PSU: $90 (silverstone sfx 500w 80 plus gold - there's probably cheaper options but most PSUs seem sold out on amazon)
RAM: $70 (16gb 3200mhz CL16, gskill or team group)
Case: $70 (Silverstone tek)
Motherboard: $120 (asrock b550-m itx)
There's your $1000 mac killer. I wouldn't call it a sensible build, but it should outperform the mac across the board. Notably the GPU is significantly better but the closest gpu the m1 is to trading blows with is the Radeon 560 which is only $30 cheaper. Also the mac comes with 8gb ram in the base model, and 16gb is a $200 upgrade but I could not find a decent speed 2x4gb ddr4 kit as nobody wants that little ram anymore in a custom build. I could save $40 by going with a 1x8gb kit for $30, but single channel will hurt performance.
I'd also consider $30 to go from the 250gb ssd to a 1tb variant, something apple charges $400 for.
The reason I wouldn't call it sensible is that the 1650 super is a budget gaming card while the 5800x a higher tier cpu. If you were actually planning to build this for gaming I'd suggest dropping down to the 5600x and putting the extra $100. actually for gaming I'd even suggest squeezing the budget for a 2060 (or even better wait for the standard 3060) by dropping to basic ddr4-2133, and going for standard sized case/psu rather than the small form factor to chase the mac.
On the other hand, if you're not gaming and just need a video output, save like 120 bucks and just get a gt 1030. Use that to buy some nicer RAM or more cores via a 5900x depending on what suits your workload better. Sadly you have to get _a gpu_ as Intel is falling behind and AMD won't give us high end APUs in the individual market.
Doesn't include monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, webcam, microphone, battery backup, and fingerprint scanner which would be necessary to make it "comparable" to a base model Macbook Air.
It also isn't a portable, fanless laptop which has its perks.
In most programming benchmarks, single core and RAM is the game. That’s why the machine in this post has overclocked ram and an undervolted CPU. In that area the 4750u loses badly. In Node for example you will see nearly 60% better performance on M1.
(I am wondering why that got downvoted, perhaps it upset someone.) the 4750u sits at around a 1050pt GB5 single threaded score while the 5800x (with tweaks detailed in the article) scores ~1800. The M1 is 1700 or so. The 4750U just isn’t there for things like Node and scores similarly to Intel’s best desktop CPUs which are real world 50% slower at these very tasks than the M1 (or I imagine, this 5800x)
Dunno, maybe because compared to Node.js developers, C/C++/Rust developers have more time to burn on HN (due to their multithreaded build still takes ages), so they are more likely to show up and make a downvote?
Joke aside, claiming "In most programming benchmarks, single core and RAM is the game" is far from truth.
Also benchmarks are biased towards multicore use cases, probably because slow things that feel like heavy computation are more commonly had parallelization efforts put into them, and are fun to benchmark.
It may outclass it in performance. However, all my life I've been waiting for something that runs over 10h on a single charge. I am naturally surprised that this is not something that ppl truly appreciate in a laptop. Hell, I even bought a cheap Atom laptop once just to have more battery time.
So as of now, there's literally no decent competitor to M1 laptops. One must be living under a rock to buy anything but Apple and this is coming from someone who doesn't have Apple products and always hated their walled off ecosystem. I am reconsidering my life choices :)
What if I want to use the same machine both at my desk and at work? The ability to use the machine on-the-go is one thing, but the actual portability is second.
But you already knew that, didn't you.
Not saying I agree with the "One must be living under a rock to buy anything but Apple" part, that's nonsense.
Sure, having a laptop in that case is unavoidable, but you won't _require_ 10 hours of battery life either.
In the long term I don't think laptops are exactly the right answer for portability. I think the ideal would be that when we get up from our desks, all of our running programs (even the whole OS) would migrate to our phones. As soon as we open our laptop, they would all migrate there.
That’s just your opinion. You don’t need large monitors to code (lines of code are 80-100 characters), and moving around and changing positions (desk to couch etc) every couple hours while working is generally better for health and concentration. Not having to hunt around for a power adapter makes it that much easier and better.
Using a laptop for 10h is super useful for days where you have to travel somewhere, have an appointment, and travel another 5h by train back. Avoids having to constantly have it plugged in in the train, and allows using it even in trains without power sockets
Neither does the Mac Mini, what's your point? If you're building your own desktop PC, then you're clearly not comparing it to a laptop.
On top of that, Apple charges $300 (in Sweden) for every 8GB of RAM, and $300 for every 500GB of SSD storage you add. The costs quickly even out. Unless you buy the absolute cheapest Mac Mini version, a self-built PC will be cheaper, at least according to the PCs I've built.
>Doesn't include monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, webcam, microphone, battery backup, and fingerprint scanner which would be necessary to make it "comparable" to a base model Macbook Air.
Let us not pretend that you don't need to also buy a keyboard, monitor, speakers, and mouse for the Macbook Air to be in anyway usable.
@dang Someone flagged my comments. I think they were very normal, about the value of a MacBook air M1 compared to buying parts and assembling a PC, but perhaps they were against the rules.
The parent post appears to be discussing a MacBook Air though. The specified machine doesn’t do much good for someone looking for a laptop; I’d be very surprised if the average customer compares a MacBook Air type device with a PC desktop when shopping for a new computer.
By the point you get the Mobo CPU and PSU you already are over the price of an M1 Mac Mini and even then, to get the results seen in this you need to overclock ram and under volt the CPU in a big way, putting you at risk of a good bin vs bad situation. Personally the fact that they had to start with some serious tweaking on a desktop to even compete with a laptop CPU seems messy.
First, the article is about performance benchmarks and how the M1 is not some magical entity like the Apple hype train has been screaming. Second, the comment I'm replying to is:
>for most use cases the apple's MBA offers much more value and will have slower depreciation.
You can build a fine computer with a $400 CPU and $500 left for the rest. One that will absolutely dominate any laptop over a long time span because laptops cannot dissipate heat forever (it's simple a matter of mass and shape).
