The progress on all fronts is really impressive, and even the write-up is top notch. The pace at which the team advances is incredible, as it seems Apple support is minimal...
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.
Totally. I'm not the target audience for Asahi as a daily driver. But I've used Linux to repurpose (life extension) my older macs. So this work is fills me with joy and appreciation.
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.
>gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones
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.
To give credit where it is due, I remember one member from the project mentioning that Apple actually did quite stellar work to enable other OSs while still maintaining a secure booting mechanism (for both osx and future third party ones!)
Are you already using Asahi on it? Would love to hear/read (if you've written it somewhere else) some feedback about your experience as I'm considering this path as well. A dual-boot would be most excellent!
Is there a way to run Asahi as a VM as native ARM yet an M1 Macs?
No, I am at a new job, so I don't have time for such fun (at least until the new company MacBook Pro arrives). Just knowing that the work seems to be moving forward was enough for me.
That's more of a 'if you have everything else in the data center, then you can have this too for consistency's sake' than something to move traditional data center workloads to.
The better example of ARM entrance to the datacenter is AWS Graviton. Apple could learn from Graviton to make its ARM cores significantly more datacenter friendly.
That said, I don't see Apple doing this unless they see it as a significant opportunity.
Apple hasn't seen fit to do that for their own data center parts yet (hence the job postings for qemu-kvm, and the xcode cloud running on x86_64 in a VM).
I don't think data center parts are on their radar at all.
> who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM?
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.
I think the idea is that a power user would be using the computer to earn money at a large enough hourly rate where 0.35$/h is literally insignificant.
800 dollar laptops today are more durable than M1 with max 16 GB of RAM at double the price, because their RAM is actually upgradable most of the time.
It's so funny see Mac fans argue about everything and its contrary that it's worth the obvious down votes.
And let’s be honest, objectively apple’s products will beat the rest in longevity hands down. In case of mobiles, it is unfortunately not even a contest, but even an 8 years old mac will run fine with OSX.
If you ignore their macs from 2016 to 2020. All of those years have keyboards and display connectors that are very prone to failure, and they had negative thermal headroom, so they throttle down more and more as dust gets lodged in them.
I suspect you'll get downvoted into oblivion for your PoV by the pro-Apple HN crowd and even though I do agree with you to some extent on the the high pricing (a basic M1 MacBook is half my NET take home pay as a dev in Europe, and double my rent costs) but value is subjective to most people, and for most, buying into the Apple ecosystem the value the ecosystem brings to their lives is justified, otherwise they wouldn't buy it in the first place (it's not a Prada handbag). Especially for high income earners from wealthy western countries, the cost of ownership can be easily justified for the convenience it brings.
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.
The other thing is that specs alone don’t tell the whole story. There’s plenty of x86 laptops that on paper have better looking specs than the MacBook Air, but few or none of them are as good at what makes a laptop a laptop — mainly, battery life and heat output. There are laptops that are thinner and lighter, like the Thinkpad X1 Nano that I own, but that thing can’t touch an Air in battery life, heat output, and in some aspects performance.
> but few or none of them are as good at what makes a laptop a laptop — mainly, battery life and heat output
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>
Yes they're expensive. But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have from 2013 that still run like new? My 2013 MacBook Pro with an i7 and 16GB of ram still screams. The trackpad works, no keys fail, the screen is still good being retina. The amount of money paid divided by how long it has lasted me makes it a ~300 USD computer!*
*if replaced every year ... or a 900 usd computer if replaced every 3 years.
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.
> 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.
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.
> But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have from 2013 that still run like new?
>> many
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.
If you wanted your comparison to be as lopsided as it sounds like you were thinking it was, you should've listed different companies. All three of those companies make high-end business laptops (EliteBook, Latitude/Precision, ThinkPad) that are absolutely built to last and have a cult following for it (ThinkPads especially). You should've listed Acer or some of the gaming brands to represent the ones that don't seem to last. I can say personally I have a ThinkPad X220T (Sandy Bridge) and ThinkPad T440p (Haswell) that are still working great. I sold a ThinkPad T60p just a few years ago that was still working as well, although it was showing its age with its 2GB of RAM and 32bit CPU (upgradable to a 64bit Core 2 Duo in theory).
> 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.
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.
