[HN Gopher] Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021
___________________________________________________________________
Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021
Author : svenpeter
Score : 330 points
Date : 2021-12-15 11:11 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (asahilinux.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (asahilinux.org)
| noisy_boy wrote:
| 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.
| juancampa wrote:
| 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.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| 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.
| chewyland wrote:
| I have been running Ubuntu on my 14 inch Mac for a little while
| now and it works great. This project here is also really
| exciting.
|
| 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.
| mlindner wrote:
| How are you getting Windows ARM on a mac? I thought it wasn't
| available yet because of some kind of exclusivity agreement.
| zamadatix wrote:
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| What is Linux graphics performance like? Can you comment on
| battery life also compared to the Mac OS running?
| SamuelAdams wrote:
| > 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.
| Leherenn wrote:
| > 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.
| fragmede wrote:
| Especially handy for SpaceX, which employs a number of ex-NASA
| folk. SpaceX wouldn't be where they are today if it weren't for
| the investment in NASA.
| minimaul wrote:
| 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.
| boris wrote:
| 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!
| smoldesu wrote:
| > Now if I could just get one with 64G of RAM and 2TB of SSD...
| ;)
|
| 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...
| phyalow wrote:
| I literally just dropped PS4,099 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.
| [deleted]
| vbezhenar wrote:
| According to MBP 16" price, Apple charges $800 for 64 GB RAM
| and $800 for 2 TB SSD. IMO that's a reasonable price.
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| 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.
| gjs278 wrote:
| none of that is reasonable. use real hardware prices not
| the manufacturer prices.
| hbbio wrote:
| 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.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| _> and even the write-up is top notch_
|
| I enjoyed the pun, even more so now that "support" for the
| hardware notch on the screen is also mentioned in the article.
| ericls wrote:
| If it can run linux, it can conquer data center
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| In it's current form I don't think so. It's not optimized for
| DC/enterprise. It certainly has potential though.
| herpderperator wrote:
| https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/12/amazon-
| ec...
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| wtallis wrote:
| For M1 Macs, isn't it _everything but the ARM cores_ that
| is not datacenter-friendly - the memory capacity, the IO
| options, the system form factors?
| wronglebowski wrote:
| 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.
| dilap wrote:
| 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.
| eptcyka wrote:
| 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.
| maratc wrote:
| In which case this will generate even more demand for
| Macbooks, which shouldn't be an issue for Apple.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| specialist wrote:
| 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.
| tambourine_man wrote:
| >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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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!)
| 2fast4you wrote:
| Once asahi is stable, I would seriously consider buying a
| MacBook to use as my daily driver
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| power users come and go.
|
| 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.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| 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.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| 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)
| hvgk wrote:
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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 1200EUR
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| I'm looking at prices on the French Apple website and it
| says
|
| 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.
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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.
| dagw wrote:
| _That 's why they have such a ridiculously low market
| share in Europe._
|
| 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
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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)
| saagarjha wrote:
| There's a new set of Apple silicon Macs that go all the way
| up to 64 GB of RAM, although you'll pay a premium for it.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| premium = an arm and a leg.
|
| 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.
| saagarjha wrote:
| I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2
| 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| The point is that I can find the performance I need for
| half the price.
|
| 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
| hpen wrote:
| Go to a university and look around at all the MacBooks
| owned by non tech people. You would be surprised by the
| fact they are everywhere.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| 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".
| Jcowell wrote:
| Why does it matter if your spending three mo the of your
| total income when you can (and should)?pay it off monthly
| ?
| nicoburns wrote:
| Err... because paying it off monthly doesn't make it any
| cheaper. And it still ends up being a sizeable chunk of
| your total purchasing power.
| 5e92cb50239222b wrote:
| 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)?
| handrous wrote:
| 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).
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > Go to a university and look around at all the MacBooks
| owned by non tech people
|
| 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.
| dagw wrote:
| _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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > But only sacrificing something else, like screen,
| battery life and/or build quality.
|
| Or branding...
|
| Which I can accept.
| dagw wrote:
| _Or branding...
|
| Which I can accept._
|
| As could I, easily. As long as that was all I was
| sacrificing.
| semi-extrinsic wrote:
| What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix
| G15 ? It is benchmarking pretty close to the M1 Pro, and
| you can get it for around $1800.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > What do you sacrifice if you get e.g. an Asus ROG Strix
| G15?
|
| 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
| r00fus wrote:
| 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.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| 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.
| dagw wrote:
| 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.
| Filligree wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| >> 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.
| carlhjerpe wrote:
| 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.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| Such as a high end Ryzen, which eats the M1 for breakfast
| ? Sure.
| GeekyBear wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.anandtech.com/show/17024/apple-m1-max-
| performanc...
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > A 5900HX is available on laptops that start at $2500,
| unlike the $4000 that a macbook pro would run you.
|
| Confused. The MacBook Pro is also available from $2500.
| simonh wrote:
| > Battery life doesn't matter, just plug your damn laptop
|
| I see you subscribe to the John Hodgman school of laptop
| design.
|
| https://youtu.be/gHG0cT_ck00
| handrous wrote:
| > 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.
| markphip wrote:
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Not this year, I've seen lots of laptops coming out
| starting at 32GB at reasonable prices, pretty sure your 99%
| is more like 80-90%
| sharikous wrote:
| not sure what's your point..
|
| 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.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| 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.
| boplicity wrote:
| > 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.
| [deleted]
| riquito wrote:
| You're confirming OP point though, you didn't upgrade in 8
| years, because for your use case it was good enough and not
| worth the expense
| MathCodeLove wrote:
| If they had instead bought a $700 laptop 8 years ago,
| they likely would have had to upgrade several times by
| now.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| 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.
| MathCodeLove wrote:
| I don't own any Apple products.
| tonguez wrote:
| "800 dollar laptops today are more durable ... because
| their RAM is ... upgradable"
|
| 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".
