Lion was peak OSX.

 

[cvaldes]

Yeah, I remember NeXTSTEP although I'd say that enough of macOS has changed that it's just a shadow of the former today. If I recall correctly, NeXTSTEP used DisplayPostScript for graphics which is long gone while Apple has gone through multiple architecture changes on the graphics side. I don't even install X anymore on my Macs like I did twenty years ago.

Don't get me started on the dumbing down of macOS and some of their applications. I still miss Final Cut Express. Many miss Aperture. Of course there are some fine third party alternatives these days so I understand that Apple was prescient in abandoning some of these.

But the dumbing down of Windows is an order of magnitude worse. And the current Windows UI is an absolute mess. I'm running both Windows 10 and Windows 11 systems. I have Windows 7 running in a VM. That's a hoot.

I know that it is very fashionable around these parts to slam Apple at every possible opportunity but I must say that there's is far less pain running macOS from both a daily user angle as well as a system administration perspective. And Linux on the desktop? Appalling. And I used to be a Linux sysadmin.

 

[Cheeseball]

These are just generalized claims. While I don't use macOS at work, I am perfectly productive using it at home. I use a Windows machine all day at work, where I'm currently trying the "New Outlook." I know Outlook is not Windows, but if New Outlook is the direction Windows is going, then Windows is about to go in a markedly terrible direction in terms of productivity.

For example, New Outlook's attachment handling is horrible. The preview is nice, but guess what happens when I tell it to open that preview in Excel? "Sorry, don't have that functionality." For opening an attachment? Try to share from Excel to New Outlook? Excel hangs, then an error message saying to restart the mail client. Want to save an attachment to a folder? New Outlook can't do that by drag n drop or "save all." No, you download them as a zip file, then extract that and move them to the folder. What was once a couple steps has now grown to more steps. Simple tasks that I do almost every day at work, and until New Outlook, had worked the same way they always had for my entire 20 year career. Nope. Not New Outlook. And while Office is not Windows, it's from the same friggin' corporation, and just the notion that this is what they have conceived and released to the public, even to "try," is really quite ridiculous. These aren't advanced features, mind you. Open source apps from 10 years ago could do these things. The best I can tell, MS is trying to webify Outlook, which I can assume they'd only do in order to move themselves further from Windows. Yikes.

The new Outlook UI is the dumbest looking shit (I'm not holding back) in the world and I hate it. I've been ranting to our Microsoft representative here on campus for a couple of months now (constructively, of course) and he's been forwarding the feedback to whoever the Outlook/Office program managers are. He said the VSTS ticket on it spans 60+ pages already since the UI revamp.

On-topic, this seems about right. The M-series ARM chips from Apple have never been slouches at what they do. The only "problem" is their inherent pricing.

 

[cvaldes]

On-topic, this seems about right. The M-series ARM chips from Apple have never been slouches at what they do. The only "problem" is their inherent pricing.

Ahahahaha, that's right. You are giving your money to Apple instead of the utility company.

I'd be happy to give someone else my money if they came up with computers that rivaled Apple's in terms of performance-per-watt. And performance-per-watt isn't the only metric I care about. I ditched my MacBook and replaced it with an Acer Swift (Intel Ice Lake 1035G1 processor).

The Acer Swift is inferior in every single way to the MacBook it replaced except for price. But since I rarely use the notebook PC (I hate staring at those small screens), just having something that boots is fine.

But my acquisition of the Intel N100-powered mini PC shows that I am actively seeking out and dutifully acknowledging performance-per-watt improvements on the Wintel side of things.

Competition is good. People who categorically hate Apple are just like what Taylor signs about.

 

[Xaser04]

These are just generalized claims. While I don't use macOS at work, I am perfectly productive using it at home. I use a Windows machine all day at work, where I'm currently trying the "New Outlook." I know Outlook is not Windows, but if New Outlook is the direction Windows is going, then Windows is about to go in a markedly terrible direction in terms of productivity.

