8 ms·

I think this is going to be a tougher sell for laptops as the M1 chip seems to be a game changer for battery life and performance. Once the majority of software

by vondur 6y ago

I think this is going to be a tougher sell for laptops as the M1 chip seems to be a game changer for battery life and performance. Once the majority of software gets native ARM support, it will only get better, not to mention this is only the first iteration of a desktop class Apple Silicon. I do understand from a philosophical point of view why people may not want to use MacOS, particularly after last weeks code signing fiasco.

rektide 6y ago
Agreed, it is quite pathetic that the entire rest of the world is getting taken to school by one chip. I hate to fall back on the "good enough" argument, it's absolutely pathetic that we're here, but PCs are, generally, good enough. Battery life and performance are both pretty stellar in ultrabooks. I'm looking forward to larger & larger tablets becoming a thing, with Apple again alas having to lead the charge there too by introducing 12 inch tablets, which thankfully, others are doing. In general, a fixed closed ecosystem can advance wonderfully, especially fueled with a multi-trillion dollar market capitalization. But a lot of people are betting on literally everyone else on the planet, to suss & finagle better ways forward, organically, over time, with hopefully building inertia, and I think, maybe not for this decade but some decade, those bets on everyone are good bets.
fsflover 6y ago
You can find GNU/Linux ARM laptops, too: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ (slow, but it's a start).
- masklinn 6y ago
  > slow, but it's a start That it's slow makes it a bad one. It's the issue endemic to existing ARM laptop offering: in the best cases, either the performances are lackluster and the battery life is good, or the performances are terrible and the battery life is great. Sure the pinebook is super cheap, but the performances are bad and it gets 6-8h battery.
  - ognarb 6y ago
    The real problem is the driver situation for the GPU on ARM. If we could have more mainline supports, the Desktop Linux ARM ecosystem would be a lot better.
donor20 6y ago
We don't yet know what the M1 can do with a higher power budget in desktop form. Very surprising though to see they can generate some reasonable seeming performance especially with native apps.
old-gregg 6y ago
Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux. So if you're building software to run on an x86 Linux server, dealing with ARM-based MacOS is going to be even a bigger PITA: as both the arch and the OS will be different. I am definitely in the camp of replicating server setups on my laptops, so as sweet and incredible as M1 is, I won't be able to use it. But for new projects, I honestly do not know what will people do. If Amazon continues to evolve their Graviton chips, and other cloud providers follow, it will be quite tempting to try a 100% ARM setup...
- masklinn 6y ago
  > Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux. One can only wonder why running linux containers on OSX would be slow.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    Soon people will be running x86 Linux containers virtualized on ARM Macs, making it even slower.
  - thawkins 6y ago
    Becuase macosx containers run inside a Linux VM, not on the native host OS, same with Windows;
    - masklinn 6y ago
      > Becuase macosx containers run inside a Linux VM, not on the native host OS My comment was sarcastic. > same with Windows Significantly less so as Microsoft themselves provide the virtualisation glue, with a custom kernel and a dedicated / special-cased VM, in the form of WSL2.
x87678r 6y ago
Yeah it sucks I was going to buy my Dell XPS 15 on Black Friday... now I dont know what to do.

by vondur 6y ago

rektide 6y ago

Agreed, it is quite pathetic that the entire rest of the world is getting taken to school by one chip. I hate to fall back on the "good enough" argument, it's absolutely pathetic that we're here, but PCs are, generally, good enough. Battery life and performance are both pretty stellar in ultrabooks. I'm looking forward to larger & larger tablets becoming a thing, with Apple again alas having to lead the charge there too by introducing 12 inch tablets, which thankfully, others are doing. In general, a fixed closed ecosystem can advance wonderfully, especially fueled with a multi-trillion dollar market capitalization. But a lot of people are betting on literally everyone else on the planet, to suss & finagle better ways forward, organically, over time, with hopefully building inertia, and I think, maybe not for this decade but some decade, those bets on everyone are good bets.

fsflover 6y ago

You can find GNU/Linux ARM laptops, too: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ (slow, but it's a start).

masklinn 6y ago
> slow, but it's a start That it's slow makes it a bad one. It's the issue endemic to existing ARM laptop offering: in the best cases, either the performances are lackluster and the battery life is good, or the performances are terrible and the battery life is great. Sure the pinebook is super cheap, but the performances are bad and it gets 6-8h battery.
- ognarb 6y ago
  The real problem is the driver situation for the GPU on ARM. If we could have more mainline supports, the Desktop Linux ARM ecosystem would be a lot better.

donor20 6y ago

We don't yet know what the M1 can do with a higher power budget in desktop form. Very surprising though to see they can generate some reasonable seeming performance especially with native apps.

old-gregg 6y ago

Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux. So if you're building software to run on an x86 Linux server, dealing with ARM-based MacOS is going to be even a bigger PITA: as both the arch and the OS will be different. I am definitely in the camp of replicating server setups on my laptops, so as sweet and incredible as M1 is, I won't be able to use it. But for new projects, I honestly do not know what will people do. If Amazon continues to evolve their Graviton chips, and other cloud providers follow, it will be quite tempting to try a 100% ARM setup...

masklinn 6y ago
> Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux. One can only wonder why running linux containers on OSX would be slow.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  Soon people will be running x86 Linux containers virtualized on ARM Macs, making it even slower.
- thawkins 6y ago
  Becuase macosx containers run inside a Linux VM, not on the native host OS, same with Windows;
  - masklinn 6y ago
    > Becuase macosx containers run inside a Linux VM, not on the native host OS My comment was sarcastic. > same with Windows Significantly less so as Microsoft themselves provide the virtualisation glue, with a custom kernel and a dedicated / special-cased VM, in the form of WSL2.

x87678r 6y ago

Yeah it sucks I was going to buy my Dell XPS 15 on Black Friday... now I dont know what to do.