Potentially the longest thread in history...

I'm gonna sound like an Apple shill but that is par for the course for my posts on TF over the past decade, so may as well continue the trend.

Ever since I got my M1 MB Air, other Intel laptops feel so shit. I have a pretty new and high spec work laptop. An Intel i7 HP Elitebook with 16GB RAM and SSD. It is crap. It's sat on my desk *doing nothing* other than running a gmail webpage and google chat and an RDP session, and I can hear the fan on it. And it's pretty warm to the touch. And it doesn't even feel very quick when I try and do anything on it. My M1 Air feels way faster, is completely silent and only slightly warm to the touch.

Though all those negative points of my work laptop were true of my old Intel MBP, to be honest.

/rant
Send me your old laptop please.
 
Just for the info, some laptop i7's up to 8th gen. are even dual-core only. Even 11th gen. i7's still have mere quad-cores. Be careful with mobile Intel. They are still better than same gen. desktop dual core i3's but still they; i.e. 11th gen. quad-core i7's, don't come close to hexa-core and above i7's which is the point.

All of that is on one hand of the scale, and the deterioration of Intel in the last, like, 5 years, is on the other. It's all bad.
 
I personally own an HP Zbook 15u with a quad i7 8th gen, has 32GB of RAM and a Sammy 981 NVMe. Inside it's paired with an AMD WX3100. I traded my old Zbook 15 G2 for it and I swear I got a downgrade if I didn't know any better. The laptop I had for work was a Zbook 15 G5 with an 8th gen Xeon (I believe) and 64GB of RAM and WD NVMe drive mated to a Quadro P2000. It is a 6 core and noticeably faster than the 15u despite boosting slower and rivals my desktop in terms of relative system performance. I've been saying it since like what 2014 (?) that Apple has OS's down in terms of resource management and proper app suspension. Considering the M1 laptops are practically PC versions of an iPad/iPhone it makes sense it'll feel way better than any x86 equivalent. The RAM being integrated to the chip means it'll practically have no latency as well which plays a huge part.
 
I personally own an HP Zbook 15u with a quad i7 8th gen, has 32GB of RAM and a Sammy 981 NVMe. Inside it's paired with an AMD WX3100. I traded my old Zbook 15 G2 for it and I swear I got a downgrade if I didn't know any better. The laptop I had for work was a Zbook 15 G5 with an 8th gen Xeon (I believe) and 64GB of RAM and WD NVMe drive mated to a Quadro P2000. It is a 6 core and noticeably faster than the 15u despite boosting slower and rivals my desktop in terms of relative system performance. I've been saying it since like what 2014 (?) that Apple has OS's down in terms of resource management and proper app suspension. Considering the M1 laptops are practically PC versions of an iPad/iPhone it makes sense it'll feel way better than any x86 equivalent. The RAM being integrated to the chip means it'll practically have no latency as well which plays a huge part.

You can really tell the RAM part. Mine is the base model and only has 8GB, but you multitask on it way more than it has any right to handle. My desktop does feel a touch faster. But then it should. It has a 8 core CPU and 32GB RAM. I guess the M1 is 8 cores technically but half of them are slow "efficiency" cores.
 
The more I think about it the more I feel I got a faulty laptop tbh. The CPU is an i7 8650u which boosts to 4.2GHz. It almost never sits on it's base and in fact right now it's idle at 5%ish sitting at 4.15. Yet this machine feels like my old XP box running W10 (940 BE OCd to 3.6GHz). The instant I open any browser it chugs harder than my 98box trying to open Google in Chrome 49. I had to disable the dedicated GPU just for it to not lag hard on the desktop. I could attest this to shitty AMD drivers but I just don't think so.
 
Does anyone on the forums know anything about CB Radios? I've been curious for a good while about them but their seems so much to them I have no idea were to start. Looking at Amazon.co.uk it all seems very complicated . I get you need the radio, but I'm confused over power supply options and Antenna options. I don't really know were to start. Can anyone offer advice? I wouldn't mind buying one to see what their all about, maybe have some fun talking to people but looking t Amazon it seems like a mine field! Anyone?
 
CB radios, bit before my time :D

Accepted a job offer yesterday, jumps my pay about 30% with a much higher potential ceiling (I'm basically at the pay ceiling at my current place). My current work really wanted to keep me, couldn't match the offer and were really nice about it.
 
Got AirPods Max. Returned AirPods Max.

They have sibilance issue. I found myself skipping atleast 10% of tracks because the S was just harsh and hurt my ears. The overall sound quality was great but wasn't worth the insane price over my Audeze Mobius. So the only benefits left were the quick pairing to my macbook and iphone, but meh. The Spatial Audio feature *could* have been enough to make me consider keeping them, it was really cool and worked great... but it only works on iphone and ipad. If i'm watching a film with atmos or surround sound support i'm gonna be watching it on my Apple TV which doesn't support the spatial audio feature on airpods (wtf).

So yeah. $550 headphones that make me skip some of my favourite tracks and don't support the spatial audio on the thing you'd most expect to find it. No bueno Apple.

And so my search for good wireless headphones continue. I switch between my PC and Apple TV a lot so I need something with good bluetooth support. Bose QuietComforts are meh, the Sony XM4s are meh, and now the AirPods Max are meh. Apparently the B&O H95 are great but... £800.
 
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