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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.
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| bestouff wrote:
| My job bought me whatever laptop I needed, so I got a
| beefed-up XPS 15 (i9, 64gb). If the M1 max could run
| Linux I would have bought that instead.
| nix23 wrote:
| >35 cents per hour to use
|
| WOW that's kind allot TBH.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| PeterisP wrote:
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| well, truth is Apple MacBook Air 13 with 16 GB of RAM is
| listed at EUR 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 EUR 729
|
| My 3D artist friend an Asus ROG 14 with an NVidia GPU and
| 32GB of RAM for EUR 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.
| dijit wrote:
| The price seems to be comparable to premium lines of
| PC's.
|
| Dell XPS and HP Elitebooks often meet or exceed the price
| of comparable MacBooks.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > The price seems to be comparable to premium lines of
| PC's.
|
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| There is a middle path here...
| dijit wrote:
| > Is it a luxury product or an entry level one?
|
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| my 3 Mac laptops sitting on a shelf because the batteries
| gave up multiple times are laughing at you.
|
| I spent on them a fortune in total, and they broke,
| pathetically.
|
| I tried, believe me.
|
| Mac HW quality is just another myth.
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| That's not what they say: they say it's cheap.
|
| 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.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| dijit wrote:
| 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.
| dmitriid wrote:
| > 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)
| dagw wrote:
| 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
| cruano wrote:
| 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.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| Not everyone has the same end user needs as your friends,
| so they're choices are just as valid.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| And who said they are not valid?
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| 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.
| kitsunesoba wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> 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>
| gigatexal wrote:
| 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.
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| 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.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > But how many HP/Dell/Lenovo etc laptops do you have
| from 2013 that still run like new?
|
| 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.
| gurkendoktor wrote:
| > I don't see many old macs around
|
| 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.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Yes 2016 to 2020 for keyboards was a terrible terrible
| black eye for my narrative. The damn keyboard fiasco.
| gigatexal wrote:
| > 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.
|
| But to each their own.
| opan wrote:
| 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).
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > 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.
| gigatexal wrote:
| 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.
| gigatexal wrote:
| > 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.
| dijit wrote:
| This is true for the good and bad.
|
| Apple removed CD drives and Ethernet ports: everyone
| does.
|
| Apple removes HDMI, many do.
|
| Apple removes headphone jack from phones: everyone mocks,
| the follows.
| stjohnswarts wrote:
| 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.
| sohrob wrote:
| 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.
| unix_fan wrote:
| 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.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| 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/
| yosito wrote:
| As a Linux user coming from Mac, I'm super excited about this,
| since Apple's hardware is some of the best.
|
| 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.
| kreetx wrote:
| I don't think being even a linux "old-timer" would help with
| the low-level stuff that they are doing.
|
| (As the sibling) Supporting on Patreon is what hopefully gets
| us what we want quicker :)
| bartvk wrote:
| Me neither, so I donate to Marcan on Patreon:
|
| 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).
| e40 wrote:
| I do, as well, and I don't even know if I'll ever use the
| result of this project. However, I know it's important work.
| captn3m0 wrote:
| Very excited about this work, planning to move to a M1 Air once
| it gets a stable relase.
| retskrad wrote:
| 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.
| mhh__ wrote:
| 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.
| marmaduke wrote:
| 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.
| earthscienceman wrote:
| "science workloads". What kind of science workloads?
| marmaduke wrote:
| 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.
| reacharavindh wrote:
| 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.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| 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.
| specialist wrote:
| > _...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.
| smoldesu wrote:
| > 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.
| automatic6131 wrote:
| Apple will only be ahead of the competition for as long as they
| can buy out the whole TSMC's latest and greatest node. After
| that day, it won't be.
| simonh wrote:
| 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.
| loeg wrote:
| The competition isn't other ARM players, it's Intel and
| AMD. Both are on larger nodes for now.
| acomjean wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-unveils-zen-4-cpu-
| road...
| sharikous wrote:
| 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.
| floatboth wrote:
| 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.
| jhickok wrote:
| And Intel seems to be storming back, albeit with pretty
| incredible power draw. Either way consumers win.
| Aissen wrote:
| Anyone has a pointer to what "Blocked on PSCI discussion" means ?
| I'd be interested to read those (mailing list?) discussions.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| 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.
| phh wrote:
| 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?
| marcan_42 wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| svenpeter wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| Does apple use psci too, hence that smc redirects to el2
| extension they have?
| marcan_42 wrote:
| I'm guessing that's so they can implement VMs that support
| PSCI but believe they're using the SMC mechanism instead of
| HVC.
| RMPR wrote:
| This is great and might actually prompt me to get a Mac, as much
| as I like ThinkPads, this battery life is simply on another
| level.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > 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.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| 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).
| LeonM wrote:
| Don't get your expectations up too high.
|
| 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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.
| GeneralMaximus wrote:
| 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.)
| nopenopenopeno wrote:
| 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.
| skrtskrt wrote:
| 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.
| sharikous wrote:
| 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.
| LeonM wrote:
| Don't forget that Thinkpads have a huge Linux fan base as
| well.
|
| 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.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| > 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.
| LeonM wrote:
| 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.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| 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 :-)
| tcmart14 wrote:
| 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!
| terafo wrote:
| 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.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Can it mine like Nvidia?
| frant-hartm wrote:
| MCM = multi chip module
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