[hbbio]

The progress on all fronts is really impressive, and even the write-up is top notch. The pace at which the team advances is incredible, as it seems Apple support is minimal...

Maybe the core tech users is negligible to Apple, but it shouldn't be: Winning over the power users generally precedes larger adoption and I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead.

[specialist]

Totally. I'm not the target audience for Asahi as a daily driver. But I've used Linux to repurpose (life extension) my older macs. So this work is fills me with joy and appreciation.

Also, the comparison of A14 and M1 (aka "A14X") gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones. There was an iPodLinux project, back in the day. I have no idea what the options are today.

[tambourine_man]

>gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones

That would involve jailbraking. The nice thing about the M series Macs is that there is an offical way to run alternative OSs, AFAIK. Something that should be required by law after X number of units sold IMO, but that's another conversation altogether.

[kaba0]

To give credit where it is due, I remember one member from the project mentioning that Apple actually did quite stellar work to enable other OSs while still maintaining a secure booting mechanism (for both osx and future third party ones!)

[2fast4you]

Once asahi is stable, I would seriously consider buying a MacBook to use as my daily driver

[biomcgary]

The final element of my decision to buy my first MacBook (after being very anti-Apple for years) was the existence of Asahi.

[Elora]

Are you already using Asahi on it? Would love to hear/read (if you've written it somewhere else) some feedback about your experience as I'm considering this path as well. A dual-boot would be most excellent!

Is there a way to run Asahi as a VM as native ARM yet an M1 Macs?

[biomcgary]

No, I am at a new job, so I don't have time for such fun (at least until the new company MacBook Pro arrives). Just knowing that the work seems to be moving forward was enough for me.

[phoe-krk]

> and even the write-up is top notch

I enjoyed the pun, even more so now that "support" for the hardware notch on the screen is also mentioned in the article.

[ericls]

If it can run linux, it can conquer data center

[stjohnswarts]

In it's current form I don't think so. It's not optimized for DC/enterprise. It certainly has potential though.

[herpderperator]

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/12/amazon-ec...

[monocasa]

That's more of a 'if you have everything else in the data center, then you can have this too for consistency's sake' than something to move traditional data center workloads to.

[r00fus]

The better example of ARM entrance to the datacenter is AWS Graviton. Apple could learn from Graviton to make its ARM cores significantly more datacenter friendly.

That said, I don't see Apple doing this unless they see it as a significant opportunity.

[monocasa]

Apple hasn't seen fit to do that for their own data center parts yet (hence the job postings for qemu-kvm, and the xcode cloud running on x86_64 in a VM).

I don't think data center parts are on their radar at all.

[wtallis]

For M1 Macs, isn't it everything but the ARM cores that is not datacenter-friendly - the memory capacity, the IO options, the system form factors?

[peoplefromibiza]

power users come and go.

general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority

who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM?

only people with lots of money to waste.

[boplicity]

> who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM?

Let's say you use a laptop for 6 hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year, and that it lasts for 3 years. That's 4,320 hours of usage. For many people, it's worth paying 35 cents per hour to use a machine that's even just a little bit better than one that costs half that. I'm writing this on a high-end Macbook Pro that's 8 years old. It was very expensive when I bought it, but the "cost per hour" has actually been quite low. The benefit of a better experience during the entire duration of usage is well worth the added cost, in my experience.

[peoplefromibiza]

> For many people, it's worth paying 35 cents per hour to use a machine that's even just a little bit better than one that costs half that

That's my point.

Some people would.

Quoting myself

people with lots of money to waste.

Does that mean that Apple is Winning over the power users (that) generally precedes larger adoption?

Absolutely not.

Anyway: spending less for the same output is better than spending more for the same output. At least make it scale linearly.

Apple HW doesn't equal double productivity, hence double price is not a price that will appeal general population, but only **some people**

It's not a critique against Apple M1, only to the assumption that a good enough CPU will make wonders on the market.

It won't.

[bestouff]

My job bought me whatever laptop I needed, so I got a beefed-up XPS 15 (i9, 64gb). If the M1 max could run Linux I would have bought that instead.

[nix23]

>35 cents per hour to use

WOW that's kind allot TBH.

[PeterisP]

I think the idea is that a power user would be using the computer to earn money at a large enough hourly rate where 0.35$/h is literally insignificant.

[wdb]

Yeah, like only ~0.4% of a hour rate of a typical contractor in London (8 hours work day)

[nix23]

in London.....of a typical contractor....

