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I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excel

by alluro2 22d ago

I was blown away by M1 Pro, and used it for 4 years before it became a little sluggish, and replacing it with an Asus S16 running on Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 (an excellent laptop). One of the main reasons was missing my old Linux setup. I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or M6. However - before, MacOS was a big factor driving me towards Apple - now, it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup and all the stuff I love about it, even for such performance...Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me.

mgaunard 22d ago
I don't think Linux nor macOS changed significantly during that period. I think what changed is that you got better at Linux. Leveled-up, so to speak.
- Crestwave 22d ago
  Haven't they? Tahoe was released which had quite a negative reception, widely considered a regression in terms of performance and UI/UX, while Linux has been gaining significant traction (especially in the gaming space).
  - mgaunard 22d ago
    macOS always had terrible UI and accessibility, it's their trademark feature. I thought that's what people liked about it. Windows emulation did see some improvements with Valve's sponsorship, but I wouldn't really consider that significant, and it's not like mac has any comparable technology anyway.
dcow 22d ago
Can you characterize the deterioration more specifically? I only ask because every time I run this exercise for myself I end up back on macOS, despite any hiccups.
- abroszka33 22d ago
  Not OP, but I have been using an M1 pro Mac Book since release. It's not sluggish in any way whatsoever.
  - peddling-brink 22d ago
    Same, I bought it with the justification that this would be future proofed for 4-5 years. Nearly 5 years later with daily usage, it's not limping along, the battery isn't on its last legs, it's doing great. My impulsive side is annoyed that I don't have a justification to buy the next latest and greatest. Is it amazing for LLM stuff? No, but that's the same story for anyone else _not_ spending boatloads, or willing to hack on weird mining cards.
    - switchbak 22d ago
      I have a nice M2 and a Linux box ... I do enjoy the looks of the Mac, but I never find myself reaching for it. A modern Linux box is just so much more useful, especially when you live in the backend dev / K8S world where Linux is the assumed foundation.
  - nifty_beaks 22d ago
    Same. I have an M1 Pro (personal use) and a M3 Max. Whenever I do side projects on my M1 Pro it feels nearly identical.
  - omgwtfbyobbq 22d ago
    I have an M5 pro at work, and certain things are a smidge faster than my personal M1 Max, but they're pretty close overall. Given how much more you can get buying used versus new, I'd go used unless there's some feature/characteristic only the new hardware has. Having said that, I could see stuff slowing down over time with OS updates/etc. I've had my M1 air for a while, and some UI stuff was slower after specific updates (I think glass in particular).
  - dajonker 22d ago
    Same, although my M1 pro has only 16 GB of RAM and that does seem to slow it down a bit with my current usage. I recently bought a used Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GB RAM and it's much faster, both subjectively and objectively by looking at how long it takes to run the full test suite of the Rails app I'm working on.
boredtofears 22d ago
Weird, I'm still using my M1 Pro and it feels just as fast as it always has. MacOS feels almost identical to me as it did 5 years ago, too, except the ugly icon change.
- als0 22d ago
  Tahoe slows it down, but Seqouia is still strong.
- ardit33 22d ago
  same... mine works great...
prmph 22d ago
Yep, vote with your wallets. It’s about time Apple learned that excellent hardware alone would not make up for what macOS lacks and where it fails for development.
- ydna404 22d ago
  We just need a better alternative lol
- danielktdoranie 22d ago
  [flagged]
- cortesoft 22d ago
  What would you want Apple to do to improve the developer experience?
  - prmph 22d ago
    Proper macOS virtualization, for example. Also, I do not want to have to upgrade my machine and OS every few years just to keep up with apps that stop working or installing, not because the hardware is no longer capable, but due to ridiculous obsolescence policies. Heck, I can not run the latest version of a lot of software (including basic developer tools) on one of my MacBooks, simply because it is running Monterey. A proper package manager CLI is also sorely needed. Delegating that to Homebrew and MacPorts doesn't cut it.
    - holoduke 22d ago
      Even my MacBook Intel from 2015 is still receiving updates. It's slow, but everything works.
      - doc_ick 22d ago
        Same here, it can’t run models but it’s got all the applications I run with no problems. Sounds more like a user error or an app preference error.
kwanbix 22d ago
Yeah, if I could install Linux without any hacks I will get one. Even if I prefer the body of a X1 Carbon ThinkPad, its keyboard and trackpoint.
- bluecalm 22d ago
  I am in the same boat. I would buy a Mac if I could run Linux on it. As it is I will pay more for X1 Carbon with a worse CPU just to run free OS on it.
  - stasomatic 22d ago
    But you aren't buying a Mac at that point, no? The hardware is 1/2 or 1/4. I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS, I like the looks and the aesthetic, don't much care about Linux besides my Proxmox / HA/ *arr setup on an old NUC. Why can't we have it all, eh? :)
    - NamlchakKhandro 22d ago
      LLMs and unified memory
    - bigyabai 22d ago
      > I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS There's actually a number of Thinkpads that can. Searching "thinkpad macos efi" will reveal a number of OpenCore configurations that support booting into the various x86 builds of macOS. I set it up once and was surprised to see that even my touchscreen worked, in addition to a HW accelerated desktop.
      - stasomatic 22d ago
        I've used Hackintosh sporadically since the netbook days. Intel support is finally deprecated with Golden Gate, and Rosetta 2 is mostly kaput. I do have a mint x230 I7, might throw Tahoe on it for fun.
        21d ago
amelius 22d ago
Apple should just switch to making servers instead.
- fooster 22d ago
  Ok, what am I using on my workstations then? Windows? Hell no. Terrible hardware, OS sucks. Linux? Hell no! Terrible hardware, desktop is terrible.
  - shit_game 22d ago
    What are your gripes with linux desktops?
    - TSiege 22d ago
      what’re your gripes with people wanting to buy a Mac for the OS and hardware? It’s nice to have things work out the box
      - xp84 22d ago
        oh cool, where can I get a Mac that does that?
    - fooster 22d ago
      Apart from anything else the keybindings are the most annoying thing ever.
      - deleted 22d ago
        [deleted]
      - tstrimple 22d ago
        My NixOS + Hyprland desktop largely has the same shortcuts as OSX. I super+space for launching things. Super+Q for quitting. Custom keybinds are trivial. I always thought KDE and Gnome were kind of garbage, but Hyprland gets out of the way and really lets me build the desktop environment I want.
acroback 22d ago
My 16" M1 Pro MacBook with 32 Gigs of RAM is still going strong. Not going to upgrade till this thing dies. I can ride this puppy for the next 10 years. Say what you will about Apple but their hardware is top notch and it is a great value if you can snag some OG hardware in M series.
- w0m 22d ago
  I ran my ~2011 i7 MBA for 12 years as primary laptop before the battery finally killed it (had to run linux on it due to apple killing support the last few years). Great hardware. I don't miss OSX though.
