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I don’t get why anyone would want to run Linux on Apple hardware. Apple hardware is very expensive and you could buy a faster Intel or AND machine for less mone

I don’t get why anyone would want to run Linux on Apple hardware. Apple hardware is very expensive and you could buy a faster Intel or AND machine for less money. Who would buy a Mac and put Linux on it? What am I not understanding?

lordleft 4y ago
Doesn't Linus Torvalds run Linux on Mac hardware? He basically adores apple's laptops, which I can't blame him for.
- bluedino 4y ago
  Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0Xi0OEQ3H1uQgOdFvHgx0w@mail.gmail.com/T/#u https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0X...
bookofjoe 4y ago
>And founder Linus Torvalds himself is particularly eager to see Linux running on his favorite portable hardware, going so far as to issue a kernel in August 2022 from an M2 MacBook Air.
justapassenger 4y ago
1. Why can’t I run both? 2. Per watt they have some of the best performance 3. Overall some of the best battery life 4. Only real option if you want to run ARM 5. Most important - just because. That’s what geeks and hackers do.
xt00 4y ago
I’ve been running Linux on MacBook Pro’s for years and the main benefits are: high quality display, excellent trackpad, solid build quality. Yes they are more expensive than other laptops but the display and trackpad especially are 2 things you interact with constantly. I haven’t done it on the new M laptops but the thing most people cite there is a super low power / quiet device. Main downside presently is the soldered ram and SSD. But still I’m planning to get a Mac to run Linux on it once things are more stabilized.
- heywoodlh 4y ago
  > I've been running Linux on Macbook Pro's for years > I haven't done it on the new M laptops From these two comments, I am guessing you are running on pre-touchbar (2016) Macbook Pro's, because the touchbar models before the M1/M2 were absolutely horrendous for running Linux. You can see a table of features that do or do not work still on those models[0], notably wifi -- perhaps the most critical feature for a laptop to be useful as a mobile device. The pre-2016/pre-touchbar Macs are such nice pieces of hardware despite their age, but it gets me wondering why not invest in another hardware platform that supports Linux well, is modern but has high quality hardware? Some examples I can think of are the XPS and the Thinkpad Carbon. [0] https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
  - xt00 4y ago
    The one I used the longest was from 2012 and WiFi worked just fine. I do remember it taking a bit of googling to get it working back then but I think it mostly just works with like Ubuntu 18. maybe I got lucky with my particular WiFi chip or something.
franciscop 4y ago
> You could buy a faster Intel or AND machine for less money Yes, but Apple has a great combination of high performance (laptop-wise), long battery life and high portability. Before I had the Zenbook series where you had the high end with the i-5 chips that died in 2-3 hours, or the low end that lived 5-6 hours but could barely play a video in 1080p (IIRC, from memory). With the Air for example I have it all; very long battery life, pretty high performance (more than enough for what I use it), super portable, and a great keyboard+trackpad. The only thing I'm missing is Linux :)
unshavedyak 4y ago
For me it's because it seems like Apple hardware has a significant edge on battery performance. Assuming for the sake of discussion that Linux doesn't inhibit this, it would mean my laptop does the "mobility" part much better than if it was Intel/etc. Frankly i'm not even sure i want to buy Apple. Not a big fan these days. But those Apple cores just seem so damn battery efficient. The number one thing i want from a laptop is to be able to use it on my lap, disconnected from a wall for as long as possible. With reasonable performance.. ie turning a CPU down to 3% doesn't count hah. I'm kinda split these days on if i buy Apple or buy a Linux and repair friendly laptop (Framework laptop, maybe one of the System 76, etc). A fully working Linux (NixOS for me) installation on an M1/M2 laptop would make this an even more difficult decision.
- robin_reala 4y ago
  Unfortunately, that’s a big assumption. Zero slight to the Asahi team (they’ve done amazing work) but there’s considerably more to do to get anywhere near what macOS gets with battery life.
- nortonham 4y ago
  >The number one thing i want from a laptop is to be able to use it on my lap, disconnected from a wall for as long as possible. With reasonable performance.. ie turning a CPU down to 3% doesn't count hah. macbook air (m1 or m2) fits the bill. Long battery life, no noise, rarely any heat.
twobitshifter 4y ago
People consider things other than pure speed and cost when buying a computer.
_ph_ 4y ago
Depending on which model you are looking at, you cannot get a faster Intel or AMD machine. Also not for less money. The Apple ARM hardware is amazing. Running Linux natively on a fast RISC machine should make many people excited. Also a good long-term alternative when Apple stops supporting new releases of macOS on these machines. While I like macOS as a "desktop" OS, I run also Linux on my Macs. So far in a VM, which obviously is very convenient. But I am certainly looking forward to installing Asahi.
- superkuh 4y ago