It’s not a waste. Referring to mac purchases as “wasteful” recycles tropes that are just false. That’s all I’m getting at. But I realize I’m shilling for a company that doesn’t need me to. Buy them, or don’t. It doesn’t matter to me or to Apple really. I prefer them for hardware. I like MacOS most of the time but sometimes yearn for Linux though things on my mac just work and I’m super keen to move to the M1 or M2.
And you can no longer install the latest macOs, and linux still has battery/sleep problems with it. I know. I have the same one. Truly incredible hardware. I wish I wasn’t forced to replace it.
I think if you get snarky with the HN crowd and tell them they're bad people and living life the wrong way they will get snarky back. HN isn't a unimind, there are lots of opinions here. Look at the way you approached it, you did well, you had nuance, you didn't assault the reader.
The thing is, I’m not sure your laptop is better than an M1, let alone the newer gen ones. Apple is really ahead in the CPU game and I say that as someone who was never there fan.
It doesn't have to be better than an M1 when it's under half the price. It needs to fulfill my needs with minimum compromises, which it does admirably. The limitations of the Apple HW, OS and ecosystem would nullify any performance benefits the M1 could ever bring for me (A Ferrari might be the fastest car on the road but if I need a 4x4 to get to the top of the mountain where my work or leisure is, then owning a Ferrari is not much use for me, is it?)
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.
>My biggest gripe with laptops have been the battery life. They were basically glorified PCs with like few hours inside them when not plugged in.
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.
well, truth is Apple MacBook Air 13 with 16 GB of RAM is listed at € 1.429 on the Italian Apple web site.
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.
My company has Lenovo Thinkpads as their standard laptops, and they cost basically the same as MacBooks. So it's not like Apple are charging uniquely high prices for their laptops
So your 3D artist friend got a 1-pound-heavier machine with a plastic build that still gets beat in a single-core CPU benchmark, and he payed extra for that privilege. Let me know how it goes when he drops it.
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.
I find the hardware in the more "elite" laptops lasts longer. In 2015 I bought an Asus ROG middle of the road priced computer and have had to replace the hard drive in it and two keyboards. I have a macbook from the same year and 0 problems, and use it more than the Asus.
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 bet the hardware will be working 10 years from now as well. Apples tends to use great hardware even if it is sometimes a little underperformative compared to PCs at the same price point.
I hesitate to say such a thing given the keyboard fiasco and the time nvidia sold them a batch of GPUs that got so hot they desoldered themselves.
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.
Why can’t a luxury product range have entry level models? Even Ferrari has cars ranging in price from $220k up to $1m. Search for “Ferrari entry-level” and you’ll get plenty of hits using that phrase for various Portofino, Spider and Roma configurations.
I can’t make this comment without seeming condescending, but please understand me when I say that I don’t intend it that way.
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.
I’d love to see a reference where Apple or anyone else says their products are cheap. It might be possible to argue they are good value for various reasons such as long product lifetimes, but that’s not the same thing as 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).
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.
> An M1 can't be both entry level and better than high end models at the same price tag, at the same time
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)
I am not what you would call an Apple fan still I bought a Macbook Air M1 with 16Gb of RAM in France for around 1200€ a couple of months ago (to replace an early 2011 Macbook Pro - I don't change my personal laptop often). While I would never buy a Macbook Pro, I think the Air pricing was fine. The price is pretty close to other ultraportables, performances are very good, battery life is incredible, the screen is beautiful and I don't mind paying a small premium for a sleek design and good quality control. I don't feel like I wasted my money.
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.
It's not interesting to buy these laptops straight from Apple. Large national resellers like Darty or Fnac offer better services and discount them very often.
> 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.
Statcounter is not really a serious source for market share.
Both Counterpoint Research and Strategy Analytics give Apple a more credible 20% market share in Europe behind Samsung and Xiaomi.
It's not disastrous but it compares poorly to the between 55% and 65% of the USA market.
Well, it is a domestic product there (at least the HQ is US). Also, Eastern Europe probably worsens the percentages a bit because it is ridiculously expensive for us (like, there was a statistic recently on how many days one would have to work to buy the latest iphone and it was quite tragic from our perspective with something like more than 2 months worth of salary, while it is a few days in other countries)
These are pure guesses on my part, but I would guess that 99% of laptops that are sold each year are purchased with 16GB or less RAM and 99% of laptops that have been sold all time have never had their RAM upgraded.
