Power-saving setting. Isn't that slow and laggy?

Not really, no. These CPUs are very fast. Giving them a lower power budget is usually not noticable.

For regular tasks like web browsing and coding I cannot notice any difference. The only times I really notice it is when I try to benchmark a piece of code and the benchmark comes out ~30-40% slower than expected, and then I remember that I'm power saving mode. But I just have to hit one button on my dock to switch profiles.

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aurareturn 2 days ago | parent [-]

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/compare/17300000?baseli...

If power savings drops perf by further 30%, then an M5 is 2.26x in ST faster while on battery. Massive difference in snappiness.

2.26x faster and 3-4x more battery life for the Mac.

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eigenspace 2 days ago | parent [-]

As I said though, the computer is already so snappy and fast that I don't notice the difference between the power saving profile and the high performance profile for anything but benchmarking and gaming.

Even taking the Geekbench numbers at face value (which would be stupid), saying that another computer is 2.26x faster at something that I don't notice the speed is not interesting to me at all.

More battery life is of course great, but to be honest 6-7 hours away from the wall is more than enough for me.

All else equal, I'd of course love to have a computer with a slicker design, more performance, and more battery life, but some things are just more important to me. I like being able to repair and upgrade my computer, and I like to have first class linux support. Those two things just make a much bigger difference to me personally.

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aurareturn 2 days ago | parent [-]

I suppose if it works for you, that's great.

But I find even an M4 will lag sometimes when coding.

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eigenspace 2 days ago | parent [-]

The question though is if those lags you're noticing have anything to do with CPU or GPU performance. My editor and web browser are basically never CPU or GPU bound in their performance.

If you notice a hitch when doing something, that's almost certainly because the computer is fetching data from your SSD that's not hot in the RAM or CPU cache.

Clocking the CPU higher won't help with that at all.

	▲	aurareturn 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		SSD isn't a problem. Web browsing, for example, is affected by ST performance. So is compiling, running tests, etc.