  - 72deluxe 22d ago
    Same here. I use a MacBook M3 for work and it's nice (still on Sequoia though - new macOS looks horrible) but I also have my own 2012 MBP still working and running (recently taken out of the cupboard due to my Lenovo dying) with Linux on it; replaced the battery, put in more RAM, and put in a different SSD and it's still fine. Well made hardware.
- fnord77 22d ago
  my 16" m1 max w/ 64gb is getting a little sluggish on some things
- pttrn 22d ago
  I thought so too when I bought a beefy iMac Pro in 2017. But then guess what, new CPU architecture and 10 years down the line it's not supported anymore. Yes I can stay on whatever OS was last supported, but the tools also start ditching support slowly. For example, Rust no longer has tier 1 support for x86_64-apple-darwin so it's a matter of time when things will start breaking. I am quite sure Apple will think of a reason to deprecate my M1 Macbook Pro (which works great BTW!) in a couple of years, at which point I'm switching back to Linux and will not be coming back. I'm tired of accumulating perfectly good hardware in my house which is nerfed by lack of software updates.
ycombinatrix 22d ago
How did it become sluggish?
- alluro2 22d ago
  Desktop is taking a bit to render after a reboot (which I need to do very rarely, admittedly), apps definitely got slower to open, a small delay in actions here and there - it started feeling a bit sluggish compared to before and it felt like it's deteriorating over time - but slightly. I think it's very likely due to OS updates, like other people are commenting on. It probably doesn't happen to everyone, and maybe doing a clean reinstall helps (I tried all the standard stuff - rebuild caches etc).
ardit33 22d ago
I still use my M1 Pro Macbook... for iOS development. It still works amazing well, and the battery still is holding strong. For large apps, compiling can be a tad slow, but for medium and small apps it still works amazingly well. Eventually I will upgrade, but for me the M1 Pro Macbook (14") has to be the best computer of the last two decades. Before that, I had the butterfly Intel version, and that was a disaster. Apple just cooked with the M1+ line...
- wolfpack_mick 22d ago
  My 14" M1 Pro out of nowhere just died on me in May after 3 years and 11 months. 'Bad luck' was the verdict of the Apple store. This never happened to me since my first G4 tower. I now have the M5 Pro since i'm stuck in the ecosystem, but i'm still a little spooked.
  - s777 22d ago
    My M1 Air also died out of nowhere after 4 years
greenowl 22d ago
Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.
- thiht 22d ago
  Same here, the thing is a beast
- dave_sid 22d ago
  Same here. Got the same machine and feel the same as you about it.
- gyomu 22d ago
  Same. It was borderline unusable on Tahoe to the point I had to downgrade it, but the Golden Gate beta brought it back to life. I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…
  - jtbayly 22d ago
    What makes Golden Gate usable?
    - gyomu 22d ago
      They clearly did a bunch of optimizations, because working on my Xcode projects (and even basic every day use tbh) in 18.x was fine, on 27.x it’s mostly fine, but on 26.x it was a slog fest.
- plasticeagle 22d ago
  M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.
tiahura 22d ago
40+ years of guis and I'd rate MacOS usability around early 90s Openwindows. Something about being wedded to Fitts's law and 1985 design docs. Everyday I check on Fedora M4 progress.
- unloader6118 22d ago
  Everytime I look at fedora, I think "are those GNOME guys retarded?" Linux would be much better if fedora never exist
jbverschoor 22d ago
Try omarchy
websap 22d ago
Mac OS has been hands down one of the best OS that I’ve used in a long long time. What problems are you running into?
- soulofmischief 22d ago
  I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on and on. I could talk about the mobilization of a desktop interface (same mistake the Unity and GNOME teams made) And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.
  - zer0zzz 22d ago
    Why not just stay on the previous 15 release? They still even push updates for it!
    - xp84 22d ago
      Agreed. I have skipped Tahoe and will update to Golden Gate when it's out of beta. I did the same complete skip on "Sonoma," I think. At this point, the complete absence of quality in MacOS releases has turned me from an "update on day one" guy into a "Skip major version updates unless it's widely being praised for improving performance and fixing existing bugs" guy.
    - soulofmischief 22d ago
      I bought a new macbook as insurance against a potential supply chain crash and it came with Tahoe :( On my M2, I have kept it on 15 but Apple aggressively tries to trick me into upgrading in a way that reminds me of Microsoft's behavior with Windows 8/10.
      - 22d ago
foxyv 22d ago
I have never owned an Apple product that didn't slowly get worse over time. After a couple iPads and MacBooks, I'm almost certain they are intentionally updating their operating system to slow down older products. Even worse is the removal of access to certain applications for older hardware in the name of security or compatibility. Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system improves with performance updates and bugfixes.
- senderista 22d ago
  iOS 26 made my iPhone SE pretty much unusable.
  - littlecranky67 22d ago
    first gen? Because my SE from 2023 works very well with the latest 26.5 version.
    - ChrisMarshallNY 22d ago
      First gen tops out at iOS15. I just shelved mine (used for a low-end test), a few months ago. I use an iPhone X as my low-end test, now. It tops out on 18.
- slowin 22d ago
  The only Apple products that I can think of that haven't degraded in quality over time are the iPods and maybe the Apple Watch.
  - xp84 22d ago
    Do you mean Airpods?
    - dcl 22d ago
      iPods were a very popular Apple product once upon a time...
HaloZero 22d ago
I'm really curious about this deterioration? I use a M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM as my primary machine and it still runs fine. I do iOS development so it's not exactly fast but I wouldn't call it slow by any word. My Poor M1 Mini though is struggling though but that's b/c I'm running it as home server and 8 GB RAM is not enough anymore.
- xp84 22d ago
  Curious about the choice of the Mac as a home server. I feel like an off-lease x86 usff pc, at roughly half the cost, would be more useful as a server. Pre-RAM-crisis you could get one with 32GB of RAM for like $240. My main home server is one of those HP ProDesk, running Debian.
  - HaloZero 21d ago
    Interoperability between my server and working dev system was a perk that I'm willing to pay the apple premium for. I can run Linux on the server but then I have to deal with running Linux and if I want to develop something locally instead of having to ssh into my machine it's nice. The cheaper PCs don't have strong graphic cards which I needed to run Plex and hardware transcoding and other few ML tasks that I occasionally do but that was only a smaller factor. Nowadays, it's even more important b/c I refuse to keep an AI model on my mac mini in case it gets compromised.
    - xp84 19d ago
      Ah. Especially once you're doing an AI model that makes plenty of sense. For non-AI, non-AAA gaming needs, I was able to get an RX560 GPU module[1] for my EliteDesk, which I use for Minecraft (It is mutually exclusive with its 2.5" HDD/SSD bay, but I just have an nvme drive in that). [1] this part: https://www.ebay.com/p/13066999150?iid=277828413614 https://www.ebay.com/p/13066999150?iid=277828413614
- ryukoposting 22d ago
  Different people are sensitive to different things. I still find my 6th gen ULV i5 and 8GB of RAM tolerable.