[riquito]

You're confirming OP point though, you didn't upgrade in 8 years, because for your use case it was good enough and not worth the expense

[MathCodeLove]

If they had instead bought a $700 laptop 8 years ago, they likely would have had to upgrade several times by now.

[peoplefromibiza]

800 dollar laptops today are more durable than M1 with max 16 GB of RAM at double the price, because their RAM is actually upgradable most of the time.

It's so funny see Mac fans argue about everything and its contrary that it's worth the obvious down votes.

[tonguez]

"800 dollar laptops today are more durable ... because their RAM is ... upgradable"

I think the word durable has more of a connotation of being resistant to damage rather than meaning "able to be used for a long time".

[MathCodeLove]

I don't own any Apple products.

[ChuckNorris89]

I suspect you'll get downvoted into oblivion for your PoV by the pro-Apple HN crowd and even though I do agree with you to some extent on the the high pricing (a basic M1 MacBook is half my NET take home pay as a dev in Europe, and double my rent costs) but value is subjective to most people, and for most, buying into the Apple ecosystem the value the ecosystem brings to their lives is justified, otherwise they wouldn't buy it in the first place (it's not a Prada handbag). Especially for high income earners from wealthy western countries, the cost of ownership can be easily justified for the convenience it brings.

But if you're not currently into the Apple ecosystem, and consider going all-in, the total costs of ownership are indeed a bit eye-watering for those without six figure jobs, if you disregard or don't need or don't care about the whole ecosystem and just look at the specs to price ratio of the laptop on it's own (I got a 13 inch QHD thin and light laptop with an 8 core Ryzen 5800U and 16GB RAM and 1TB NVME removable!!! SSD and 8 hour battery life for 750 Euros, where I can dual-boot Linux and Windows and run absolutely any (non-Apple)SW I could ever need).

So, since I don't need any component of the Apple ecosystem, I can't justify spending double the money to get more limited functionality in return, though I am tech savvy enough to use Windows and Linux and create for myself a similar (and subjectively better) ecosystem to Apple's for cheap/free using various OSS and proprietary SW.

However, lost of doctors I visit and most high-earners I know seem to own Macs and iPhones, so for them most likely it's worth the extra penny for the magic of the ecosystem where everything Justworks(TM) and they don't have to spend extra time learning and fiddling with tech related stuff they don't care for.

And TBH, if I didn't have to worry about money, and didn't have a career and hobbies that required the need to run X86_X64 binaries and Android apps, then I'd probably go all-in on the latest Apple MacBook Pros with extra-ports plus iPhone ecosystem for the convenience and time savings.

[kitsunesoba]

The other thing is that specs alone don’t tell the whole story. There’s plenty of x86 laptops that on paper have better looking specs than the MacBook Air, but few or none of them are as good at what makes a laptop a laptop — mainly, battery life and heat output. There are laptops that are thinner and lighter, like the Thinkpad X1 Nano that I own, but that thing can’t touch an Air in battery life, heat output, and in some aspects performance.

[ChuckNorris89]

> but few or none of them are as good at what makes a laptop a laptop — mainly, battery life and heat output

Meh, my Ryzen laptop, while not M1 level, handles performance, heat and battery just fine for my needs, considering it costs well under half the price of an equivalent M1, and, as a major necessity for me, is easier to repair/upgrade but most importantly, it runs both Windows and Linux plus all X86 binaries I could ever want natively and I have full control over it (on Linux at least), instead of the manufacturer dictating what I'm allowed to run on it.

M1s are great but they aren't the magic silver bullet that solves everyone's problems, as I have no use for benchmark topping chips that can't run the SW I use. <shrug>

[gigatexal]

Yes they're expensive. But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have from 2013 that still run like new? My 2013 MacBook Pro with an i7 and 16GB of ram still screams. The trackpad works, no keys fail, the screen is still good being retina. The amount of money paid divided by how long it has lasted me makes it a ~300 USD computer!*

*if replaced every year ... or a 900 usd computer if replaced every 3 years.

[peoplefromibiza]

> But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have from 2013 that still run like new?

many

I don't see many old macs around, because they're harder and more expensive to repair.

> if replaced every year

that's a big if.

The assumption is that Pro market will drive general adoption.

It's a false premise.

Pro market, especially Apple Pro market, it's predictive of exactly nothing.

[gurkendoktor]

> I don't see many old macs around

Just anecdata, but from walking through German trains, I disagree. I still see non-Retina MacBook Airs on some trays, for example, last sold in 2015.

