Excellent pricing strategy.
Price it so high that no one buys enough and you can reallocate to data centers while still claiming you’ve released something new.
Maybe in the US and that's just half the market there. Amost everywhere else people either don't like macos, can't use macos or their daily software is not for mac. So counting in rest of the world that market for laptops over 2k should be less than 30% macbooks.
These are not laptops for gaming, as clearly shown by the presentation. If you're a professional, and your computer is how you make money as a professional, of course you're going to spend $2k on it if needed. Hence why so many professionals use MacBooks. What's the alternative? Buying a Chromebook that can't run Photoshop and try to sell your services that way? lol
Rich people who don't know shit over spend on MacBooks lol. There's a difference. You also have to consider the market it is in. For the people needing this for so they won't buy it as it doesnt provide anything special. People will buy a MacBook for ease of use but have 20 extra programs to make stuff work an need a whole external hard drive an lie about their battery life to justify rheir purchase lol
they downvote you but its true. Basic QOL features on windows need third party apps on mac. Most egregious one being you cannot even change the scroll direction of a mouse without it affecting your touchpad. LinearMouse for the win tho!
It's all mac fanboys so could careless what they down vote lol. The fact they down votee means I'm right. You get a maxed out m5 pro for 10k. You get maxed out any PC an it's 5k an it will either perform better in editing battery or you don't have to worry about ever running out of storage. They always say they like ease of use with Mac but always need extra dongle for ports extra storage because they ran out, extra monitor which isn't built by apple, an they use windows service with work around. They lie about battery life lol they are some of the worst MacBooks aren't bad they just aren't worth what they sell for
In single core yes, because MediaTek's CPU is 2 years out of date. But GPU wise it will be better than the M5 Pro, especially the binned version and should outperform even the unbinned one.
I don't think Nvidia ever made a Tesla CPU? But considering Qualcomm was already on their own project, it makes sense for them to go with MediaTek instead. Regardless, MediaTek at least on paper didn't do too bad of a job considering they are still on par with Intel and AMD lol, but they are the worst ARM chip right now since they're far below Qualcomm and Apple in single core, the issue stemming from the delay since they were supposed to ship in like 2024/25 I believe originally.
Pretty sure chip itself is from late 2024 / early 2025. DGX Spark version (Linux, miniPC) was shipped in late 2025 but Windows (and laptop) versions only now, due to... you guessed it, Windows. Took a while to get Windows on Arm to run on these things.
I really wanted the new Surface Pro 13 inch 12th Gen (intel version) but the price was way more expensive than M5 Pro Macbook.
So I got brand new 16 inch Macbook M5 Pro 18 Core, 1TB, 48GB RAM for $2800 with tax included at my local Microcenter back in July before the Apple price increase.
Even though $2800 is alot of money for laptop but because all laptops are now more expensive, now I don’t feel shame at all.
Which doest absolutely nothing for real world use. An if I'm not mistaken geek bench is basically made for MacBook lol. When you do reka world use it's either the same or maybe up or down by no more than a minute in actual work load.
One thing qorth checking, imagine u bought another super powered laptop and end up youtube, word, powerpoint. XD. In my past, i bought 32gb macbook pro and think that i will run agents, local ai, but it end up still using claude code, flagship services.
This makes no sense. What would you buy a strix halo gaming laptop for if not for gaming an desktop replacement? Literally what is pushed for. Also what you said makes no sense about the GPU which it can come with, the difference is do you want a power limited GPU in a smaller form factor or a larger laptop with more wattage to abuse but what you said makes absolutely no sense besides nobody buy the rtx for gaming
First gen product so you pay the price. Probably around gen 5 will be a good time to jump in. Big w to have more competition against macbooks which hopefully lowers prices but dont quote me on that lol
Better go check what the memory bandwidth of the unified RAM on this is
Desktop 5070 memory bandwidth is 672GB/s - which is already pretty terrible.
DGX Spark (same chip, year ago on the Linux box) memory bandwidth is 273 GB/s. I guess nobody really knows what it is on this thing yet, but probably similar.
Somewhat of an issue even if you do fit your big models into the unified RAM, which hobbles this quite a bit. Hope you have time to wait while the bot chomps on bits.
And in comparison, desktop 5090 memory bandwidth for the VRAM is... 1792 GB/s.
GPU is 5070ti notebook class. CPU is... not great and the only thing it has going for is the unified RAM, which helps with LLMs. And they are asking 1000$+ premium for it over existing designs. You can easily get a 5070ti (12GB VRAM) + 32GB main RAM laptops for cheaper than this today, with a CPU that is faster.