holoduke 22d ago
What cant you do what you can do with Linux? Nowadays my main apps are terminal apps mostly running Claude. Honestly don't really care whether it's macOS or Linux or maybe even windows. I do care about local speed. Occasionally try out local models.
- doc_ick 22d ago
  I can’t download ms teams on Linux (the browser version sucks).
  - ta8903 22d ago
    You can download ms teams on Linux, you just can't use it.
    - doc_ick 22d ago
      That sounds like the same problem then?
zer0zzz 22d ago
Why buy all that for Linux when there’s asahi for the m1?
- Jnr 22d ago
  Because it still doesn't fully support all of the hardware on M1. I know it because I used Asahi while I had M1. Now I have M4 for work and it doesn't support Asahi at all. I just use Linux PC as much as possible instead. And that 4$ M4 is just a fancy presentation computer I use when I travel. Personally I would spend thousands on an actually great Linux laptop, but there are still none around.
  - distances 22d ago
    Reviewers seem very happy with the new Framework Pro, have you considered it? Of course, it still wont have quite the same level CPU/GPU.
  - zer0zzz 22d ago
    Up to the M2 series are supported pretty much fully. There are a few exceptions, but it does work quite well. I'd need a good reason to grab an intel/amd laptop just for running linux.
- porjo 22d ago
  Not OP. I'm a huge fan of Asahi and use it on my M2 MBP. There are some significant downsides in particular battery life is nowhere near what you'll get from MacOS due to inability to go into low power sleep state, and buggy DP alt mode for external monitors. I hope that will change but it's not there yet.
  - zer0zzz 22d ago
    From what I understand, the based M1/M2s are closer to the battery life you'd want and still quite good for a linux laptop. USB DP is a real bummer though.
meerita 22d ago
I'm still on my M1 Pro. I bought one M5 for one of my employees and after 5 minutes playing around I am thinking in getting a new one.
Twirrim 22d ago
I'm always a little cautious about "tried it in the store" experience. If I nuke and rebuild my machine (either Linux, or Windows), it's always significantly faster than it was before. Over time stuff just tends to accumulate that you don't notice. Like the old days of needing to defrag hard disks.
- alluro2 22d ago
  Yeah, same - I tried the M5 Pro randomly while waiting for my daughter to finish salivating over a Neo, and just got surprised by how quickly it opened apps and reacted to anything I did - ~1-1.5 seconds for Affinity Designer was amazing. My MBP probably got affected by OS updates like other people are saying - opening apps and responsiveness definitely got worse, and felt like slightly deteriorating over time (but it might have been MacOS updates along the way).
- snazz 22d ago
  I agree with you that this is a noticeable effect, but I have a hard time figuring out why it is, especially on Macs with the sealed system volume (which should make the operating system files bit-for-bit identical between a freshly set up Mac and one you've been using for years). Certainly it could come from the accumulation of cruft in /Library and ~/Library, but you can clean that up too.
  - alasdair_ 22d ago
    One reason is the ssd. A heavily used ssd is just slower than a new one.
    - thewebguyd 22d ago
      Thermal performance degrades too. Paste breaks down over 2 to 5 years, you'll thermal throttle more often and more quickly than when new after a few years. Phase change thermal pads help with this, extending that timeline out beyond 5+ years but still will eventually degrade. There's all kinds of other hardware things we don't usually think about that can start having an actual performance impact after ~3-5 years too. Battery, obviously, as it degrades can limit your peak wattage, the power delivery capacitors lose capacitance over the years and develop more resistance impacting maximum clock states, fan bearings wear out, you get vacuum leaks in copper heat pipes, and micro-fissures in soldering. Granted, most of it is going to be software but its easy to forget that hardware degrades, and degrades relatively quickly especially in higher power systems. This is why repairability and user serviceability is so important. If you can't open up and swap parts in your machine easily, a $10 consumable turns it into $2,000+ ewaste.
aymeric 22d ago
What Linux distribution do you use?
- alluro2 22d ago
  CachyOS with KDE...it's been amazingly fast, dependable, stable, customizable, polished (yes, really)...
st3fan 22d ago
the top comment .. "i prefer linux"
sharts 22d ago
Just run a linux vm
ColdStream 22d ago
There is a youtube channel 'Dank Pods', he was going on about his Framework laptop and was talking about how modern OS's have this ark to their usability. He was arguing that Windows is well past its best years and that OSX is now starting on the downward slope and that is why he was moving to Linux. It was a interesting take on the whole thing about the life times of OS quality. But with a new CEO for Apple, they have an opportunity to turn things around and blame it all on Tim Cook, but only time will tell if they do that.
- hedora 22d ago
  Linux has been going down hill, but since you can choose distributions, there is an escape hatch. I’ve been moving all my machines to devuan with xfce (or freebsd with xfce). I have zero issues despite not having to deal with wayland, systemd, snap, etc.
  - rowanG077 22d ago
    I could not disagree more. I have been using linux for about 15 years. Linux is better now than it ever was.
    - darkwater 22d ago
      I've been using Linux as myninly desktop OS for ~25 years now and I agree. I can't really understand the irrational hate of a vocal minority towards systemd, pulseaudio etc
      - polnoner 20d ago
        I think there has always been a gate keeping minority that liked the dysfunction. Or more specifically, they liked that they could figure out how to correct the dysfunction while others struggled. That really obnoxious, insecure, computer nerd personality type. So glad I can just block those motherfuckers now instead of begging for their assistance.
    - fladd 22d ago
socalgal2 22d ago
> I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or M6. How did you measure this? I have an M1 Pro and short of actually measuring with tools I can't imagine you can tell the diffrence between an M1 Pro and an M5 Pro in the Apple Store
- mathisfun123 22d ago
  bro people don't measure things - it's all vibes these days (in all fairness OP specifically used the word "felt"). if they measured anything they'd have realized M5 GPU is ~V100 lolol.
robertwt7 22d ago
i'm still rocking m1 pro with 16gb ram. for all my eng stuff its still snappy for me. that includes some iOS dev from time to time, lightroom classic, much better than my pc with ryzen 9 5900x + rtx 3080 somehow! i haven't even think about upgrading my mac
binkHN 22d ago
> Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me. Same, but it's Windows that's been deteriorating fast for me. Linux has it's warts, but it's FAR better than the current commercial offerings.
jasoneckert 22d ago
I'm still using an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB RAM running Fedora Asahi Remix. It's far more power than I need for a very long time, which is one of the reasons I love the Apple Silicon platform so much.
abrookewood 22d ago
The M1 was genuinely a big step forward, but what has followed, not so much. I have an M5 Pro with 48GB of RAM and it is genuinely good ... but that's about it. I love the battery life, appreciate the hardware, but find the OS to be annoying. Less annoying than Windows for sure, but I'd rather be running Linux.
- shrubby 22d ago
