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Ask HN: ARM Laptop Suggestions?
I'm looking for an ARM laptop. I'd settle for something with half the horsepower of an m1, running Linux, with fully functional drivers. Does such a thing exist? Uses: browsing the web, and some light coding. Why arm? I want exceptional battery life.
P.s.
I know about asahi, but from a quick glance, it doesn't look like all the driver functionality is there yet (although, I must say, their rate of progress has been awe inspiring).
- ggm 3y agoAnd you reject the Mac, right? Thats the given? Or would a secondhand M1 Mac do you?
- 3np 3y agoI'm not sure if what you're looking for even exist today (as much as half of m1). Other than that, I think your choice is generally between consumer-focused ARM-based Chromebooks with MT Kompanio 1380 like Acer Spin 530 on on hand, or enthusiast devices like MNT and Pinebook on the other. https://liliputing.com https://liliputing.com is worth keeping an eye on.
- dvhh 3y agoWhat about the ThinkPad X13s ? I think most of the drivers have been implemented but could not talk of personal experience (have the yoga c630 and drivers requires firmware files that need to be extracted from windows, my current experince is useable but subpar )
- zer0zzz 3y agoWay too expensive for a qualcomm
- not_your_vase 3y agoARM-based laptops have good (but wouldn't say exceptional) battery life with very light usage. Once you start using a browser or pretty much anything using a non-trivial amount of CPU, that battery life goes down the drain. My PinebookPro is very happy to work for 10 hours on one charge, as long as the CPU is left alone. LibreOffice, very light shell scripting, book reading, no bluetooth, things like that... Once I start (ab)using QtCreator, or start messing with Firefox, that number gets closer to 2 hours. For comparison one of my other (budget) laptops with Ryzen 4700u gives me over 6 hours of battery life with light usage (including browsing the internet), but I still get around 4 hours out of it when I keep compiling the kernel over and over again.
- necovek 3y agoIf you don't mind glossy screens and crappy keyboards and lack of ports, М1 Airs are your best bet if you are after cheap and good battery life: haven't tried it yet with Asahi Linux, simply because I do my Linux stuff on X1 Carbons (though they are getting worse by the generation).
- thetbw 3y agohuawei metapad e go, https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-e-go/ https://consumer.huawei.com/en/laptops/matebook-e-go/
- Takennickname 3y agoCan it run Linux fine?
- throwaway4good 3y agoI believe most of them are locked down - but something the Microsoft surface or the Samsung galaxy book but have nice performant arm editions.
- qwytw 3y agoQualcomm has a list of all Windows laptops (I guess Chromebooks should work too?): https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-tablets/laptop-device-finder?Device+Type=6703404&Operating+System=7985890 https://www.qualcomm.com/products/mobile/snapdragon/pcs-and-... Though their latest CPU seems to be Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3? And it hasn't ben updated for 1.5+ years. It seems to perform at around 60-70% of M1 which I guess is not that terrible. But I'm not sure their battery life is really that exceptional? The ThinkPad X13s doesn't seem to last that much longer than laptops with low-power AMD CPUs (which are both much faster and should have way less driver and software issues, e.g. even laptops with something as old as 5700U supposedly have comparable battery life according to some benchmarks)
- icemelt8 3y agoSurface Pro X
- lynguist 3y agoThe available options are: - Thinkpad X13s (barely works Ubuntu/Armbian) - Microsoft Surface Laptop (barely works Fedora) - Macbook Air (works Arch, Fedora, Debian) Macbook Air M1 will provide you with 3x CPU power and will have the best drivers and largest community. If you want 0.5x M1, you’re already out of options. The closest you get is 0.33x M1 that barely works.
- smoldesu 3y agoFirst off, those are not your only options (nor your only OS options) Second off, there is no reason to list the Thinkpad X13s as "barely works". It had better power-management and GPU drivers than Asahi on day-one. The same probably goes for the Surface Laptop, if it's also got a Snapdragon GPU. Thirdly, according to Geekbench (and every resource I could find), the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 exceeds 50% of the M1's performance without a struggle: https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2504172 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2504172 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2490755 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2490755 Making matters worse, the Snapdragon chip only maxes out at 9w, whereas Apple's chip will happily go to 30-40w during regular use. So, not only do you get better than the .5x M1, you get it with better battery life too!
