Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron | Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.::Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.
Windows 11 has made the “clean Windows install” an oxymoron | Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.::Op-ed: PC makers used to need to bring their own add-on bloatware—no longer.
I’m not just making up demands of the market, touchscreen and convertibles are some of the highest driving factors in laptops right now and their demand is growing, I’m not talking about personal preference whatsoever here lol, I’m coming from an objective view on the subject. Yes Apple’s specs haven’t lived up to the hype they generated and sales have been falling for a bit now.
For some reason you seem to be telling me the performance and capabilities of Chromebooks running Windows which I do find very strange as it’s obviously a subject I have a great deal more experience as you can do a pretty large amount of anything you need to do on one. Gimp, SketchUp, YouTube, word, Excel (any office suite anything is going to run perfectly obviously) web browser with any movie streaming site you want. You still have a huge selection of games to choose from. And if I’m getting into the personal area of things I come from the audio industry (where Linux and MacOS aren’t practical options) and my little fleet of used $50 Chromebooks running Windows can do anything without day to day usage. Honestly I think people have forgotten that common programs and software have not really be increasing in system demand but CPU’s, even on the low end have gotten far more powerful.
Cause you’re talking about running Windows on an Intel/AMD chip. Usually Intel Celerons on the cheap end. It’s not a niche area of knowledge. And plenty devices run that configuration stock. Just because Windows has been installed on it doesn’t raise the inherent upper bound of the silicon. And you’re right — much like the smart phone market — it is able to meet the needs of people handily and the lower end is much higher than what it used to be. And I agree that people are often overpaying for tech regularlly. But there are tasks the silicon is ‘priced’ out of because, while possible on the lower end chips, it becomes hard for them to keep up. That is why I’m confused whenever you claim a Chromebook “does more” than a Macbook.
I brought up very specific things: rendering video, 3-d modeling tasks, and a set of recently released AAA titles that run well. They’re a family of common things people do with their devices that are really computationally expensive the computer was designed to do (prolly shouldn’t game on a Mac tho, but I find it funny). Those are in a different computation league than running GIMP, office, or a drawing app. Your claim was “Definitely does more than a MacBook Air and for a lot less” and I’m trying to point out there are things bound by the silicon it cannot do as well by comparison (granted we went off on a few tangents). Like, the headroom just isn’t there. The Celeron family gets blown out of the water, and those running Intel i3’s and Intel i5’s fall behind as well. Some of those i3/i5’s get suspiciously close to MacBook territory in price tho.
I’m wondering though, is all this time, were you meaning they get more “bang for your buck?” If so, I agree, and I may have focused on “Definitely does more,” as in the set of things an ARM-silicon Mac can achieve is a subset of what a Chromebook can, and got really confused.
However, this device confuses both of us. Why.
“does more” means more functional, I think I explained that up above. I think you have again sort of glossed over touchscreen functionality and the ability to flip your screen around into tablet mode. A laptop is a portable computer, touchscreen and screen flipping allow for the Device to be even more portable and functional for the user who had decided to purchase a laptop as opposed to a desktop.
This is all very important stuff to be aware of as for a lot of industries and use cases can’t make use of a laptops form factor as it is just too cumbersome. This is why they are so popular in stem and creative fields, not to mention healthcare, education, and service industries. This may not be as large of a factor for someone working in graphic design or software development but at the same time it really makes just as much sense as a typical laptop.
I could go on about the functional benefits of having a touchscreen and having a tablet but really that list is just so massive and everyone who uses one of aware of that which is why the market is shifting over that direction so quickly. Helped in part by the fact that they are popular purchases for companies to buy for their employees and anyone who uses a 2in1 at work is typically going to end up buying one for themselves as it’s really not a great experience going back to how things used to be.