  M4 with 32 gigs and a 1 terabyte here and how I wish this could run Linux properly. Windows sucks and MacOS perhaps even more, but we're locked in. Perhaps soon everything will be reversed by AI and we can use whatever OS we wish on whatever device we supposedly own.
- deleted 22d ago
  [deleted]
mrcwinn 22d ago
I’m on an 14” M5 Pro MacBook Pro with nano texture display. It’s the best computer I have ever owned. Not close.
teiferer 22d ago
> a little sluggish > surprised by how quick it felt Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor? I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to move a window around on a screen without it feeling sluggish.
- hnsr 22d ago
  Yeah, I think they can be a combination of processor, GPU, memory architecture, and G(UI) software. But I too have ran a super snappy XFCE desktop for ages on pretty old hardware. I only recently switched to KDE+Wayland on much newer hardware and felt like it was snappy enough to not bother me. I also remember there were times were my much more powerful dedicated GPU was outperformed by my CPU integrated GPU, which I think has something to do how shared memory can be faster for UI rendering (or maybe it was just driver-related)
- amelius 22d ago
  > Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor? They are a result of all of them.
- pjmlp 22d ago
  This applies to the whole stack, even ignoring the GUI, you would not find systems with a gazillion of processes, doing OS IPC all over the place, because the hardware could not accommodate it. But hey, microservices and static linking are the future. /s
  - flohofwoe 22d ago
    > But hey, microservices and static linking are the future. /s Aren't those two things contradicting each other? ;) I think macOS getting more sluggish in each release (which is objectively true) is just plain old bad software engineering and prioritising the wrong things. E.g. it's just Apple's version of "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.".
mcv 22d ago
Yeah, I really wish processors like these were available for other hardware. I don't really understand why everybody else isn't making SoC processors like these for laptops, and is still clinging to the 40 year old intel architecture.
- jackjeff 22d ago
  The Snapdragon X2 Elite / Extreme are a thing but they lag a bit on the GPU side compared to to Apple. But it’s not setting the PC laptop market on fire, and I’m quite surprised as well… I guess Lunar lake and the few ARM compatibility issues make it a worse option?
torh 22d ago
Earlier this year, a few weeks before the price hike, I bought an MacBook Air M5, and it was everything I hoped it would be. Long battery life and silent. The last part is important for me. I've gotten so fed up over the years by Wintel (Windows/Intel) machines where the fans are always running, even when idle. My last Mac was an MacBook Air from 2011 (now we can talk about "a little sluggish"). I also don't dislike the current MacOS, although I do prefer the older look to the new one. But this is from a person using Windows 11 at work, so everything is a step up, right?
- kristianp 22d ago
  My Intel laptop is pretty close to silent on Linux. ThinkPad p14s. As soon as it boots into Windows 11 the fan is very audible.
sandGorgon 22d ago
have you tried Windows + WSL2 ? i have been on fedora for 20 years. WSL2 is one of the best linux experience you can have.
- ilidur 22d ago
  Sounds like an ad. No, any cross os operations need to happen via NTFS and using files on the mounted drives is horrible
pierreortega 22d ago
[flagged]
shevy-java 22d ago
Linux spoiled me totally. I can no longer accept Microsoft's slowness.
whoiskazar 22d ago
you can easily install some linux distros on macbook. and from my experience, my macbook with m4 pro runs better than laptops with intel u7 and u9, which I use at work.
- mapcars 22d ago
  Easily? The only one I'm aware of is Asahi Linux and they are still far away from having good level of support
- s777 22d ago
  Even M3 doesn't have GPU support yet last I checked
flux3125 22d ago
> it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup and all the stuff I love about it, even for such performance...Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me. I can relate. I'm one of the few people at work using linux, most use MacOS or Windows with WSL. Every single time I share my screen and run build commands, people comment on how fast my computer is, then seem surprised when I say I bought it before COVID.
todotask2 22d ago
Probably, you have not yet optimised with Mole or other tools, that would have re-gain back some performance.
tomaskafka 22d ago
> for 4 years before it became a little sluggish Weird, I didn't know silicone degrades in this way. Perhaps it was rather the macOS and Mac apps that were getting progressively worse?
temporallobe 22d ago
This eventual sluggishness is due to inevitable OS rot. I bought a brand new MBP in 2017 and it was snappy as hell. Booted up instantly, breezed through complex tasks, and ran GarageBand and Logic Pro X very smoothly. Every OS update seemed to take it down a notch and eventually Logic Pro X - my main production tool - was unusable. I happed to be talking about this to a professional music producer friend of mine and he said that everyone in his industry NEVER updates their OS. Basically they install everything, disconnect from the internet, and don’t touch the OS ever again because it can break delicate plugin ecosystems and drivers. That’s essentially what I ended up doing. I installed a different DAW (UA Luna) and have not updated the OS for about 5 years now and it’s still chugging along. I don’t use that system for any other purpose however I do keep it connected to the internet for ease of access to icloud. One day the hardware will die, but my next audio production system will likely be a Mac Studio that I set up and don’t touch for 10 years.
- douglee650 22d ago
  Interesting -- seems to be a "Docker for music production" product in there somewhere
  - arnorhs 22d ago
    how would that work exactly?
    - douglee650 21d ago
      :shrugging emoji: I remember long ago, when I first met a computer person in college and he told me about PCs vs UNIX, I asked him, "why don't they make it run on a PC?"
ulfw 22d ago
How did MacOS deteriorate? In what way?
metabagel 22d ago
MacOS does some pretty annoying things. The virtual desktop implementation is abysmal. It won't let you just assign applications to a virtual desktop. It insists on forcing it and also auto-switching when you switch to the application. It's an archaic implementation, and I'm surprised Apple doesn't revise it. The globe key only works with Mac keyboards, which apparently Apple refuses to license? And all Mac keyboards seem to be terrible. Sometimes, the main application window seems to go away; or when I open an application it opens with no main window? What is the point of that? So close to being a world class operating system. In some ways, Windows feels superior in terms of having softer edges. I think you can work around the Mac's hard edges with third party software, but in that way it feels more like a hobbyist operating system.
telesilla 22d ago
My M1 macbook with 64GB ram is still going great, I think it will be some time yet before I feel the need to upgrade my daily working machine. Team-wise though, we're looking into getting something to run a local model and offset token costs for generic tasks. It's starting to make sense.
alfirous 19d ago
> ...before, MacOS was a big factor driving me towards Apple - now, it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup I can relate to that. MacOS was my dream OS, even I installed Linux elementaryOS before I can get hand on Mac. Catalina is my favorite, I don't bother upgrade to BigSur and beyond. Now my Macbook is dead, I don't have reason anymore to get another one, maybe if Apple support Nvidia again somehow.