For example, New Outlook's attachment handling is horrible. The preview is nice, but guess what happens when I tell it to open that preview in Excel? "Sorry, don't have that functionality." For opening an attachment? Try to share from Excel to New Outlook? Excel hangs, then an error message saying to restart the mail client. Want to save an attachment to a folder? New Outlook can't do that by drag n drop or "save all." No, you download them as a zip file, then extract that and move them to the folder. What was once a couple steps has now grown to more steps. Simple tasks that I do almost every day at work, and until New Outlook, had worked the same way they always had for my entire 20 year career. Nope. Not New Outlook. And while Office is not Windows, it's from the same friggin' corporation, and just the notion that this is what they have conceived and released to the public, even to "try," is really quite ridiculous. These aren't advanced features, mind you. Open source apps from 10 years ago could do these things. The best I can tell, MS is trying to webify Outlook, which I can assume they'd only do in order to move themselves further from Windows. Yikes.

Outlook constantly pestering me to "Try" the new version of Outlook is really starting to get annoying. It has seemingly installed itself at some point as now I get mail notifications from both the "New" Outlook and the current one I am already running (and have setup exactly as I want it). Having seen the general layout from when my boss decided to give the new version a try, I can say I won't be switching for as long as possible.

I did read somewhere (or heard, can't remember now) that the general direction is to merge the desktop application with Outlook Online so you have one look to everything. Great in theory but not great in practice as generally speaking you will using the full blown desktop application because you want the extra features / and/or features structured in a way you are used to and find more productive. Same with say Excel online and Excel proper.

Mind you if Microsoft could just sort it so Teams doesn't just randomly dissapear or Teams meetings goes for a walk in Outlook itself that would be great. Have experienced that with multiple users at work with not obvious pattern or reasoning that I can see.

I say all this writing off a MacBook Pro with a M3 Pro chip that was charged, errr, I can't remember when it was actually charged last as it's stupidly efficient and completely silent (it has fans but I haven't yet heard them since owning it).

 

[NC37]

It still surprises me that there is still Apple hate. Its just a company. Everyone should have moved on from the MS v. Apple wars of the 90s and 00s by now. There never was any reason to care about any of these companies. You just use what you need for work and play. Different solutions for different environments.

Especially after Jobs betrayed Mac users on the x86 switch. Promised cheaper Macs and instead raised the price of Macs while lowering production costs. But by then, Apple was trendy and most of the intelligent Mac users were silenced. All the Mac user mags went from enthusiast/geek oriented to mainstream mindless drone mags.

As an old Mac addict who grew up on them, I find PC life much more agreeable than Apple post PowerPC. Though, I got an M1 Mac for work and find it acceptable, it's just silly to consider the old arguments again. Gates is still a dick, M$ can't innovate, Apple can't make anything not brushed metal, and there is less and less reason to own a console when PCs get the same titles. Indeed, there is no reason to hate or love either side.

 

[Scrizz]

It comes down to software support and how much game developers want to bend backwards to address a given architecture.

This can be said of every single operating system and hardware. This is what ultimately determines a platforms success.
A lot of times the technologically superior platform fails for this reason.

 

[apoklyps3]

Apple custom special holy silicon, now that's a good joke, but not as good as their "operating system"

 

[stimpy88]

Apple are running out of IPC steam. Their CPU & GPU designs stagnated about 4 years ago. Clock speed and sheer number of cores are what's driving them.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

Apple are running out of IPC steam. Their CPU & GPU designs stagnated about 4 years ago. Clock speed and sheer number of cores are what's driving them.

M2 has about a 10% SC improvement over M1. M3 has a 20% SC improvement over M2. That's single core performance, so it's not from extra cores. Even if it's mainly from extra clock speed, it's still decent generational improvements that are coming at about the same power consumption. One could also argue that Intel's IPC has mostly stagnated (the latest P cores had some gains, some losses, over previous core), but for even longer than that. They've been using clocks and power consumption for their generational gains. What's interesting is that Apple doesn't even come near Intel and AMD in terms of clock speeds, yet still manage to perform pretty well. M3 is just hitting 4.0GHz.

 

[trsttte]

This is not new, we've known this since the M1 was available and similar benchmarks were run.