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 have replaced my Core i9 with 32Gb RAM with an M1 Air with 16Gb RAM and couldn't be happier.
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.
I monitor the RAM usage of my work machine with prometheus, and I haven't been above 16GB yet. This is on a machine with 40GB RAM and swappiness set to 1 (don't swap unless you reeeeeeeaaaalllyyyy have to).
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)
While I've recently stopped using Macs as my primary computers, I can definitely see the appeal of Apple computers for a large segment of the population.
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.
The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price.
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.
Weight and real world battery life would be two things. Almost certainly build quality. The screen almost certainly isn't as nice. Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc. If I need 'real' performance I'll use a chunky Ryzen/Threadripper desktop computer running Linux over any laptop on the market.
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.
At least on the 2021 model G14/15, sleep is outright disabled. They never did get it to work. There's also a relay-based cutoff for the discrete nvidia gpu, because that was the only way Asus could find to prevent phantom power draw on battery.
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.
> Even if the overall 'macro' bench marks are the same, it almost certainly won't beat the Macbook in day to day 'micro benchmarks' I care about like time to open a new terminal, time to run npm install, time to wake when I open the lid, time from login to watching Netflix, time to search the hard drive for file etc. etc.
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.
4 GB dedicated VRAM instead of 16 GB shared memory is better/worse depending on workload.
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.
You have to install Windows or none of the benchmarks are meaningful. That's a showstopper for me. Forums say installing linux on there is an undertaking and you end up with critical drivers still not working (Mic, etc).
Who knows when a random driver stops working due to a kernel patch.
>> 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
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.
It's weird isn't it, how Apple might become the first 3 trillion dollar company.... Even if all their products are overpriced horseshit. One could almost assume people value what Apple is making and are willing to pay for it.
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.
I see Apple users all around me. I also live in a country where $500/month is considered a decent salary. It's the power of their very competent marketing department and nothing else; otherwise you wouldn't see so many iPhone users who spent three months of their total income for the privilege of owning this "status symbol".
Not "nothing else". They're the only half-decent vendor if you don't want to have to think about your computer very much, and also want it to mostly work well and do useful things automatically or very easily (especially when used in concert with other Apple stuff). They're in a niche in which they have, essentially, no competition. I wish they did, and I'm sure plenty of other Apple "fans" do too. I'd rather be on an open source OS, for one thing, all else being equal (which it very much is not, which is the problem).
No but it gives you you better means to purchase an item you otherwise wouldn’t have if you had to do it upfront. There’s greater purchasing power in buying something over time rather than all at once.
I have no idea how much you're making (and no desire to know), but for the sake of the argument let's say it's $6k a month. Try to extrapolate our reality to your own. Would you go around with a phone that cost $18k? Would you even buy one, monthly installments or not (and then get the next one right after it comes out, like many iPhone users here tend to do)?
The M1 chips that have been released certainly can't compete on core count against desktop chips with Zen 3 cores, but compared to the laptop versions of Ryzen, the M1 is absolutely not being eaten for breakfast.
>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.
This article is one of the few anandtech articles which is just straight up wrong and/or incomplete on many points, notably only comparing to (relatively) old desktop chips. A 5900HX (released in January) scores 50% higher on multithreading on cinebench, and equal on single threaded tests like Geekbench. A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500, unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you.
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.
> 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.
Most people spend a lot of time on the computer. I can't imagine working around a half screen of data and halfscreen of a keyboard. Make a proper wireless docking station and give me a keyboard and mouse and monitor and then we'll talk. After about half hour staring at a phone screen I'm ready to throw it through a window from the eye strain. I think laptops/desktops will be with us for a while longer.
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.
A $200 smartphone isn’t enough for most people. They’ve been sold that ideology but all I see is people struggling with them constantly assuming that’s the best of the future in their hands.
Are there any other laptop currently on the market with similar performance and battery life? It’s not like M1s are the exact same as the models before.
I do wonder what Apple will do if this gets any sort of traction. I fear they only allow disabling of secure boot/other OS installs due to fear of regulation. Apple wants you running their OS and in their walled garden.
I don't know, when they were on Intel they went out of their way to support dual-booting with Windows.
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.
