1. I prefer Mac hardware to any PC hardware (I don't know any manufacturers who come close to apple in hardware quality, so I don't think the "comparable PC" you cite even exists in reality).

2. I prefer to use Linux, since I'm more familiar with it, I'm more likely to be able to debug it when things go wrong (macOS Just Works more reliably, but when it doesn't, I'm stuck), and also I work on software that runs in prod on Linux and I don't want to deal with Docker for Mac.

3. While this is not yet the case, I think it's likely that someday Asahi will run better and more reliably on macs than mainstream distros run on PC laptops. The reason is that they only have one target (or, I suppose, one very closely related family of targets) whereas there are a pile of different PC vendors that are all subtly broken in different ways. I've _never_ seen a high-end PC laptop run Linux without tons of bugs and weird quirks; to get a solid Linux laptop experience, you seem to need to eschew discrete graphics cards and use a system that's a few years old at minimum.

What else I could buy of similar weight/size/battery/quality?

Even if knew of an alternative, there are other unexpected perks to going with Apple: travel constantly, occasionally selling my old one and switching to a new machine is easy whereas with other brands would be impossible. Amortized cost is less than $1/day.

If this Asahi thing pans out (I'm guessing maybe in a year or two it won't use twice the battery) I'll immediately dual boot and spend the majority of my time in it. :)

Raw performance per watt, and per weight/dimensions is best in class. For pure performance (e.g. an Asus ROG Zephyrus) or lightness (e.g. LG Gram) there are better options, but if you want all three it's hard to beat.

I personally think the hardware is so good, even with the caveats, but the software so bad that I'm honestly tempted to get an Air for portability or a Pro as a daily driver when Asahi Linux is good enough for me and the prices are right (so some sale or something, sticker prices are ridiculous if you max everything, and you kind of have to due to the impossibility of upgrades).

I bought my first MacBook just because of the M1 processor and /despite/ the OS, which is ok-ish but not my cup of tea. I'm looking forward to running Linux on it as my daily driver.

But if I did, it would be cause apple has unmatched hardware build quality. (But also the battery time would as you mention also be a nice thing)

Essentially it comes down to that macs have great hardware but shitty software. The later which asahi fixes.

Apple is the best built laptop. No other brand even comes close.

Linux is the best OS. I have no idea how people can work on Windows, I think other people used to Linux will agree. OSX feels like a really old fork of Linux that has not kept up with the open source Linux.

it runs forever and _fast_, the ergonomics are kick ass for my body dimensions (i mean, it's comfortable), and it's _silent_.

Not sure such a thing exists!

Plus, the Snapdragon CPU in the X13s is still far from the M1 in regular benchmarks. Linux support is better in the X13s, except for the camera. It's an IR one, and this might never be well supported.

Work gave me a DELL XPS 15, one of the worst laptops ever. 2 jobs, 2 XPS's, both 2 generations apart and both terrible plagued with issues.

i think the usb-c port is connected directly to the motherboard as well so i suppose i should be greatful that its only the cable that's been breaking. im going to sell this off soon and im pretty much done with lenovo for the foreseeable future

I guess it's why they make them of metal now… Less problems with bad design and using the user as a heat sink.

The 10W (MacBook Air) variant of the M1 achieves a median CPUMark score of ~14500. That's a lot better than the Intel CPU's 13453 at 29W. Now, if you limit the Intel CPU to a lower TDP by underclocking, the performance per watt can improve substantially (since the efficiency plummets when going for peak clock speeds), but it's still considerably behind the M1.

The best think I have found that runs Linux reasonably well (still with lots of caveats) is the X13s. And I cannot get a decent price.

My first PC (~year 2000) came with Windows but I wanted to use some software that only existed for Unix at the time and I was used to work in Unix anyway, so I heard about Linux and installed it. Great, I got an OS I was used to and the software I needed for my project.

When finally I had to use Windows for work a couple of years later it took time to adapt and, even to this day, I just find it easier to use Linux. It's just a metter of what you are used to.