by alluro2 22d ago

mgaunard 22d ago

I don't think Linux nor macOS changed significantly during that period. I think what changed is that you got better at Linux. Leveled-up, so to speak.

Crestwave 22d ago
Haven't they? Tahoe was released which had quite a negative reception, widely considered a regression in terms of performance and UI/UX, while Linux has been gaining significant traction (especially in the gaming space).
- mgaunard 22d ago
  macOS always had terrible UI and accessibility, it's their trademark feature. I thought that's what people liked about it. Windows emulation did see some improvements with Valve's sponsorship, but I wouldn't really consider that significant, and it's not like mac has any comparable technology anyway.

dcow 22d ago

Can you characterize the deterioration more specifically? I only ask because every time I run this exercise for myself I end up back on macOS, despite any hiccups.

abroszka33 22d ago
Not OP, but I have been using an M1 pro Mac Book since release. It's not sluggish in any way whatsoever.
- peddling-brink 22d ago
  Same, I bought it with the justification that this would be future proofed for 4-5 years. Nearly 5 years later with daily usage, it's not limping along, the battery isn't on its last legs, it's doing great. My impulsive side is annoyed that I don't have a justification to buy the next latest and greatest. Is it amazing for LLM stuff? No, but that's the same story for anyone else _not_ spending boatloads, or willing to hack on weird mining cards.
  - switchbak 22d ago
    I have a nice M2 and a Linux box ... I do enjoy the looks of the Mac, but I never find myself reaching for it. A modern Linux box is just so much more useful, especially when you live in the backend dev / K8S world where Linux is the assumed foundation.
- nifty_beaks 22d ago
  Same. I have an M1 Pro (personal use) and a M3 Max. Whenever I do side projects on my M1 Pro it feels nearly identical.
- omgwtfbyobbq 22d ago
  I have an M5 pro at work, and certain things are a smidge faster than my personal M1 Max, but they're pretty close overall. Given how much more you can get buying used versus new, I'd go used unless there's some feature/characteristic only the new hardware has. Having said that, I could see stuff slowing down over time with OS updates/etc. I've had my M1 air for a while, and some UI stuff was slower after specific updates (I think glass in particular).
- dajonker 22d ago
  Same, although my M1 pro has only 16 GB of RAM and that does seem to slow it down a bit with my current usage. I recently bought a used Mac Studio M2 Max with 64 GB RAM and it's much faster, both subjectively and objectively by looking at how long it takes to run the full test suite of the Rails app I'm working on.

boredtofears 22d ago

Weird, I'm still using my M1 Pro and it feels just as fast as it always has. MacOS feels almost identical to me as it did 5 years ago, too, except the ugly icon change.

als0 22d ago
Tahoe slows it down, but Seqouia is still strong.
ardit33 22d ago
same... mine works great...

prmph 22d ago

Yep, vote with your wallets. It’s about time Apple learned that excellent hardware alone would not make up for what macOS lacks and where it fails for development.

ydna404 22d ago
We just need a better alternative lol
danielktdoranie 22d ago
[flagged]
cortesoft 22d ago
What would you want Apple to do to improve the developer experience?
- prmph 22d ago
  Proper macOS virtualization, for example. Also, I do not want to have to upgrade my machine and OS every few years just to keep up with apps that stop working or installing, not because the hardware is no longer capable, but due to ridiculous obsolescence policies. Heck, I can not run the latest version of a lot of software (including basic developer tools) on one of my MacBooks, simply because it is running Monterey. A proper package manager CLI is also sorely needed. Delegating that to Homebrew and MacPorts doesn't cut it.
  - holoduke 22d ago
    Even my MacBook Intel from 2015 is still receiving updates. It's slow, but everything works.
    - doc_ick 22d ago
      Same here, it can’t run models but it’s got all the applications I run with no problems. Sounds more like a user error or an app preference error.

kwanbix 22d ago

Yeah, if I could install Linux without any hacks I will get one. Even if I prefer the body of a X1 Carbon ThinkPad, its keyboard and trackpoint.

bluecalm 22d ago
I am in the same boat. I would buy a Mac if I could run Linux on it. As it is I will pay more for X1 Carbon with a worse CPU just to run free OS on it.
- stasomatic 22d ago
  But you aren't buying a Mac at that point, no? The hardware is 1/2 or 1/4. I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS, I like the looks and the aesthetic, don't much care about Linux besides my Proxmox / HA/ *arr setup on an old NUC. Why can't we have it all, eh? :)
  - NamlchakKhandro 22d ago
    LLMs and unified memory
  - bigyabai 22d ago
    > I'd get an X1 myself if it could run macOS There's actually a number of Thinkpads that can. Searching "thinkpad macos efi" will reveal a number of OpenCore configurations that support booting into the various x86 builds of macOS. I set it up once and was surprised to see that even my touchscreen worked, in addition to a HW accelerated desktop.
    - stasomatic 22d ago
      I've used Hackintosh sporadically since the netbook days. Intel support is finally deprecated with Golden Gate, and Rosetta 2 is mostly kaput. I do have a mint x230 I7, might throw Tahoe on it for fun.
      - 21d ago

amelius 22d ago

Apple should just switch to making servers instead.

fooster 22d ago
Ok, what am I using on my workstations then? Windows? Hell no. Terrible hardware, OS sucks. Linux? Hell no! Terrible hardware, desktop is terrible.
- shit_game 22d ago
  What are your gripes with linux desktops?
  - TSiege 22d ago
    what’re your gripes with people wanting to buy a Mac for the OS and hardware? It’s nice to have things work out the box
    - xp84 22d ago
      oh cool, where can I get a Mac that does that?
  - fooster 22d ago
    Apart from anything else the keybindings are the most annoying thing ever.
    - deleted 22d ago
      [deleted]
    - tstrimple 22d ago
      My NixOS + Hyprland desktop largely has the same shortcuts as OSX. I super+space for launching things. Super+Q for quitting. Custom keybinds are trivial. I always thought KDE and Gnome were kind of garbage, but Hyprland gets out of the way and really lets me build the desktop environment I want.

acroback 22d ago

My 16" M1 Pro MacBook with 32 Gigs of RAM is still going strong. Not going to upgrade till this thing dies. I can ride this puppy for the next 10 years. Say what you will about Apple but their hardware is top notch and it is a great value if you can snag some OG hardware in M series.

w0m 22d ago
I ran my ~2011 i7 MBA for 12 years as primary laptop before the battery finally killed it (had to run linux on it due to apple killing support the last few years). Great hardware. I don't miss OSX though.
- 72deluxe 22d ago
  Same here. I use a MacBook M3 for work and it's nice (still on Sequoia though - new macOS looks horrible) but I also have my own 2012 MBP still working and running (recently taken out of the cupboard due to my Lenovo dying) with Linux on it; replaced the battery, put in more RAM, and put in a different SSD and it's still fine. Well made hardware.
fnord77 22d ago
my 16" m1 max w/ 64gb is getting a little sluggish on some things
pttrn 22d ago
I thought so too when I bought a beefy iMac Pro in 2017. But then guess what, new CPU architecture and 10 years down the line it's not supported anymore. Yes I can stay on whatever OS was last supported, but the tools also start ditching support slowly. For example, Rust no longer has tier 1 support for x86_64-apple-darwin so it's a matter of time when things will start breaking. I am quite sure Apple will think of a reason to deprecate my M1 Macbook Pro (which works great BTW!) in a couple of years, at which point I'm switching back to Linux and will not be coming back. I'm tired of accumulating perfectly good hardware in my house which is nerfed by lack of software updates.