Some Mac models are clearly more reliable and maintainable than others, see the butterfly keyboard fiasco. But I think companies should be judged by their better products, not the duds.

[gigatexal]

Yes 2016 to 2020 for keyboards was a terrible terrible black eye for my narrative. The damn keyboard fiasco.

[gigatexal]

> that's a big if. > The assumption is that Pro market will drive general adoption. > It's a false premise. > Pro market, especially Apple Pro market, it's predictive of exactly nothing.

Hah. It is actually. Apple releases the MacBook Air... what does the PC market do in lock step? Try to copy it. We can thank Apple for insisting on SSDs in the laptop for all our PC laptops having them. When Apple moves industries follow. That won't be like that forever but it is currently.

[dijit]

This is true for the good and bad.

Apple removed CD drives and Ethernet ports: everyone does.

Apple removes HDMI, many do.

Apple removes headphone jack from phones: everyone mocks, the follows.

[gigatexal]

> But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have from 2013 that still run like new? >> many

I find that hard to believe. You're claiming plastic race-to-the-bottom laptop pc makers are building machines that last as long as all aluminium premium Macs? Fat chance.

Re the software issue, yeah, that's a pain. I do plan on putting Linux on it when I replace it with another Mac laptop, probably a M1. But that just furthers my point that Apple makes the best, longest lasting hardware.

But to each their own.

[opan]

If you wanted your comparison to be as lopsided as it sounds like you were thinking it was, you should've listed different companies. All three of those companies make high-end business laptops (EliteBook, Latitude/Precision, ThinkPad) that are absolutely built to last and have a cult following for it (ThinkPads especially). You should've listed Acer or some of the gaming brands to represent the ones that don't seem to last. I can say personally I have a ThinkPad X220T (Sandy Bridge) and ThinkPad T440p (Haswell) that are still working great. I sold a ThinkPad T60p just a few years ago that was still working as well, although it was showing its age with its 2GB of RAM and 32bit CPU (upgradable to a 64bit Core 2 Duo in theory).

[peoplefromibiza]

> find that hard to believe. You're claiming plastic race-to-the-bottom laptop pc makers are building machines that last as long as all aluminium premium Macs? Fat chance.

I'm not saying that, at all.

I am saying that people keep reasonably priced hardware for longer than Mac owners because they don't have money to waste and can actually repair and upgrade them for cheap.

[nopenopenopeno]

And you can no longer install the latest macOs, and linux still has battery/sleep problems with it. I know. I have the same one. Truly incredible hardware. I wish I wasn’t forced to replace it.

[stjohnswarts]

I think if you get snarky with the HN crowd and tell them they're bad people and living life the wrong way they will get snarky back. HN isn't a unimind, there are lots of opinions here. Look at the way you approached it, you did well, you had nuance, you didn't assault the reader.

[kaba0]

The thing is, I’m not sure your laptop is better than an M1, let alone the newer gen ones. Apple is really ahead in the CPU game and I say that as someone who was never there fan.

[ChuckNorris89]

It doesn't have to be better than an M1 when it's under half the price. It needs to fulfill my needs with minimum compromises, which it does admirably. The limitations of the Apple HW, OS and ecosystem would nullify any performance benefits the M1 could ever bring for me (A Ferrari might be the fastest car on the road but if I need a 4x4 to get to the top of the mountain where my work or leisure is, then owning a Ferrari is not much use for me, is it?)

Therefore I am more comfortable buying something that, while not the fastest in the world at topping benchmarks, is plenty fast enough (faster than anything Apple ever made pre-M1 which many users still use just fine), fits my needs better, is easier to repair/upgrade, and as an added bonus, is significantly cheaper than an M1, so I can take the difference in money I would have spent on an M1 and buying into the Apple ecosystem and put it into Apple stock and I'd be even better off in the long run :)) Everybody wins.

[kaba0]

My biggest gripe with laptops have been the battery life. They were basically glorified PCs with like few hours inside them when not plugged in.

This is solved by the M1, that’s all I say. Your laptop is still much more expensive than a significantly better desktop PC.

[ChuckNorris89]

>My biggest gripe with laptops have been the battery life. They were basically glorified PCs with like few hours inside them when not plugged in.

Online reviews show multiple laptops with near full-day battery life (>8h) exist if you do some googling, so that's almost a non-issue ATM if that's your main concern.

>Your laptop is still much more expensive than a significantly better desktop PC.