Now you mention running AAA game titles and I’m finding that pretty hard to track down titles getting mentioned unless they are games of some serious age or you are trying to qualify games like baldurs gate 3 and the Sims 4 as AAA titles which is rather disingenuous. As far as I see people talking about with Mac gaming they tend to suggest people use Xbox cloud or other game streaming services. Obviously you get a much wider selection of games than the Mac available library when going that route especially with something like a MacBook Air where storage comes at a premium and typical AAA titles are coming in above the 100gb mark now. This would make things even more difficult for someone doing video editing as well especially if they are working in 4k resolution. You could go the route of using an external drive as well but that sorta saps the portability when you have all the extras hanging off your computer at which point if I was serious about doing either of those things I would be using a desktop anyhow to gain the benefits seen there. As for where our Chromebook stands in this situation, well, they can stream cloud service games and even stream games locally from a desktop gaming PC (as I commonly do) just the same as a MacBook Air can.
(Btw I got curious and tried using blender on one of the Chromebooks and I’ll be damned if it didn’t run surprisingly well, loaded a bunch of demo projects and it was pretty great. I also discovered that using touchscreen with blender was pretty awesome, made sculpting super easy as well as animating and modeling, camera controls are actually really intuitive, ran great in Evee and workbench, cycles was a little sluggish , but with evee in viewport render mode it was actually pretty smooth, definitely workable, material preview and solid were both pretty great as well)
Cloud gaming is an option! But I prefer to run games locally, and it’s been a moving target since Apple switched to ARM processors. I’m not going to go into the gritty details, but it involves combining Microsoft’s(x86->Arm) translation layer, Apple’s Rosetta 2 (x86->Arm) translation layer, a Windows->MacOS translation layer (which I brought up above for software compatibility for the rare case software, or and equivalent, doesn’t have a MacOS build), and converting graphical api calls to Apple’s Metal api (this last one flies over my head a bit on the particulars, I’m a backend developer). Mostly the community, and a company called Codeweavers, finding little optimizations per title. Most DirectX11 titles would ‘run’ tho we’d have graphical bugs from time to time, or stuff straight up crashed. However, Apple recently debuted a ‘Game Porting Toolkit’ during this year’s MacOS beta cycle at WWDC — which was an actual first party translation layer for DirectX11/12->Metal calls. It was intended for developers since you do need to crack open a terminal and go to town, but that didn’t stop users from employing it themselves. Simply put, it’s been rather amazing! Here’s a video, if you’re curious:
Video
Though, it is a bit out of date since we’ve had newer versions of the Toolkit. Horizon Zero Dawn no longer slows down and there’s been framerate improvements across the board. I didn’t mention these titles since I haven’t run them locally on my machine, but I play Diablo4 on my MacBook Air using this method. It’s pretty neat, but if someone’s goal was to strictly “game” they’d be better served with a Rog Zephyrus G14 near the same price. However, for those of us who landed on my M-series Mac, for whatever reason, it’s been nice. There’s been projects since then that does the terminal work for you and it’s much more user friendly.
But, back to our dicussion. Which I might add has been rather civil, usually strangers responding to each other in disagreement on the internet quickly turns into throwing insults back and forth. Cheers for that 🙂
As for the touch screen/ 2-in-1 stuff: I understand the benefit using that form factor. Infact, I urge users to purchase the correct hardware for what their use case is, nor have I claimed they shouldn’t be during our discussion. I’m not claiming the stronger statement “Chromebook (or 2-in-1) users should be using a MacBook”. I don’t know everyone’s use case and budget, or what form factor best suits them. I’m responding to the stronger, blanket statement (and I know I’m paraphrasing) “Chromebooks have more functionality than a MacBook for alot less” by contradiction by giving usecases where Chromebooks may have issues with. Similarly, I’m pointing out the hardware matters, in particular when the user needs more robust silicon better suited for the job. Say they want to take advantage of a dedicated engine built onto the board that handles rendering video, or the neural engine that handles neural nets, or improved build times since I’m not using an Intel Celeron or whatever i3/i5 they can install under budget. In my case, I use all three. Plus, it’s been a wonderful ‘generalist’ device. But to say “it lacks a touch screen” and laying out sectors where one would be useful not only doesn’t discount users whose work flows call for stronger silicon but it also could apply to any non-touchscreen clamshell intended for Windows, or otherwise, in the same usecase.
But, this discussion has been rather useful to me. I never actually considered reformatting a Chromebook to run Windows, and will be including them in my recommendations going forward (after I do the easy, but thankless, task of installing Windows for them).
