10 ms·

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are? - locked bootloader - no bootcamp

> Why would anyone (who is not forced) buy an Intel PC laptop when these are available and priced as competitive as they are? - locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows - virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines - only 2 thunderbolt ports - limited to 16GB RAM - no external gpu support/drivers - can't use nvidia or amd cards - no AAA gaming - can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static - uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down

wffurr 6y ago
- Starts at $999 for the base laptop version. You can get much cheaper still good Windows laptops.
- blunte 6y ago
  You lost me at "good Windows laptops". macOS has plenty of warts, but my experience with high quality equipment (Thinkpad, XPS, Alienware) has left me ultimately disappointed with Windows in many day to day situations compared to Mac. Windows is still clunky, despite many improvements. And aside from a Thinkpad Carbon X1, I haven't used any laptop with the performance and build quality (for the size/money) as a Macbook Air.
  - kube-system 6y ago
    I bought a thinkpad hoping to avoid quality issues that I’ve experienced with other machines. The hardware is great (except for the wimpy cooling), but I have had various annoying issues with drivers, bios updates, and the behavior of their system update tool.
    - blunte 6y ago
      It's been a couple of generations since I used the Thinkpad, but wiping and carefully reinstalling only the useful drivers/apps was how to did it. Perhaps it's locked down now such that you can't do that (and if so, I wouldn't buy it!)
    - m4rtink 6y ago
      Maybe that's Windows or Windows pre installed bloatware specific ? The high end thinkpads (t/x/p/w/carbon) are generally well supported by Linux distros, partially thanks to many kernel and distro developers using them. As for bios (well EFI these days) that should be handled very seamlessly via fwupd on all major Linux distros: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/ https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/ (Frankly seems much more robust to how it is handled on Windows - not at oll or via half broken OEM bloatware.)
      - thekyle 6y ago
        You can also buy some ThinkPads with Linux preinstalled now if you don't want to worry about hardware compatibility issues.
  - _jal 6y ago
    In my experience, the Thinkpads are indeed the only real competition, hardware-wise. When my current Mac dies, that's where I'm headed, but running Linux; Microsoft is less of a danger, so I don't outright boycott anymore, but I still find Windows super annoying to use.
    - culopatin 6y ago
      If Lenovo could for once figure out why the speakers on these Thinkpads are SO BAD, I wouldn't be reading this thread because I wouldn't care about Macs. I know there are headphones, but many times when I'm alone, I just want to watch a video and actually hear the people talk, can't do with the Thinkpad.
    - sumtechguy 6y ago
      The windows market is all over the place. All the way from leftover bin junk from 5 years ago sold as new to high end cutting edge. When you get bellow 900 dollars the market decidedly on the crap side with respect to windows. There are some exceptions but usually you have to get 1200-1800 before you start get quality items. Not saying you can not find good stuff near the bottom. But you get what you pay for. Usually they skimp on the screen, memory, and disk. I am currently using an MSI stealth gaming laptop. other than the keyboard layout being slightly odd i am liking it a lot. i replaced my previous hp of 8 years. that will find a new home doing something else once I do a full teardown and repasting. luckily it is one of the last hp laptops where taking it apart is not a total nightmare. finding a decent laptop takes a lot of work. going with apple has a lot of advantages as the hassle of 'picking' is cut down to a few models, and you have a good shot of it being decent. I personally would not buy an apple but that is because of other 'petty' reasons and not quality.
  - fpig 6y ago
    If you need a computer for serious (long hours) use, I would always go for desktop, as you can get a vastly superior machine to any laptop, with massive amounts of disk space, memory, tons of cores, screens, etc. If you want a Mac, I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do. For travelling, I don't think anything beats a Macbook due to how light, thin, and resilient they are. But my 2016 MBP is a pretty shit machine for its price. It's also loud (like every other laptop I've had). I avoid using it. Sure, if you take size/design/mechanical quality into account, it is probably unmatched. But for 95% of my computer usage, those are irrelevant, as I just sit at my desk. I had a company provided HP laptop (not sure if stock or upgraded by our IT staff) at my previous job which was far more performant than my Macbook, so I don't really agree that Windows laptops are necessarily bad, but it was even louder than the Macbook, and of course clunky and ugly. For me personally, the new Macbooks are disqualified as viable work machines if it's really true that you can't use more than 1 external screen. That's just not a viable computer for me (for work). I will always have a Macbook though just because of how much I love them for travel. But a Macbook is more of a toy than a serious computer, especially if the 1 screen limit is true.
