I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are. It's not really your computer, you're just renting. Apple has decided that they know what you want and need better than you.
It's really kind of tragic that so much incredible research and engineering work goes into creating new hardware like this only for it to be locked into one particular company with very tight constraints on target audience, income bracket, and technical limitations. Think how incredible it would be if everyone could use this new silicon.
It is, in fact, already used by everyone, because it's an evolution of the chipset in basically every smartphone in the world with widely divergent target audiences, income brackets, and technical limitations.
I don't know that that's a fair comparison. Just because it's an ARMv8 chip doesn't mean it's directly comparable to what's in smartphones. (I assume you aren't comparing it to Apple made chips for iPhone specifically, since then it wouldn't be true that it's in "basically every smartphone in the world".)
In particular, this is the first 5nm chip to be widely available, and by most accounts on performance it competes with top of the line hardware at a small fraction of the power use. Most existing ARM chips are designed for the very-low-power market, e.g. in phones, not to be used in a high performance laptop.
If there's a Dell or Thinkpad laptop with an ARM chip that's comparable, by all means, let me know.
AFAIK you are correct. Apple has completely redesigned their own ARM chip. It has the same instruction set (or a superset of the instruction set) as what runs in a cellphone, but the design is completely different from say, Qualcomm chips.
I guess, but the "whole concept of the machine" that I'm typing this on was to run Windows... 7 (I think?); that's a completely artificial limitation, as shown by running Ubuntu on it years after the hardware went out of support.
I'm not sure what the problem is, then. You have a device that does what you (or the GP) want, which is to install any operating system, tinker, etc.
Is the worry that Apple and its practices will dominate the industry to the point that you literally will not be able to turn on your current machine and use it?
Right, the point is that it didn't use to be that way exclusively and now it is, so the new machines are more restrictive than previous Macs, which also ran macOS.
In fact macOS itself is more restrictive nowdays than it used to be.
No, not necessarily. Renting just implies you're not the owner and need to follow someone's rules, (that of the actual owner), in order to make use of the rented item.
'Purchasing' a Kindle book or video on Amazon is also renting for example and yet it does not mean you have to continue paying and yet you don't own the copy as Amazon's going to decide how you're allowed to consume it and if they're going to let you keep it[1][2].
I don’t think purchasing a computer is the same thing as buying a movie from Amazon. The computer is always gonna be yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, even if Apple has made it very difficult to do so. But there are lots of objects in my house that would fall under that category as well, but I consider myself as their owner.
I prefer for the class of device the Air fits into (travel, work laptop) to have a nicely curated nix machine with working drivers out of the box. Apple has continued to improve on this by making this product class faster, more battery efficient, and* cheaper.
There is a massive marketplace for tinkering on computers, from Arduinos to multi-GPU ML rigs. Trying to optimize for both classes of things seems like a foolish endeavor, especially when Linux users represent such a small fraction of the desktop market.
I hear this all the time from people "drivers working out of the box", but I've been running Linux machines for a decade now, and I've run into very few issues comparatively speaking. My work makes me use a MacBook for work, and it has a lot of significant bugs that are not getting fixed. The trick with Linux is to use a popular distribution. The one thing I will fully concede is that Linux laptops have poor battery life.
Hopefully it's not just secret apple sauce that makes these powerhouses, and other chip makers make arm based processors soon enough giving us the choice we deseeve. (given gravitons similar performance bump this is likely the case)
It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly diminished on Windows or Linux.
Actually I had a Mac mini with the touchpad and the damn thing disconnected three times a day. All my input devices have wires now and the stick out of the right places.
Touché. But seriously, most people who want to run Linux on Mac want to do it because they like Apple's laptop hardware. If you want a compact Linux desktop then a NUC should probably serve you just as well. Or at least, this was the case while Apple was still using Intel chips. If Apple Silicon lives up to expectations then I suppose there could finally be a compelling reason for running Linux on a Mac desktop.
To be clear, I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be any good reason for wanting to run Linux on a Mac desktop. But desktops are already a niche product for Apple, and people who want to run Linux on Mac desktops are arguably a tiny niche within a niche.