I know it's not the same. But I think a lot of people had a similar feeling going from Intel-Macbooks to Apple Silicon. An insane upgrade that I still can't believe.
This. My M1 MacBook felt like a similarly shocking upgrade -- probably not quite as much as my first SSD did, but still the only other time when I've thought, "holy sh*t, this is a whole different thing".
The M1 was great. But the jump felt particularly great because Intel Macbooks had fallen behind in performance per dollar. Great build quality, great trackpad, but if you were after performance they were not exactly the best thing to get
For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance.
After the M1, my casual home laptop started outperforming my top-spec work laptops.
> For as long as I can remember, before M1, Macs were always behind in the CPU department. PC's had much better value if you cared about CPU performance.
But not if you cared about battery life, because that was the tradeoff Apple was making. Which worked great until about 2015-2016. The parts they were using were not Intel’s priority and it went south basically after Broadwell, IIRC. I also suppose that Apple stopped investing heavily into a dead-end platform while they were working on the M1 generation some time before it was announced.
It's a lot more believable if you tried some of the other Wintel machines at the time. Those Macbook chassis were the hottest of the bunch, it's no surprise the Macbook Pro was among the first to be redesigned.
I usually use an M2 Mac at work, and haven't really touched Windows since 2008. Recently I had to get an additional Windows laptop (Lenovo P series) for a project my team is working on, and it is such a piece of shit. It's unfathomable that people are tolerating Windows or Intel (and then still have the gall to talk shit about Macs).
It's like time travelling back to 2004. Slow, loud fans, random brief freezes of the whole system, a shell that still feels like a toy, a proprietary 170W power supply and mediocre battery life, subpar display. The keyboard is okay, at least. What a joke.
Meanwhile, my personal M3 Max system can render Da Vinci timelines with complex Fusion compositions in real time and handle whole stacks of VSTs in a DAW. Compared to the Lenovo choking on an IDE.
A lot of this is just windows sucking major balls. Linux distros with even the heaviest DEs like KDE absolutely fly on mediocre or even low range hardware.
I got a lunar lake laptop and slapped fedora on it and everything is instant. And I hooked up 2 1400p/240hz over thunderbolt.
Expensive PCs are also crap. My work offers Macbooks or Windows laptops (currently, Dell, but formerly Lenovo and/or HP), and these machines are all decidedly not 'cheap' PCs. Often retailing in excess of $2k.
All my coworkers who own Windows laptops do is bellyache about random issues, poor battery life, and sluggish performance.
I used to have a Windows PC for work about 3 years ago as well, and it was also a piece of crap. Battery would decide to 'die' at 50% capacity. After replacement, 90 minute battery life off charger. Fan would decide to run constantly if you did anything even moderately intensive such as a Zoom meeting.