    - pantulis 6y ago
      " I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do." Unfortunately they will also blow your wallet.
      - fpig 6y ago
        Wow, I just checked and yeah those prices are pretty insane, especially if you want a better-than-base model. I guess then in the desktop arena, Macs are at a disadvantage, because you can build a similarly powerful PC for a much more reasonable amount.
        pantulis 6y ago
        Certainly the Pro Desktops must be intended for Pro people that can quantify the number of billable hours they will save in Final Cut or Logic and come up with a "return of investment" figure. The iMacs are a mistery to me, but guess I'm not the target market anyway. (I have a 2018 MBP)
- wildrhythms 6y ago
  In my experience, Microsoft and PC laptop manufacturers still haven't figured out how to make a trackpad that works as well as a 2008 era Macbook.
  - DrScientist 6y ago
    Yep, though sadly, in my view, the current line up of Macbooks trackpads aren't as good as the 2008 era Macbooks either....
  - wishysgb 6y ago
    I disagree, my razer blade 15 has been amazing.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I have both platforms at the office for years, still haven't discovered what is so magic about the trackpad.
    - moogleii 6y ago
      Edge to edge uniformity, physical feel, virtual feel of the scroll and motion, gestures. Other than that, sure, same.
    - gxx 6y ago
      The biggest difference between Macbook trackpads vs the best for Windows is the super low hysteresis of pointer motion vs finger motion. I recently bought and returned a Microsoft Surface Book with "precision touchpad". The main reason for returing it was that pointer control feels sluggish compared to the Macbook and its pointer speed was too slow even at its fastest. The best Dell touchpads are no better and Lenovo trackpads are even worse. I understand that this may be because PC touchpad hardware reports jitter, sometimes higher than it really is, and this causes the Precision Touchpad software to increase the hysteresis. Macbook touchpads have low jitter and the driver is tuned to benefit from it. If anyone Microsoft with input into the Precision Touchpad reads this, why don't you fix it or work with your licensees to fix it?
spockz 6y ago
But these “features” are not highlighted on the product page. (Aside from memory) The core count and battery performance are listed. I think many people will buy these. And arm64 containers will come in time with adoption.
Reason077 6y ago
> "no AAA gaming" This is, arguably, a disadvantage of any Mac. But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase.
- moondev 6y ago
  It's more about losing the ability to boot into windows to game there, as well as losing egpu support.
- lucasverra 6y ago
  That and streaming direct to the browser
- ralfd 6y ago
  I agree. It is not without danger, the same as with Apps actually, that developers target only the iPad (touch interface) and don't care about optimizing for the Mac experience. But on the whole I am optimistic.
  - theshrike79 6y ago
    Apple has had support for game pads for a while now. This will just make it more viable. The only issue might be multi-touch based games on M1
- Mindwipe 6y ago
  > But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase. Not really. The business models for desktop gaming are completely different to mobile devices, and there is no meaningful common market. I think people will actually be surprised at how few games from iOS will even run on an ARM Mac because developers will block them. It used to be possible to do some gaming on a Mac - the vast, vast majority of Steam users have graphics hardware of a level that was perfectly achievable on a Mac, especially with an eGPU. The end of x86 is the end of that market, forever.
zwily 6y ago
Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.
- gsich 6y ago
  Maybe the gaming part.
  - aNoob7000 6y ago
    If porting IOS games is easy then gaming for most people shouldn't be an issue.
    - fiblye 6y ago
      I feel like the demand for desktop versions of simple phone games is pretty low. Mac users who hope to play anything from their steam library or dual boot Windows are going to be very disappointed.
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    To the extent that games are made available for MacOS/ARM in the first place (admittedly a sticking point), it looks like these machines will be able to play most of them reasonably well. Certainly much better than most of Apples previous machines with integrated graphics or low end discrete GPUs.
  - katbyte 6y ago
    I work on multiple OSX machines, servers run linux, and i have a single windows machine just got the few games that can't be run elsewhere.
  - lsllc 6y ago
    iOS games/apps run on Apple Silicon Mac, so that by itself opens up a huge gaming market.
