Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021(asahilinux.org) |
Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021(asahilinux.org) |
Maybe the core tech users is negligible to Apple, but it shouldn't be: Winning over the power users generally precedes larger adoption and I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead.
Also, the comparison of A14 and M1 (aka "A14X") gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones. There was an iPodLinux project, back in the day. I have no idea what the options are today.
That would involve jailbraking. The nice thing about the M series Macs is that there is an offical way to run alternative OSs, AFAIK. Something that should be required by law after X number of units sold IMO, but that's another conversation altogether.
I enjoyed the pun, even more so now that "support" for the hardware notch on the screen is also mentioned in the article.
general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority
who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM?
only people with lots of money to waste.
Let's say you use a laptop for 6 hours a day, five days a week, 48 weeks a year, and that it lasts for 3 years. That's 4,320 hours of usage. For many people, it's worth paying 35 cents per hour to use a machine that's even just a little bit better than one that costs half that. I'm writing this on a high-end Macbook Pro that's 8 years old. It was very expensive when I bought it, but the "cost per hour" has actually been quite low. The benefit of a better experience during the entire duration of usage is well worth the added cost, in my experience.
But if you're not currently into the Apple ecosystem, and consider going all-in, the total costs of ownership are indeed a bit eye-watering for those without six figure jobs, if you disregard or don't need or don't care about the whole ecosystem and just look at the specs to price ratio of the laptop on it's own (I got a 13 inch QHD thin and light laptop with an 8 core Ryzen 5800U and 16GB RAM and 1TB NVME removable!!! SSD and 8 hour battery life for 750 Euros, where I can dual-boot Linux and Windows and run absolutely any (non-Apple)SW I could ever need).
So, since I don't need any component of the Apple ecosystem, I can't justify spending double the money to get more limited functionality in return, though I am tech savvy enough to use Windows and Linux and create for myself a similar (and subjectively better) ecosystem to Apple's for cheap/free using various OSS and proprietary SW.
However, lost of doctors I visit and most high-earners I know seem to own Macs and iPhones, so for them most likely it's worth the extra penny for the magic of the ecosystem where everything Justworks(TM) and they don't have to spend extra time learning and fiddling with tech related stuff they don't care for.
And TBH, if I didn't have to worry about money, and didn't have a career and hobbies that required the need to run X86_X64 binaries and Android apps, then I'd probably go all-in on the latest Apple MacBook Pros with extra-ports plus iPhone ecosystem for the convenience and time savings.
So I would also guess the number of people willing to buy one of these is pretty high. I purchased the MacBook Air and love it. So fast, so quiet. Could I afford it? Yes. But I also typically use a Mac for 5-7 years so I did not consider it overly expensive.
I work as a platform engineer, code mostly in Go and Python, run VMs and containers as well as some crappy resource-hungry apps like Slack and Signal all day long, and have never felt the need for more RAM on this machine.
YMMV, of course, but 16Gb on an Apple Silicon machine takes you a lot farther than you would imagine. I have co-workers who go by daily with 8Gb M1 machines.
E.g I still have my old MacBook around for running Ableton, because support for pro audio on both Windows and Linux is not great. Linux is almost there with PipeWire support landing in most major distros, but Windows still requires a lot of fiddling with drivers and random EXEs downloaded off the web to get a reasonable setup going. And I'm not even an audio professional, just a hobbyist with very mainstream hardware.
I suspect a lot of media/design/film professionals are in the same boat. Not to mention software developers who want a smoother experience than Windows/Linux can give them. This has always been Apple's market and they don't care about anyone else.
A wholeful lot of working people need a computer, a phone is not enough.
A laptop that has top notch battery performance and can handle heavy work at the same time, being also very lightweight, has a lot of pluses.
The fact that it is well built and that it is battery efficient is, that alone, sort of an insurance policy. I can see many occasions arising in a timespan of some years where a professional could lose a lot of money if its main work device proves to be unreliable at a wrong moment. It might be more than those 1500 euros depending on the field.
Maybe if 20XX really does become year the "year of desktop on linux" they'll start to get worried? But for now it seems like an easy calculation that it only benefits Apple to allow easy dual-booting to Linux -- it makes their hardware more appealing to the hard-core geek crowd (w/ disproprtionate mind-share and knock-on effects), while still having essentially zero chance of Linux cannibalizing your every-day user market.