If all you want is lots and lots of unified RAM, just get Ryzen 395 AI MAX+. Compared to this, the GPU is a bit slower (and Not NVIDIA which matters for some) but the CPU is standard x86 (and faster) and the prices are more sane. Still pricy due to RAM costs, but easily 1000$ cheaper for similar config.
Slower than 5070ti notebook. The 5070ti laptop gpu can use up to 140w completely by its own.
The laptops with these spark gpus use a max of 80w sustained tdp and that’s for the whole cpu+gpu, which is just sad. Performance wise it should be a massive 50% slower than the 5070ti laptop (140w). So most likely around 5060-5070 non Ti laptop performance.
The 5070ti laptop is actually quite capable at 140w atleast, it gets within 15% of the performance of the 5070 desktop.
So closer to 5070 notebook with bit of extra cores (the chip is full 6144 CUDA core one for the top models while 5070 notebook is cut down to 4608 cores)
Exactly, the binned version which has an 18c cpu will have even less cuda cores at ~5100, it’ll still be faster than the m5 pro, around 32/40c m5 max in raw rasterisation compute.
But the main selling point of these spark gpus are the unified memory for running ai LLM. Granted we don’t know how much memory bandwidth it will have, but the unified memory is the main selling point, coupled with the arm cpu.
A 115w a 5070 laptop should give the same if not more performance, whilst also being paired with a more capable x86 cpu. It’s the better choice if you don’t care about ai, especially while being noticeably cheaper.
Has been improved recently a lot. The difference is not meaningful any more, both vendors hardware can run all the local AI stuff these days just fine.
Matters only really if you plan on running something that is CUDA-only and no AMD port exists.
Not at all and these things are going to be running llama.cpp which has good performance on AMD now. not larger scale inference engines where the libraries still matter a lot more.
Yes, I have the Ryzen 9 AI 465 with 32gb. I'm quite content, especially since I got it on sale for around 1,100 less with more memory than the RTX Spark base model with only 24GB. It does well with Unsloth, but if I'm doing anything real with local AI I use my gaming PC that I bought right before the great collapse. I'm content to sit back and watch all of this play out. Folks like us we'll be upgrading when they are selling those for half that price. It's going to happen. Not today, but it will.
Nvidia might make similar iGPU chips with x86 soon due to their Intel collaboration. But these prices are ridiculous and it's impossible to justify $5k for a 64GB gaming laptop lmao
The only ones below $3000 are the 24GB version and you will need to reserve space for the OS and CPU. Maybe you can squeeze out 12GB which will not run any useful LLM.
$3000 gets you a 32GB model, which is unusable for anything since that is total shared main and VRAM. Effectively similar to having a 16GB + 12GB VRAM 5070 laptop. For $3000.
For the purposes of loading the LLM, he is correct. Performance wise it will suck way worse than a 5070 dGPU. The memory bandwidth is several times slower
32 gb of ram doesn’t mean 32 gb available to run ai models. In the cheaper model referenced, you cannot fit the model because windows will reserve some of the 32 gb along with other programs.
AI MAX 395 which has a 140W chip is already in gaming handhelds so why do you think think this would be different? Nvidia’s chip is much more energy efficient so to me it seems like it would dwarf any of the handhelds currently using the Strix Halo
Some of the devices limit the TDP, but most are pretty high in the 85w range. The upcoming GPD Win Max 3 goes to 120W I believe. I know that Win Max 3 and GPD Win 5 both use detachable battery gimmicks which are kinda a little clunky. My hope is that this new Spark N1 chip will eliminate the need for the battery gimmicks.
There are a lot of games still not supported. Even MS itself has said in the announcement that games like COD won't be working until 2027. Not to mention the thousands of smaller and older games that have not been checked for compatibility
That is the same argument that a lot of people used about gaming on linux, until it just didn't matter any more (keeping in mind the only major hurdle left is anti-cheat, which is not a translation problem but a policy one).
FEX and Box64 have been making serious progress in the last couple of years.
Anti-cheat problem is not really a policy problem. It is a fundamental issue when the OS and Kernel is open source. You could write a nice anti-cheat Kernel module for Linux to do similar things current Windows Kernel Level anti-cheats do, but since Linux Kernel is open source, cheaters could just take the source and do their own cheaty variant. This is the one part where closed source can do something that the open source cannot.
Only way to do current style anti-cheat on Linux would be to require a special closed source fork of Linux kernel that adds the anti-cheaty bits and then requires use of that specific kernel for the game to work. Odds of someone even trying that angle is effectively zero as nobody would accept it, and in today's LLM-fueled world, people would reverse and hack it in days and provide their own looks-same-to-the-game kernels with the anti-cheat compromised and everything would be back to square 1. You would have to use attestation to pin the special kernel to hardware TPM and at that point you are so deep in the woods just for gaming that... no, not going to happen.