Of course it is, but so what? I need a laptop, not a desktop.

[peoplefromibiza]

well, truth is Apple MacBook Air 13 with 16 GB of RAM is listed at € 1.429 on the Italian Apple web site.

My sister bought a Lenovo thinkbook with a Ryzen 7, 16 GB of RAM (upgradable up to 32) for € 729

My 3D artist friend an Asus ROG 14 with an NVidia GPU and 32GB of RAM for € 1.780 and he's using it to render complex scenes.

Does the increase in performance justify the ridiculous price?

It doesn't, in my opinion.

Also, Apple doesn't want to be a mainstream company, their market is never gonna be huge, premium prices are only justifiable if the product is somewhat exclusive.

[dagw]

My company has Lenovo Thinkpads as their standard laptops, and they cost basically the same as MacBooks. So it's not like Apple are charging uniquely high prices for their laptops

[cruano]

So your 3D artist friend got a 1-pound-heavier machine with a plastic build that still gets beat in a single-core CPU benchmark, and he payed extra for that privilege. Let me know how it goes when he drops it.

Not to mention the unusable trackpad and keyboard, and the lack of video camera. Or even the fact that this machine gets super hot and loud, while an air doesn't even have fans.

[peoplefromibiza]

it's not plastic.

M1 Macs can't do what that laptops does.

Simple as that.

People are not stupid, that might surprise you, but people use their money for the best, usually.

> Not to mention the unusable trackpad and keyboard

Have you ever heard of a device called "mouse"?

My friend uses another device entirely, it's called "WACOM CINTIQ PRO TOUCH 32"

because he cares about eronomics in his job, specific to his job, he doesn't need to show off with his friends.

> and the lack of video camera

are you familiar with the concept of a working machine?

> Or even the fact that this machine gets super hot and loud

have you ever thought that people don't care about it, because they are working and their job is not making less noise possible?

that's a feature only if your job requires absolute silence, rendering at X minutes per frame is not one of them.

People just don't care.

It's like saying that your washing machine is noisy.

Do you stare at it while it washes your underwear?

[cruano]

> M1 Macs can't do what that laptops does

And vice versa. Try using it for hours just on battery.

>Have you ever heard of a device called "mouse"?

Then you can't use it on your lap, need a bigger desk, etc.

>are you familiar with the concept of a working machine?

Are you familiar with the concept of online meetings ? Or do you work as a hermit ?

>because they are working and their job is not making less noise possible?

Not to mention audio people that do require that, but I'm sure your coworkers wouldn't appreciate the fan noise blasting each time you unmute

>Do you stare at it while it washes your underwear?

Do you leave the room when using your computer ?

[dijit]

The price seems to be comparable to premium lines of PC's.

Dell XPS and HP Elitebooks often meet or exceed the price of comparable MacBooks.

[stjohnswarts]

I find the hardware in the more "elite" laptops lasts longer. In 2015 I bought an Asus ROG middle of the road priced computer and have had to replace the hard drive in it and two keyboards. I have a macbook from the same year and 0 problems, and use it more than the Asus.

[peoplefromibiza]

> The price seems to be comparable to premium lines of PC's.

How many times people said that the Air is the "entry level" "low budget" Mac?

Which one is true?

Is it a luxury product or an entry level one?

I can quote many comments saying both things in the same thread.

Anyway, no company pays Lenovo full price and their discount policies are far more aggressive than Apple's.

There's a reason: Apple doesn't undersell, they don't care.

Lenovo, Dell, HP make volumes, they don't care to be a luxury brand.

The X1 carbon, paid full price, is for people who have money to waste.

[dijit]

> Is it a luxury product or an entry level one?

Obviously: Both.

The absolute "entry" point is the Mac mini.

The MacBook Air a low spec "luxury" quality device for people who want a well built laptop (that has decent battery life and a good screen) but do not have heavy demands on performance.

If your argument is discounts then I don't support that pricing model (unpredictable frenetic oscillation) anyway.

And, yah, if you're a company you get a flat rate discount based on volume with Apple products.

[simonh]

Why can’t a luxury product range have entry level models? Even Ferrari has cars ranging in price from $220k up to $1m. Search for “Ferrari entry-level” and you’ll get plenty of hits using that phrase for various Portofino, Spider and Roma configurations.

[stjohnswarts]

There is a middle path here...

[stjohnswarts]

Not everyone has the same end user needs as your friends, so they're choices are just as valid.