Apple is at no risk of having Linux stealing their users away. Unless someone makes a business of reselling Macbooks with linux being preinstalled and in some magical way that business becomes immensely successful.
Nothing. Most Mac users are not buying from Apple to run vendor unsupported OSs. It really doesn't matter to corporate Apple what is going on other than to make sure technical documentation isn't leaked.
Alder Lake, Intel's flagship dekstop class CPU, is only 10-15% faster than the M1 Pro/M1 Max in CPU performance but it requires an insane amount of cooling and the power consumption is frankly ridiculous.
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.
Performance per Watt only matters to Intel when they are leading. Otherwise they brute force to be "fastest". I think that the ARM in Macs is on a different trajectory than Intel. The battery life along in an ARM based Mac is second to none. That's more important to most folks, IMO.
> ...the ARM in Macs is on a different trajectory than Intel
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.
> 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.
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.
Ya. I know this is true. Monospony. Constant jockeying around the supply chain for advantage.
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.
Raw performance has never been an issue for me on laptops anyway. I care more about the laptop not sounding like an airport because the fans have to spin at full speed to cope with web browsing. Or having to carry a charger around with me everywhere because the laptop gets 4 hours battery despite having a huge battery pack.
These new macbooks are like a dream. By far the best laptops I have ever used.
Memory bandwidth is still 76 GB/s. One reason I’m moving science workloads to M1 is for the cache line size and memory bandwidth, which bump by factor 2-3x the speed.
Computational neuroscience, but since your username is earth science I would mention one of the core algorithms which is quite a bit faster is the spherical harmonic transform.
Not the parent commenter. But, I know a few scientific tools in the genomics field that had the exact demand. The bottleneck was always memory bandwidth. 64bit wide floating point and memory bandwidth would make a huge difference for such tools.
Maybe not 5 but it is years ahead in terms of process.
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.
It's not only that. They have the knowhow, and a top-notch engineering team. The iPhone processor were developed over the course of 15 years and grew organically to become the M1. Even if you consider other mobile processors on par with Apple's (they are not) - it will take years before they can be adapted to PCs. And as latest Intel efforts show us processors that were not designed with efficiency as a key target from the beginning cannot be easily modified to challenge the M1 either.
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.
Don't discount the other engineering teams. AMD is currently not too far behind (even ahead in a couple benchmarks) despite being on TSMC's previous node. It's all gonna be pretty close.
I think there is good chance, they remain at the top, for a while, but a low chance there will be a huge gap to the competitors, when they have access to the same tech stack.
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.
There is good reason to believe that’s not the case. Oh having access to TSMC 5nm to other designs would definitely help reduce the gap, but we can see from like-for-like node implementations of previous A series chips and other ARM designs that Apple has a significant lead in architecture too. M1 has some really impressive new architectural features of its own that it’s hard to imagine their competitors being able to replicate any time soon.
According to AMD you get >1.25 performance at 1/2 the power usage when chips go from 7nm to 5nm. Some of that might be architecture but when x86 gets to 5nm the difference in performance might be fairly negligible.
It's still not really ready for prime-time, but I've got a M1 mac mini running debian as an arm64 build bot (and a few other small things) now, and I can say that the bits that work, work really well.
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.
I literally just dropped £4,099 on a fully loaded MacBook Pro 16" with those specs. I could not be happier. Its going to be a great daily driver for many years to come. Also the construction is A+ and solid, makes my 2015 MacBook Pro feel cheap in comparison.
I spent about £3k on a 14" with 1TB and 32G and I'm very very happy with it - the experience is just ridiculously better than the older 15" MBP I had - or any of the x86 laptops I've used recently too - it has a good screen, a reasonable keyboard, a good touchpad, it's much faster, quieter, has better battery life, and is more portable without losing a lot of screen space.
2 TB of NVME storage is little more than $200 off-the-shelf. 64 gigs of DDR4, high-bandwidth laptop memory costs ~$250. Even assuming Apple is springing for high-quality, high-speed RAM, $800 borders on insanity when other laptops offer similar configuration options at less than half the price. Apple's price gouging in this department is well-documented, I don't think I need to argue with HN users about that.
$250 will get you 64 GB of laptop memory but that will be operating at something like 1/8 to 1/16th the bandwidth. Similarly you can get 2 TB of NVMe for $200 but you need to go to the ~$350 range to approach the bandwidth, I haven't looked into IOPS.
