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I was seduced by Apple Silicon after experiencing the exceptional battery life and performance. Those things are great, as are the screens and the speakers. Bu
by whimblepop 4mo ago
I was seduced by Apple Silicon after experiencing the exceptional battery life and performance. Those things are great, as are the screens and the speakers.
But I'm still excited about the Framework 12 because I don't love macOS. I don't need an alternative to beat Apple on every line of the spec sheet. I just need them to align with my values, support Linux well, and cross a certain "good enough" threshold. The latest laptops from Framework meet all of those requirements, and I'm excited to buy one after I've saved up enough money. I've missed Plasma for a long time. At the same time, I wouldn't even consider a MacBook Neo.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago>I was seduced by Apple Silicon after experiencing the exceptional battery life and performance. DHH showed the Framework laptops with latest Intel Panther Lake SoCs having similar battery life to AS Macs (~14 hours) under Omarchy linux while gaming benchmarks put their iGPUs in line or better than AMD's Ryzne SoCs at gaming. The era of long battery life being the USP feature exclusive to Macbooks is slowly going away, especially if AMD pulls a similar move and heats up the competition. Once the chip shortage from AI datacenters bubble pops, we could see even better SoCs from Intel, AMD, and even Qualcomm and Nvidia could join the ARM laptop battle in a serious way. X86_amd64 + Linux let's goooo!
- criddell 4mo agoNow they need to work on a fanless option. It would be nice to have at least one SKU be a silent machine with no moving parts.
- rbanffy 4mo agoThat, in the x86 universe, has some heavy penalties in performance terms. I got myself a fanless “student” laptop (another name for “rugged”, but sells for less) and, while performance is acceptable, it ain’t fast - like a 10 year old i3.
- criddell 4mo agoI don’t think performance matters much to a lot of people. Look at how well the Neo is selling and it’s running what is essentially a phone SOC. Forget about raw FLOPs and focus on performance per watt. Computers have been fast enough for most people for a decade now.
- sheepscreek 4mo agoThe (memory) chip shortage saga is not going away for a few years. Most fabs are going to be capacity starved. Apple will happily pony up billions to TSMC to set up a new plant in exchange for exclusive capacity. No other laptop manufacturer can do this. This will put them in an even more advantageous position. In all honesty, the Neo couldn’t have arrived at a better time for them.
- nl 4mo agoTSMC doesn't do memory. AMD actually got access to TSMC 2nm before Apple: https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-4-14-amd-achieves-first-tsmc-n2-product-silicon-milesto.html https://www.amd.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-4-14-amd...
- rbanffy 4mo agoAlso, a completely new fab takes up to five years to come online. The best bet is investing in increasing throughput of existing RAM plants, but that isn’t fast either. The other is buying RAM from Chinese suppliers which are less oversold (but not much, and not for long anyway).
- sheepscreek 4mo agoI was commenting specifically on this bit: > Once the chip shortage from AI datacenters bubble pops, we could see even better SoCs from Intel, AMD, and even Qualcomm and Nvidia could join the ARM laptop battle in a serious way. EPYC (the 2nm AMD chip being produced at TSMC Arizona) is still going to support the datacenter demand, not consumer devices. You and I are still screwed. Apple is the only behemoth, IMO, that wields significant power against other trillion dollar companies. Not Acer, not HP, not even Dell (I don’t think). This is my personal opinion, I don’t have specific facts at hand to back it. Just a strong intuition. But hey, govts might step in at some point and say - we need to put a cap on how much supply data-centres can buy. Since computers and phones are the backbone of modern society. There may be some rationing happening down the line.
- tobinfricke 4mo agoIs it feasible to run Linux on the Apple hardware? Seems like that could meet your requirements, except possibly "align with my values." I saw https://asahilinux.org/ https://asahilinux.org/ but don't know how usable it is, or whether the long battery life and hardware support is preserved.
- benoau 4mo agoEvery generation of Mac has its own requirements that Asahi has to support through a painstaking process of reverse-engineering, so it lags behind quite a bit. Realistically it will probably be 2030 before you can use it on any current-generation Mac.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4mo agoIt's irritating to see it constantly recommended as a real option.
