I wouldn’t be able to do it until Asahi Linux is totally done. Paying 1.5k for a laptop that doesn’t respect you is quite a big ask. They’d have to pay me to use Mac OS, as someone would have to pay me to use Windows.
Got a Mac for work. I’m sure I’m holding it wrong, but to me it just doesn’t measure up to Linux/Gnome. Of particular annoyance is that Mac will just ignore my scroll wheel input sometimes. I suspect it’s a heuristics thing aimed at trackpads. Lots of other small things where Mac doesn’t measure up. And Homebrew is inferior to most Linux package managers. Mac is very focused on the use-case of GUI-only, trackpad-only, no external monitor, unplugged usage. That’s fine, but it’s really not how I use computers.
> will just ignore my scroll wheel input sometimes.
The other day I was trying to set the scroll speed (and have it consistent for all apps) on KDE and it was quite a struggle. AFAIK it just works on Gnome/Wayland but having to chose between something as basic as this and using a DE the UX of which I personally find slightly repulsive (at least in default config) doesn't seem ideal.
And for many HN users, they do get paid to use Mac OS and offered a Macbook for work. I personally still use Linux for work but I have to admit it hinders my work in certain ways (e.g. no easy access to testing Safari and no way to test VoiceOver). But I couldn't trade my setup for whatever Apple decides is best for me. So I appreciate companies still pushing for more solid Linux-first laptops.
Not the person you're replying to, but I'm afraid so. MacBooks are just so far ahead of their "competition" that it's not funny.
The M2 MacBook Pros are about as close as you can get to a perfect laptop. Really, I wish it wasn't so. It would arguably be better for everyone (except Apple) if there was some serious competition at the top end of the market. But there just isn't.
I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management. (A lot of this is an OS integration problem, so Apple is playing on easy mode here.)
I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad. (Again, OS integration, plus a stupid amount of heuristics built into the hardware itself to interpret what you actually meant when you touched the trackpad in an awkward way.)
I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks. (The first generation of M1 MacBook laptops was awful, but they fixed it. Also this point isn't really fair because I haven't really seriously looked.)
I've still yet to see a laptop with as slick of a chassis and display.
I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time, and not simultaneously sounds like a jet engine and throttle itself to a near halt.
But really, just give me proper power management and a decent trackpad and I'll call it a serious competitor.
That combination of decent performance (even while unplugged), battery life, and silence is hard to come by in x86 laptops, even in ultraportables built with efficiency-focused laptop CPUs where one would expect at least battery life and fan noise to not be issues.
Apple’s silicon helps here but I wonder if part of the problem isn’t x86 laptop manufacturers trying too hard to juice perf numbers at the cost of all else, as well as penny pinching on heatsink and fan.
Ever opened up the average laptop? They look like someone threw the list of component dimensions at a bin packing algorithm, let it run for a couple of minutes, then added some extra plastic struts to fill the dead space.
They are obviously doing a great job at what they set out to do but besides reparability and customization I don't think they are really ahead in anything compared to some premium Windows laptops.
> efficiency-focused laptop CPUs where one would expect at least battery life and fan noise to not be issues.
AMD laptops seem to be pretty decent at that. You can get something on par or even ahead of MBPs in battery life and performance and just a bit louder fans (IMHO the Air is till unbeatable if it works for your use case though)
I agree with some of that, but none of it is worth sacrificing user freedom. Using an Apple product is being forced to use computers in exactly the way Apple designed them, with very little room for customization of the experience. This might be fine if your preferences align with Apple's, or if you just don't care, but for tinkerers and tech enthusiasts it's an oppressive and limited environment. And at the end of the day, it still has its own share of issues, like any device, so it's always a tradeoff.
I'd trade lower build quality and performance per watt for software freedom any day of the week. No, Asahi Linux is not a serious option.
Why is Asahi not a serious option? Linus Torvalds himself uses Asahi on an Apple Silicon Mac, that is a pretty solid endorsement of it being a serious option.
How did you reach that conclusion? On the contrary, my reasons are purely practical. The fact Linus uses Asahi is far from an endorsement for regular users. He obviously has a much deeper knowledge of Linux compared to a regular user, with the skills to troubleshoot and fix most issues.