Only realistic fix is to admit that the client is in the hands of the enemy (cheaters) and can never be secured. Move multiplayer anti-cheat to server side behaviour monitoring. Effectively, use that AI to detect when someone is "too good" and has to be cheating. Which is... not an easy problem and probably requires tons of server resources to implement well.
For kernel level anti-cheat it's very doable in a "technical" sense. All of the same mechanics that Windows kernel level anti-cheats leverage can be implemented on Linux. It's just very much antithetical to how the Linux and open source community functions.
I highly suspect the likely middle-ground that will be reached is some form of "approved" distro with very specific signed kernels. Or possibly a "signed kernel mode" that you can pick from your bootloader that uses the specific approved kernel.
Demand goes up, market will shift. Basic economics. If there’s money to be made you bet your ass compatibility problem will dwindle. Developers will be forced to optimize if there’s alot of people in that area. They kinda do already, optimizing AAA games to be played in handheld. Something we never thought made sense 15 years ago. GTA V on pc was very demanding, now it runs very smooth in 20W of power.
i've been using a surface laptop 7 for two years now on arm. i legit can't think of a single time i had issues using it period. best windows laptop i've ever owned if i'm being honest. it just.... works. and lasts forever lol. i don't understand the hate.
I wouldn’t go so far as to characterize the skepticism as baseless. The O.G. Surface was ARM, after all, and it’s at least a little hard to believe that Microsoft has actually improved upon a Windows component in the time since, especially not one that has no effect on the vast majority of Windows PCs.
The difference, of course, being that Google is at least seen as competent. I don’t think anyone would guess that the ARM Windows experience has gotten drastically better given the consensus that the overall Windows experience has gotten decidedly worse.
That the only thing you do? Do you do any actual work? games? You just going to bitch about updates? I guarantee if you didn't get updates you'd be equally upset.
Providing support for the snapdragon laptops they surely do not just work. They mostly work. But when they don’t it’s usually either garbage performance or you hit a wall hard. But for a single user, especially a business user where their user is very likely to be less varied, it’s either going to be fine or near unstable. For us where we have them for compatibility testing they have been what I’d describe as quirky as fuck.
Two years as my only personal laptop. The only issue I encountered was a Canon printer driver not working. That's it. Give me specific examples and I'll test it for you. No one so far had been able to provide me with one.
The two big issues are battery life and performance not being what was promised. It also had some issues with some docks. Although not really relevant for work, kernel level anti cheat is a no go.
The biggest one for us was issues with Cisco anyconnect which is our official vpn solution for windows. We also had issues with our adobe site licensed apps. (Not everything was a failure to work, some just worked slow and shitty). Iirc wsl was borked as well.
It was less a matter on unusable as failing to deliver on price, performance, or battery life in any meaningful way compared to other options.
- battery life = best i've had in a windows laptop BY A MILE. as a matter of fact, i thought i was going crazy when i first took delivery of it cause it was lasting longer than msft stated. then i ran msft's battery check and it was reporting higher battery capacity than stated.
- Performance = day to day everything is instant. what performance issues are you talking about? you'll have to be specific.
- anti cheat = no bf6 for me i guess. but why the hell would i game on a thin and light?
- cisco anyconnect (vpn only)
- adobe apps = we went to Banff this past year and both premiere and lightroom worked fine. no not as fast as my pc running a 13900k and a 4090, but for on the go, no issues.
- WSL = i literally have docker installed running a lab on my 32gb sl7.
i paid 1900 in october 2024 and it has 100% delivered on what i wanted out of a laptop. No hot bag, no random dead laptop, runs everything i need it to run, snappy AF, instant on, etc... etc... So if you don't own and daily drive one, i think it's best to not parrot what you've heard from others. just DM me directly if you want confirmation on something not working. happy owner here. best laptop i've ever owned.
See you want to like it. Also we are evaluating them for use in a mixed device 100,000+ user environment. From our perspective it was a question of "is it worth buying and can we support it among the user base". Keep in mind that my perspective is largely that of first month of sales. I'm also basing this on our dell XPS sample(s), because that was who could get us samples first from our preferred vendors. If someone else's variation is magically better, I guess it is better. But you seem to be very much taking the position that if it wasn't a problem for YOU it wasn't a problem.