The apple chips are pretty great, they're not magic but we've got to hand it to them, they're pretty good. The problem is they're designed by apple who's happy with limiting their pottential by their stupid OS policies. If you're a creative type, probably all the software you use is supported, if you're not you're screwed.

 

[Minus Infinity]

If that’s for the M2, then there is even more performance uplift with M3. A peculiar thing about AS is that, regardless of if you go with base, Pro, Max, or Ultra, the single core performance is basically the same. It’s the multicore and gpu performance that improves with each tier. Even the Neural Engine is the same until you get to ultra, where it doubles in EUs.

The Neural Engine is another plus to the Mac platform, as developers are confident that such hardware is available on every AS Mac. I use a RAW denoising app by DXO, and on macOS, it uses the NE if it detects AS. If it’s x86, it uses the GPU. The NE handles this task faster than my 5600XT, regardless of if it is on Windows or x86 macOS, all while using a fanless MacBook Air. So in a case like that, the power of the CPU or GPU doesn’t really matter the most, and the power consumption is just a fraction. Apple is more able to push specialized hardware because the offer fewer hardware options. I know that’s not always a plus, but in this case the user does see a benefit.

And what about Meteor Lake and Phoenix/Hawk Point that also have NPU's. Do you have proof DxO doesn't leverage those? I don't know how Apple's NPU compares to ML and HP, but currently the GPU is faster than the NPU for this sort of thing on x86.

 

[Noyand]

And what about Meteor Lake and Phoenix/Hawk Point that also have NPU's. Do you have proof DxO doesn't leverage those? I don't know how Apple's NPU compares to ML and HP, but currently the GPU is faster than the NPU for this sort of thing on x86.

Those NPU's might be too fresh, but DxO and Lightroom make use of the tensor cores, so it's reasonable to think that support for them will be available soon.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

As mentioned by a colleague of ours, they do have NEON for SIMD.

Also the text rendered on your screen right now was rendered with the help of SIMD instructions.

There's coursework in most reputable computer science programs on how to leverage SIMD. Ironically one of the motivations for tuning for SIMD is because it saves power.



I'd also add this is being executed in a VM under Parallels which I'm pretty sure is a type 2 hypervisor; there's going to be some inherent overhead even though it's technicaly running native ARM binaries without (much) translation.

This is kind of a ham-fisted comparison though. We need a cross-platform benchmark result like SPEC CPU and/or SPECviewperf running under native MacOS to accurately compare it to x86/Power/RISC-V/et al.


They're running the ARM port of CPU-Z so it's not being translated. Still impressive.

I feel like I know something about something…till I read this.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

And what about Meteor Lake and Phoenix/Hawk Point that also have NPU's. Do you have proof DxO doesn't leverage those? I don't know how Apple's NPU compares to ML and HP, but currently the GPU is faster than the NPU for this sort of thing on x86.

I really don’t know. What I can say is that the NE on the M2 can apply the denoising AI on a 20MP RAW file in 4 seconds. Using a 5600XT (in a different system, obviously), it’s more like 8 or 9 seconds. An RX 480 is even slower, at about 12-14 seconds. Even if an even faster GPU could do it in less than 4 seconds, that’s a significant investment. 4 seconds on the M2 in a fanless laptop is pretty darn good IMO, and I don’t know what it takes to match that. They offer a 30 day trial on the software, so anyone here is welcome to test it out. Measuring power draw would also be a good data point.

 

[Noyand]

I really don’t know. What I can say is that the NE on the M2 can apply the denoising AI on a 20MP RAW file in 4 seconds. Using a 5600XT (in a different system, obviously), it’s more like 8 or 9 seconds. An RX 480 is even slower, at about 12-14 seconds. Even if an even faster GPU could do it in less than 4 seconds, that’s a significant investment. 4 seconds on the M2 in a fanless laptop is pretty darn good IMO, and I don’t know what it takes to match that. They offer a 30 day trial on the software, so anyone here is welcome to test it out. Measuring power draw would also be a good data point.