ycombinatrix 22d ago

How did it become sluggish?

alluro2 22d ago
Desktop is taking a bit to render after a reboot (which I need to do very rarely, admittedly), apps definitely got slower to open, a small delay in actions here and there - it started feeling a bit sluggish compared to before and it felt like it's deteriorating over time - but slightly. I think it's very likely due to OS updates, like other people are commenting on. It probably doesn't happen to everyone, and maybe doing a clean reinstall helps (I tried all the standard stuff - rebuild caches etc).

ardit33 22d ago

I still use my M1 Pro Macbook... for iOS development. It still works amazing well, and the battery still is holding strong. For large apps, compiling can be a tad slow, but for medium and small apps it still works amazingly well. Eventually I will upgrade, but for me the M1 Pro Macbook (14") has to be the best computer of the last two decades. Before that, I had the butterfly Intel version, and that was a disaster. Apple just cooked with the M1+ line...

wolfpack_mick 22d ago
My 14" M1 Pro out of nowhere just died on me in May after 3 years and 11 months. 'Bad luck' was the verdict of the Apple store. This never happened to me since my first G4 tower. I now have the M5 Pro since i'm stuck in the ecosystem, but i'm still a little spooked.
- s777 22d ago
  My M1 Air also died out of nowhere after 4 years

greenowl 22d ago

Still rocking an M1 Air - 2020 build. 8GB ram. No slowdown or deterioration at all. Battery health reports the battery max capacity at 84%. Best computer I've ever owned, by far.

thiht 22d ago
Same here, the thing is a beast
dave_sid 22d ago
Same here. Got the same machine and feel the same as you about it.
gyomu 22d ago
Same. It was borderline unusable on Tahoe to the point I had to downgrade it, but the Golden Gate beta brought it back to life. I’m only using it as a travel machine now, trying to hold on from upgrading it until I can get an Air with OLED display - hopefully coming in <24 months…
- jtbayly 22d ago
  What makes Golden Gate usable?
  - gyomu 22d ago
    They clearly did a bunch of optimizations, because working on my Xcode projects (and even basic every day use tbh) in 18.x was fine, on 27.x it’s mostly fine, but on 26.x it was a slog fest.
plasticeagle 22d ago
M1 Pro 2021 16GB RAM Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.

tiahura 22d ago

40+ years of guis and I'd rate MacOS usability around early 90s Openwindows. Something about being wedded to Fitts's law and 1985 design docs. Everyday I check on Fedora M4 progress.

unloader6118 22d ago
Everytime I look at fedora, I think "are those GNOME guys retarded?" Linux would be much better if fedora never exist

jbverschoor 22d ago

Try omarchy

websap 22d ago

Mac OS has been hands down one of the best OS that I’ve used in a long long time. What problems are you running into?

soulofmischief 22d ago
I wouldn't even know where to begin, because the slide in quality has permeated every aspect of the operating system, from stability to design. Numerous networking bugs, SSH agent bugs, sleep state bugs, sometimes having to restart my machine because the network screws up so badly, Bluetooth issues that they keep introducing and then not fixing; I have peripherals that just no longer work due to this. I could go on and on. I could talk about the mobilization of a desktop interface (same mistake the Unity and GNOME teams made) And I don't feel like beating a very dead horse, so just google "macOS Tahoe design issues" and take your pick.
- zer0zzz 22d ago
  Why not just stay on the previous 15 release? They still even push updates for it!
  - xp84 22d ago
    Agreed. I have skipped Tahoe and will update to Golden Gate when it's out of beta. I did the same complete skip on "Sonoma," I think. At this point, the complete absence of quality in MacOS releases has turned me from an "update on day one" guy into a "Skip major version updates unless it's widely being praised for improving performance and fixing existing bugs" guy.
  - soulofmischief 22d ago
    I bought a new macbook as insurance against a potential supply chain crash and it came with Tahoe :( On my M2, I have kept it on 15 but Apple aggressively tries to trick me into upgrading in a way that reminds me of Microsoft's behavior with Windows 8/10.
    - 22d ago

foxyv 22d ago

I have never owned an Apple product that didn't slowly get worse over time. After a couple iPads and MacBooks, I'm almost certain they are intentionally updating their operating system to slow down older products. Even worse is the removal of access to certain applications for older hardware in the name of security or compatibility. Meanwhile my Linux laptop continues to get faster every year as the operating system improves with performance updates and bugfixes.

senderista 22d ago
iOS 26 made my iPhone SE pretty much unusable.
- littlecranky67 22d ago
  first gen? Because my SE from 2023 works very well with the latest 26.5 version.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 22d ago
    First gen tops out at iOS15. I just shelved mine (used for a low-end test), a few months ago. I use an iPhone X as my low-end test, now. It tops out on 18.
slowin 22d ago
The only Apple products that I can think of that haven't degraded in quality over time are the iPods and maybe the Apple Watch.
- xp84 22d ago
  Do you mean Airpods?
  - dcl 22d ago
    iPods were a very popular Apple product once upon a time...

HaloZero 22d ago

I'm really curious about this deterioration? I use a M1 Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM as my primary machine and it still runs fine. I do iOS development so it's not exactly fast but I wouldn't call it slow by any word. My Poor M1 Mini though is struggling though but that's b/c I'm running it as home server and 8 GB RAM is not enough anymore.

xp84 22d ago
Curious about the choice of the Mac as a home server. I feel like an off-lease x86 usff pc, at roughly half the cost, would be more useful as a server. Pre-RAM-crisis you could get one with 32GB of RAM for like $240. My main home server is one of those HP ProDesk, running Debian.
- HaloZero 21d ago
  Interoperability between my server and working dev system was a perk that I'm willing to pay the apple premium for. I can run Linux on the server but then I have to deal with running Linux and if I want to develop something locally instead of having to ssh into my machine it's nice. The cheaper PCs don't have strong graphic cards which I needed to run Plex and hardware transcoding and other few ML tasks that I occasionally do but that was only a smaller factor. Nowadays, it's even more important b/c I refuse to keep an AI model on my mac mini in case it gets compromised.
  - xp84 19d ago
    Ah. Especially once you're doing an AI model that makes plenty of sense. For non-AI, non-AAA gaming needs, I was able to get an RX560 GPU module[1] for my EliteDesk, which I use for Minecraft (It is mutually exclusive with its 2.5" HDD/SSD bay, but I just have an nvme drive in that). [1] this part: https://www.ebay.com/p/13066999150?iid=277828413614 https://www.ebay.com/p/13066999150?iid=277828413614
ryukoposting 22d ago
Different people are sensitive to different things. I still find my 6th gen ULV i5 and 8GB of RAM tolerable.

holoduke 22d ago

What cant you do what you can do with Linux? Nowadays my main apps are terminal apps mostly running Claude. Honestly don't really care whether it's macOS or Linux or maybe even windows. I do care about local speed. Occasionally try out local models.

doc_ick 22d ago
I can’t download ms teams on Linux (the browser version sucks).
- ta8903 22d ago
  You can download ms teams on Linux, you just can't use it.
  - doc_ick 22d ago
    That sounds like the same problem then?

zer0zzz 22d ago

Why buy all that for Linux when there’s asahi for the m1?