    - gsich 6y ago
ubermonkey 6y ago
"uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down" Citation Needed. Apple detractors LOVE to bring this idea up, but there's nothing to it in any real sense. Do Macs ship with a checkbox filled in that limits software vendors? Yes. This is a good thing. Is it trivial to change this setting? Also yes. Anyone who buys a Mac can run any software on it they like. There is no lockdown.
- greatpatton 6y ago
  There is a lockdown as you cannot even boot linux anymore...
  - lstamour 6y ago
    You can change that on T2-based Intel Macs, at least, just like on Windows: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330 Of course, Apple as an OEM does not support running non-Mac OSes, so virtualization should still be preferred for most use cases.
    - greatpatton 6y ago
      That's why I'm saying anymore. It was the case but it is no more possible with the new Apple Silicone laptop.
      - dylan604 6y ago
        I guess Microsoft will have to hurry up and build an ARM version of Windows so they can keep the rounding error number of BootCamp users satisfied.
        ValentineC 6y ago
        There is an ARM version of Windows 10 that runs on the Surface Pro X [1]. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/
rkangel 6y ago
As a related benefit to a non Mac user - ARM64 support for packages at build time is going to greatly improve over the next few years!
kube-system 6y ago
Hmm. I might buy one anyway and use a remote docker host for x86...
noir_lord 6y ago
IIRC, binaries on arm on osx have to be signed. I.e. "We raised the walls on our garden further" Balls to that, if I buy hardware I want to be able to run what I want on it or it's not a general purpose computer, it's something else.
- dylan604 6y ago
  The Macintosh, by design, was never a general purpose computer. It was a computer that Steve Jobs allowed you to use. The Apple II was the general purpose computer that Woz championed.
FroshKiller 6y ago
Most games played by most players are on iOS & iPadOS, and macOS Big Sur will run them on your MacBook.
mmcconnell1618 6y ago
> - no AAA gaming I thought Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc. were all pushing streaming gaming services that will run on any hardware with a decent internet connection. I would imagine the hardware video decoder in the M1 chip would allow 4K streaming video pretty well.
aluminum96 6y ago
The claim of no AAA gaming is totally uncertain -- Apple seems to think that you'll be able to run games in Rosetta with better performance than what you can get on the existing 16" Macs. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but if these new Macs really are so great, I'd expect devs to start porting their games.
marfan 6y ago
>- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows This has been a claim made about the Macs since the T2 chip came out. It was strictly false then (you just had to boot into Recovery Mode and turn off the requirement that OSes had to be signed by Apple to boot) and we still don't know for sure now. Apple has stated in their WWDC that they're still using SecureBoot, so it's likely that we can again just turn off Apple signature requirements in Recovery Mode and boot into ARM distros. Whether or not that experience will be good is another thing entirely, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple made it a bitch and a half for driver devs to make the experience usable at all. >- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines True, but this isn't a strictly unsolvable limitation of AS and more like one of those teething pains you have to deal with, as it is the first-generation chip in an ISA shift. By this logic, you could say that make doesn't even work yet. Give it some time. In a few months I expect all of these quirks to be ironed out. Although, I suppose if you're concerned about containers it sounds like you want to be in the server market, not the laptop market. >- only 2 thunderbolt ports, limited to 16GB RAM, no external gpu support/drivers, can't use nvidia or amd cards, can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static See above about "give it some time". >- no AAA gaming I mean, if you're concerned about gaming, you shouldn't buy any Mac at all. Nor should you be in the laptop market, really. Although, this being said, the GPU in the new M1 is strong enough to be noted. In the Verge's benchmarks, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was running on the M1 MacBook Air at 38FPS at 1920x1200. Yes, it was at very low settings, but regardless – this is a playable framerate of a modern triple-A game, in a completely fanless ultrabook ... running through a JIT instruction set translation layer. >- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down I disagree. I know we were talking about the M1 specifically, but Apple has shown that the future of ARM on desktop doesn't have to be as dismal as Windows made it out to be. Teething pains aside, the reported battery life and thermal performance on the new AS machines have been absurdly fantastic. I think, going down the road, we'll stop seeing x86 CPUs on all energy-minded machines like laptops entirely.