My reasons for not considering it:
- As skilled as the Asahi team is, they're a small team going against one of the world's largest corporations. Not only does it take immense effort to reverse engineer every single hardware component, the project will always be at the mercy of Apple, who may break the support at any time with a software or hardware update, whether willing or unwillingly.
- The Linux software ecosystem is sufficiently unstable on its own, but also running it on ARM, _and_ an alien hardware environment, presents even more challenges. As much as the Asahi team has made progress here, expecting them to support all variations of software in this landscape is unreasonable. I definitely don't want to have additional issues to troubleshoot, which I'm tired of doing with Linux to begin with. Cue the replies claiming how Asahi works flawlessly...
That's a whole lot of shaky ground to base my computing on, and I wouldn't consider it even for personal, let alone professional, use. Maybe if Apple started opening up and officially supporting Linux on their hardware, I _might_ consider a project like Asahi, but until then, it's a non-starter for me.
It's an "inconvenient truth" that plenty in the saltier circles of the Linux world really don't like. Getting a good *nix environment on a laptop is a struggle. Even on lines like the ThinkPads you still have paper cuts like bad touchpads, DSP-less audio, terrible battery life, or buggy drivers making the experience unpleasant. Nothing single device has brought everything together as well as an M2 MacBook Pro, and it's a damn shame.
> I've still yet to see another laptop that has even passable handling of sleep states / other parts of power management.
That's the advantage of Apple where they control both hardware and software. It's hard to replicate, so yeah, they have an edge here.
> I've still yet to see another laptop with an even passable trackpad.
Never understood this comment, if you use keyboards instead for shortcuts the trackpad is hardly something you care about. this seems like a comment from Apple users who justify the trackpad as the key differentiator to not even consider anything else, even though the rest of the world has no problem not using Apple trackpads.
> I've still yet to see a laptop with a keyboard as nice as the current generation MacBooks.
Lenovo Thinkpad line has world-class keyboards that put the Macbook's to shame.
> laptop with as slick of a chassis and display.
display, they certainly have good ones, but most of them are not matte. As for the chassis, there's really nothing special in having a uniform grey chassis - it's a matter of taste rather than anything else.
> I've still yet to see another laptop that can chew through demanding workloads, remain snappy the whole time,
Recent AMD CPUs equipped PC, running Linux, fit that description - they are formidable machines with great performance for a variety of workloads and while you will hear the fan now and then, it's still much better than what you had a few years ago.
Never heard the fan on my M1 Pro in a year of ownership, and temperature is never uncomfortably high.
I'll pay double just to never hear a shitty laptop fan.
> but most of them are not matte
It is a matter of preference. Matte reduces contrast, saturation, and sharpness. I noticed Apple uses a higher quality anti-reflective coating than my other (cheap non-Apple branded) glossy desktop LCD. No distracting reflections on the laptop, but the desktop monitor looks like a mirror sometimes.
> Never understood this comment, if you use keyboards instead for shortcuts the trackpad is hardly something you care about. this seems like a comment from Apple users who justify the trackpad
Or as shockingly as it seems other people might have preferences which are different to yours and which are not somehow inherent inferior to yours.
> else, even though the rest of the world has no problem not using Apple trackpads.
If you go few years back same could've been said about appalling battery life, poor screen and build quality and a dozen other things. I had not problem using computers back then because I didn't know it could be better so just had to deal with it. Going back to something objectively inferior is not that easy (e.g. I almost always used an external mouse until the first retina MBP, I haven't really felt the need to since then except occasionally for gaming).
A $2000 USD laptop would depreciate to nothing over five years so that is an expense of only $400 USD per year.
At a moderate $80k USD developer salary, the laptop costs only 0.5% of that. And this is the main tool you depend on to earn an income. For an underpaid junior developer earning $40k it's still only 1% of their income.
10% of an average developer salary is something like $8k per year. What laptop costs $8k per year? That's $40k after five years. Are you confusing a laptop with a new Mercedes or what?
Laptops are a business expense for a developer. This is how you need to think about it.
+ 1. to get a usable MBP spec (i.e. at least 1TB disk and 24GB RAM) you’re looking at a 2,689€ price tag here in Germany. Not an issue if it’s company provided, but outside, this is more than two months worth of rent and a substantial part of a post tax income of a software engineer in Germany.
I’m glad these options exist such as Tuxedo.