Seems like Apple Silion will be 5 years ahead of the competition - similar to how long it took for others to catch up with the first iPhone.
Storage is fast, CPU performance is solid, PCIe for ethernet works just fine.
Now if I could just get one with 64G of RAM and 2TB of SSD... ;)
edit: the setup process is still far from polished but that's not unexpected this early, and it's still in a 'build your own kernel' state. But it was easy enough to get going in an hour or two with a pointer or two from IRC and from reading the wiki.
Careful what you wish for. With the way Apple marks up memory and storage upgrades, you might be looking at a $5,000 machine there...
I built the initial kernel on an AMD 5800X running Debian - there are cross-compiling instructions on the Asahi Linux wiki.
For bootloader, I'm currently just appending the kernel & device tree to m1n1 (which is the first stage Asahi loader).
I suggest getting started with your rootfs and kernel under m1n1's hypervisor, as the virtualised serial ports make it much easier to debug initial issues.
edit: other than the install script which is linked elsewhere in this comment thread, everything you need is on the wiki in various places :)
Interesting how working on new technologies helps improve existing things for all users. Sort of reminds me how NASA invests in R&D and those investments eventually come back to military and consumers.
Are there even ARM systems with that amount of RAM? I assume it's something in the order of what super computers use, but I don't think any of them are ARM. That doesn't sound that surprising to me that no one noticed if no one uses that much RAM.
As a web application developer and Linux newbie, I don't feel like I have the expertise to be able to contribute to this, but I wish I did.
https://www.patreon.com/marcan/posts
(I'm not saying you should, I just thought your point is good and I wanted to point out the possibility of sponsoring to everyone here).
(As the sibling) Supporting on Patreon is what hopefully gets us what we want quicker :)
Also, Windows ARM with the recent updates also works well in the new base 14 inch. I've been using it daily, no issues.
I have nothing but praise and swiftly switching between 3 OSs sure is neat. This computer is sooo fast.
I can see myself using this Mac for many years ahead.
I've been using Windows ARM on M1 as my primary work PC device since ~January when I got a 13" M1 MacBook Pro. I now have a 16" MacBook Pro M1 Max. Can share particulars of my Parallels config or answer any questions.
- Doesn't ARMv8 architecture require supervisor mode? You should be able to just pop a good old Arm Trusted Framework sample, implement PSCI in there just like other standard ARMv8?
- Linux kernel already supports various PSCI-less architectures (rpi4 notably for armv8 if I'm not mistaken), so I don't think upstream would mind about that at all?
I guess your proposed approach makes sense when the target is more than just Linux though, do you have hopes that m1n1 could be eventually suitable to boot Windows?
I'm working on Wi-Fi for M1 Macs this week and that particular patch will be useful for T2 Macs too, so hopefully that will be upstream in the near future.
There should be a driver to support apple NVME implementation, and that should get you to boot on a t2 mac.
Agreed. Yes and:
I'd like more analysis and punditry (predictions) comparing SoC offerings from Apple, Intel, AMD, etc.
Especially wrt Apple's anticipated consumer features and markets, like AR/VR, video chat, integrated Apple Pay, whatever.
For instance, I want to hear more about Apple Silicon's codecs. More about biometrics UX (Face ID, Touch ID).
I think a server optimized SoC from Intel is right and proper. Ditto for Apple Silicon's strategy for mobile and media. And I don't anticipate Apple caring so much about server use cases. Maybe in-house stuff, like server farms for Siri. And I mean "market focus", vs "technical focus". While Apple Silicon is probably fine for server, I don't anticipate Apple caring, leaving those segments to existing cloud providers, eg Amazon's Graviton.
Now that I think about it, I'd like to see an Apple Silicon vs Graviton matchup. Just to get a sense of the landscape. For instance, I'd guess Apple Silicon's TPU (Neural Engine) is optimized for their software stack, whereas Amazon's doing something more general purpose, as befits their respective markets.
Sorry for stream of conscious, blathering for too long. I'm just writing out loud.
These new macbooks are like a dream. By far the best laptops I have ever used.
Also Alder Lake is actually pretty normal in terms of power usage on actual workloads, almost no one is running AVX stress tests. The power draw is basically a symptom of intel massively pushing it past the efficiency frontier, undervolting is the new overclock thanks to massive stock OC
In most gaming benchmarks alder Lake is basically the same or less than Zen 3 in terms of power, last time I looked.