Jnr 22d ago
Because it still doesn't fully support all of the hardware on M1. I know it because I used Asahi while I had M1. Now I have M4 for work and it doesn't support Asahi at all. I just use Linux PC as much as possible instead. And that 4$ M4 is just a fancy presentation computer I use when I travel. Personally I would spend thousands on an actually great Linux laptop, but there are still none around.
- distances 22d ago
  Reviewers seem very happy with the new Framework Pro, have you considered it? Of course, it still wont have quite the same level CPU/GPU.
- zer0zzz 22d ago
  Up to the M2 series are supported pretty much fully. There are a few exceptions, but it does work quite well. I'd need a good reason to grab an intel/amd laptop just for running linux.
porjo 22d ago
Not OP. I'm a huge fan of Asahi and use it on my M2 MBP. There are some significant downsides in particular battery life is nowhere near what you'll get from MacOS due to inability to go into low power sleep state, and buggy DP alt mode for external monitors. I hope that will change but it's not there yet.
- zer0zzz 22d ago
  From what I understand, the based M1/M2s are closer to the battery life you'd want and still quite good for a linux laptop. USB DP is a real bummer though.

meerita 22d ago

I'm still on my M1 Pro. I bought one M5 for one of my employees and after 5 minutes playing around I am thinking in getting a new one.

Twirrim 22d ago

I'm always a little cautious about "tried it in the store" experience. If I nuke and rebuild my machine (either Linux, or Windows), it's always significantly faster than it was before. Over time stuff just tends to accumulate that you don't notice. Like the old days of needing to defrag hard disks.

alluro2 22d ago
Yeah, same - I tried the M5 Pro randomly while waiting for my daughter to finish salivating over a Neo, and just got surprised by how quickly it opened apps and reacted to anything I did - ~1-1.5 seconds for Affinity Designer was amazing. My MBP probably got affected by OS updates like other people are saying - opening apps and responsiveness definitely got worse, and felt like slightly deteriorating over time (but it might have been MacOS updates along the way).
snazz 22d ago
I agree with you that this is a noticeable effect, but I have a hard time figuring out why it is, especially on Macs with the sealed system volume (which should make the operating system files bit-for-bit identical between a freshly set up Mac and one you've been using for years). Certainly it could come from the accumulation of cruft in /Library and ~/Library, but you can clean that up too.
- alasdair_ 22d ago
  One reason is the ssd. A heavily used ssd is just slower than a new one.
  - thewebguyd 22d ago
    Thermal performance degrades too. Paste breaks down over 2 to 5 years, you'll thermal throttle more often and more quickly than when new after a few years. Phase change thermal pads help with this, extending that timeline out beyond 5+ years but still will eventually degrade. There's all kinds of other hardware things we don't usually think about that can start having an actual performance impact after ~3-5 years too. Battery, obviously, as it degrades can limit your peak wattage, the power delivery capacitors lose capacitance over the years and develop more resistance impacting maximum clock states, fan bearings wear out, you get vacuum leaks in copper heat pipes, and micro-fissures in soldering. Granted, most of it is going to be software but its easy to forget that hardware degrades, and degrades relatively quickly especially in higher power systems. This is why repairability and user serviceability is so important. If you can't open up and swap parts in your machine easily, a $10 consumable turns it into $2,000+ ewaste.

aymeric 22d ago

What Linux distribution do you use?

alluro2 22d ago
CachyOS with KDE...it's been amazingly fast, dependable, stable, customizable, polished (yes, really)...

st3fan 22d ago

the top comment .. "i prefer linux"

sharts 22d ago

Just run a linux vm

ColdStream 22d ago

There is a youtube channel 'Dank Pods', he was going on about his Framework laptop and was talking about how modern OS's have this ark to their usability. He was arguing that Windows is well past its best years and that OSX is now starting on the downward slope and that is why he was moving to Linux. It was a interesting take on the whole thing about the life times of OS quality. But with a new CEO for Apple, they have an opportunity to turn things around and blame it all on Tim Cook, but only time will tell if they do that.

hedora 22d ago
Linux has been going down hill, but since you can choose distributions, there is an escape hatch. I’ve been moving all my machines to devuan with xfce (or freebsd with xfce). I have zero issues despite not having to deal with wayland, systemd, snap, etc.
- rowanG077 22d ago
  I could not disagree more. I have been using linux for about 15 years. Linux is better now than it ever was.
  - darkwater 22d ago
    I've been using Linux as myninly desktop OS for ~25 years now and I agree. I can't really understand the irrational hate of a vocal minority towards systemd, pulseaudio etc
    - polnoner 20d ago
      I think there has always been a gate keeping minority that liked the dysfunction. Or more specifically, they liked that they could figure out how to correct the dysfunction while others struggled. That really obnoxious, insecure, computer nerd personality type. So glad I can just block those motherfuckers now instead of begging for their assistance.
  - fladd 22d ago

socalgal2 22d ago

> I've briefly tested M5 Pro in an Apple store and was surprised by how quick it felt and did anything. A tangible and significant difference, and I really feel it would be good getting it, or M6. How did you measure this? I have an M1 Pro and short of actually measuring with tools I can't imagine you can tell the diffrence between an M1 Pro and an M5 Pro in the Apple Store

mathisfun123 22d ago
bro people don't measure things - it's all vibes these days (in all fairness OP specifically used the word "felt"). if they measured anything they'd have realized M5 GPU is ~V100 lolol.

robertwt7 22d ago

i'm still rocking m1 pro with 16gb ram. for all my eng stuff its still snappy for me. that includes some iOS dev from time to time, lightroom classic, much better than my pc with ryzen 9 5900x + rtx 3080 somehow! i haven't even think about upgrading my mac

binkHN 22d ago

> Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me. Same, but it's Windows that's been deteriorating fast for me. Linux has it's warts, but it's FAR better than the current commercial offerings.

jasoneckert 22d ago

I'm still using an M1 Ultra Mac Studio with 128GB RAM running Fedora Asahi Remix. It's far more power than I need for a very long time, which is one of the reasons I love the Apple Silicon platform so much.

abrookewood 22d ago

The M1 was genuinely a big step forward, but what has followed, not so much. I have an M5 Pro with 48GB of RAM and it is genuinely good ... but that's about it. I love the battery life, appreciate the hardware, but find the OS to be annoying. Less annoying than Windows for sure, but I'd rather be running Linux.