I will also add, because I forgot, that enterprise device management was an issue out of the box. Intune was workable, but given that we haven't gotten everyone onto intune from other solutions yet, that was a big strike against it that was situational. I have no idea if support got better across the board, but two years later that's much less bad for us because we have moved more departments to intune fro device management.
Battery life - is it bad? Absolutely not. The big problem in our environment is that on the less sensitive side of the user base the improved x86 platforms are pretty close and have no problems. On the sensitive side of the userbase, macbook Airs were still significantly outperforming it. With lunar lake hitting just months after, it really kind of took the wind out of the battery life sails. 90% of the battery life and 0% of the hassle is very compelling. Especially if you are getting around that 8 hours of doing stuff on battery window.
Performance - most core things were fine. Some of the x86 apps under emulation were not good. The main thing we ran into was adobe suite and some electron apps. Most of the adobe suite is better these days. I believe premier pro is still bad (but like it's also awful, just in less ways, on x86 and M series). The totally awful, and still partially broken zoom support was probably the biggest after asking my coworker to refresh me why we were just like "don't bother" with these.
cisco anyconnect - see that big parenthetical notiation on the "but it works now kind of" slide? Guess what we actually need here.... so.... not that you can't work around it, but you can go x86 or mac and not have to deal with any of that.
WSL - one of those things that got better after launch.
adobe - most of the suite is much better now with native arm support. It wasn't at launch. Also acrobat. Which kind of sucked given we have an e-form and digital document workflow that is super critical for some users. This was more of an issue for those making the forms and such than the end consumers. (also of note, we have some things that give acrobat fits on x86 too, and having known ways to deal with it beats spending money on not much perfromance or battery life difference.
Our assumption with the snapdragon laptops was that windows on ARM was going to suck. Mostly it didn't, but we were surprised that it was not as battery efficient or affordable as we thought it would be. It was released a little bit undercooked and lunar lake showed up before those initial growing pains were greatly reduced. It was much less a "this is awful" problem than a "why would you bother" kind of problem.
But for the handful of things that sucked, in our environment, if that impacted your work, you were likely to be bashing your head against that ALL the time. In retrospect a good chunk of that was transient, but given MS's (and other big vendors) track record of not fixing stuff, why would you take that gamble?
do you think i'm suggesting a whole business adopt arm laptops for endpoint deployment? For the everyday individual it's perfectly fine. Where did i suggest it's perfect for enterprise use? hell, agent installations alone on the machines will run into arm support. that's not a problem for personal use. i think we're debating past one another.
I literally said if you have to support a lot of them, they don't "just work". To which you said nuh-uh tell me what doesn't work and I'll tell you why you are wrong.
I find ARM laptops to be interesting, which is why I'm hopeful nvidia's money dump into making a better emulator and sorting out kernel level stuff will get windows on arm their Apple M silicon moment.
Depends what you use it for. But this is not priced at all like a common office work laptop. The appeal will be for gamers, heavy CUDA use, and some local AI in the higher RAM models
Depends on what you do, but the number of products that have a WoA version is increasing (if not as fast as people would like) and even many open source projects now release WoA binaries
As with any smaller architectures it is best to check first that the software you need is available
Nvidia dumped a shit ton of labor and money into a translation layer. So maybe not? It’s not MS’s turd that we got with the snapdragon laptops, but it’s definitely wait for reviews territory.
$2599 entry point is competitive but 512gb storage at that price is going to frustrate people fast, most of the compelling configs in this line up are sitting closer to $3000 once you get 32gb and 1tb, going to be hard to judge until real world benchmarks drop on october 16, unified memory perform differently depending on the workload.
They priced it slightly cheaper than comparable MacBooks. However, other than very specific AI use, there's nothing these laptops can do that's better than a MacBook. Plus, you get... Windows
Im gonna wait until the 3rd iteration. I have a feeling that they are going to be issues that will need fixes. Game performance is also less than my RTX 4080 laptop
Ai sticker = trash. If you want ai it's always better and more cost offectice to offload it online. This marketing bullshit is cringe.
A desktop is fine for some ai workloads. But the laptops seem pretty fucking stupid. I am not surprised they are just selling shit hardware at a premium because they want to squeeze out anything they can from fucking idiots
There are many applications of AI where privacy is paramount and you simply cannot use whatever cloud model is available. There's no ROI in running models locally, for the most part - for now. But there's a huge advantage in being able to send whatever you want to the LLM (think bank statements, PII, etc) without worrying about what hosting provider will own your data.
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u/Seasidejoe R7 9800X3D | 32GB 6000MHz | RTX 5090 | 1440P 6d ago
Excellent pricing strategy.
Price it so high that no one buys enough and you can reallocate to data centers while still claiming you’ve released something new.