Ha, this is true as does amortizing things like the coffee maker that needs replacing every 5 years, white vinegar for monthly descaling, the Stanley thermos I bought 4 years ago to bring coffee to work, etc.
Let’s say that it takes 15 minutes to brew the pot of coffee at 1,500 watts. That’s 0.375 watt hours. At $0.20/kwh that’s $0.075/pot. Yay for dumping it into a thermos once it’s brewed.
All in, even if you added an extra $0.50/day brewing at home is still way cheaper.
Stay away from espresso and super “high end” artisan beans and you can have a very solid coffee hobby for not a whole lot of $$. We do a mix of drip, French press, and cold brew. The cost per cup is basically the same for each and the equipment was not very expensive.
You got me curious, so I did the math for us.
I am a drip coffee person, drink far too much coffee (40 oz) throughout the day, and work on a fairly large corporate campus so I have easy access to hot/fresh coffee that I can purchase. Even though there are multiple branded places to get coffee from on campus, they have similar pricing.
My wife and I split a pot of coffee. It takes us 3 oz of coffee beans to brew it. I can buy a 20 oz bag of the coffee beans we use for $15.29, which works out to $2.30/pot. We often stock up on the beans when they go on sale, but I don’t know what we paid for them the last time around.
So… since my wife also drinks coffee let’s say that the price spread between purchased already brewed coffee vs brewed at home coffee is between $6.50-$10.60/day. Splitting the difference = $8.85. Doing that 365 days/year = $3,120 saved.
The fact that I have coworkers who drink a similar quantity of espresso based (more $$) drinks at work is insane.
Do this over a 25 year career, invest the money monthly ($260), plan for a conservative 5% rete of return and you’ll have $162,577 - only half of which is principal.
Apply this pattern of thinking over a number of different spending categories and you’ll be way better off financially. That said, the stats on the billionaire class are eye watering and no amount of frugality will catch any of us up to them.
Qualcomm’s stuff is within single-digit percentage points of the current-gen AMD and Intel chips both in power usage, performance, and battery life
Back in June, the new Snapdragon X processors were a lot more efficient than their x86 based counterparts. I can personally attest to much lower levels of heat generation.
The problem is that the current tradeoff is that huge amounts of the software you’ve been using just does not work, and a huge portion of it might NEVER work, because nobody is going to invest time in making it behave.
I agree with the sentiment, but IMO this is a PC and Windows problem. I would also extend this beyond pure comparability. I say this for a few reasons
All that said, I’ve had zero issues with emulation so far. I never personally used a M1 max when they launched, but from reports of that era the current Windows experience is at least as good as that.
I own a Lenovo Yoga slim 7x Gen 9, which is powered by a Snapdragon X. It certainly checks the “good enough” box. I use it primarily for photo culling/editing (I’m a holdout dedicated camera user). It is more than fit for purpose there, stays cool, is slim, and although I know the fan has come on a few times I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t on my lap. When I bought mine, it was also one of the better deals - you could upgrade to 32 GB of memory and a SSD for under $125 in total. The SSD also isn’t soldered, but the memory is. The 3k OLED display is amazing, but if you want the ultimate battery sipper it’s probably not the best choice. I still get tons of runtime per charge, but am somewhat sad that I lose about 5% charge per day thanks to the laptop not really being off while asleep.
The biggest downside is linxu support is very hit and miss depending on the laptop in question, which means you’re tied to windows 11. I don’t have the time to tinker with it, so I haven’t looked much further into it than this.
It’s not just the surface devices anymore. In June this year, a fresh wave of ARM powered laptops from a verity of different OEs launched. There are offerings from Dell, HP, Lenovo, Samsung, Asus, etc.
I still view it differently than being locked out of using actual OEM features of the car
Totally agree!
I do find this unsurprising though based on the metric fuckton of spam you get from SiriusXM after buying any new or used car from a legit dealer.
I’ve always wondered how much this costs relative to the number of takers they pull in.