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.
I just checked out some random Dell Precision laptop. They want $800 for 64GB RAM and $720 for SSD. Seems pretty comparable to me. Samsung 970 Pro 1TB is $270 on newegg, so it makes $540 for 2TB. Cheaper, but it's only PCI-E 3.
If you have the time to share the details, I would definitely appreciate them (looking to do something like this myself). In particular, on which hardware did you build the kernel? Or did you cross-compile it? Also which bootloader did you use? Thanks in advance!
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 :)
> Amusingly, while implementing support for this in Linux, we ran into a bug in Linux’s ARM SMMU support that had been there ever since 52-bit address support was introduced. This was breaking systems with more than 256 TiB of RAM - I wonder why nobody noticed? Either way, Linux now correctly supports standard ARM systems with up to 4 PiB of RAM ;-).
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.
> This was breaking systems with more than 256 TiB of RAM - I wonder why nobody noticed?
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.
While it's obvious that within two years every GPU manufacturer is going to release MCM offering to the consumer market I'm surprised by a fact that Apple, of all companies, actually might deliver first consumer(actually more prosumer with their pricing) MCM GPU to the market. I think two M1 Max dies, if overclocked, actually can beat 3090 in most tasks and take performance crown if they release it this spring. Nvidia won't have a new GPU generation for nearly a year, same for AMD and Intel will probably shoot for performance crown only with Battlemage, which will probably be released in mid-2023.
It'll be VM, use Parallels as it has better Windows 11 ARM64 support. You do not want to use Windows 10, it doesn't have x86-64 app compatibility like Windows 11. GPU acceleration is decent but no DX12 support yet.
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.
I will probably never install Linux on this MacBook but I'm so impressed with the technical quality of this work that I sponsor them a coffee per month through GitHub Sponsors, you can find out more here: https://asahilinux.org/support/
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.
> My ThinkPad X1E has horrible battery life under Linux
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.
Hi Marcan! Amazing to get a response from the man himself :) This is why I love HN.
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.
Keep in mind that "the last 1%" does not mean "horrible pain points". Will we ever get the last 1% of functionality running? Probably not; there's certainly stuff in these machines that nobody will care about enough to be worth making work (there's also stuff we already support that macOS doesn't yet, so it goes both ways!). But our goal isn't to make 100% of the features of the hardware work; it is to make all the features people expect to work work, and make them stable. We can't do everything - e.g. proper notch support depends on, well, downstream projects supporting that - but we can make it a good experience (e.g. by excluding the strip of screen containing the notch by default).
Will there be bugs? Absolutely. But hey, that's why I'm here, isn't it? Report away, I'll get it fixed :-)
Love the work! One request though, could future progress reports include a little bit about the work being done for OpenBSD also? I know there is someone on the team who is working on the porting effort to Linux, but is also working on OpenBSD concurrently. Thank you!
Your work, and even your answers here are really awesome. We can feel your passion for the project: the M1s are fantastic hardware and you and the Asahi team will enable all of us to tweak them as we wish.
Just joined the Patreon and hope many others will do it too!
Judging from the enthusiasm radiating from Asahi Linux I am optimistic in this regard. It seems to be interesting enough to attract a lot of talents, which is the key to succeeding for OSS projects.
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.
Oh wow, this sounds quite painful. I almost bought the X1E, but now I'm glad I didn't.
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.)
FWIW my new Lenovo P1 Gen 4 runs Ubuntu perfectly, and with external monitors. Everything works out of the box with the latest Ubuntu but I run 20.04 which requires a wireless driver install. Super easy. And nvidia graphics drivers with on-demand support is great.
That said, I still miss Apple hardware so I’m still donating to Marcan’s project.
I have the exact same experience with Linux (Fedora) on X1 Carbon Gen 9 (everything works great), and with the Intel Macbook, where falling asleep connected to the monitor almost always results in a crash.
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.
To be honest, I have been burned way too many times with intel CPUs so I am not sure it is a linux problem at this point.
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.
> This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac
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.