It's taking less than a second to denoise a 60mp file with a RTX 3070...I'm not even sure if going beyond that will bring any tangible improvement . It's so much faster than Lightroom denoise, albeit more subtle by default

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

It's taking less than a second to denoise a 60mp file with a RTX 3070...I'm not even sure if going beyond that will bring any tangible improvement . It's so much faster than Lightroom denoise, albeit more subtle by default

Is that on the standalone PureRAW app, or Photolab? Of all the developers for image editing, DxO seems to work the hardest on the performance of the program. I also have On1 2024, and it's rather sluggish, despite them actually working on performance improvements.

 

[Noyand]

Is that on the standalone PureRAW app, or Photolab? Of all the developers for image editing, DxO seems to work the hardest on the performance of the program. I also have On1 2024, and it's rather sluggish, despite them actually working on performance improvements.

On Photolab

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

On Photolab

I notice Photolab behaves differently than PureRaw, I'm not entirely sure why, but PureRAW is slower, perhaps because it's outputting the file immediately, where Photolab might be approximating it during edits, and doing the final pass at the time of export. I noticed that Photolab was pretty quick, even on the 2013 Mac Pro I used to have, and the D700 is by no means a fast GPU. I could just never really get along with Photolab's layout, but I do like DxO's NR the best.

 

[jallenlabs]

Uhh except for the fact that some of the softwares people use are on Mac and they work really well. The end user can use whatever they want, it's their choice. I don't see Macintosh system as a limitation at all.

It is a limitation. As an IT pro at a university we tell staff and students time and time again- Check your software and be absolutely sure its support on Mac OS. We've had staff buy Mac Pros (against our advice) only to find that they cant run their software or the scientific instruments that they use on a daily basis. Only Windows or Linux is really suitable. People never listen. In my opinion and Im prepared to get flack for this, if Mac OS didn't have MS Office, there would be a lot of people leaving that platform. But then again, Apple has a sliver of the market share that Microsoft does. I admit I use a Mac at work, and the hardware is nice, but half the time I need to remote into my PC to access software that's only on Windows.

 

[Minus Infinity]

The new Outlook UI is the dumbest looking shit (I'm not holding back) in the world and I hate it. I've been ranting to our Microsoft representative here on campus for a couple of months now (constructively, of course) and he's been forwarding the feedback to whoever the Outlook/Office program managers are. He said the VSTS ticket on it spans 60+ pages already since the UI revamp.

On-topic, this seems about right. The M-series ARM chips from Apple have never been slouches at what they do. The only "problem" is their inherent pricing.

I made the mistake of switching to the new UI in Outlook and over half my emails went missing. It broke so many things I switched back immediately and will never ever try it again.

Maybe with a fresh install it would work properly but based on what I'm reading, it's a massive regression in usability so who cares.

As for Apple I have been mostly Windows/Unix/Linux user but have owned MacBook Air for 2 years now and find working with MacOS seemless and as easy as using windows. I don't do any power work on the Mac as it's basically an iPad Pro repalcement and mostly use it when I'm on the train or at a cafe, but I do do fair bit of word processing on it and I've basically forgotten I'm not using windows.

 

[Darmok N Jalad]

It is a limitation. As an IT pro at a university we tell staff and students time and time again- Check your software and be absolutely sure its support on Mac OS. We've had staff buy Mac Pros (against our advice) only to find that they cant run their software or the scientific instruments that they use on a daily basis. Only Windows or Linux is really suitable. People never listen. In my opinion and Im prepared to get flack for this, if Mac OS didn't have MS Office, there would be a lot of people leaving that platform. But then again, Apple has a sliver of the market share that Microsoft does. I admit I use a Mac at work, and the hardware is nice, but half the time I need to remote into my PC to access software that's only on Windows.

User ignorance is certainly a problem with all things software. I have the joy of supporting about 300 field devices that are mostly locked down. I can't even get folks to update them with very simple instructions. "But we aren't having problems, why do we need to update?"

