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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).

sofixa 4y ago
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).
- kitsunesoba 4y ago
  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.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    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.
    - tambourine_man 4y ago
      On a second thought, there where some transformative hardwares though. The iMac 5k for me, almost a decade later, is still better than anything other vendors have to offer. It’s my childhood dream monitor. Such a shame that they never sold it separately. The M series laptops seem like an inflection point as well. A fanless powerhouse with more than a day's work of battery life and best in class monitor and trackpad.
      - pram 4y ago
        They do: https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/ https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/
        tambourine_man 4y ago
        You’re correct! How could I forget. Thanks. Shows I haven’t been shopping for Macs in a long time.
      - rsynnott 4y ago
        > Such a shame that they never sold it separately. Well, they sold the controversial LG 5K, which was the same panel, but certainly not the same build quality. I've got one, and it's... fine, and for a very long time was literally the only 5K monitor you could buy, but for the price it is not a well-built piece of kit. (And the first two versions had weird bugs) They now (nearly a decade later) finally sell a fully first-party one, which is very similar.
- musicale 4y ago
  > 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.
  - goosedragons 4y ago
    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.
- astrange 4y ago
  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.
  - bernawil 4y ago
    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.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    > 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.
    - astrange 4y ago
      The glossy screens' higher contrast should lead to less eye strain in the end. That's a big reason for better visual quality, like HiDPI displays and OLEDs.
callesgg 4y ago
Not that I would buy a new Mac and install linux on it... But if I did, it would be cause apple has unmatched hardware build quality. (But also the battery time would as you mention also be a nice thing)
recuter 4y ago
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. :)
- nextos 4y ago
  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.
  - atchoo 4y ago
    Interesting product. 230g lighter with 10 hours longer battery life than an M1 Air. > In Europe it's 50% more expensive It's basically the same price in the UK. £84 more than an equivalent M1 Air on the Lenovo site right now.
    - nextos 4y ago
      That's a good price. In mainland EU, right now, the X13s is €1490 in lenovo.com. A MacBook Air M1 is €1200, and I can get almost 10% off using academic discount. Plus, the Snapdragon CPU in the X13s is still far from the M1 in regular benchmarks. Linux support is better in the X13s, except for the camera. It's an IR one, and this might never be well supported.
  - Kuinox 4y ago
    There was ARM laptops before M1, nobody wanted them. M1 was ahead because it was 1 silicon node ahead for a year. The competition already caught back: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html
rowanG077 4y ago
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.
emmo 4y ago
The Mac Mini is actually a pretty nice little unit, and not priced too terribly.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
not at all a silly question... it runs forever and _fast_, the ergonomics are kick ass for my body dimensions (i mean, it's comfortable), and it's _silent_.
coutego 4y ago
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.
School-Cotton 4y ago
There are a number of reasons. 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.
- Conan_Kudo 4y ago
  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. [1]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen-10-(14-inch-intel)/21cbcto1wwus2 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    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.
dopeboy 4y ago
Two reasons: battery life + touchpad.
coldtea 4y ago
Power+performance, great battery life, great build quality, great hardware...
- teaearlgraycold 4y ago
  Yup
pard68 4y ago
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).
chrisseaton 4y ago
> any comparable PC Not sure such a thing exists!
jurschreuder 4y ago
Simple: 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.

sofixa 4y ago

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).

kitsunesoba 4y ago
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.
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  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.
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    On a second thought, there where some transformative hardwares though. The iMac 5k for me, almost a decade later, is still better than anything other vendors have to offer. It’s my childhood dream monitor. Such a shame that they never sold it separately. The M series laptops seem like an inflection point as well. A fanless powerhouse with more than a day's work of battery life and best in class monitor and trackpad.
    - pram 4y ago
      They do: https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/ https://www.apple.com/studio-display/specs/
      - tambourine_man 4y ago
        You’re correct! How could I forget. Thanks. Shows I haven’t been shopping for Macs in a long time.
    - rsynnott 4y ago
      > Such a shame that they never sold it separately. Well, they sold the controversial LG 5K, which was the same panel, but certainly not the same build quality. I've got one, and it's... fine, and for a very long time was literally the only 5K monitor you could buy, but for the price it is not a well-built piece of kit. (And the first two versions had weird bugs) They now (nearly a decade later) finally sell a fully first-party one, which is very similar.
musicale 4y ago
> 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.
- goosedragons 4y ago
  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.
astrange 4y ago
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.
- bernawil 4y ago
  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.
- sofixa 4y ago
  > 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.
  - astrange 4y ago
    The glossy screens' higher contrast should lead to less eye strain in the end. That's a big reason for better visual quality, like HiDPI displays and OLEDs.

callesgg 4y ago

Not that I would buy a new Mac and install linux on it... But if I did, it would be cause apple has unmatched hardware build quality. (But also the battery time would as you mention also be a nice thing)

recuter 4y ago

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. :)

nextos 4y ago
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.
- atchoo 4y ago
  Interesting product. 230g lighter with 10 hours longer battery life than an M1 Air. > In Europe it's 50% more expensive It's basically the same price in the UK. £84 more than an equivalent M1 Air on the Lenovo site right now.
  - nextos 4y ago
    That's a good price. In mainland EU, right now, the X13s is €1490 in lenovo.com. A MacBook Air M1 is €1200, and I can get almost 10% off using academic discount. Plus, the Snapdragon CPU in the X13s is still far from the M1 in regular benchmarks. Linux support is better in the X13s, except for the camera. It's an IR one, and this might never be well supported.
- Kuinox 4y ago
  There was ARM laptops before M1, nobody wanted them. M1 was ahead because it was 1 silicon node ahead for a year. The competition already caught back: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html https://www.cpubenchmark.net/power_performance.html

rowanG077 4y ago

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.

emmo 4y ago

The Mac Mini is actually a pretty nice little unit, and not priced too terribly.

jjtheblunt 4y ago

not at all a silly question... it runs forever and _fast_, the ergonomics are kick ass for my body dimensions (i mean, it's comfortable), and it's _silent_.

coutego 4y ago

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.

School-Cotton 4y ago

There are a number of reasons. 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.

Conan_Kudo 4y ago
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. [1]: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/thinkpad-x1-carbon-gen-10-(14-inch-intel)/21cbcto1wwus2 https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadx1/t...
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  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.

dopeboy 4y ago

Two reasons: battery life + touchpad.

coldtea 4y ago

Power+performance, great battery life, great build quality, great hardware...

teaearlgraycold 4y ago
Yup

pard68 4y ago

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).

chrisseaton 4y ago

> any comparable PC Not sure such a thing exists!

jurschreuder 4y ago

Simple: 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.