Even without TSMC Apple has all the cards - experience in state of the art chips, phones, tablets and PCs, from the silicon to the software, all in one company. They should do some serious slipups before someone has even a chance to challenge them.
My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux, and has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt, the external dock, HDMI port, audio and WiFi. For example: when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources. USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by. BMC support seems problematic as well, my battery status is often 'unknown' with the Lenovo ACPI kernel modules.
And this is even with 'official' support from Lenovo for Linux. I can only imagine how bad the experience will be for running Linux on Apple products for the coming years.
I ran the M1 Pro for a whole day during early testing without charging (because we hadn't initialized the USB-C port yet) and didn't even run out of battery. And I didn't even have the power management driver running yet.
> has a boatload of issues with thunderbolt
We'll see how that goes, but I get the feeling Apple's Thunderbolt controllers are going to be a lot less insane than Intel's...
> HDMI port
That's just a DP-HDMI converter and whatever needs managing is managed by DCP firmware; it'll work once DP works.
> audio
WIP, already working on some machines; we just need to write a couple codec drivers to get it working across the board.
> WiFi
That's my TODO for this week, and I have it all planned out already :-)
> when my Thinkpad goes standby with an external monitor attached via TB, some ACPI interrupt goes insane and starts burning 100% CPU resources.
Good thing these machines don't have ACPI then! :-)
> USB ports regularly don't work after stand-by.
We actually already have a workaround in Linux for USB lockups that affect macOS on these machines, so we're already doing better on that front.
> BMC support seems problematic as well, my battery status is often 'unknown' with the Lenovo ACPI kernel modules.
That goes via SMC on these machines, which has a very simple interface. That's my TODO right after WiFi :-)
> And this is even with 'official' support from Lenovo for Linux.
Turns out "official" support sometimes is horrible... we can do better than that.
> I can only imagine how bad the experience will be for running Linux on Apple products for the coming years.
Some people are already using them as their daily driver; I don't see it taking more than another year to be in a very good place.
The ThinkPad seems a boring challenge in comparison. It won't surprise me if the Linux support will be better for Macs than it is for Lenovo "officially supported" PCs.
I'm on a X1 Carbon Gen 9 at the moment. I've had no issues with anything at all, besides having to change some settings on the WiFi chip to prevent the connection from dropping. In fact, Linux has been more reliable with external monitors than my old Intel MacBook.
(FWIW, I have a Dell 4k monitor that has documented compatibility issues with some MacBook Pro models, so that's probably on Dell.)
Both my thinkpad t480 and t14 has cpu throttling, and the quite expensive t14 has it so seriously that it will lock to ~500 MHz and will become barely usable.
Before you jump in, be aware that actually installing a Linux distro on one of these is not exactly trivial (and many "guides" out there are outdated).
[EDIT]: as a matter of fact, I've been browsing the Asahi site for a "howto install asahi", and there's basically no such thing.
(If you're a developer and you want to do tethered boot and you know what you are doing, the guide is simple: make sure you have macOS 12.0.1 or newer, use diskutil to resize macOS to leave at least 3GB of unpartitioned space, boot holding down power / options / terminal, curl -L mrcn.st/alxsh | sh and follow the prompts, once you're booted into m1n1 you can use m1n1.git/proxyclient/tools/linux.py from another machine connected via USB to run a kernel / initramfs).
That said, I still miss Apple hardware so I’m still donating to Marcan’s project.
You simply cannot beat the MacBook touchpad though. Feels amazing. The X1 Carbon trackpad and click buttons feel downright cheap in comparison, and it's the flagship laptop.
Don't get me wrong though, I am hoping that this project succeeds, I'd love to have a Mac with Linux as my daily work machine.
I guess time will tell how well this unfolds.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-unveils-zen-4-cpu-road...
This is running Linux rather than macos though, but it shouldn't really matter. I do have loads of web junk loaded. (Slack, Gmail, Gcal, YT music, Fastmail, plenty of browser tabs)
The M1's speed and efficiency are mostly not the result of something ground-breakingly smart, but 5nm TSMC and a non-modular design, integrated chip platform. In other words: They played monopoly and made a huge compromise on the design front. I don't expect they could pull off another leap like that soon. The M1 isn't magic, as far as I can tell.
