i'm using it as a daily driver for a couple months easily, but my daily driving happens to not require the not-quite-perfect device drivers. i shutdown for sleep, for instance, which works just fine, since boot and login is super fast and restores everything.
Possibly stupid q: Why buy a mac if you are just going to run Linux on it? I suspect any comparable PC would be more economical (w/ exception of power draw).
1. I prefer Mac hardware to any PC hardware (I don't know any manufacturers who come close to apple in hardware quality, so I don't think the "comparable PC" you cite even exists in reality).
2. I prefer to use Linux, since I'm more familiar with it, I'm more likely to be able to debug it when things go wrong (macOS Just Works more reliably, but when it doesn't, I'm stuck), and also I work on software that runs in prod on Linux and I don't want to deal with Docker for Mac.
3. While this is not yet the case, I think it's likely that someday Asahi will run better and more reliably on macs than mainstream distros run on PC laptops. The reason is that they only have one target (or, I suppose, one very closely related family of targets) whereas there are a pile of different PC vendors that are all subtly broken in different ways. I've _never_ seen a high-end PC laptop run Linux without tons of bugs and weird quirks; to get a solid Linux laptop experience, you seem to need to eschew discrete graphics cards and use a system that's a few years old at minimum.
I would probably suggest that Lenovo comes pretty close to Apple in terms of build quality. I have both Macs and ThinkPads and they both feel pretty good. The Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 10 is available with Fedora Linux as an option[1] and pretty much everything works out of the box with great performance.
If you're in Europe, you can also get the ThinkPad Z13 and Z16 (which are AMD-based laptops) with Fedora as well, and that should be coming to the North American Lenovo store soon (hopefully).
Lenovo works with Fedora to ensure that things work, and there's a nice process to make sure everything stays "good" with Fedora Linux on Lenovo hardware.
That laptop is not “high-end”. i7 processor, standard (not 4K) screen resolution, Intel graphics.
I also have a thinkpad, and it gives me no end of issues, presumably largely due to the Nvidia GPU. There are also some weird non-GPU-related quirks; for example, charging over USB-C sporadically stops working (requiring an unplug and re-plug of the cable), especially when the battery is low.
The X1s have great build quality compared to other non-Apple laptops, but mine didn't last but about 1.5 years of daily work use before the case itself started failing (case metal chipping and bending + keys failing, battery issues, ports failing, etc etc). On the other hand, my 2014 macbook air still looks almost new even after almost 7 years of daily use.
I think it's as close as it gets, but it's still nowhere near Apple. I'd love to see a premium non-Apple manufacturer.
Yeah my expensive Lenovo Slim 7 Pro Carbon edition has just had the hinge fail at 11 months. I'm sick and tired of high end Windows laptops all failing due to hardware issues. I am seriously considering a Mac for the first time in two decades in disgust with the state of reliability of Windows laptops. But I don't want to run Apple software and live in their walled garden.
I have some hope Framework laptops are going to end up filling this niche eventually. Right now, Linux is an afterthought on them, but its the same for Apple M1/M2 series.
I get 12+ hours of battery life on my M1 Air, no longer bother with cables and outlets at coffee shops.
What else I could buy of similar weight/size/battery/quality?
Even if knew of an alternative, there are other unexpected perks to going with Apple: travel constantly, occasionally selling my old one and switching to a new machine is easy whereas with other brands would be impossible. Amortized cost is less than $1/day.
If this Asahi thing pans out (I'm guessing maybe in a year or two it won't use twice the battery) I'll immediately dual boot and spend the majority of my time in it. :)
This also happened when Macs transitioned to Intel and Core 2 Duo laptops were released. At the same price point, PCs were much noiser and had much poorer battery range.
ARM laptops from other brands are starting to pop up but they will take at least a year to catch up in terms of performance.
Right now, ThinkPad X13s runs Linux very decently, but it's less powerful than the M1.
In the US market it might be cheaper than M1 Mac Airs. In Europe it's 50% more expensive and customer support is poor.
> This also happened when Macs transitioned to Intel and Core 2 Duo laptops were released. At the same price point, PCs were much noiser and had much poorer battery range.
I had one of those macbooks… very silent but the fan broke quite soon and to use it I had to limit the cpu frequency or it would overheat and shut down.
I take the noise over the sleek computer with the air intake and outtake placed in the same hole that overheats constantly.
The machine was completely unusable in the summer, the bottom would get scorching hot. I could NOT place it on my legs.
