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I would love to be able to socket one of these suckers in a Linux desktop for a reasonable price. I'm loving seeing competition in this field, but I don't like
by Taywee 3y ago
I would love to be able to socket one of these suckers in a Linux desktop for a reasonable price. I'm loving seeing competition in this field, but I don't like using MacOS and don't want to pay the Apple hardware tax.
- ddorian43 3y agoWhy? Do you want to save electricity costs?
- aaomidi 3y agoThere’s really nothing like them.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- diffeomorphism 3y agoHow so? Apple says 20% faster cpu than the M1 ultra. So now it should be about as fast as a 13th gen i9 chip or comparable Amd chip. Power consumption is still very impressive, performance is as expected, so yeah it is good but "nothing like it" sounds like much, much more.
- nordsieck 3y agoIMO, they really stand out as a laptop chip. If you want something that's thin-and-light but still powerful, that's getting tough on the x86 side. As you point out, the power efficiency isn't as great a benefit in a desktop form factor where cooling is a lot easier to accomplish.
- ActorNightly 3y agoThreadripper?
- Taywee 3y agoThey excel at a lot of workloads I do a lot of, and I'm really keen to experiment with non x86 desktop processors.
- breuleux 3y agoThe Apple hardware tax is arguably what funds the development of these suckers.
- smlacy 3y agoSo you're saying it's not a "tax" per say and that the hardware premiums actually go to R&D on next gen systems? Apple's profit margin says otherwise. :) > Apple net profit margin as of March 31, 2023 is 24.49%.
- jonny_eh 3y agoIs that their net profit margin on hardware?
- gjsman-1000 3y agoWell, that's actually not out of line for tech. Microsoft is 34.62%, NVIDIA is 28.41%, and Google is 20.58%.
- reaperman 3y agoLowering the price 10% won’t be a game changer for the vast majority of people who would buy these to put in a linux desktop/workstation/server.
- jakear 3y agoWhere exactly do you think they get the money to make payroll if not by selling goods and services?
- breuleux 3y agoMy understanding is that the profits are accumulated in a cash/low-risk investment reserve, which serves several purposes: hedging against the ~100B of debt they apparently hold, ensuring smooth operation in a downturn, and also enabling the acquisition of valuable companies or talent, such as P.A. Semi in 2008. Let's put it this way: it would be a lot harder for Apple to do what it wants if it didn't have a stupendous amount of cash to fund it. That money pile means that they can shoulder the risks of their own plans, and the fact that they just pile on more and more profit every year just means these plans are largely successful.
- jonny_eh 3y ago> don't want to pay the Apple hardware tax It's called the "price". Unlike taxes, you can choose to not buy it and not pay it.
- pxc 3y agoYou can also avoid sales taxes by not buying. Like a sales tax, it's a tax you have to pay it you really want to buy the thing
- nosefurhairdo 3y agoYou're making a silly point. There are not legal substitutes for paying taxes (inb4 loopholes for wealthy and corporations), while there are plenty of more affordable substitutes for Apple products.
- Taywee 3y agoWhat are the affordable substitutes for the M2 Ultra?
- the_watcher 3y agoIf there are no substitutes, a high price is extremely justified.
- alpaca128 3y agoI get that lack of competition explains the price, but I don't think that means it's justified.
- sib 3y agoIf there is no competition (substitute, for given use cases and/or customers) and customers are willing to pay for it, then that is pretty much the definition of its being justified.
- PartiallyTyped 3y agoAsahi Linux :)
- xnx 3y agoApple hardware is genuinely better in so many ways large and small: case, keyboard, hinges, touchpad, etc. I wish I could pay the Apple "tax" and without having to use MacOS (RIP Bootcamp).
- mk_stjames 3y agoYou can with Asahi Linux. There are people using Asahi on M1 Macbooks as their daily driver, right now.
- yewenjie 3y agoHow is the situation with M2 machine though?
- mk_stjames 3y agoI think it is already supporting installing with the base M2 chip and they are putting in support for the Pro/Max/Ultra in the kernel in just this latest release, with install support for those machines coming soon.