[peoplefromibiza]

And who said they are not valid?

[WastingMyTime89]

I am not what you would call an Apple fan still I bought a Macbook Air M1 with 16Gb of RAM in France for around 1200€ a couple of months ago (to replace an early 2011 Macbook Pro - I don't change my personal laptop often). While I would never buy a Macbook Pro, I think the Air pricing was fine. The price is pretty close to other ultraportables, performances are very good, battery life is incredible, the screen is beautiful and I don't mind paying a small premium for a sleek design and good quality control. I don't feel like I wasted my money.

[peoplefromibiza]

I'm looking at prices on the French Apple website and it says

7 cores GPU / 16GB RAM / 256GB SSD 1.359 euros

https://i.imgur.com/udZSqAz.png

8 core GPU / 16GB RAM / 512GB SSD 1.629 euros

https://i.imgur.com/QacUu2X.png

I'm not saying it isn't the price people will pay, I'm only saying it's a price point that will convince people to upgrade, but won't allow Apple market to expand in a meaningful way.

Apple had already a boom years ago, I still remember Peter Jackson editing LOTR on set with his MacBook Pro + Final cut.

Then Apple stagnated and studios replaced their Macs with PCs.

Now maybe they will buy Macs again, it's a cycle, it's the same market shrinking a little and expanding a little over time.

Pro Macs are not iPhones, there are countless alternatives.

[WastingMyTime89]

It's not interesting to buy these laptops straight from Apple. Large national resellers like Darty or Fnac offer better services and discount them very often.

> Pro Macs are not iPhones, there are countless alternatives.

I have a very different reading of the market.

I don't think iPhones are priced competitively. They are not really better than Android phones which are far cheaper. That's why they have such a ridiculously low market share in Europe.

The Macbook Air is competitively priced however. Its price is in line with the rest of the market and it is a good cost to value offered proposition.

[dagw]

That's why they have such a ridiculously low market share in Europe.

Phone market share in Europe[1]:

Apple 35.42%

Samsung 30.81%

Xiaomi 11.71%

edit: some other sources have it Samsung 32%, Apple 28% and yet others Samsung: 30% and Apple: 22%, but either way hardly "ridiculously low"

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe

[WastingMyTime89]

Statcounter is not really a serious source for market share. Both Counterpoint Research and Strategy Analytics give Apple a more credible 20% market share in Europe behind Samsung and Xiaomi.

It's not disastrous but it compares poorly to the between 55% and 65% of the USA market.

[markphip]

These are pure guesses on my part, but I would guess that 99% of laptops that are sold each year are purchased with 16GB or less RAM and 99% of laptops that have been sold all time have never had their RAM upgraded.

So I would also guess the number of people willing to buy one of these is pretty high. I purchased the MacBook Air and love it. So fast, so quiet. Could I afford it? Yes. But I also typically use a Mac for 5-7 years so I did not consider it overly expensive.

[stjohnswarts]

Not this year, I've seen lots of laptops coming out starting at 32GB at reasonable prices, pretty sure your 99% is more like 80-90%

[cassianoleal]

I have replaced my Core i9 with 32Gb RAM with an M1 Air with 16Gb RAM and couldn't be happier.

I work as a platform engineer, code mostly in Go and Python, run VMs and containers as well as some crappy resource-hungry apps like Slack and Signal all day long, and have never felt the need for more RAM on this machine.

YMMV, of course, but 16Gb on an Apple Silicon machine takes you a lot farther than you would imagine. I have co-workers who go by daily with 8Gb M1 machines.

[lillecarl]

I monitor the RAM usage of my work machine with prometheus, and I haven't been above 16GB yet. This is on a machine with 40GB RAM and swappiness set to 1 (don't swap unless you reeeeeeeaaaalllyyyy have to).

This is running Linux rather than macos though, but it shouldn't really matter. I do have loads of web junk loaded. (Slack, Gmail, Gcal, YT music, Fastmail, plenty of browser tabs)

[GeneralMaximus]

While I've recently stopped using Macs as my primary computers, I can definitely see the appeal of Apple computers for a large segment of the population.

E.g I still have my old MacBook around for running Ableton, because support for pro audio on both Windows and Linux is not great. Linux is almost there with PipeWire support landing in most major distros, but Windows still requires a lot of fiddling with drivers and random EXEs downloaded off the web to get a reasonable setup going. And I'm not even an audio professional, just a hobbyist with very mainstream hardware.