- hparadiz 4mo agoI think it's a feasible option I just can't use it for work because here's how that goes: > "Hey can you remove MDM from this Macbook so I can install Linux?" No. > "Hey can I get a linux laptop for a hardware refresh?" Sure. Asahi on an M2 Macbook Pro supports almost everything https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support https://asahilinux.org/fedora/#device-support
- 866-RON-0-FEZ 4mo agoM-series MacBooks stink, literally. [1] My newest MacBook reeks of strong adhesive from the vents. Googling revealed hundreds of similar complaints, it's allegedly a solvent they use, perhaps flux. I thought it was the battery. Many claim "they all smell like that". Some (insane) people like the smell, I assume they sniffed glue as kids. Unfortunately it's the last one I buy. I won't tolerate a smelly laptop. [1] https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/unpleasant-solvent-like-smell-coming-from-macbook-pro-m4-2024.2447010/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/unpleasant-solvent-like...
- bb88 4mo agoIs that true with the mac book airs? My understanding is that they're completely sealed, and they use the case as a heat spreader.
- as1992 4mo agoYeah if your Macbook smells like that you need to be contacting Apple. That's obviously a manufacturing flaw. I've had multiple M series Mac pros from M1 up M5 and none of them have ever had an unpleasant smell.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- msla 4mo ago[flagged]
- fortran77 4mo agoI love Windows Arm. My latest machine, an Asus Zenbook A16 is great. 18 core Snapdragon X2 extreme, 48 GB of memory, and OLED screen--all for $1699. It feels very fast, faster than my 24-core Xeon desktop (though benchmarks would put my Xeon ahead) and has great "all-day" battery life. You can remove the screws on the bottom and replace the battery (which is screwed in, too, no glue to peel) or the M.2 NVME which is enough "servicability" for me....
- embedding-shape 4mo agoYou should try Linux on it someday, to really see what the CPU can do, night and day difference :) With that said, I'd probably prefer a Windows laptop over a MacBook too, their hardware is great, but the software is just so awful. But whatever you do, don't get Microsoft's hardware, I got a Surface Pro 8 some years ago and throughout my ~25 years of computing I've never had a worse laptop, and just 2-3 weeks after the warranty went out, the entire machine bricked itself during an update and it no longer boots at all, basically threw 1500 EUR into the sea with nothing to show for it.
- dijit 4mo agolast time I tried Linux on ARM (a month ago) nothing worked. No sound, no webcam, no USB-C(iirc) and no video hardware acceleration. It was a Thinkpad T14s with Snapdragon Elite X-2 if it matters.
- youre-wrong3 4mo agoHad a similar issue and just pointed codex at my laptop and it got everything working.
- regexorcist 4mo agoSame. By the time I got back it had even upstreamed a few device drivers to mainline Linux, all on its own.
- 4mo ago
- throwaway894345 4mo agoI would happily jump ship for any competitor that offers solid AI inference benchmarks at a competitive power efficiency, but as far as I can tell Apple owns that market by a pretty big margin. I’m sure someone will point out if I’m wrong.
- pyrophane 4mo agoI just have a desktop at home that I run inference off of. It is a great setup and I don't find myself wanting to inference models directly on my laptop.
- throwaway894345 4mo agoThat’s what I would do too, but I haven’t found a desktop build that can rival a Mac Mini or Mac Studio on performance per watt. I haven’t looked super hard, but it seems like Mac is in a different ballpark.
- zhivota 4mo agoI mean, once it's a desktop, watts are pretty cheap, so it's a bit strange to optimize on that factor for the desktop form factor. For laptops it makes a ton of sense.
- throwaway894345 4mo agoIf I was optimizing solely for cost I wouldn't use a desktop in the first place. Watts are cheap, but they result in pollution and noise (e.g., fan) or you need some costly alternative. Also I just value efficiency.
- topaz0 4mo agoHumans own inference power efficiency by a much bigger margin
- throwaway894345 4mo ago
- saidnooneever 4mo agobattery life is not only factor of the laptop. having moved from Linux (ran gentoo quite minimal...) to freeBSD default install makes my laptop last about twice or thrice as long. the art of idle software and efficient energy consumption is not landed in windows and Linux takes too much work.. mac does it not too bad + having good batteries, but thats not to say a laptop with a lesser battery should be trashed by a bad OS. mobile operating systems are usually much more tuned to being good with battery life. I suppose Linux and perhaps windows do not seem to have laptops as main target even for 'desktop' distros or versions.
- schaefer 4mo ago> having moved from Linux ... to freeBSD default install makes my laptop last about twice or thrice as long. I’ve literally never heard this from anyone before, and I have to admit, I’m curious enough to try it for myself. The last time I tried FreeBSD was 2001.