Teslas unlimited Internet package is also super cheap at $100/year the last time I checked. Competitors are multiple times more expensive.
SiriusXM does revenue share with auto companies.) Old article, but I’m too lazy to dig through a financial report or find something newer.
Both are windows 11. It wouldn’t surprise me if the older laptop doesn’t support the new sleep state. I would personally trade slower wakeup for less battery use while sleeping. I don’t use the laptop every day and it’s kind of a bummer when I turn it on and find out it lost 20% of its charge between uses.
Even when it’s “shutdown” the Lenovo 7x slim doesn’t appear to actually be off.
lol. Amusingly, my wife’s Dell Latitude 7400 with an i3 has much better stand by battery life than my 7x slim. The slim does wake up a ton faster - by the time the lid is open it’s already doing facial unlock and it it sees me it unlocks immediately and is “fully awake”, but I suspect this is achieved at the expense of more battery consumption while sleeping.
The 7x slim loses around 5% / day when asleep :(
Recall was the headline feature for Copilot+ PCs.
When a wave of ARM powered Windows laptops, and now a few desktops launched, they were all Copilot+ for whatever reason. They all marketed the NPU, but struggled to really say what the NPU unlocked that you couldn’t do with a CPU or GPU. Other marketing gimmicks were a better background blur and an AI drawing assistant in I think paint. I think you could also do “AI stuff” in photos, but don’t think that was local.
Honestly, I think everyone missed the punchline on ARM. The promise is lower heat and greater battery life. There was no need to bundle that with AI gimmicks. But clearly a PM thought so and now they’re trying to save face. Really taking advantage of ARM and pushing for battery life, by optimizing the kernal and changing what happens in standby, would probably be a bigger engineering lift.
/Thoughts from a rando who bought an ARM powered Windows laptop and generally likes it but has never touched the NPU enabled stuff
They did see it coming, this was the goal.
A lot of my camera gear is second hand too. It’s a great way to save some serious $$. As an added bonus, some of my “used” gear was very lightly used by their previous owner.
The true best gear is the gear you end up using
I dabble in photography as a hobby. One of the sayings is, “the best camera is the one you have with you”. The “best” cameras and lenses tend to be big and heavy, but are often overkill. There’s a certain amount of prestige attached to this gear, IMO you’re better off with compromise gear that’s smaller/lighter - especially for frequent casual use. You’ll take it out with you more.
https://ingenext.ca/products/boost-50
50 hp for $1k
I can’t find them right now, but there are similar things you can buy to unlock factory features at a discount.
Up front disclaimer: this is all conjure on my part.
I own an “AI” laptop (only because I was interested in a snapdragon x). Most of the AI enabled features don’t really require a NPU, such as a decent background camera blur, some paint and photo stuff, live captions, etc. Microsoft was looking for a headline feature that didn’t already have a CPU/GPU/cloud implementation. Enter: recal.
IMO this is very much about finding a novel feature, that doesn’t have an alternate implementation. The near term motive is to justify their “AI” PCs to customers in hops that customers adopt them. I suspect the long term goal is opening up a revenue stream for AI - get customers used to “AI enabled” features and then tack a subscription cost onto them, but I truly hope this won’t be the case - especially when the hardware you own has a NPU.
I haven’t spent much time looking at Linux support due to having a busy personal life, so I’ll live with Win 11 in the meantime.
That said, I don’t think anyone has Linux booting on any Snapdragon X machines yet. I think there’s a signing limitation (eg device OEM signing) and a graphics driver gap. It does seem like the first will be overcome eventually, otherwise no one will be able to build their own machine.
More people in the market means more people working on both of these things!
Find people who care about what they’re working on and they’ll go well beyond the extra mile. As an extra motivator, make it clear the company won’t be around if they don’t succeed. I’m sure these employees have shares, but tha only really matters if the company succeeds (extra motivation!). Unfortunately, there have been a ton of green/green-adjacent automotive “startups” that have struggled to gain a foothold. See also:
(I’m sure many others)