There's no HOWTO because the experience isn't up to end user standards; I haven't even gotten around to settling on the precise U-Boot config/boot chain yet, and I don't really encourage non-kernel-developers to try to install things at this point (though we have some folks doing it anyway). Right now the focus is very much on kernel developers doing tethered boots via USB. That will change rather soon, as enough core drivers are getting merged or usable to make this actually useful for people without very high standards (e.g. we just merged in proper keyboard/touchpad support), so now it's worth spending more time on the installer, to get it to the point where the stand-alone boot flow is where it needs to be.
(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).
It hasn't really started yet, other than some discussions on IRC, but the TL;DR is on every other ARM64 system those features are handled by either a hypervisor or a supervisor, via special PSCI calls. These machines don't have the option for a supervisor (and no nested virtualization, so an under-OS hypervisor would preclude VMs). Rather than introducing a special snowflake driver for these machines, the current thinking is we can introduce some kind of third PSCI mechanism to make these calls into code set up by the bootloader (a la EFI runtime services), without switching to a higher privilege level. That means we need to define how all that would work first.
Implementing a PSCI mechanism in m1n1 sounds like a nice workaround (I could almost consider it an actual fix, even if it's not totally standard), but I'm a bit surprised:
- 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?
ARMv8 does not require EL3 (nor EL2, for that matter). They are architecturally optional, and there's a whole bunch of the spec dedicated to how things interact with their presence or absence. There is definitely no EL3 on these machines.
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.
The rpi4 has some power management via the mailbox interface to the videocore, but it's just hacked on to the side and is more of an example of how not do things IMO. Particularly how it's exposed to user space is real gross (basically raw mailbox calls). It's closer to the primitives that psci or acpi would be papering over.
It's honestly a bit amusing how many people have been doubting how good Asahi can get without official support, but then you look at "officially supported" platforms like Raspberry Pi and so much stuff is barely held together with string and kernel forks...
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.
yeah I was really excited about the first generation of RPi and then ran headlong into big problems where the kernel would drop USB packets when running at sustained high loads at USB 2.0 speeds. And nobody else could fix it because it was relying on CPU documentation that Broadcom hadn't released yet. It took basically 2 years to get USB working properly, and the RPi architecture basically uses USB as a system bus so potentially more or less everything was affected...
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.
Yup, rpi being the the "most acclaimed" SBC Linux platform shows that even in our midst marketing is everything, while other SBC have actual full opensource full mainline for every components (both for first boot stages, and EL3) support from SoC vendor.
I don't think ARMv8 requires EL3 but even if it did there is no EL3 on the M1.
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.
Though I'm ok with my Thinkpad X1E Gen 2 (not super happy but ok), I had made up my mind about Framework being my next machine. Now with Asahi Linux's progress, build quality of the Macbook combined with flexibility of Linux makes it a serious option. Very interested to see how things turn out on both these fronts in next few years.
I'm curious, what don't you like about the X1E? I have a Gen 3 and it's super wonky with an external monitor, nvidia + linux seems to still be a mistake.
Battery life isn't great (I occasionally take it out for about 2-2.5 hours which it does manage but a longer duration would probably kill it). Once froze and refused to resume when I tried to put it on standby and I had to do multiple hard resets to somehow make it going again (could be related to S3 config in BIOS) - scared me off to ever try to standby again. Also, I think you are 100% correct on Nvidia + Linux point; I did an upgrade to Nvidia driver version 460 (I think) and it basically made everything so slow that it was unusable. When I tried to downgrade, apt showed that uninstalling the driver would uninstall entire pop-desktop so had to do some hacks to downgrade back to version 450. Thankfully everything works well with that version including multiple external displays so I have locked the version via Synaptic. But yeah, not a great overall experience; someone less experienced with Linux might have (justifiably) given in to frustration and switched to Windows or Mac.
Does the method whereby they circumvent the T2 security enclave work on Intel-based Macs? I have a 2018 Mac mini which I would love to repurpose with Linux once the end-of-life support stage is reached.
You want to look at t2linux.org. There is nothing to circumvent, it's just that some of the drivers aren't upstream yet. NVMe has been upstream for years, so you won't have any issues doing a vanilla Linux install with an up to date distro, especially on a Mac Mini (the bigger issue is no upstream keyboard support on the T2 laptops).
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 is no circumvention going on. The problem with the t2 chip is more of the lack of proper driver support, because it’s Frankenstein hardware even for Apple.
There should be a driver to support apple NVME implementation, and that should get you to boot on a t2 mac.
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.