wffurr 6y ago

- Starts at $999 for the base laptop version. You can get much cheaper still good Windows laptops.

blunte 6y ago
You lost me at "good Windows laptops". macOS has plenty of warts, but my experience with high quality equipment (Thinkpad, XPS, Alienware) has left me ultimately disappointed with Windows in many day to day situations compared to Mac. Windows is still clunky, despite many improvements. And aside from a Thinkpad Carbon X1, I haven't used any laptop with the performance and build quality (for the size/money) as a Macbook Air.
- kube-system 6y ago
  I bought a thinkpad hoping to avoid quality issues that I’ve experienced with other machines. The hardware is great (except for the wimpy cooling), but I have had various annoying issues with drivers, bios updates, and the behavior of their system update tool.
  - blunte 6y ago
    It's been a couple of generations since I used the Thinkpad, but wiping and carefully reinstalling only the useful drivers/apps was how to did it. Perhaps it's locked down now such that you can't do that (and if so, I wouldn't buy it!)
  - m4rtink 6y ago
    Maybe that's Windows or Windows pre installed bloatware specific ? The high end thinkpads (t/x/p/w/carbon) are generally well supported by Linux distros, partially thanks to many kernel and distro developers using them. As for bios (well EFI these days) that should be handled very seamlessly via fwupd on all major Linux distros: https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/ https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/ (Frankly seems much more robust to how it is handled on Windows - not at oll or via half broken OEM bloatware.)
    - thekyle 6y ago
      You can also buy some ThinkPads with Linux preinstalled now if you don't want to worry about hardware compatibility issues.
- _jal 6y ago
  In my experience, the Thinkpads are indeed the only real competition, hardware-wise. When my current Mac dies, that's where I'm headed, but running Linux; Microsoft is less of a danger, so I don't outright boycott anymore, but I still find Windows super annoying to use.
  - culopatin 6y ago
    If Lenovo could for once figure out why the speakers on these Thinkpads are SO BAD, I wouldn't be reading this thread because I wouldn't care about Macs. I know there are headphones, but many times when I'm alone, I just want to watch a video and actually hear the people talk, can't do with the Thinkpad.
  - sumtechguy 6y ago
    The windows market is all over the place. All the way from leftover bin junk from 5 years ago sold as new to high end cutting edge. When you get bellow 900 dollars the market decidedly on the crap side with respect to windows. There are some exceptions but usually you have to get 1200-1800 before you start get quality items. Not saying you can not find good stuff near the bottom. But you get what you pay for. Usually they skimp on the screen, memory, and disk. I am currently using an MSI stealth gaming laptop. other than the keyboard layout being slightly odd i am liking it a lot. i replaced my previous hp of 8 years. that will find a new home doing something else once I do a full teardown and repasting. luckily it is one of the last hp laptops where taking it apart is not a total nightmare. finding a decent laptop takes a lot of work. going with apple has a lot of advantages as the hassle of 'picking' is cut down to a few models, and you have a good shot of it being decent. I personally would not buy an apple but that is because of other 'petty' reasons and not quality.
- fpig 6y ago
  If you need a computer for serious (long hours) use, I would always go for desktop, as you can get a vastly superior machine to any laptop, with massive amounts of disk space, memory, tons of cores, screens, etc. If you want a Mac, I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do. For travelling, I don't think anything beats a Macbook due to how light, thin, and resilient they are. But my 2016 MBP is a pretty shit machine for its price. It's also loud (like every other laptop I've had). I avoid using it. Sure, if you take size/design/mechanical quality into account, it is probably unmatched. But for 95% of my computer usage, those are irrelevant, as I just sit at my desk. I had a company provided HP laptop (not sure if stock or upgraded by our IT staff) at my previous job which was far more performant than my Macbook, so I don't really agree that Windows laptops are necessarily bad, but it was even louder than the Macbook, and of course clunky and ugly. For me personally, the new Macbooks are disqualified as viable work machines if it's really true that you can't use more than 1 external screen. That's just not a viable computer for me (for work). I will always have a Macbook though just because of how much I love them for travel. But a Macbook is more of a toy than a serious computer, especially if the 1 screen limit is true.
  - pantulis 6y ago
    " I'm not familiar with desktop Macs but I'm guessing the Mac Pro machines blow laptops out of the water the same way high end desktop PCs do." Unfortunately they will also blow your wallet.
    - fpig 6y ago
      Wow, I just checked and yeah those prices are pretty insane, especially if you want a better-than-base model. I guess then in the desktop arena, Macs are at a disadvantage, because you can build a similarly powerful PC for a much more reasonable amount.
      - pantulis 6y ago
        Certainly the Pro Desktops must be intended for Pro people that can quantify the number of billable hours they will save in Final Cut or Logic and come up with a "return of investment" figure. The iMacs are a mistery to me, but guess I'm not the target market anyway. (I have a 2018 MBP)
wildrhythms 6y ago
In my experience, Microsoft and PC laptop manufacturers still haven't figured out how to make a trackpad that works as well as a 2008 era Macbook.
- DrScientist 6y ago
  Yep, though sadly, in my view, the current line up of Macbooks trackpads aren't as good as the 2008 era Macbooks either....
- wishysgb 6y ago
  I disagree, my razer blade 15 has been amazing.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I have both platforms at the office for years, still haven't discovered what is so magic about the trackpad.
  - moogleii 6y ago
    Edge to edge uniformity, physical feel, virtual feel of the scroll and motion, gestures. Other than that, sure, same.
  - gxx 6y ago
    The biggest difference between Macbook trackpads vs the best for Windows is the super low hysteresis of pointer motion vs finger motion. I recently bought and returned a Microsoft Surface Book with "precision touchpad". The main reason for returing it was that pointer control feels sluggish compared to the Macbook and its pointer speed was too slow even at its fastest. The best Dell touchpads are no better and Lenovo trackpads are even worse. I understand that this may be because PC touchpad hardware reports jitter, sometimes higher than it really is, and this causes the Precision Touchpad software to increase the hysteresis. Macbook touchpads have low jitter and the driver is tuned to benefit from it. If anyone Microsoft with input into the Precision Touchpad reads this, why don't you fix it or work with your licensees to fix it?