  That's a very untrue set of statements. Apple charges an absurd amount for tiny little features that real computers have in spades. Like RAM going for $200+ increments per 8GB, or $200+ increments per 512GB of SSD storage. That's almost offensive pricing if you know actual hardware costs. Why? Because Apple "Silicon" computers are not modular. For a top end Apple M2 you're spending $2500 just to get feature parity with a $1000 PC and even then you're maxing out at a pathetic 2TB of storage and only 24GB of ram. If you built a $2500 PC it would absolutely, unequivocally, blow the highest end M2 out of the water in both performance (especially after thermal throttling on the M2) and ability to do computer task (ie, having more space than a Dell computer from 2006 which Apple M1/M2 products cannot).
  - ThemalSpan 4y ago
    I think most folks here are advocating for MacBooks, which you absolutely could not build or buy an equivalent of in the 1000$ range. Desktops are a different class of hardware altogether.
  - _ph_ 4y ago
    When the parent post spoke about "faster" I compared the CPUs. The Apple CPUs are very competetive the the top end x86 CPUs, especially in laptops.
  - paulrpotts 4y ago
    Just to take on one of your points: the RAM you are talking about is not truly comparable. Sure, you can add DIMMs to a PC motherboard. M2 "unified" memory bandwidth to the on-chip RAM, LPDDR5-6400, exceeds 100Gb/sec. That's incredible bandwidth. So yes, there's a cost tradeoff, and the lack of modularity means the upgrade path is "get a new device." That's frustrating. That's actually been true of high end PCs for decades, given the constant churn in socket standards and power requirements, but fans of building their own PCs generally don't like to acknowledge it. The criticism of the onboard flash is more valid - it's costly and if you don't get the dual bank setup, paying yes, a big premium like I did for a 512Gb version, performance isn't great. https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-ssd-read-write-speeds-testing-benchmarkhttps://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-ssd-read-write-speeds-testing-benchmark https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-... The lack of an upgrade path is, again, not great, but ask yourself honestly, aside from some ThinkPads which really were nicely upgreadable in the past, how many laptops are upgradeable and what can you upgrade? Your bias ("Apple charges an absurd amount," for "tiny little features that real computers have in spades") is showing and it isn't pretty. Show us the modular laptop with comparable performance or shut up; you're stuck in the nineties. Go on - find me a PC laptop that performs better than an M2 and let's look at prices, weight, and battery life. Oh, and modularity. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_ranking-best_mobile_processors https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_ranking-best_mobile_proces... Or even show us your PC build that is comparable to the Mac Studio and let's talk about how big, noisy, and power-hungry it is; these are things that people who want to use real computers in real offices and studios care about, more than PC hot-rodders who, let's face it, are mostly gamers bragging to each other about their frame rates rather than professionals using computers as tools.
efficax 4y ago
There is no other equivalent PC laptop that is as fast, with such great battery life, power draw, quiet and lack of heat, and hidpi display, and all the equivalents in terms of performance and portability are just as expensive. The apple silicon machines are best in class right now, with no real competition. Surely this will change, but with Apple's kind of exclusive access to so much TSMC production (because of the massive volume of iphone chips, which are basically the same as M1 chips), it's going to take massive investment by intel or AMD to catch up in the price/power/performance category. You can definitely get an AMD Threadripper that gives you more computing power than an M1 Max, but not as quiet, as cool, or as cheap. (I'm typing this on a work-provided linux machine with a 32 core threadripper pro 5975WX that costs $3299 just for the processor, not even the rest of the PC, which is more than my personal M1 Max Mac Studio and when all 64 threads get going on this thing it's loud enough to hear it from the other room, even with "bequiet" fans).
- deleted 4y ago
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- howinteresting 4y ago
  ??? A 7950X is 50% faster than an M1 Ultra and it only costs 550 or so.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Yes, sure, at somethings. The 7950x does really well at some cache friendly workloads. But it also burns way more power and generally lives in a large ATX case with at least 7 fans (2 intake, 1 exhaust, 1 power supply, 2 on the GPU, and one for the chipset). It also has 1/8th the memory bandwidth, a MUCH slower iGPU, and takes much more power. Sure you can add a nice GPU, which helps for GPU workloads, but if it's from the current gen it's at least another $800 and 300 watts. The M1 Ultra in comparison has the fastest iGPU out, competitive (depending on workload) with some of the mid range GPUs, but generally good enough for things except for gaming. The apple studio is small, quiet, sips power, and has a single large fan that under most workloads is silent.
paulrpotts 4y ago
I've used a lot of laptops over the last 30 years going back through generations of ThinkPads running Linux and Windows, some HP boxes, PowerBook Duo and G4, and probably some I've forgotten. I now have a "midnight" M2 MacBook Air, 512Gb flash and 16Gb RAM, and it is, hands-down, the best laptop I've ever had. It's far faster than my 8-core Mac Pro. I run VS Code, OpenOffice, tons of tabs in Firefox, and terminals. I can even run Stable Diffusion on it using the "Diffusion Bee" packaged version. I think your bias about expensive and "faster... for less money" is out of date. Some of us appreciate things like length of time we can use it before having to recharge, and this thing leaves other devices far behind.