- lynguist 3y agoHere is the complete writeup on X13s: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad_x13s/ https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/08/linux_on_the_thinkpad...
- emptysongglass 3y agoIs the X13s still barely working on Linux?
- lynguist 3y agohttps://www.phoronix.com/news/Armbian-23.08-Released https://www.phoronix.com/news/Armbian-23.08-Released The CPU can’t do virtualization. M1 can, but can’t do nested virtualization.
- justinclift 3y agoHmmm, if you're ok with say 0.1 of an M1, then maybe one of the Pinebook laptops would be useful to consider? https://pine64.com/product-category/pinebook-pro/ https://pine64.com/product-category/pinebook-pro/ They're only about US$200, so depending on your budget it might be a useful experiment. :)
- qwerty456127 3y agoHow do they compare to Raspberry Pi 4B? Similar performance is Okay for many uses, somewhat faster CPU (so heavy websites like YouTube wouldn't feel like a turn-based game) would be excellent.
- quechimba 3y agoIt's really slow. YouTube works but browsing is really slow overall. I installed Manjaro with KDE on mine and quickly changed to i3 because the trackpad isn't that good so moving windows around wasn't really fun. When I got the graphics drivers to work, Alacritty ran pretty good and I used it for coding. I wouldn't recommend it for any serious work.
- qwerty456127 3y agoThen I just wonder why can't they or somebody else build a similar laptop around a Raspberry Pi Compute Module then... I just googled that and found out there is such a thing branded WaveShare, seeming pretty good, but it's discontinued. That's sad, I would be buying it straight away but I couldn't even find a used thing on eBay.
- qwerty456127 3y ago"YouTube works" is ambiguous because YouTube is two distinct things: video playback and the actual website UI. E.g. YouTube video plays Ok on Raspberry Pi (I believe this can be attributed to hardware codecs) but the rest of the elements of a YouTube page work painfully slow and YouTube is not alone in this, there are other websites (including ones lacking any multimedia content) which work really slow as well. I haven't seen any which would be completely unusable though, it's just really annoying to use some.
- bashbjorn 3y agoThe MNT Reform[1] is a pretty sexy open hardware laptop with a mechanical keyboard, optional trackball, and a small ARM processor. A cursory glance at geekbench shows that you can get around 50% the performance of a 2020 Macbook Air M1, if you get the upgraded CPU option.[2][3] I have no idea how useful those benchmarks are, though. [1] https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform [2] https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16291496 https://browser.geekbench.com/v4/cpu/16291496 [3] https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2504172 https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/2504172
- minimaul 3y agoGeekbench scores do not compare between versions - you have a v4 score for the MNT Reform and a v6 score for the M1.
- KronisLV 3y ago> I'm looking for an ARM laptop. I'd settle for something with half the horsepower of an m1, running Linux, with fully functional drivers. Does such a thing exist? It's surprising that there are few actual suggestions here, so I guess we're not quite there yet, at least as far as affordable mainstream options go? Props to Lenovo and others for trying, though. I recall needing something similar a few years ago and just opting for an x86 netbook with an underpowered Celeron, something like this: https://techbite.eu/en/laptopy/laptop-zin-3-14-1 https://techbite.eu/en/laptopy/laptop-zin-3-14-1 (probably just a rebrand of something else) The battery life was great and it was dirt cheap, which I'd love to have with ARM and perhaps more RAM. That particular model was just an example (build quality shows the budget segment and Wi-Fi drivers started working in Linux distros out of the box some time after the release), but I hope we'll have more budget computing options I'm the future! Maybe even RISC-V some day.
- zer0zzz 3y agoGiven the current amazon price of $750 for an m1 and the rapid progress of the asahi project (arch and fedora) I don’t even understand how this is even a question? Are you seriously asking for advice or do you just want people to argue with you? The fedora devs came out and said the asahi system on m1 is the reason they were able to qualify btrfs as the default fs for fedora, so that should tell you something.
- smoldesu 3y agoYou can go get a new-in-box Pinebook Pro for $199: https://pine64.com/product/14%e2%80%b3-pinebook-pro-linux-laptop-ansi-us-keyboard/ https://pine64.com/product/14%e2%80%b3-pinebook-pro-linux-la... And look! Their Mali GPU even ships with compliant OpenGL and Vulkan drivers. Now that's rapid progress.