spockz 6y ago

But these “features” are not highlighted on the product page. (Aside from memory) The core count and battery performance are listed. I think many people will buy these. And arm64 containers will come in time with adoption.

Reason077 6y ago

> "no AAA gaming" This is, arguably, a disadvantage of any Mac. But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase.

moondev 6y ago
It's more about losing the ability to boot into windows to game there, as well as losing egpu support.
lucasverra 6y ago
That and streaming direct to the browser
ralfd 6y ago
I agree. It is not without danger, the same as with Apps actually, that developers target only the iPad (touch interface) and don't care about optimizing for the Mac experience. But on the whole I am optimistic.
- theshrike79 6y ago
  Apple has had support for game pads for a while now. This will just make it more viable. The only issue might be multi-touch based games on M1
Mindwipe 6y ago
> But Apple Silicon may actually improve the situation over time, as having the same GPUs and APIs on Macs and iOS devices means there is now a much bigger market for game developers to target with the same codebase. Not really. The business models for desktop gaming are completely different to mobile devices, and there is no meaningful common market. I think people will actually be surprised at how few games from iOS will even run on an ARM Mac because developers will block them. It used to be possible to do some gaming on a Mac - the vast, vast majority of Steam users have graphics hardware of a level that was perfectly achievable on a Mac, especially with an eGPU. The end of x86 is the end of that market, forever.

zwily 6y ago

Although I personally care about every point you listed, I don’t think most buyers care about any of them.

gsich 6y ago
Maybe the gaming part.
- aNoob7000 6y ago
  If porting IOS games is easy then gaming for most people shouldn't be an issue.
  - fiblye 6y ago
    I feel like the demand for desktop versions of simple phone games is pretty low. Mac users who hope to play anything from their steam library or dual boot Windows are going to be very disappointed.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  To the extent that games are made available for MacOS/ARM in the first place (admittedly a sticking point), it looks like these machines will be able to play most of them reasonably well. Certainly much better than most of Apples previous machines with integrated graphics or low end discrete GPUs.
- katbyte 6y ago
  I work on multiple OSX machines, servers run linux, and i have a single windows machine just got the few games that can't be run elsewhere.
- lsllc 6y ago
  iOS games/apps run on Apple Silicon Mac, so that by itself opens up a huge gaming market.
  - gsich 6y ago

ubermonkey 6y ago

"uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down" Citation Needed. Apple detractors LOVE to bring this idea up, but there's nothing to it in any real sense. Do Macs ship with a checkbox filled in that limits software vendors? Yes. This is a good thing. Is it trivial to change this setting? Also yes. Anyone who buys a Mac can run any software on it they like. There is no lockdown.