- Eldandan 4y ago
  Hear, hear. M2 MBA 16/512GB here after buying Thinkpads exclusively since 2010 and even modding to get 51NB X62 and T70 boards installed into X61 and T61 Thinkpads. The mba wipes the floor with them all and I wish it was close. I want to go back to my trackpoint but don't want to deal with the fan noise, heat, battery life, or battery loss while suspended.
mhh__ 4y ago
Apple's hardware (unless you want a hackable Thinkpad that weights 5x as much and sounds like a jet engine in exchange for being slower) is so much better than basically any alternative it's not even funny anymore. There's probably a laptop out there that's as nice as a piece of art than a MacBook but the internals are probably crap in comparison.
nortonham 4y ago
>Who would buy a Mac and put Linux on it? Some people might buy a mac and put linux on it to help out asahi linux with testing/troubleshooting etc, or because they like the hardware more than what other brands offer. Others in this comment section are running Asahi Linux as their daily driver apparently. There really isn't an ARM machine on the market like an M1/M2. > you could buy a faster Intel or AND machine Genuine question, what intel or AMD chip is better than the M1 or M2? Are you referring to desktops, laptops, or both? I get that you can buy/build a very good machine for less money than brand new Mac, but is the performance really as good as the m1 or m2?
- midoridensha 4y ago
  You can easily get better performance than Apple's chips. The catch is that the power consumption will be bad and your battery life will suck. People aren't buying M1/M2 laptops because of raw performance.
kaba0 4y ago
There is literally no other laptop on the market that are anywhere near Apple silicons’ performance-efficiency point, and those that are somewhat closish are often even more expensive. You can say plenty of things about apple but they do make great hardware more often than not.
sliken 4y ago
Apple makes nice hardware. Nice case (milled aluminum), nice heatsinks/airflow, and killer memory systems. Not a fan of their OS though. Generally the competition from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia generally has much less memory bandwidth (2 to 4 times less), much larger, and full of pitfalls. Oh you bought the wrong GPU that's catching on fire? Or the GPU with the fans that die or whine? Or a system with a iGPU severely hamstrung by a 128 bit wide memory interface? Or the motherboards with active cooling muffin fans that die/squeak/whine? Oh you bought brand X motherboard which was good last year but terrible this year? Even the PC case designs are terrible. Why do GPUs form a cube with minimal airflow on nearly every standard desktop chassis in existence? AMD/Intel desktops remind me of non-tesla EVs where often the suspension, drive train, battery, in car entertainment, traction control and similar departments don't talk, compete for resources, and minimize shared designs. PC airflow is engineered for each device separately. Even simple things like front to back airflow can not be assumed. Some GPUs don't exhaust air, just stir it. Others intake air (fighting front to back airflow). Others exhaust air ... often sucking in hot air from the CPU side. Sadly the hottest component (generally the GPU) has the worst airflow, while the CPU at 1/3rd the power often has 2x the airflow in a normal ATX case. Why do motherboard chipsets depend on tiny high rpm fans that make more noise/vibration than airflow? Why do high performance M.2 cards often require heat sinks ... that violate the size specifications for the M2? Why are dimms often perpendicular with the airflow? Why does even a small PC case require 5 or more fans instead of just 1? Except for gaming a Mac Mini with a M2 Pro or a Mac Studio M1 Max seems plenty fast, likely to last a long time, silent, and plenty fast for a wide variety of purposes while being substantially quieter, smaller, and lower power than it's PC competition. Personally I'm waiting for apple to bring out a Mac Studio with the M2 max. I'd love to see something arm or x86-64 that would make a nice quiet, fast, small, power efficient desktop with good memory bandwidth to support a decent iGPU. Sadly I'm not expecting anything. It's possible AMD will sell a small/cheaper version of the MI300 or Nvidia will sell a smaller/cheaper version of the Grace+Hopper, but that seems like years away.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  >AMD/Intel desktops remind me of non-tesla EVs where... >... while the CPU at 1/3rd the power often has 2x the airflow in a normal ATX case. That's the problem: the ATX standard. It's almost 30 years old at this point. It was never designed for modern GPUs or good thermal performance, it was just a step up from the creaky old IBM PC-AT standard that came before. The only way to get a desktop PC designed for good airflow and proper thermal management is to abandon the ATX standard and do something custom and proprietary, like the small-form-factor or workstation corporate desktops from Dell. But that means you need to buy the entire system at once (just like buying a laptop), and not put it together from parts like in the 1990s. And it's impossible to have a new open standard because no huge players are stepping up to make such a standard and then force everyone else to use it, and it's impossible for the industry as a whole to sit down and make a standard together that doesn't suck.
fulafel 4y ago
Lots of employers give a choice between a Macbook or a predetermined configuration & model x86 business laptop. For some kinds of dev work x86 incompatiblity doesn't cause that much hassle.