- kllrnohj 3y agoApple's keyboards are pretty mediocre or even outright broken (butterfly switch debacle anyone?) If it's just chiclet keyboards you like there are no shortage of those. Logitech's MX Keys for example.
- PheonixPharts 3y agoI run desktop linux at home, and agree with the concerns/frustrations about running MacOS but I've never understood the complaints about Apple's pricing. The products do come at a bit of a premium, but, in my experience, it's well earned and is a premium experience as well. There have been occasional periods of sub-par hardware, but generally (and especially current generation) Apple's hardware is extremely well designed and durable. On top of that, I don't get the software engineer aversion to paying for quality tools. How many hours a year do you spend on a computer? How many hours over the lifetime of the computer will you spend? Even if devs weren't generally in top income brackets it would still be easily justifiable to spend several thousand dollars on tools that you were happy with. Again, I completely understand not wanting to go with Apple in order to have much finer grained control over your system. But if Apple is selling what you're buying, then the pricing is more than fair imho.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ddtaylor 3y ago> Apple's hardware is extremely well designed and durable. It's well designed, yes, but it's certainly not durable. The entire device will have to get scrapped and replaced if even the slightest thing goes wrong with any of it.
- AYBABTME 3y agoAh yes, like my 2016 MBPr that's still working like new, and had the battery replaced afresh for pretty cheap last year at the Apple Store.
- Taywee 3y agoHow cheap is "pretty cheap"? They wanted $300 to replace the trackpad that suddenly stopped working on its own on my 2019 one. Looking at the price estimator, battery service is like $250. That's not cheap.
- 7e 3y agoThere is no hardware tax. And why would you want to hobble your awesome hardware with the shit show that is desktop Linux?
- Taywee 3y agoI like having a real package manager, good native containerization and virtualization, being able to develop on the same OS that the deployment target is, and a large handful of things that are simply more pleasant on Linux (like the assumption of a case-sensitive filesystem, better job scheduling and daemon handling, more scriptable system utilities, and simply more transparency and control of my machine front to back). The DE situation is crappy, but I'd expect this place to recognize that there's more to an OS than the DE, and that developers might take a subpar DE for a better development experience as a whole.
- jbverschoor 3y agosystemd was copied from launchd. Wasn’t everybody against systemd?
- comboy 3y agoYou probably can have a better AMD setup. Just look at things they brag about [1] - our newest 24-core machine is UP TO 4x faster than 8-core Intel from I don't know how many years ago. I have no idea about actual performance but it doesn't look great, especially given that they are running software for which these chips were specifically optimized. I currently use macos, the software is tolerable, but when I need some serious computation power the server is running Linux. You can have more cores, you can have more memory, what else do you need? 1. https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/
- dathinab 3y agoif you go with an AMD Zen 4 Epyc server unit you still only get 12 "CPU memory channels" with M2 Ultra (or M1 Ultra) the equivalent of 16 "CPU memory channels" don't matter for many applications but for some and the it's a server unit you are buying not a prosumer desktop (with a ryzen CPU you get 2 channels, threadripper 4 channels and 8 with a threadripper pro)
- mannyv 3y agoApple's hardware tax funds their R&D, which is why Apple develops stuff like the M2 ultra when the Intel and Linux OEMs sit around waiting for Intel or Qualcomm to shit out some useless chip that's undifferentiated.
- dangus 3y agoThere's nothing impressive about Apple's chips in a desktop environment. If you've got a high end current generation Intel or AMD workstation processor plus an RTX 4090, you've got a more powerful and probably cheaper system than Apple's desktops that have the M2 Ultra (which start at $4000). Performance per watt is where Apple Silicon shines, so the only thing a Windows/Linux user should have envy over is the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. I would personally stay away from Apple's desktops even though I like macOS well enough.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sxcurry 3y agoWhat’s the Apple hardware tax? I’ve never seen it applied, but maybe that’s because I live in Oregon, no sales tax.