greatpatton 6y ago
There is a lockdown as you cannot even boot linux anymore...
- lstamour 6y ago
  You can change that on T2-based Intel Macs, at least, just like on Windows: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208330 Of course, Apple as an OEM does not support running non-Mac OSes, so virtualization should still be preferred for most use cases.
  - greatpatton 6y ago
    That's why I'm saying anymore. It was the case but it is no more possible with the new Apple Silicone laptop.
    - dylan604 6y ago
      I guess Microsoft will have to hurry up and build an ARM version of Windows so they can keep the rounding error number of BootCamp users satisfied.
      - ValentineC 6y ago
        There is an ARM version of Windows 10 that runs on the Surface Pro X [1]. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/surface-pro-x/

rkangel 6y ago

As a related benefit to a non Mac user - ARM64 support for packages at build time is going to greatly improve over the next few years!

kube-system 6y ago

Hmm. I might buy one anyway and use a remote docker host for x86...

noir_lord 6y ago

IIRC, binaries on arm on osx have to be signed. I.e. "We raised the walls on our garden further" Balls to that, if I buy hardware I want to be able to run what I want on it or it's not a general purpose computer, it's something else.

dylan604 6y ago
The Macintosh, by design, was never a general purpose computer. It was a computer that Steve Jobs allowed you to use. The Apple II was the general purpose computer that Woz championed.

FroshKiller 6y ago

Most games played by most players are on iOS & iPadOS, and macOS Big Sur will run them on your MacBook.

mmcconnell1618 6y ago

> - no AAA gaming I thought Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, etc. were all pushing streaming gaming services that will run on any hardware with a decent internet connection. I would imagine the hardware video decoder in the M1 chip would allow 4K streaming video pretty well.

aluminum96 6y ago

The claim of no AAA gaming is totally uncertain -- Apple seems to think that you'll be able to run games in Rosetta with better performance than what you can get on the existing 16" Macs. I guess we'll have to wait and see, but if these new Macs really are so great, I'd expect devs to start porting their games.

marfan 6y ago

>- locked bootloader - no bootcamp - can't install or boot linux or windows This has been a claim made about the Macs since the T2 chip came out. It was strictly false then (you just had to boot into Recovery Mode and turn off the requirement that OSes had to be signed by Apple to boot) and we still don't know for sure now. Apple has stated in their WWDC that they're still using SecureBoot, so it's likely that we can again just turn off Apple signature requirements in Recovery Mode and boot into ARM distros. Whether or not that experience will be good is another thing entirely, and I wouldn't be surprised if Apple made it a bitch and a half for driver devs to make the experience usable at all. >- virtualization limited to arm64 machines - no windows x86 or linux x86 virtual machines True, but this isn't a strictly unsolvable limitation of AS and more like one of those teething pains you have to deal with, as it is the first-generation chip in an ISA shift. By this logic, you could say that make doesn't even work yet. Give it some time. In a few months I expect all of these quirks to be ironed out. Although, I suppose if you're concerned about containers it sounds like you want to be in the server market, not the laptop market. >- only 2 thunderbolt ports, limited to 16GB RAM, no external gpu support/drivers, can't use nvidia or amd cards, can't run x86 containers without finding/building for arm64 or taking huge performance hit with qemu-static See above about "give it some time". >- no AAA gaming I mean, if you're concerned about gaming, you shouldn't buy any Mac at all. Nor should you be in the laptop market, really. Although, this being said, the GPU in the new M1 is strong enough to be noted. In the Verge's benchmarks, Shadow of the Tomb Raider was running on the M1 MacBook Air at 38FPS at 1920x1200. Yes, it was at very low settings, but regardless – this is a playable framerate of a modern triple-A game, in a completely fanless ultrabook ... running through a JIT instruction set translation layer. >- uncertain future of macos as it continues to be locked down I disagree. I know we were talking about the M1 specifically, but Apple has shown that the future of ARM on desktop doesn't have to be as dismal as Windows made it out to be. Teething pains aside, the reported battery life and thermal performance on the new AS machines have been absurdly fantastic. I think, going down the road, we'll stop seeing x86 CPUs on all energy-minded machines like laptops entirely.