lordleft 4y ago

Doesn't Linus Torvalds run Linux on Mac hardware? He basically adores apple's laptops, which I can't blame him for.

bluedino 4y ago
Not that I've used it for any real work, I literally have only been doing test builds and boots and now the actual release tagging. But I'm trying to make sure that the next time I travel, I can travel with this as a laptop and finally dogfooding the arm64 side too. https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0Xi0OEQ3H1uQgOdFvHgx0w@mail.gmail.com/T/#u https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAHk-=wgrz5BBk=rCz7W28Fj_o02s0X...

bookofjoe 4y ago

>And founder Linus Torvalds himself is particularly eager to see Linux running on his favorite portable hardware, going so far as to issue a kernel in August 2022 from an M2 MacBook Air.

justapassenger 4y ago

1. Why can’t I run both? 2. Per watt they have some of the best performance 3. Overall some of the best battery life 4. Only real option if you want to run ARM 5. Most important - just because. That’s what geeks and hackers do.

xt00 4y ago

I’ve been running Linux on MacBook Pro’s for years and the main benefits are: high quality display, excellent trackpad, solid build quality. Yes they are more expensive than other laptops but the display and trackpad especially are 2 things you interact with constantly. I haven’t done it on the new M laptops but the thing most people cite there is a super low power / quiet device. Main downside presently is the soldered ram and SSD. But still I’m planning to get a Mac to run Linux on it once things are more stabilized.

heywoodlh 4y ago
> I've been running Linux on Macbook Pro's for years > I haven't done it on the new M laptops From these two comments, I am guessing you are running on pre-touchbar (2016) Macbook Pro's, because the touchbar models before the M1/M2 were absolutely horrendous for running Linux. You can see a table of features that do or do not work still on those models[0], notably wifi -- perhaps the most critical feature for a laptop to be useful as a mobile device. The pre-2016/pre-touchbar Macs are such nice pieces of hardware despite their age, but it gets me wondering why not invest in another hardware platform that supports Linux well, is modern but has high quality hardware? Some examples I can think of are the XPS and the Thinkpad Carbon. [0] https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux https://github.com/Dunedan/mbp-2016-linux
- xt00 4y ago
  The one I used the longest was from 2012 and WiFi worked just fine. I do remember it taking a bit of googling to get it working back then but I think it mostly just works with like Ubuntu 18. maybe I got lucky with my particular WiFi chip or something.