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Yeah when I was saying “Chromebooks have more functionality than macbooks for a lot less” I was literally saying “Chromebooks have more functionality than macbooks for a lot less”. I was not saying “Chromebooks can run resource intensive programs faster than macbooks for a lot less” as performance doesn’t mean function and anyone wanting to play games will be better suited with a Windows gaming laptop than a MacBook or Chromebook no matter how you slice it and it the hope is for extended battery life while gaming you are going to be better suited streaming games anyhow. And as I noticed in that guys video he was having to use an SD card so we know that storage limitation is a factor.
As far as video goes I can’t say as I haven’t tested it but I did do some quick poking around and it appears that the Celeron chip in the Chromebooks I use does support Intels quick sync so that leads me to believe it’s not gonna be too bad, especially in the area of rendering final output. I’m not all that knowledgeable as far as video goes but I do work in the production world and as far as video goes I have only seen macbooks used for video a handful of times and I’ve never actually seen a Mac used on a large scale production. This is coming from a live production and broadcast perspective (think music festivals, concerts, sporting events, political functions, high profile streaming events) so the use of gaming spec laptops and desktops are likely chosen for their higher performance, stability, and support cycle. Which is likely similar logic behind why PC’s are used for professional non-linear video editing as well.
I did see you slipped back a little bit on the 2in1 situation though. I think there might be a misunderstanding here in that clamshell vs. Convertible is a matter of usage and need, in reality there isn’t actually a situation aside from outliers in not aware of where having touchscreen or convertible would be undesired (you mentioned some people may want matte screens but there are matte screen protectors you can get for very cheap that work great with touch).
Ah, isn’t there a quote about “every discussion should start with establishing definitions.” For me, I suppose, I interpret the “functionality” of a device, be it a phone or w.e., I’m focused on what problems or solutions it provides and often I bound by the specs. Anyhow, that was precisely how I read it and was extremely confused. I understand the take now.
Oh for sure, I was just using it as an example use case and demonstration of perfomance. Getting into benchmark comparisons, or rendering runtimes, or L2 cache performance is super boring and boils down to “number go up, big good,” ya know? That being said, when you do come across a game that is Metal based it’s pretty nuts 'cause then you get the full power of the reduced instruction set of the processor without the computation bloat of translation layers, and on general applications ARM vs x86 Intel builds make a huge difference on battery life (Though, Metal games are super rare). While it runs on everything, WoW had a Metal build at the device launch and that puppy ran for 8-9 hours on battery (which, like it’s WoW, come on 🤣). I’m really excited for the Metal release of Baldur’s Gate 3 coming the first week of Sept cause I suspect it will be lovely too.
Def, I think he runs the AppleGamingWiki (or one of them) so he’s testing tons of stuff constantly. Personally, I keep I a library of 5-6 games plus my various IDEs and various software without external storage.
Absolutely. At that performance clip Apple sucks on the high end (like I can at least defend the ‘premium’ hike of the entry level MBA, but what the fuck 🤣). Sure, they have a “MacPro” that’s offensive and obsene in pricing. If you want a good laugh take a look. Play around with a few builds, it’s a wonder to behold. There might exist a rendering studio in the world that has a workflow built around FinalCut or something, but at that point an Applications Analyst should start waving the warning flag about saving tons of money switching to another application. I know MKBHD’s Production Company has a horrifyingly expensive MacPro, but that’s the only one that comes to mind. They’re trying to target speed to the umpteenth degree, but I can’t speak to how much better it does at that clip versus a similarly priced PC (I’d wager it doesn’t, but he swears by it so idk 🤷).
Correct, I suspected there was a definition mismatch of “functionality” and made arguments relative to the language to eek it out. Though, I imagine a consumer wouldn’t be likely exclude a product for having a touch screen or being a 2-n-1 (since these features are optional) and wouldn’t elimate a MacBook — however, if one wanted/expected it they would certainly pass over the device on the snap or consider it a concession. In my personal experience, I do have people poke my Mac screen from time to time since it’s the default on Windows devices. I’m curious if Apple moves to include it going forward, since they are offerring to serve iOS apps on MacOS if the developer opts in.