It mostly comes down to the supply chain, from what I can see. Apple is already pushing their luck with the 5nm node, their current strategy is pretty much just keeping everyone else off the cutting edge technology so they can monopolize TSMC's manufacturing chops. They could pivot to servers, but that would cannibalize their plans for the Mac and probably force them back onto the 7nm node, which would probably throw away the majority of their bragging points right now.
Plus, if history has shown us anything, people simply don't want Macs in the datacenter. xServe gave people the option, but that quickly went the way of Itanium after a year or two. Apple's history of "it's not a bug, it's a feature" and "you're holding it wrong" doesn't exactly appeal to corporate buyers who want to set-and-forget a system and have a number to call when it breaks.
Piqued, I briefly poked around trying to find absolute number of chips everyone produces, fab capacity, forecasts. Much like The Limiting Factor and others do for Li-ion batteries. No joy.
Is there a way to run Asahi as a VM as native ARM yet an M1 Macs?
I still think the prices are inflated over raw hardware but not as exaggerated as finding the cheapest parts with the same capacities would make it seem.
7 cores GPU / 16GB RAM / 256GB SSD 1.359 euros
https://i.imgur.com/udZSqAz.png
8 core GPU / 16GB RAM / 512GB SSD 1.629 euros
https://i.imgur.com/QacUu2X.png
I'm not saying it isn't the price people will pay, I'm only saying it's a price point that will convince people to upgrade, but won't allow Apple market to expand in a meaningful way.
Apple had already a boom years ago, I still remember Peter Jackson editing LOTR on set with his MacBook Pro + Final cut.
Then Apple stagnated and studios replaced their Macs with PCs.
Now maybe they will buy Macs again, it's a cycle, it's the same market shrinking a little and expanding a little over time.
Pro Macs are not iPhones, there are countless alternatives.
> Pro Macs are not iPhones, there are countless alternatives.
I have a very different reading of the market.
I don't think iPhones are priced competitively. They are not really better than Android phones which are far cheaper. That's why they have such a ridiculously low market share in Europe.
The Macbook Air is competitively priced however. Its price is in line with the rest of the market and it is a good cost to value offered proposition.
Phone market share in Europe[1]:
Apple 35.42%
Samsung 30.81%
Xiaomi 11.71%
edit: some other sources have it Samsung 32%, Apple 28% and yet others Samsung: 30% and Apple: 22%, but either way hardly "ridiculously low"
[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/europe
That said, I don't see Apple doing this unless they see it as a significant opportunity.
My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds.
It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.
The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is.
I could understand 20% more, but not two times.
Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs.
That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market.
They simply will never be mainstream.
My answer was to
I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead
I would!
CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
Does rPi4 really have these features without PSCI? The internet suggests it does not support sleep states at all, and I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't do any fancy CPU idle states either. Hence, they're at the same point we're at without PSCI.
Honestly, those Broadcom chips are crazier to support than th M1s, and the rPi foundation don't exactly have much of an upstream-first reputation... so I'm quite confident we can do a lot better.
Booting Windows natively would require Microsoft's support since some rather invasive changes to the kernel would be required (FIQ support, DART instead of SMMU) on top of implementing drivers for everything.
Please don't take my post too cynical, I understand how much work has already gone into getting this far, but also how hard it is to get the last 1% functionality working 'just right'. So, I am just trying to tame expectations here :-)
Thanks for the great work! I enjoyed reading the progress reports, and watching the Youtube live streams on the bring-up.
Will there be bugs? Absolutely. But hey, that's why I'm here, isn't it? Report away, I'll get it fixed :-)
Just joined the Patreon and hope many others will do it too!
I don't think data center parts are on their radar at all.
AFAICT the way things are going y'all are setting the bar for support for a platform regardless of if you're first or third party.
https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/19
A huge number of the use-cases that people were excited about ended up being "low-power device to connect X usb device to network" (whether that's storage devices, cameras, whatever) and it kinda killed a lot of the utility for a long time.
And yeah I know the "official" purpose was as a low-power system for schools, but the first gen also had reliability problems due to the full-size SD cards being unsupported in their slow and tending to warp a little bit with sustained warm-ish temperatures and questionable power adapters people were using, so they weren't even something I'd really want to administer, the reliability wasn't there.