I suspect a lot of media/design/film professionals are in the same boat. Not to mention software developers who want a smoother experience than Windows/Linux can give them. This has always been Apple's market and they don't care about anyone else.

[brokenmachine]

God I wish Ableton would support Linux, but I don't think it'll happen.

[saagarjha]

There's a new set of Apple silicon Macs that go all the way up to 64 GB of RAM, although you'll pay a premium for it.

[peoplefromibiza]

premium = an arm and a leg.

My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds.

It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.

[saagarjha]

I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.

[peoplefromibiza]

The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price.

The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is.

I could understand 20% more, but not two times.

Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs.

That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market.

They simply will never be mainstream.

My answer was to

I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead

I would!

CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget

[dagw]

The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price.

But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.

I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.

[simonh]

>> I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead

>I would!

>CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget

You’re quite right. If you restrict your market segment of interest to budget products and overall market share, that’s Macs out of the picture before you even start. Apple does not care, at all, about the budget end of the market. It’s irrelevant to them.

Looking at the premium segment, and the market dynamics are completely different. The majority of retail laptops costing over $1k sold are Macs. They also enjoy about tripple the market share among university students that they have in the general market, although that varies greatly by country. The result is that Apple captures roughly 60% of the profits in the desktop/laptop computer market globally.

Aiming for market share would mean accepting much lower profit margins. That’s something they’re just not interested in.

[lillecarl]

It's weird isn't it, how Apple might become the first 3 trillion dollar company.... Even if all their products are overpriced horseshit. One could almost assume people value what Apple is making and are willing to pay for it.

Their products aren't twice as expensive, their upgrades might be (RAM, iPhone storage) but the base models aren't very expensive if you compare it with "closest to comparable" competitor models.

[hpen]

Go to a university and look around at all the MacBooks owned by non tech people. You would be surprised by the fact they are everywhere.

[ohgodplsno]

Such as a high end Ryzen, which eats the M1 for breakfast ? Sure.

[GeekyBear]

The M1 chips that have been released certainly can't compete on core count against desktop chips with Zen 3 cores, but compared to the laptop versions of Ryzen, the M1 is absolutely not being eaten for breakfast.

>The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...

[stjohnswarts]

Most people spend a lot of time on the computer. I can't imagine working around a half screen of data and halfscreen of a keyboard. Make a proper wireless docking station and give me a keyboard and mouse and monitor and then we'll talk. After about half hour staring at a phone screen I'm ready to throw it through a window from the eye strain. I think laptops/desktops will be with us for a while longer.

[sharikous]

not sure what's your point..

A wholeful lot of working people need a computer, a phone is not enough.

A laptop that has top notch battery performance and can handle heavy work at the same time, being also very lightweight, has a lot of pluses.

The fact that it is well built and that it is battery efficient is, that alone, sort of an insurance policy. I can see many occasions arising in a timespan of some years where a professional could lose a lot of money if its main work device proves to be unreliable at a wrong moment. It might be more than those 1500 euros depending on the field.

[hvgk]

A $200 smartphone isn’t enough for most people. They’ve been sold that ideology but all I see is people struggling with them constantly assuming that’s the best of the future in their hands.

[kaba0]

Are there any other laptop currently on the market with similar performance and battery life? It’s not like M1s are the exact same as the models before.

[wronglebowski]

I do wonder what Apple will do if this gets any sort of traction. I fear they only allow disabling of secure boot/other OS installs due to fear of regulation. Apple wants you running their OS and in their walled garden.

[dilap]

I don't know, when they were on Intel they went out of their way to support dual-booting with Windows.

Maybe if 20XX really does become year the "year of desktop on linux" they'll start to get worried? But for now it seems like an easy calculation that it only benefits Apple to allow easy dual-booting to Linux -- it makes their hardware more appealing to the hard-core geek crowd (w/ disproprtionate mind-share and knock-on effects), while still having essentially zero chance of Linux cannibalizing your every-day user market.

[eptcyka]

Apple is at no risk of having Linux stealing their users away. Unless someone makes a business of reselling Macbooks with linux being preinstalled and in some magical way that business becomes immensely successful.

[maratc]

In which case this will generate even more demand for Macbooks, which shouldn't be an issue for Apple.

[favorited]

Apple explicitly enabled support for this: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/13331260180689551...

[sys_64738]

Nothing. Most Mac users are not buying from Apple to run vendor unsupported OSs. It really doesn't matter to corporate Apple what is going on other than to make sure technical documentation isn't leaked.