Last year I bought a MacBook, because of the M1, and I can't get used to the "weirdness" of MacOS, specially the keyboard and the window management. Every other machine I use (Linux, Windows or ChromeOS) uses the same keybindings but in MacOS the same software I use everywhere else (e.g. Chrome) has been forced to change the standard keybindings to something else and and it's even not configurable. Programs just don't implement stuff as C-c to copy and C-v to paste. Programs link that functionality to S-c and S-v, instead. WTF? This means there is no remapping of the keyboard that can fix this, since the software itself is broken.

For me, this makes the machine pretty unusable. I'm a keyboard guy and quite fast at it. But when I'm in MacOS I waste a lot of time finding the right keybindings even for switching Windows. Example: S-w to close a tab but C-TAB to switch tabs %~(

Incredible that these myths are being perpetuated by a Mac user. The fact is that at release, new Macs (including 68k and PPC) were always the most performant machines available in their class. Always. You could buy a cheaper x86, but it wasn't as powerful on that date. And the fact is, Mac prices were and are always within $100 of a feature-matched PC. The problem was consistently that PC consumers didn't want the included hardware features, wanted other features that weren't included, and translated that they could buy a much shittier PC for less as Macs being outrageously expensive. It was always bullshit. Ornery PC consumers were never Apple's market. Macs were and are the computer "for the rest of us." And, ironically, everything Apple designs gets copied poorly by Microsoft and PC manufacturers. Asahi is the inverse of Hackintosh. Both ideas are somewhat ridiculous. I want a Ford engine in my Chevy powered by tomato soup!

I am still often frustrated with keyboard shortcuts, despite having installed a dedicated software to not feel in such an alien place. Sure there is a lot of muscle memory you can blame here. But how does it happens that the default OS doesn't provide the software option? Brew is nice, but here too it's community work filling the hole of the default.

I miss the home, end and del key on the integrated keyboard.

The only way to shutdown the integrated screen and still have the camera usable is to duplicate the screen and diminish brightness to zero. Or use a magnet. Seriously?

No key to show the contextual keyboard.

Where is my select and paste with middle click, outside iTerm2 (community provided)?

Why is there no straight forward way to browse the actual file path in Finder, when a shortcut allows to copy it? It's possibly the file manager that made me feel the most clueless in my life.

It is not like everything is utterly horrible, but I was very surprised at how frustrating it could be as a daily driver. I didn't discovered anything that I would miss from it when I go back on something as basic as a vanilla Gnome.

The iMac 5k for me, almost a decade later, is still better than anything other vendors have to offer. It’s my childhood dream monitor. Such a shame that they never sold it separately.

The M series laptops seem like an inflection point as well. A fanless powerhouse with more than a day's work of battery life and best in class monitor and trackpad.

Horrible peripherals, too. I guess you love them for the same reasons I hate them.

The G4s were overclocked for most of their life and stuck behind a 133mhz bus that choked the whole system. The MDDs you cite even gained the unaffectionate “Wind Tunnel” nick name. I hope whoever worked in Pro Tools with such machines had it running in a different room.

I remember a video studio still running a 68k Quadra that had some crazy expensive Avid board in 2001 or something, so I'm not surprised by high end equipment lasting a long time. Though I imagine you could emulate it on a laptop these days. Depending on 20yo hardware that ran really hot for most of its life it's not a recipe for peace of mind.

I was a huge enthusiast of 68k and the PPC and was devastated when Apple switched to Intel. Mediocrity won, I thought. Even though both architectures were much more interesting than x86, the reality of chip manufacturing is that scale is almost everything. Intel had it then, mobile phone chips have it now.

No, of course. But the gap between linux and windows for that matter is really smaller, thus my surprise. All the more with the way Apple is marketed as so great in ergonomics.

>Keyboard shortcuts are mostly a pro user thing.

Sure, I would not use a Mac had my employer not provided it. Like many coders out there I guess. But Apple is not willing to pay attention to the adoption ease for this population it seems. Or at least, it doesn't feel like this to me.

>And don’t get me started on the way that OS inserts special keys. How do you insert ® on Windows?

I use a bépo layout everywhere, with it the answer is obvious. It comes out of the box in linux distros. Mac and Windows require third party installation. The Mac one is a bit less functional/buggy. The worst issue being that my IDE won't recognize the combination for underscore. It's more a responsibility of IDE producer here certainly. But still, it makes the Mac UX far less pleasant from a dev point of view.