I know a lot of these have been fixed over time in various fashions (the microSD card doesn't cantilever out into open air, so it doesn't tend to warp as much, and people have figured out better adapters, etc) but the early experience was rough and the software issues were exacerbated by Broadcom's high level of secrecy with their documentation. And unlike Asahi, there wasn't the drive to "figure it out" and write your own implementation/documentation - just as an outsider it seems like the existence of documentation (even if nobody outside the foundation could see it) killed the drive to reverse-engineer it. Why go to the effort ifthe documentation exists, type thing.
It's not disastrous but it compares poorly to the between 55% and 65% of the USA market.
That's my point.
Some people would.
Quoting myself
people with lots of money to waste.
Does that mean that Apple is Winning over the power users (that) generally precedes larger adoption?
Absolutely not.
Anyway: spending less for the same output is better than spending more for the same output. At least make it scale linearly.
Apple HW doesn't equal double productivity, hence double price is not a price that will appeal general population, but only **some people**
It's not a critique against Apple M1, only to the assumption that a good enough CPU will make wonders on the market.
It won't.
WOW that's kind allot TBH.
It's so funny see Mac fans argue about everything and its contrary that it's worth the obvious down votes.
>The chips here aren’t only able to outclass any competitor laptop design, but also competes against the best desktop systems out there, you’d have to bring out server-class hardware to get ahead of the M1 Max – it’s just generally absurd.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-performanc...
So, really, what this is saying is that a brand new, constructor specific 5nm SoC that is tailor made with a CPU/memory quasi-direct link is about equal to a year and a half old 7nm CPU, while being twice as expensive. As much as the Apple fanboys can scream about pOwEr EfFiCciEnCy!1, making up a $1500 difference just in electricity costs is going to be hard. Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop, it's throttling itself if it's not plugged in anyways.
Counterpoint: battery life and, for the first time in my life, being able to treat my laptop as actually portable and not have to carry a power brick and mouse (because other touchpads were so terrible) everywhere is the main thing that sold me on Macs, initially, after ~15 years of my computing life being totally Mac-free.
It sold me fast. Turned me from "pft, Macs, OK, whatever, they're nothing special" to "huh, maybe there's something to this" to "I'm never buying anything but a Mac again until competitors can match [list of features I now wouldn't want to give up]" in like a month.
Sadly, no other vendors seem close to closing that gap. Macs remain a category of their own. Not a great situation.
Confused. The MacBook Pro is also available from $2500.
I see you subscribe to the John Hodgman school of laptop design.
It isn't.
I think the word durable has more of a connotation of being resistant to damage rather than meaning "able to be used for a long time".
But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.
I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.
Also I just don't trust Windows laptops to go to sleep properly when I shut the lid. With both high end Dell and Lenovo laptops I've on more than one occasion pulled out a scorching hot laptop with a dead battery out of my bag. Never had a Mac do that. It may be a small thing, but I'm willing to pay a pretty decent premium to never have that happen again.
Plus there's the fact that something almost certainly won't just work if I try to install a *nix based operating system on it.
edit: Oh yea another big one, with the Mac I get a trackpad good enough that I don't feel the need to carry a mouse.
Heat, battery life, fan noise, etc have been discussed to death so I'll gloss over those. Past that, the other huge thing is the screen:
62.5% sRGB coverage is a really garbage color gamut. Supposedly the "G513IM-HQ088R" gets you a DCI-P3 screen but I literally can't find that model available for purchase anywhere to check what it costs.
1920x1080 vs 3024x1964 is about 1/3 the pixel count of the 14" Mac. Or compared to the 16" 3456x2234 it's about 1/4 the pixel count.
A beautiful high-resolution display and half a day's battery life, primarily. Also the ROG Strix trackpads are truly awful, but YMMV on that front
Who knows when a random driver stops working due to a kernel patch.
Or branding...
Which I can accept.
Which I can accept.
As could I, easily. As long as that was all I was sacrificing.
>I would!
>CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
You’re quite right. If you restrict your market segment of interest to budget products and overall market share, that’s Macs out of the picture before you even start. Apple does not care, at all, about the budget end of the market. It’s irrelevant to them.
Looking at the premium segment, and the market dynamics are completely different. The majority of retail laptops costing over $1k sold are Macs. They also enjoy about tripple the market share among university students that they have in the general market, although that varies greatly by country. The result is that Apple captures roughly 60% of the profits in the desktop/laptop computer market globally.
Aiming for market share would mean accepting much lower profit margins. That’s something they’re just not interested in.