- zer0zzz 3y agoThe Mali T-860 driver from Panfrost was developed by the dev that is now working on Asahi today, so yeah I expect the same rapid progress. The PineBook is probably the best M1 alternative given the price and driver support, but Snapdragon not so much unless they're at some significant discount from what I saw last.
- fwipsy 3y agoDell has one (I haven't verified that it meets your requirements:) https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-14/spd/inspiron-14-3420-laptop https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/inspiron-14/spd...
- runjake 3y agoAn M1 MacBook is your best bet. If that doesn't meet your needs, then you'll want to get an Intel or AMD laptop, for now. I'm not aware of a non-Apple ARM laptop that works better than an M1 with Asahi.
- smoldesu 3y ago> I'm not aware of a non-Apple ARM laptop that works better than an M1 with Asahi. As early as the Toshiba AC100 there were usable ARM laptops on Linux. Nowadays, you can spend $99 and get a fully-supported ARM Pinebook if you fancy. Or check out the MNT Reform, ClockworkPi systems, Snapdragon laptops, Nintendo Switch, the list goes on. There are dozens of better-supported mobile ARM platforms, if you specifically want Linux on ARM.
- runjake 3y agoI am aware that ARM is well-supported on Linux. However, the OP was asking about ARM laptops with at least half the performance of the M1 and long battery life. The 13-year old AC100 and Pinebook don't meet the ops' specs of half the performance of the M1 and great battery life. Nor would any of the other examples you list. The MNT Reform looks neat, but I doubt the performance and battery will meet OP's specs. Nonetheless, pretty neat. The Nintendo Switch isn't a laptop.
- kramerger 3y agoHere is question for you: why ARM? Apple users have to switch to ARM because that's what Apple decided to use, but in PC-land you can get more performance out of a new ryzen for less money. You can rent an ARM VM for the odd occasion you absolutely need an ARM.
- stephenr 3y agoIt's almost like OP was psychic when s/he wrote the original post: > Why arm? I want exceptional battery life.
- kramerger 3y agoLet me rephrase the question then: how often would a normal person need 10+ hours battery life? (there are PC laptops with 16-20 battery life, but just like with macs that number goes down significantly when you start using it for real)
- stephenr 3y ago> Let me rephrase the question then: how often would a normal person need 10+ hours battery life? This isn't some hypothetical debate about what "the average person" needs to determine how important a given aspect is. It's one specific person who wants a specific thing. You don't need to question how often they need something - they've told you a specific thing they want and the reason. The "real world" tests from Laptop Mag suggest M2-series Macs have 16-18 hours of battery life doing exactly what OP asked for: browsing (and light coding). Of the 10 laptops they tested, 7 were ARM based, and the "best" non-ARM was #6 in terms of battery life, the other two were #9 and #10. Regardless of whether you want/like Macs specifically, I think arguing against the common wisdom that modern Arm devices are typically get better battery life than x86 competitors is kind of bizarre. It's like arguing that 64bit was a mistake or the Internet is just a fad.
- kramerger 3y agoNo, I think we are allowed to question the base assumptions here. For example, were laptops completely useless before 2020, when the best you could get out of them was 12 hours? How often in your life are you stuck on a 18 hours flight without AC power? OP mentioned light coding on Linux. What battery life would M2 achieve when running Docker in a VM? Does Ashahi Linux reach anywhere near the 16 hrs battery of macs? Apple delibertly limited Windows battery on Intel macs, do you think they would treat Linux differently. And so on...
- ActorNightly 3y ago>I want exceptional battery life. You can get very good battery life with a modern "windows" (i.e non-mac) laptop with a bigger battery, and running a very lightweight distro like bunsenlabs (an optionally tweaking some CPU throttling parameters). In standby the battery should last close to a full day. With modern fast charging over USB-C, this works very well. You can also just get a modern Android Tablet with good battery life, and use a bluetooth keyboard + mouse with something like Termux on the backend. You can run vscode web gui for an IDE.
- wetpaws 3y ago[dead]
- antongribok 3y agoSince others are suggesting x86 instead of ARM, I highly recommend an LG Gram (either 16 or 17) that comes with an 80 Wh battery, and stock Fedora. With Power Profiles in Gnome set to "Power Saver" you'll easily last more than a day. Standby power is excellent. LG has other, smaller models as well, but I think they come with smaller batteries that aren't quite as good a balance of power and weight.