franciscop 4y ago

> You could buy a faster Intel or AND machine for less money Yes, but Apple has a great combination of high performance (laptop-wise), long battery life and high portability. Before I had the Zenbook series where you had the high end with the i-5 chips that died in 2-3 hours, or the low end that lived 5-6 hours but could barely play a video in 1080p (IIRC, from memory). With the Air for example I have it all; very long battery life, pretty high performance (more than enough for what I use it), super portable, and a great keyboard+trackpad. The only thing I'm missing is Linux :)

unshavedyak 4y ago

For me it's because it seems like Apple hardware has a significant edge on battery performance. Assuming for the sake of discussion that Linux doesn't inhibit this, it would mean my laptop does the "mobility" part much better than if it was Intel/etc. Frankly i'm not even sure i want to buy Apple. Not a big fan these days. But those Apple cores just seem so damn battery efficient. The number one thing i want from a laptop is to be able to use it on my lap, disconnected from a wall for as long as possible. With reasonable performance.. ie turning a CPU down to 3% doesn't count hah. I'm kinda split these days on if i buy Apple or buy a Linux and repair friendly laptop (Framework laptop, maybe one of the System 76, etc). A fully working Linux (NixOS for me) installation on an M1/M2 laptop would make this an even more difficult decision.

robin_reala 4y ago
Unfortunately, that’s a big assumption. Zero slight to the Asahi team (they’ve done amazing work) but there’s considerably more to do to get anywhere near what macOS gets with battery life.
nortonham 4y ago
>The number one thing i want from a laptop is to be able to use it on my lap, disconnected from a wall for as long as possible. With reasonable performance.. ie turning a CPU down to 3% doesn't count hah. macbook air (m1 or m2) fits the bill. Long battery life, no noise, rarely any heat.

twobitshifter 4y ago

People consider things other than pure speed and cost when buying a computer.

_ph_ 4y ago

Depending on which model you are looking at, you cannot get a faster Intel or AMD machine. Also not for less money. The Apple ARM hardware is amazing. Running Linux natively on a fast RISC machine should make many people excited. Also a good long-term alternative when Apple stops supporting new releases of macOS on these machines. While I like macOS as a "desktop" OS, I run also Linux on my Macs. So far in a VM, which obviously is very convenient. But I am certainly looking forward to installing Asahi.

superkuh 4y ago
That's a very untrue set of statements. Apple charges an absurd amount for tiny little features that real computers have in spades. Like RAM going for $200+ increments per 8GB, or $200+ increments per 512GB of SSD storage. That's almost offensive pricing if you know actual hardware costs. Why? Because Apple "Silicon" computers are not modular. For a top end Apple M2 you're spending $2500 just to get feature parity with a $1000 PC and even then you're maxing out at a pathetic 2TB of storage and only 24GB of ram. If you built a $2500 PC it would absolutely, unequivocally, blow the highest end M2 out of the water in both performance (especially after thermal throttling on the M2) and ability to do computer task (ie, having more space than a Dell computer from 2006 which Apple M1/M2 products cannot).
- ThemalSpan 4y ago
  I think most folks here are advocating for MacBooks, which you absolutely could not build or buy an equivalent of in the 1000$ range. Desktops are a different class of hardware altogether.
- _ph_ 4y ago
  When the parent post spoke about "faster" I compared the CPUs. The Apple CPUs are very competetive the the top end x86 CPUs, especially in laptops.
- paulrpotts 4y ago
  Just to take on one of your points: the RAM you are talking about is not truly comparable. Sure, you can add DIMMs to a PC motherboard. M2 "unified" memory bandwidth to the on-chip RAM, LPDDR5-6400, exceeds 100Gb/sec. That's incredible bandwidth. So yes, there's a cost tradeoff, and the lack of modularity means the upgrade path is "get a new device." That's frustrating. That's actually been true of high end PCs for decades, given the constant churn in socket standards and power requirements, but fans of building their own PCs generally don't like to acknowledge it. The criticism of the onboard flash is more valid - it's costly and if you don't get the dual bank setup, paying yes, a big premium like I did for a 512Gb version, performance isn't great. https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-ssd-read-write-speeds-testing-benchmarkhttps://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-ssd-read-write-speeds-testing-benchmark https://www.theverge.com/23220299/apple-macbook-air-m2-slow-... The lack of an upgrade path is, again, not great, but ask yourself honestly, aside from some ThinkPads which really were nicely upgreadable in the past, how many laptops are upgradeable and what can you upgrade? Your bias ("Apple charges an absurd amount," for "tiny little features that real computers have in spades") is showing and it isn't pretty. Show us the modular laptop with comparable performance or shut up; you're stuck in the nineties. Go on - find me a PC laptop that performs better than an M2 and let's look at prices, weight, and battery life. Oh, and modularity. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_ranking-best_mobile_processors https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_ranking-best_mobile_proces... Or even show us your PC build that is comparable to the Mac Studio and let's talk about how big, noisy, and power-hungry it is; these are things that people who want to use real computers in real offices and studios care about, more than PC hot-rodders who, let's face it, are mostly gamers bragging to each other about their frame rates rather than professionals using computers as tools.