- pell 3y agoPeople tend to claim their hardware is generally overpriced. I do think that's more of a myth when examined more closely. However their RAM and storage upgrades are clearly absurdly expensive as we can easily compare them to retail numbers.
- derefr 3y ago> and don't want to pay the Apple hardware tax Why do you believe that the "Apple hardware tax" here is being applied to some pieces of aluminium, rather than to their extremely-high-CapEx investment into a new SoC? I would bet money that when the Mac Pro logic board becomes available as a component through the repair program, that a replacement of it will be 90-95% of the cost of replacing the full machine.
- musicale 3y ago> Why do you believe that the "Apple hardware tax" here is being applied to some pieces of aluminium, rather than to their extremely-high-CapEx investment into a new SoC? Sometimes it does seem to be applied to pieces of aluminum, like the $999 stand for the Pro Display XDR. But your point is a good one that many people seem to forget: a lot of the tax is to recoup their massive investment in developing their own Apple Silicon SoCs as well as the OS and other software.
- tracker1 3y agoThere's an Ampere workstation with like 128 arm cores as an alternative you can run Linux on. But it's going to run $5k+
- ingenieroariel 3y ago$3,999.00 is the entry price for the M2 Ultra. The M1 Ultra is supported by Asahi Linux and I have to say the memory bandwidth makes things like running llama.cpp way faster than Intel CPUs. The rust GPU driver is also a joy to use. Compared to the price of Two very good nvidia cards and the PC to host it I think the price is reasonable for running Linux on high end Apple Hardware. Another thing is that the memory consumption is under 20W when idle and 100W when compiling the Linux Kernel. I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years.
- mk_stjames 3y agoI was doing a lot of playing around in Stable Diffusion when it first dropped, with scripts generating a lot- some stuff I left overnight, 12+ hour runs. My M1 Pro Macbook at doing SD inference averages about 60-70 watts, or around that I think. The inference speed is about 0.9 iterations/s (1.1s/it). Later I had time and got SD running on a workstation of mine- an HP Z840 with dual Xeons and an RTX 3090. The 3090 eats 350 watts alone, and the rest of the system sucks another 250 watts or so, for a total of 600W. The generation speed (same Euler sampler) is about 9 iterations/s. So, 10x faster than my Macbook, nearly exactly. While using 10x the power. Utilizing larger batching with the extra 3090 vram can actually result in even more throughput. But I find it interesting that it winds up being nearly the same in images-per-$.
- PragmaticPulp 3y ago> Compared to the price of Two very good nvidia cards and the PC to host it I think the price is reasonable Apple’s marketing about how they compare to nVidia GPUs has been exaggerated, to put it lightly. A pair of high end nVidia GPUs will be substantially faster than an M2 Ultra. They don’t really compare. > I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years. You might want to check those numbers. At least where I live, I’d have to burn almost a thousand watts constantly at idle 24/7 for several years to start marking up the electricity premium. The power savings is great, but it’s not going to justify spending thousands of dollars more. I love the quietness of my M1/M2 machines, but I’m under no illusions that I’m saving money by using them.
- dathinab 3y agogiven that it's a pro-sumer product the price isn't even that absurd (I mean look at the cost of Threadripper PRO workstations) the main issue I would have with buying such system is repair-ability For one the questionable anti-repair, e.g. what they did with hard drives on their last desktop systems. I mean wtf. do you mean I can't just easily replace a worn hard drive that is a _must have basic essential feature for commercial usage in larger scale. for the other that fact that RAM can not be replaced at all, which is most times not an issue for desktop systems on normal consumer use, but is an issue for a workstation system which might run 24/7 for most days on high utilization
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- NayamAmarshe 3y agoI'd rather build an AMD machine that'll be much cheaper and way better at performance than these. Linux is awesome on the desktop but the only place where we are lagging behind is the laptop space.
- m3kw9 3y agomacOS can virtualized Linux
- Sparkyte 3y agoDepends how far down the rabbit hole of support you want to go I suppose.
- emodendroket 3y agoIt wouldn't be what it is if you could "socket it in" to a desktop. Having everything integrated is part of why it can perform so well.