- saidnooneever 4mo agoi am not sure why btw but i read some articles on here about software not being idle on background properly a lot of times (fancy terminals etc.). for me tho 'it just happens' because im unsure how to measure it precisely.. maybe my linux had a big or wrong setup u know, but it was running very lean. Freebsd runs about as lean tho. cannot be bothered ofc to go back and measure it is some hp-elitebook withh a ryzen and iGPU in there. If i run things like Claude it sucks my battery. But if i just run my editors code all day myself its all gd..use firefox as browser on both. other then that its x,i3,hx,rg,fd,fzf. thats about all i use..(so u see i hate it when any laptop empties soon.... i hardly use anything of it). usually i dont even open x/i3.
- skydhash 4mo agoI run openbsd on an old latitude and that tracks. I mostly have only application active at a time. The others are idling. I believe on Linux, especially with DE, there’s always some polling or scanning going on.
- regexorcist 4mo agoI'm constantly surprised by just how bad macOS is as a Linux user. I currently have to deal with it sometimes as I run my local LLM server on it and it's painful. That said the hardware is great, I run Asahi on another M1 MBP and Linux makes it the best laptop I've ever used.
- commandersaki 4mo agoFunny it’s the opposite for me. What if I want to switch between desktops of multiple users; easy with fast user switching, not really a thing in Linux (yeah I’m sure it can be hacked up, but bleh).
- treve 4mo agoLinux had this well before OS X
- wpm 4mo agoDoes it still or was it another of the things cut in Wayland?
- treve 4mo agoStill does. On gnome you can switch via the lock screen.
- rbanffy 4mo agoI miss the 3D cube and the wobbly windows.
- tiberious726 4mo agoInstall the plasma add-ons package if you're on KDE, I'm sure there's still something around for gnome too. Burning windows away on close is my favorite
- nl 4mo agoI think the Framework 13 is something that completes reasonably with a MacBook Pro. I don't have one but would consider a Ryzen AI based one instead of a MBP. The Intel based ones have upgradable RAM and Mac-competetive battery life on Linux. The shared RAM on the Ryzen is useful for local AI though.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 4mo agoThe thing about the framework 12 is that they are giving you an open device that is meant to be upgraded. The value of that is different to everyone, but to place it side by side hardware wise and try to compare it as if it is equivalent on the software side to the closed source bullshit Apple has on offer feels at the very least a false equivalency
- JKCalhoun 4mo agoThat's cool. Can I upgrade the display? That seemed to be a very weak point for the Framework 12 (for me anyway).
- MostlyStable 4mo agoI don't believe that they have (yet) released a new display for the 12. But the 13 has gotten several upgrades, and I think the 16 just got it's first. So, most likely eventually yes.
- sfjailbird 4mo agoIt's funny how Apple has come full circle. Back in the 90s, when they were in deep crisis (before the second coming of Jobs), it was almost conventional wisdom that they should just stop selling hardware, and focus on their superior software. And here we are today when a lot of people lust for the hardware, but just can't deal with MacOS.
- joxdosba 4mo ago> And here we are today when a lot of people lust for the hardware, but just can't deal with MacOS Are there actually a lot of such people? Linux-on-desktop users are certainly loud, but also extremely uncommon.
- 3form 4mo agoI'm sure a lot of the crowd that's using Windows as more than a browser OS would also find things to complain about. There's a ton of differences in how to do things at OS level, having to find other software, from time to time poor hardware support, different security mechanisms, being locked out of 80% of PC gaming by OS more than ARM... I guess the list could go on.
- aurareturn 4mo agoThey're very loud online. If you hang out in any technology forum online, it feels like everyone is running Linux on their mac/Lenovo/Framework/etc.
- rjrjrjrj 4mo agoNo, but they are all on HN. And before that, Slashdot.
- bayindirh 4mo agoI'm a "Linux on Desktop" person, and the reason I use macOS on laptops is it's the best non-Linux OS which works great with Linux and comes with great hardware. The funny thing is, I'm using macOS for ~20 years now, and there are "still" things which are way better on Linux. As a result, macOS is a laptop-only secondary OS for me. I have a couple of Desktop computers both for work and personal use, and they run Linux exclusively, for 20+ years.
- markus_zhang 4mo agoI’m so sad that Apple continues to push out excellent hardware with mediocre software. Wish Asahi to be more successful.
- oliver66677 4mo agoSo it's reasonable to ask $300 extra dollar (on top of $500) for using the free linux over macOS? That must be a joke.