I bought a MacBook Air M2.
As of writing, it's very affordable with the 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 13.6" model available for $750.
As of writing, also Asahi Linux doesn't support anything newer than M2.
it’s very affordable with the 16 GB RAM, 256 GB SSD, 13.6" model available for $750
my new laptop literally is more than double in each spec and costed $100 less; i guess mac people have a definition of affordable whether they’re linux people or not.
still, it’s nice to learn that this is an option now.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the architecture is so different. Notice his observation in the article:
I am very impressed with how smooth and problem-free Asahi Linux is. It is incredibly responsive and feels even smoother than my Arch Linux desktop with a 16 core AMD Ryzen 7945HX and 64GB of RAM.
M1 architecture has a huge advantage being a SoC and having shared memory between the CPU and the GPU which avoids the need for a bus. I’m still using M1 macbook with 8gb of RAM that I got to keep at one of my jobs a few years ago, and it’s incredibly snappy. I’ve tried x86 laptops with way better specs on paper, and they don’t come anywhere close in practice.
macs always feel smooth and snappy; they’re well polished compared to the core/libreboot clevos i had previously and i really like my macbook m2.
the price tag always get me with macs and they were the primary reason why i bought those clevos: i had the dubious pleasure of carnally getting to know a quartet of very highly placed engineers/directors/managers while i lived in silicon valley and what i learned during the pillow talk about both the company and about the employees makes me refuse to ever buy from them.
so, instead of spending the $$$ on mac hardware; i spent it on core/libreboot as my feeble and almost infinitesimally small middle finger to apple as well as my equally feeble & small (plus lazy) attempt to leave this world slightly better that i found it. lol
i haven’t yet figured out if it’s the institution or the employees that makes apple the biggest display of labor aristocracy i’ve ever seen and i doubt i ever will since not even most of their employees are aware of oniony layers of palace intrigue that goes on at the top. (no wonder why the forced chinese had to sell off grindr; that’s the only other way you can find this shit out). lol
My view is that all corps are slimy, some are just more blatant about it than others. I do agree that Apple stuff tends to be overpriced, and I’ve love to see somebody else offer a similar architecture using RISCV that would target Linux. I’m kind of hoping some Chinese vendors will start doing that at some point. What Apple did with their architecture is pretty clever, but it’s not magic and now that we know how and why it works, seems like it would make sense for somebody else to do something similar.
The big roadblock in the west is the fact that Windows has a huge market share, and the market for Linux users is just too small for a hardware vendor to target without having Windows support. But in China, there’s an active push to get off US tech stack, and that means Windows doesn’t have the same relevance there.
Unified operations vs static resource operations. It’s like saying work smarter than harder. Container vs VM. Or even AMD vs Intel. They all accomplish the same things but do it differently. So you don’t need that much for Apple devices/workflows.
my new laptop literally is more than double in each spec and costed $100 less; i guess mac people have a definition of affordable whether they’re linux people or not.
still, it’s nice to learn that this is an option now.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the architecture is so different. Notice his observation in the article:
M1 architecture has a huge advantage being a SoC and having shared memory between the CPU and the GPU which avoids the need for a bus. I’m still using M1 macbook with 8gb of RAM that I got to keep at one of my jobs a few years ago, and it’s incredibly snappy. I’ve tried x86 laptops with way better specs on paper, and they don’t come anywhere close in practice.
macs always feel smooth and snappy; they’re well polished compared to the core/libreboot clevos i had previously and i really like my macbook m2.
the price tag always get me with macs and they were the primary reason why i bought those clevos: i had the dubious pleasure of carnally getting to know a quartet of very highly placed engineers/directors/managers while i lived in silicon valley and what i learned during the pillow talk about both the company and about the employees makes me refuse to ever buy from them.
so, instead of spending the $$$ on mac hardware; i spent it on core/libreboot as my feeble and almost infinitesimally small middle finger to apple as well as my equally feeble & small (plus lazy) attempt to leave this world slightly better that i found it. lol
i haven’t yet figured out if it’s the institution or the employees that makes apple the biggest display of labor aristocracy i’ve ever seen and i doubt i ever will since not even most of their employees are aware of oniony layers of palace intrigue that goes on at the top. (no wonder why the forced chinese had to sell off grindr; that’s the only other way you can find this shit out). lol
My view is that all corps are slimy, some are just more blatant about it than others. I do agree that Apple stuff tends to be overpriced, and I’ve love to see somebody else offer a similar architecture using RISCV that would target Linux. I’m kind of hoping some Chinese vendors will start doing that at some point. What Apple did with their architecture is pretty clever, but it’s not magic and now that we know how and why it works, seems like it would make sense for somebody else to do something similar.
The big roadblock in the west is the fact that Windows has a huge market share, and the market for Linux users is just too small for a hardware vendor to target without having Windows support. But in China, there’s an active push to get off US tech stack, and that means Windows doesn’t have the same relevance there.
Where did you find a laptop with a 27.2" or larger screen?
missed that one, but it would have been nice. lol
Unified operations vs static resource operations. It’s like saying work smarter than harder. Container vs VM. Or even AMD vs Intel. They all accomplish the same things but do it differently. So you don’t need that much for Apple devices/workflows.