efficax 4y ago

There is no other equivalent PC laptop that is as fast, with such great battery life, power draw, quiet and lack of heat, and hidpi display, and all the equivalents in terms of performance and portability are just as expensive. The apple silicon machines are best in class right now, with no real competition. Surely this will change, but with Apple's kind of exclusive access to so much TSMC production (because of the massive volume of iphone chips, which are basically the same as M1 chips), it's going to take massive investment by intel or AMD to catch up in the price/power/performance category. You can definitely get an AMD Threadripper that gives you more computing power than an M1 Max, but not as quiet, as cool, or as cheap. (I'm typing this on a work-provided linux machine with a 32 core threadripper pro 5975WX that costs $3299 just for the processor, not even the rest of the PC, which is more than my personal M1 Max Mac Studio and when all 64 threads get going on this thing it's loud enough to hear it from the other room, even with "bequiet" fans).

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
howinteresting 4y ago
??? A 7950X is 50% faster than an M1 Ultra and it only costs 550 or so.
- sliken 4y ago
  Yes, sure, at somethings. The 7950x does really well at some cache friendly workloads. But it also burns way more power and generally lives in a large ATX case with at least 7 fans (2 intake, 1 exhaust, 1 power supply, 2 on the GPU, and one for the chipset). It also has 1/8th the memory bandwidth, a MUCH slower iGPU, and takes much more power. Sure you can add a nice GPU, which helps for GPU workloads, but if it's from the current gen it's at least another $800 and 300 watts. The M1 Ultra in comparison has the fastest iGPU out, competitive (depending on workload) with some of the mid range GPUs, but generally good enough for things except for gaming. The apple studio is small, quiet, sips power, and has a single large fan that under most workloads is silent.

paulrpotts 4y ago

I've used a lot of laptops over the last 30 years going back through generations of ThinkPads running Linux and Windows, some HP boxes, PowerBook Duo and G4, and probably some I've forgotten. I now have a "midnight" M2 MacBook Air, 512Gb flash and 16Gb RAM, and it is, hands-down, the best laptop I've ever had. It's far faster than my 8-core Mac Pro. I run VS Code, OpenOffice, tons of tabs in Firefox, and terminals. I can even run Stable Diffusion on it using the "Diffusion Bee" packaged version. I think your bias about expensive and "faster... for less money" is out of date. Some of us appreciate things like length of time we can use it before having to recharge, and this thing leaves other devices far behind.