The hardware is pretty good. Utterly unmaintainable, unserviceable and unapgradeable, extremely overpriced tiering (e.g. adding storage or RAM which you have to do at purchase time), with limited options (e.g. i cannot stand glossy screens with shitty reflections everywhere causing eye strain), but still very good. However the software (macOS) is pretty shit and IMO hard to adapt to coming from any other OS.
Raw performance per watt, and per weight/dimensions is best in class. For pure performance (e.g. an Asus ROG Zephyrus) or lightness (e.g. LG Gram) there are better options, but if you want all three it's hard to beat.
I personally think the hardware is so good, even with the caveats, but the software so bad that I'm honestly tempted to get an Air for portability or a Pro as a daily driver when Asahi Linux is good enough for me and the prices are right (so some sale or something, sticker prices are ridiculous if you max everything, and you kind of have to due to the impossibility of upgrades).
Serviceability is improved (though still not amazing) in all the machines with chassises redesigned during the "M" era — the "notched" MBP 14/16 and Air have easily accessible bottom screws (no need to remove rubber feet first) and don't have batteries glued in. Keyboards can be changed independently from the top case too. Notably, many Windows laptops fail on both of those counts (like the LG Gram which hides screws under adhesive-attached feet).
But yes, it's difficult to find laptops as well-rounded as MacBooks are. Generally laptops will require you to make significant sacrifices in multiple categories to be good at one or two things, which is less true of MacBooks (particularly the 14"/16" Pro models), especially if you want good performance without the laptop being huge and bulky and/or have horrible battery life with constantly-screaming fans. The 14"/16" models get you performance in the ballpark of a desktop Ryzen 5800X while unplugged and still getting great battery life while also being silent and still reasonably portable, along with a killer screen, great speakers, decent keyboard and great trackpad.
Macs, for me, are the software. This is something that became pretty evident during the Intel era. And I bought Macs exclusively when the hardware was both much slower and pricier than PCs (68k and PPC), because I loved the software so much.
Funny to read such an opposite opinion.
I don’t mind the pretty casing, but it’s icing on the cake.
> extremely overpriced tiering (e.g. adding storage or RAM
As I understand it, Apple uses a "system in a package" multi chip module that mounts RAM inside the same package as the main M1/M2 SoC.
Seems to work well in terms of memory bandwidth, unified memory architecture, and physical size, but it's hard to crack that SIP/MCM open to add more RAM.
And it's even harder to add RAM to an SoC die itself. And the GPU is integrated as well (although in theory one could connect an eGPU over Thunderbolt - assuming the driver issues could be sorted out somehow.)
Some old Macs from the 1990s included an external L2 cache SRAM slot. But cache RAM upgrades became impossible once the L2 cache was integrated on the CPU die.
Even on the remaining Intel models having Apple upgrade the RAM is a bad deal. The Intel Mac Mini has socketed RAM and they want $1000 for 64GB of DDR4 2666. You can get 64GB DDR4 3200 sodimms for less than $200 right now. Even in 2018 it was a bad deal. I put 32GB in the one I had for less than a third the price Apple was asking.
And for storage that isn't on the SoC, it's just flash chips on the board so it shouldn't be much different cost wise to what the M.2 drive manufacturers are paying. Yet it costs considerably more.
Glossy screens have better picture quality (black levels) in any situation where you can control the lighting. That’s usually true for laptops because you can just put it on your lap and swing around to avoid sunshine.
> That’s usually true for laptops because you can just put it on your lap and swing around to avoid sunshine.
So the options are extreme eye strain due to lights/sun/my own reflection, or extreme back pain due to having to sit like a prawn to hide the light from the laptop? I'd take slightly lower visual quality (doesn't matter in the slightest for what i do on a screen) over either of those.
it's true for everything. You can even more so control the lighting and orientation of a desktop. Matte screens are the industry's worst mistake and I just can't understand why everybody hadn't ditched them already.
There are no comparable laptops to M[1,2] Macs, AFAIK. Linux on an M1 simply flies. It's just stupidly quick. A MacBook with Linux is the most amazing Linux machine that exists, even without the GPU acceleration.
I bought my first MacBook just because of the M1 processor and /despite/ the OS, which is ok-ish but not my cup of tea. I'm looking forward to running Linux on it as my daily driver.
Linux is more user friendly for some developers. Linux support with Asahi is also markedly better then any comparable PC. Hardware wise it beats all windows laptops.
Essentially it comes down to that macs have great hardware but shitty software. The later which asahi fixes.