I don't know if Office is all that important to Mac users anymore. If you're doing creative tasks, like video and photo work, Office doesn't mean much. It's nice to have, but I don't think it's the end all, be all for macOS like maybe it once might have been (like when MS seemed to be holding back on Mac users). The sad part here is that MS appears to be moving Office in a negative direction, at least if Outlook is any indication. Turning Office into glorified web-apps might be fine for the casual or light user, but it's painful for anyone trying to do real work. Ironically, the OS most dependent on the existence and success of Office is Windows. Take away the corporate environments, and I wonder how grim it might look for Windows these days. If our house is representative of anything, we have one functional Windows PC, 2 Macs, 5 iPads, 2 iPhones and a Switch. The Windows PC is for the tasks the other things can't do, and in our house, that has become very few things these days, and we homeschool 3 kids. Honestly, it gets the most use for typing lessons because it has a physical keyboard.

And while yes, macOS share is very small, it's also very lucrative, as Macs are a mostly premium-priced product. I don't know if a comparison could even be made, but I wonder how many $2000 premium Windows laptops are purchased, as compared to $2000 MacBook Pros. As far as Apple revenue goes, the real point here is that macOS sales are just not high-volume sales machines, but they are still profitable. Apple makes most of its hardware revenue selling iPhones and iPads.

Many macOS fans were at one time worried that the platform didn't have much of a future in Apple's roadmap. Things really languished for a while there around 2013-2019. That's effectively when they didn't really have a legitimate Pro desktop option, and their MacBook Pros were portless space heaters with crap keyboards. They are kinda there again, IMO. Fortunately, the Studio and MacBook Pros are solid, but the Mac Pro is just an empty cavern with no drop-in hardware upgrades, and the max RAM capacity is nowhere close to the 2019 model. There's no legit large-screen iMac either.

At the end of the day, it's still just user preference. I think we'd all be better served to say "different strokes for different folks." We use what we like, and that doesn't automatically make anyone stupid, snobby, or better-than. I think folks get defensive when their overall personhood is judged based on the computer they use. My main complaint with Windows these days is MS's software design and telemetry/tracking. Outlook with over 700 trackers going to 3rd parties? Ugh.

 

[alphaLONE]

Thats because the Pro and Ultra are, quite literally, two or four of the base M3 fused together. Sorta a pseudo-chiplet approach. So the single core perf being identical makes sense, that’s the case also with Zen where, if locked to the same freq, the SC score will be identical from the 6-core model all the way to TR.

Nah. That's completely wrong. M1 and M2 Ultra were "UltraFusion", more like Intel's EMIB, leveraging TSMC's CoWoS-L or similar, to tile together two M1 Max dies. The products under them (M1/2, M1/2 Pro and M1/2 Max) are just variants that share the same microarchitectures (like an i5-13500 does with the i9-13900, or the i5-2400 with the i7-2600), nothing novel. The M1 Pro doesn't even share a multiple of the base M1's topology (8C2c vs 4C4c).

Though before M3, the Max chips were essentially Pro chips with a mirrored GPU layout (and doubled memory controllers, and doubled codec blocks, much like Intel's DG2-256 is to DG2-128), so I can understand where the confusion comes from. CPU-side (outside of the memory controllers) it was essentially a Pro chip.

So I think they noticed that people just got the Pro model, so on the M3 series they gimped it (6C6c compared to the Max's 10C4c), yielding MT performance equal to the M2 Pro, making that chip more of an M3 Plus than anything. But they cost more, of course . But it makes your claim even more wrong, since no M3 chip model is really similar to each other, and they haven't got an Ultra version of it yet briding several dies!

User ignorance is certainly a problem with all things software. I have the joy of supporting about 300 field devices that are mostly locked down. I can't even get folks to update them with very simple instructions. "But we aren't having problems, why do we need to update?"

I don't know if Office is all that important to Mac users anymore. If you're doing creative tasks, like video and photo work, Office doesn't mean much. It's nice to have, but I don't think it's the end all, be all for macOS like maybe it once might have been (like when MS seemed to be holding back on Mac users). The sad part here is that MS appears to be moving Office in a negative direction, at least if Outlook is any indication. Turning Office into glorified web-apps might be fine for the casual or light user, but it's painful for anyone trying to do real work. Ironically, the OS most dependent on the existence and success of Office is Windows. Take away the corporate environments, and I wonder how grim it might look for Windows these days. If our house is representative of anything, we have one functional Windows PC, 2 Macs, 5 iPads, 2 iPhones and a Switch. The Windows PC is for the tasks the other things can't do, and in our house, that has become very few things these days, and we homeschool 3 kids. Honestly, it gets the most use for typing lessons because it has a physical keyboard.