Eldandan 4y ago
Hear, hear. M2 MBA 16/512GB here after buying Thinkpads exclusively since 2010 and even modding to get 51NB X62 and T70 boards installed into X61 and T61 Thinkpads. The mba wipes the floor with them all and I wish it was close. I want to go back to my trackpoint but don't want to deal with the fan noise, heat, battery life, or battery loss while suspended.

mhh__ 4y ago

Apple's hardware (unless you want a hackable Thinkpad that weights 5x as much and sounds like a jet engine in exchange for being slower) is so much better than basically any alternative it's not even funny anymore. There's probably a laptop out there that's as nice as a piece of art than a MacBook but the internals are probably crap in comparison.

nortonham 4y ago

>Who would buy a Mac and put Linux on it? Some people might buy a mac and put linux on it to help out asahi linux with testing/troubleshooting etc, or because they like the hardware more than what other brands offer. Others in this comment section are running Asahi Linux as their daily driver apparently. There really isn't an ARM machine on the market like an M1/M2. > you could buy a faster Intel or AND machine Genuine question, what intel or AMD chip is better than the M1 or M2? Are you referring to desktops, laptops, or both? I get that you can buy/build a very good machine for less money than brand new Mac, but is the performance really as good as the m1 or m2?

midoridensha 4y ago
You can easily get better performance than Apple's chips. The catch is that the power consumption will be bad and your battery life will suck. People aren't buying M1/M2 laptops because of raw performance.

kaba0 4y ago

There is literally no other laptop on the market that are anywhere near Apple silicons’ performance-efficiency point, and those that are somewhat closish are often even more expensive. You can say plenty of things about apple but they do make great hardware more often than not.

sliken 4y ago

Apple makes nice hardware. Nice case (milled aluminum), nice heatsinks/airflow, and killer memory systems. Not a fan of their OS though. Generally the competition from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia generally has much less memory bandwidth (2 to 4 times less), much larger, and full of pitfalls. Oh you bought the wrong GPU that's catching on fire? Or the GPU with the fans that die or whine? Or a system with a iGPU severely hamstrung by a 128 bit wide memory interface? Or the motherboards with active cooling muffin fans that die/squeak/whine? Oh you bought brand X motherboard which was good last year but terrible this year? Even the PC case designs are terrible. Why do GPUs form a cube with minimal airflow on nearly every standard desktop chassis in existence? AMD/Intel desktops remind me of non-tesla EVs where often the suspension, drive train, battery, in car entertainment, traction control and similar departments don't talk, compete for resources, and minimize shared designs. PC airflow is engineered for each device separately. Even simple things like front to back airflow can not be assumed. Some GPUs don't exhaust air, just stir it. Others intake air (fighting front to back airflow). Others exhaust air ... often sucking in hot air from the CPU side. Sadly the hottest component (generally the GPU) has the worst airflow, while the CPU at 1/3rd the power often has 2x the airflow in a normal ATX case. Why do motherboard chipsets depend on tiny high rpm fans that make more noise/vibration than airflow? Why do high performance M.2 cards often require heat sinks ... that violate the size specifications for the M2? Why are dimms often perpendicular with the airflow? Why does even a small PC case require 5 or more fans instead of just 1? Except for gaming a Mac Mini with a M2 Pro or a Mac Studio M1 Max seems plenty fast, likely to last a long time, silent, and plenty fast for a wide variety of purposes while being substantially quieter, smaller, and lower power than it's PC competition. Personally I'm waiting for apple to bring out a Mac Studio with the M2 max. I'd love to see something arm or x86-64 that would make a nice quiet, fast, small, power efficient desktop with good memory bandwidth to support a decent iGPU. Sadly I'm not expecting anything. It's possible AMD will sell a small/cheaper version of the MI300 or Nvidia will sell a smaller/cheaper version of the Grace+Hopper, but that seems like years away.

midoridensha 4y ago
>AMD/Intel desktops remind me of non-tesla EVs where... >... while the CPU at 1/3rd the power often has 2x the airflow in a normal ATX case. That's the problem: the ATX standard. It's almost 30 years old at this point. It was never designed for modern GPUs or good thermal performance, it was just a step up from the creaky old IBM PC-AT standard that came before. The only way to get a desktop PC designed for good airflow and proper thermal management is to abandon the ATX standard and do something custom and proprietary, like the small-form-factor or workstation corporate desktops from Dell. But that means you need to buy the entire system at once (just like buying a laptop), and not put it together from parts like in the 1990s. And it's impossible to have a new open standard because no huge players are stepping up to make such a standard and then force everyone else to use it, and it's impossible for the industry as a whole to sit down and make a standard together that doesn't suck.

fulafel 4y ago

Lots of employers give a choice between a Macbook or a predetermined configuration & model x86 business laptop. For some kinds of dev work x86 incompatiblity doesn't cause that much hassle.