Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.
They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
I was required to use a Macbook Air in my last job. I hated small things like the window management, the keyboard lack of delete, home, etc keys. There were ways to work around this. Cold aluminium in an aircon office though was no fun, and the keyboard lacked travel.
For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
Same here. Have a Base M1 Air. Will trade that for M7 Base Air maybe if I can drag this one for a while. I can't go back to computers with noisy fans. It seems too last generation since the M1 launched.
I really do not know when I will replace my five year old M1 Pro. I'm not even starting to begin to get to the point where I start thinking about replacing this thing which I'm frankly astonished by.
I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
The Intel period of MacBooks allowed a more direct comparison. Don't think macOS itself is the differentiator vs Windows.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
A significant portion of the Apple Silicon efficiency gains would have come from shifting away from discrete GPUs. At that time it was very normal for the integrated GPU to be minimal (slow) because people who need it get a discrete GPU. Things are very different now because we push far more onto the GPU now vs. back then, which made Intel and AMD scale them up out of uselessness. Now most people don't really need a discrete GPU because the integrated ones are fast enough to even handle some gaming.
The majority(?) of Intel MacBooks didn't have dGPUs though. That was a higher-end option on the larger models. I also vaguely remember there being a big leap in iGPU performance with Intel Iris around 2013. I had a high-end MBP from work and wished I could perma disable the dGPU, cause I didn't need it and it just made the thing get hot.
But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
Not just single core perf though. Very efficient idle TDP, efficient all core boost, efficient all core TDP, and efficient mid-high performance tier accelerator (GPU, NPU) TDP.
And the benchmarks seem to understate this. That i9-9001THIKK doesn't matter when it thermal throttles a few seconds into a task. Are they testing these laptops inside freezers or something?
Apple is one of the biggest companies in the known universe. If every single person on earth who wanted to use Desktop Linux were to buy the most expensive Mac Apple sells in order to do that, the revenue would not be material relative to Apple's existing size. Please exit your bubble.
Who said anything about desktops? The ARM datacenter is being taken over by Nvidia's Grace and Vera CPU products. If Apple supported OpenBSD, Linux or Solaris, they could destroy Nvidia in CPU performance and kick Graviton and Ampere to the curb forever. But instead they've left the low hanging fruit as another trillion dollar market for Nvidia to eat up.
they deliberately do not want to enter the server market. it is literally an entirely different thing than what they're doing right now. they can't do any of their vertical integration there, there's no moat for them.
like Tim Cook said (quoting Steve I believe) - it's about knowing how to say no 1000 times so that you can say yes to the right thing once, and then put your all into that
I had a bad experience with my Lenovo laptop. It had a firmware issue that caused the trackpad to become unresponsive after suspend and Lenovo never fixed it.
Made the laptop miserable to use, so I went for a MacBook instead which wouldn't have such an obvious issue be unfixed because Apple has so few SKUs to support.
Also went for it in part because I do not like Windows and macOS typically would save me when Linux support was lacking. Just had to hope for a quick port of Asahi Linux to become (unfortunately didn't happen for my M3, but thankfully it's been progressing recently).
Is Apple taking steps to purposefully blocking open stuff, or are they just pointedly ignoring it and continuing to develop new hardware? I am genuinely asking, I don't know myself.
edit: speaking mostly about macOS here, mobile OSes are much more locked down
For desktops and laptops, the latter. But for phones and tablets they do not want user control. And even where they do allow it, even a tiny effort in hardware documentation that would make it so much easier never happens. So it's quite hostile overall.
Give it up. People have been predicting this for 15 years.
You can’t have a development machine locked down like iOS. As long as the Mac is the development machine at apple it will need to be able to run arbitrary code.
They only want to sell the whole package. You might as well ask the Catholic Church to start a rap music 8-track only record club. Same probability.
The hardware is a means to an end, and nothing else to them.
I dunno, the current Pope is kind of cool. Never say never.
Sadly that scenario probably has better odds than Jude Law and John Malkovich getting there first.
I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
like Tim Cook said (quoting Steve I believe) - it's about knowing how to say no 1000 times so that you can say yes to the right thing once, and then put your all into that
Made the laptop miserable to use, so I went for a MacBook instead which wouldn't have such an obvious issue be unfixed because Apple has so few SKUs to support.
Also went for it in part because I do not like Windows and macOS typically would save me when Linux support was lacking. Just had to hope for a quick port of Asahi Linux to become (unfortunately didn't happen for my M3, but thankfully it's been progressing recently).
edit: speaking mostly about macOS here, mobile OSes are much more locked down
It was only really open to ease the transition between intel and arm.
You can’t have a development machine locked down like iOS. As long as the Mac is the development machine at apple it will need to be able to run arbitrary code.
But they'll remove support for other OS's
Where is the challenge or the fun or feeling of accomplishment in that?