Their products aren't twice as expensive, their upgrades might be (RAM, iPhone storage) but the base models aren't very expensive if you compare it with "closest to comparable" competitor models.
Depends on where.
In Italy it's absolutely not true.
I am a consultant for an Italian University in Milan.
I see a lot of Chromebooks, people don't have 1.500 euros to waste on a laptop + rent + food.
Many students ask me what they can buy with their budget, that, on average, is far below a thousand euros.
Meh, my Ryzen laptop, while not M1 level, handles performance, heat and battery just fine for my needs, considering it costs well under half the price of an equivalent M1, and, as a major necessity for me, is easier to repair/upgrade but most importantly, it runs both Windows and Linux plus all X86 binaries I could ever want natively and I have full control over it (on Linux at least), instead of the manufacturer dictating what I'm allowed to run on it.
M1s are great but they aren't the magic silver bullet that solves everyone's problems, as I have no use for benchmark topping chips that can't run the SW I use. <shrug>
*if replaced every year ... or a 900 usd computer if replaced every 3 years.
many
I don't see many old macs around, because they're harder and more expensive to repair.
> if replaced every year
that's a big if.
The assumption is that Pro market will drive general adoption.
It's a false premise.
Pro market, especially Apple Pro market, it's predictive of exactly nothing.
Just anecdata, but from walking through German trains, I disagree. I still see non-Retina MacBook Airs on some trays, for example, last sold in 2015.
Some Mac models are clearly more reliable and maintainable than others, see the butterfly keyboard fiasco. But I think companies should be judged by their better products, not the duds.
Hah. It is actually. Apple releases the MacBook Air... what does the PC market do in lock step? Try to copy it. We can thank Apple for insisting on SSDs in the laptop for all our PC laptops having them. When Apple moves industries follow. That won't be like that forever but it is currently.
I find that hard to believe. You're claiming plastic race-to-the-bottom laptop pc makers are building machines that last as long as all aluminium premium Macs? Fat chance.
Re the software issue, yeah, that's a pain. I do plan on putting Linux on it when I replace it with another Mac laptop, probably a M1. But that just furthers my point that Apple makes the best, longest lasting hardware.
But to each their own.
Therefore I am more comfortable buying something that, while not the fastest in the world at topping benchmarks, is plenty fast enough (faster than anything Apple ever made pre-M1 which many users still use just fine), fits my needs better, is easier to repair/upgrade, and as an added bonus, is significantly cheaper than an M1, so I can take the difference in money I would have spent on an M1 and buying into the Apple ecosystem and put it into Apple stock and I'd be even better off in the long run :)) Everybody wins.
This is solved by the M1, that’s all I say. Your laptop is still much more expensive than a significantly better desktop PC.
My sister bought a Lenovo thinkbook with a Ryzen 7, 16 GB of RAM (upgradable up to 32) for € 729
My 3D artist friend an Asus ROG 14 with an NVidia GPU and 32GB of RAM for € 1.780 and he's using it to render complex scenes.
Does the increase in performance justify the ridiculous price?
It doesn't, in my opinion.
Also, Apple doesn't want to be a mainstream company, their market is never gonna be huge, premium prices are only justifiable if the product is somewhat exclusive.
Not to mention the unusable trackpad and keyboard, and the lack of video camera. Or even the fact that this machine gets super hot and loud, while an air doesn't even have fans.
M1 Macs can't do what that laptops does.
Simple as that.
People are not stupid, that might surprise you, but people use their money for the best, usually.
> Not to mention the unusable trackpad and keyboard
Have you ever heard of a device called "mouse"?
My friend uses another device entirely, it's called "WACOM CINTIQ PRO TOUCH 32"
because he cares about eronomics in his job, specific to his job, he doesn't need to show off with his friends.
> and the lack of video camera
are you familiar with the concept of a working machine?
> Or even the fact that this machine gets super hot and loud
have you ever thought that people don't care about it, because they are working and their job is not making less noise possible?
that's a feature only if your job requires absolute silence, rendering at X minutes per frame is not one of them.
People just don't care.
It's like saying that your washing machine is noisy.
Do you stare at it while it washes your underwear?
Dell XPS and HP Elitebooks often meet or exceed the price of comparable MacBooks.
How many times people said that the Air is the "entry level" "low budget" Mac?
Which one is true?
Is it a luxury product or an entry level one?