And while yes, macOS share is very small, it's also very lucrative, as Macs are a mostly premium-priced product. I don't know if a comparison could even be made, but I wonder how many $2000 premium Windows laptops are purchased, as compared to $2000 MacBook Pros. As far as Apple revenue goes, the real point here is that macOS sales are just not high-volume sales machines, but they are still profitable. Apple makes most of its hardware revenue selling iPhones and iPads.

Many macOS fans were at one time worried that the platform didn't have much of a future in Apple's roadmap. Things really languished for a while there around 2013-2019. That's effectively when they didn't really have a legitimate Pro desktop option, and their MacBook Pros were portless space heaters with crap keyboards. They are kinda there again, IMO. Fortunately, the Studio and MacBook Pros are solid, but the Mac Pro is just an empty cavern with no drop-in hardware upgrades, and the max RAM capacity is nowhere close to the 2019 model. There's no legit large-screen iMac either.

At the end of the day, it's still just user preference. I think we'd all be better served to say "different strokes for different folks." We use what we like, and that doesn't automatically make anyone stupid, snobby, or better-than. I think folks get defensive when their overall personhood is judged based on the computer they use. My main complaint with Windows these days is MS's software design and telemetry/tracking. Outlook with over 700 trackers going to 3rd parties? Ugh.

Corporate environments truly do keep Windows alive, but to be honest, I don't know how long that'll stay. I can fully imagine a Chrome based future for the enterprise, as web-based tools and cloud-based infrastructure becomes more and more powerful and ubiquitous. Schools did the switch a long time ago and it worked out well for them.

I was raised on Mac and moved to PC for a good time. I'd say I'm comfortable with Windows, Linux and macOS. Last year I bought myself one of the new MBPs, because I'd been tired as to how laptops got worse over time. Look at the landscape now: Thinkpads come with optional Ethernet ports, fixed batteries and soldered RAM, the XPS line loses its function keys, media controls, and basically all ports, everything is getting thin and awful, while parts rise in TDP again (AlderLake P class chips my beloathed). Laptop manufacturers bring me what pisses me off about Apple while not giving me what's great about Apple (wonderful displays, silent operation, all day battery life, great integration with the OS), so why the hell would i keep paying for what feels like knockoffs and not bespoke products nowadays? (same can be said about the phone landscape too — give me my headphone jack back, damn it)

Windows post-8.1 pissed me off too much, Linux has issues with power management, macOS just... works? And while it's definitely worse than my memories of Snow Leopard and Mountain Lion (and how come they haven't improved the window management? W11 is leaps and bounds better than this), it has the merit of never leaving me stranded (loved having Windows force driver updates that specifically weren't compatible with my hardware and not letting me cancel the "upgrade", leaving it stuck in an endless update-rollback loop as soon as i left the device unattended). MATLAB runs on it, a bunch of development tools run on it, can even play games surprisingly well. It cost way more than an equivalent PC laptop, but god damn does it save me trouble. It wasn't that bad eight years ago!

I don't think the "general purpose" pros are going to get any more than what's already there. The Mac already shifted from standing on its own to becoming a bigger, more open iPhone. Mx chips' memory controllers don't make them play nice with external GPUs, they seemingly can't be fucked to offer a serious tiered memory offering on the Pro, with fast on-package LPDDR coupled to expensible DDR5 sticks (not unlike Intel's Optane or their new SPR Max chips with HBM on package). There's just no more market for that stuff. Apple pissed them all away over time, with nonsensical hardware choices (2013 Mac Pro, the touch-bar dark ages), software apathy (remember when FCPX came out ? Same with dropping Aperture. Thank god they didn't stop Logic). Nowadays it's just academia or enthusiasts getting those high end models, because nearly all the pros went to the PC. The ones that remain "evolved" through those hard times and adapted to external storage and accelerator schemes. The only targets of that new Mac Pro are music producers, and software houses wanting a rackable unit. It's just a different time.