I do not (currently) use this but I am interested in this. My reason is simple, I have a Mac and not a PC running Linux because my employer provides Macs and not PCs. If I got to use the computer I want, than I'd use a PC and run Linux (have at prior employers who didn't have/care about MDM).
Apple is the best built laptop. No other brand even comes close.
Linux is the best OS. I have no idea how people can work on Windows, I think other people used to Linux will agree. OSX feels like a really old fork of Linux that has not kept up with the open source Linux.
Question for those in the know: are there any substantial changes from M1 to M2? I'm sure lots of tuning took place, but is there any major component that was completely overhauled?
Another question for those in the know: there are what seem to be tons of weird GPU problems on macOS under M1— weird cursor tails, choppy scrolling, and very occasional panics that derive from GPU drivers. Are there any workarounds for unstable GPU behavior that were discovered during the RE & driver implementation?
Edit: I've directly observed these on my machine, and it doesn't look to be an isolated incident. There is a video in [2] below.
YMMV but on an MBP 16" M1 Pro driving its internal display alongside an Apple Thunderbolt Display (yes, the one they sold from 2011-2016) I've seen no graphical problems whatsoever in the past year.
Agreed with other commenter: I'd disregard the reports. Been using an M1 for 6 months now on macOS. One kernel panic when closing the lid. Solid machine and no issues with the GPU.
> there are what seem to be tons of weird GPU problems on macOS under M1— weird cursor tails, choppy scrolling, and very occasional panics that derive from GPU drivers.
Never heard of these. Been using M1 for a year. I don’t think it’s worth taking seriously.
Are you sure you're not using any displaylink cable/drivers?
I had a choppy mouse at a certain point, but that was only with a bluetooth mouse. Bluetooth runs at a slower rate in any case, but I think it might have had to do with some interference.
I'm aware of bluetooth issues, it's a similar experience. However, this is using the built-in trackpad and built-in display, and occurs seemingly randomly. The bluetooth issue made it initially very difficult to find any discussion of the M1 issue.
The biggest change, IIRC, is that the M1 was based on the A12(?) but the M2 was based on the A14(?). So the CPU/GPU design was newer. They tweaked and improved other modules like the neural engine too.
So it wasn’t just clock speed, but to most end users it was just somewhat faster and more mature.
I've been reading bits and pieces from the people doing Linux for Apple SoCs for a while and it sounds like the evolution has been mostly incremental going way back (like A7 era).
Some ppl have been saying reason macs doesn't support 4k 120hz using thunderbolt to hdmi 2.1 cables is a software limitation, I wonder if linux on macbook solves that
Most often it's a hardware limitation because the cables/adapters use the MCDP2900 converter chip inside, even when they advertise HDMI2.1 support. That's the same chip inside the built-in HDMI port of the new MacBook Pro and its datasheet [0] says it only supports up to 60hz
That chip is also the reason for a lot of support emails I'm getting on Lunar (https://lunar.fyi/) because it seems to break DDC/CI and hardware brightness control stops working through cables and ports that use it.
M1RACLES was a security flaw that was hyped as a joke, because it was such a weak bug, and yet it was hyped to oblivion. It totally does not deserve even a mention on the M1 Wikipedia page.
The flaw means that two malicious processes, already on the system, can potentially communicate without the OS being aware. Even though they already could through pipes, desktop icons, files, inter-process communication, screen grabbing each other, over the network, from a remote website, take your pick. Now, what are the odds of two malicious processes, being on a system, with a pre-agreed protocol for communication, going to need a weird processor bug to communicate over for? Absolutely nothing. It's not supposed to happen - but it's basically useless when you are twice-pwned already.
The other flaw that was found was that Pointer Authentication (PAC) could be defeated on the M1 with the PACMAN attack. However, PAC was actually an ARM standard added in ARMv8.4 that affects all ARMv8.4 implementers - the M1 just happens to be the most notable chip with that ARM version. Versions before ARMv8.4 didn't have PAC at all - so, even with that defeated, you aren't worse off than you were before ARMv8.4, so it's just a "sad, we tried, but oh well" thing from ARM's perspective.
Notably, almost every other Arm A series processor which supported PAC also was susceptible to the same attack [1], the issue is just that actually buying such processors is nigh impossible (up until this year it was actually impossible, now you just need to do research on a phone SoC) whereas anyone can buy an apple silicon device from a million different places.
Anyone have an idea how soon we should expect GPU support to be in mainline?