I can quote many comments saying both things in the same thread.
Anyway, no company pays Lenovo full price and their discount policies are far more aggressive than Apple's.
There's a reason: Apple doesn't undersell, they don't care.
Lenovo, Dell, HP make volumes, they don't care to be a luxury brand.
The X1 carbon, paid full price, is for people who have money to waste.
Online reviews show multiple laptops with near full-day battery life (>8h) exist if you do some googling, so that's almost a non-issue ATM if that's your main concern.
>Your laptop is still much more expensive than a significantly better desktop PC.
Of course it is, but so what? I need a laptop, not a desktop.
It still doesn't have anywhere near as good battery life as a macbook, and while the CPU is fast, it's slower than the M1.
Yeah! I feel like I have been needing a word for that for sometime.
Never had a mac, but surprisingly I have the same exact experience with my IT_managed_Dell+Windows+Antivirus vs my 6yo thinkpad with linux (even months of uptime)
even plain process spawning from powershell is slow, that AV is just hell.
Apple removed CD drives and Ethernet ports: everyone does.
Apple removes HDMI, many do.
Apple removes headphone jack from phones: everyone mocks, the follows.
I'm not saying that, at all.
I am saying that people keep reasonably priced hardware for longer than Mac owners because they don't have money to waste and can actually repair and upgrade them for cheap.
And vice versa. Try using it for hours just on battery.
>Have you ever heard of a device called "mouse"?
Then you can't use it on your lap, need a bigger desk, etc.
>are you familiar with the concept of a working machine?
Are you familiar with the concept of online meetings ? Or do you work as a hermit ?
>because they are working and their job is not making less noise possible?
Not to mention audio people that do require that, but I'm sure your coworkers wouldn't appreciate the fan noise blasting each time you unmute
>Do you stare at it while it washes your underwear?
Do you leave the room when using your computer ?
Obviously: Both.
The absolute "entry" point is the Mac mini.
The MacBook Air a low spec "luxury" quality device for people who want a well built laptop (that has decent battery life and a good screen) but do not have heavy demands on performance.
If your argument is discounts then I don't support that pricing model (unpredictable frenetic oscillation) anyway.
And, yah, if you're a company you get a flat rate discount based on volume with Apple products.
I have a MacBook from 2011 that works perfectly well (almost as good as the day I got it, save the battery and a few bits of corrosion on the edge of the front where your palms rest). I’ve definitely cycled through other laptops much faster than that.
I spent on them a fortune in total, and they broke, pathetically.
I tried, believe me.
Mac HW quality is just another myth.
Luxury is never cheap.
An M1 can't be both entry level and better than high end models at the same price tag, at the same time (that's what they say).
They are not in fact.
Please leave Ferrari alone, they actually make cars that last for decades.
Apple doesn't.
You’re having an emotional reaction to a brand and a product, and this is not ideal.
I struggle to deal with people who are emotional about brands, both love and hate because I find that there’s no room for objectivity or discussion. There are circumstances where interacting with a brand can be wholly toxic (Oracle) or largely good (Linux, if you can call it a brand). But when you only respond in an emotional way it prevents an intellectually curious discussion.
Stop thinking of these as “Apple” computers and instead look at them as.. computers.
It makes the trade offs a lot more obvious when you remove the emotive element.
> An M1 can't be both entry level and better than high end models at the same price tag, at the same time (that's what they say).
I have no idea what you’re referring to. Apple has some laptop models that are less expensive, I might even say cheaper, than others. That’s just comparing them relative to other Apple products though. The MacBook Air is cheaper than a MacBook Pro, that’s not the same thing as saying it’s objectively cheap relative to laptops generally. These are the entry level products in the MacBook product range.
You can get capabilities from even the low end M1 MacBooks that you can’t get from even very expensive notebooks from other manufacturers. You can get faster notebooks elsewhere, or lighter notebooks, or… actually no, you can’t get notebooks with better battery life anywhere else. However you can’t get the combination of lightness power and battery duration of even a low end M1 MacBook anywhere else at any price. That can absolutely make it better than more expensive models from other manufacturers in ways some people find very important.
Yes. Yes they can. Because that's their new entry model in the new line-up. And can be both entry level and better than high-end models from the previous line-up.
These are entry models for Apple products. So no sense comparing them with entry models for other products (which could be shoddy plastic netbooks for all those brands care)