shrubby 22d ago
M4 with 32 gigs and a 1 terabyte here and how I wish this could run Linux properly. Windows sucks and MacOS perhaps even more, but we're locked in. Perhaps soon everything will be reversed by AI and we can use whatever OS we wish on whatever device we supposedly own.
deleted 22d ago
[deleted]

mrcwinn 22d ago

I’m on an 14” M5 Pro MacBook Pro with nano texture display. It’s the best computer I have ever owned. Not close.

teiferer 22d ago

> a little sluggish > surprised by how quick it felt Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor? I've been using systems 20 years ago that were super snappy. The same software would still be snappy today obviously. But the software has become bloated to the point that you need to run the latest generation of CPUs such that things are not sluggish. In principle you don't need 32-core GHz CPUs to move a window around on a screen without it feeling sluggish.

hnsr 22d ago
Yeah, I think they can be a combination of processor, GPU, memory architecture, and G(UI) software. But I too have ran a super snappy XFCE desktop for ages on pretty old hardware. I only recently switched to KDE+Wayland on much newer hardware and felt like it was snappy enough to not bother me. I also remember there were times were my much more powerful dedicated GPU was outperformed by my CPU integrated GPU, which I think has something to do how shared memory can be faster for UI rendering (or maybe it was just driver-related)
amelius 22d ago
> Aren't these properties of the (G)UI rather than of the processor? They are a result of all of them.
pjmlp 22d ago
This applies to the whole stack, even ignoring the GUI, you would not find systems with a gazillion of processes, doing OS IPC all over the place, because the hardware could not accommodate it. But hey, microservices and static linking are the future. /s
- flohofwoe 22d ago
  > But hey, microservices and static linking are the future. /s Aren't those two things contradicting each other? ;) I think macOS getting more sluggish in each release (which is objectively true) is just plain old bad software engineering and prioritising the wrong things. E.g. it's just Apple's version of "What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.".

mcv 22d ago

Yeah, I really wish processors like these were available for other hardware. I don't really understand why everybody else isn't making SoC processors like these for laptops, and is still clinging to the 40 year old intel architecture.

jackjeff 22d ago
The Snapdragon X2 Elite / Extreme are a thing but they lag a bit on the GPU side compared to to Apple. But it’s not setting the PC laptop market on fire, and I’m quite surprised as well… I guess Lunar lake and the few ARM compatibility issues make it a worse option?

torh 22d ago

Earlier this year, a few weeks before the price hike, I bought an MacBook Air M5, and it was everything I hoped it would be. Long battery life and silent. The last part is important for me. I've gotten so fed up over the years by Wintel (Windows/Intel) machines where the fans are always running, even when idle. My last Mac was an MacBook Air from 2011 (now we can talk about "a little sluggish"). I also don't dislike the current MacOS, although I do prefer the older look to the new one. But this is from a person using Windows 11 at work, so everything is a step up, right?

kristianp 22d ago
My Intel laptop is pretty close to silent on Linux. ThinkPad p14s. As soon as it boots into Windows 11 the fan is very audible.

sandGorgon 22d ago

have you tried Windows + WSL2 ? i have been on fedora for 20 years. WSL2 is one of the best linux experience you can have.

ilidur 22d ago
Sounds like an ad. No, any cross os operations need to happen via NTFS and using files on the mounted drives is horrible

pierreortega 22d ago

[flagged]

shevy-java 22d ago

Linux spoiled me totally. I can no longer accept Microsoft's slowness.

whoiskazar 22d ago

you can easily install some linux distros on macbook. and from my experience, my macbook with m4 pro runs better than laptops with intel u7 and u9, which I use at work.

mapcars 22d ago
Easily? The only one I'm aware of is Asahi Linux and they are still far away from having good level of support
s777 22d ago
Even M3 doesn't have GPU support yet last I checked

flux3125 22d ago

> it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup and all the stuff I love about it, even for such performance...Linux progressed really nicely, while MacOS deteriorated at the same rate, and it's changing the balance and the decision for me. I can relate. I'm one of the few people at work using linux, most use MacOS or Windows with WSL. Every single time I share my screen and run build commands, people comment on how fast my computer is, then seem surprised when I say I bought it before COVID.

todotask2 22d ago

Probably, you have not yet optimised with Mole or other tools, that would have re-gain back some performance.

tomaskafka 22d ago

> for 4 years before it became a little sluggish Weird, I didn't know silicone degrades in this way. Perhaps it was rather the macOS and Mac apps that were getting progressively worse?

temporallobe 22d ago

This eventual sluggishness is due to inevitable OS rot. I bought a brand new MBP in 2017 and it was snappy as hell. Booted up instantly, breezed through complex tasks, and ran GarageBand and Logic Pro X very smoothly. Every OS update seemed to take it down a notch and eventually Logic Pro X - my main production tool - was unusable. I happed to be talking about this to a professional music producer friend of mine and he said that everyone in his industry NEVER updates their OS. Basically they install everything, disconnect from the internet, and don’t touch the OS ever again because it can break delicate plugin ecosystems and drivers. That’s essentially what I ended up doing. I installed a different DAW (UA Luna) and have not updated the OS for about 5 years now and it’s still chugging along. I don’t use that system for any other purpose however I do keep it connected to the internet for ease of access to icloud. One day the hardware will die, but my next audio production system will likely be a Mac Studio that I set up and don’t touch for 10 years.

douglee650 22d ago
Interesting -- seems to be a "Docker for music production" product in there somewhere
- arnorhs 22d ago
  how would that work exactly?
  - douglee650 21d ago
    :shrugging emoji: I remember long ago, when I first met a computer person in college and he told me about PCs vs UNIX, I asked him, "why don't they make it run on a PC?"

ulfw 22d ago

How did MacOS deteriorate? In what way?

metabagel 22d ago

MacOS does some pretty annoying things. The virtual desktop implementation is abysmal. It won't let you just assign applications to a virtual desktop. It insists on forcing it and also auto-switching when you switch to the application. It's an archaic implementation, and I'm surprised Apple doesn't revise it. The globe key only works with Mac keyboards, which apparently Apple refuses to license? And all Mac keyboards seem to be terrible. Sometimes, the main application window seems to go away; or when I open an application it opens with no main window? What is the point of that? So close to being a world class operating system. In some ways, Windows feels superior in terms of having softer edges. I think you can work around the Mac's hard edges with third party software, but in that way it feels more like a hobbyist operating system.

telesilla 22d ago

My M1 macbook with 64GB ram is still going great, I think it will be some time yet before I feel the need to upgrade my daily working machine. Team-wise though, we're looking into getting something to run a local model and offset token costs for generic tasks. It's starting to make sense.

alfirous 19d ago

> ...before, MacOS was a big factor driving me towards Apple - now, it would be hard for me to give up my Linux setup I can relate to that. MacOS was my dream OS, even I installed Linux elementaryOS before I can get hand on Mac. Catalina is my favorite, I don't bother upgrade to BigSur and beyond. Now my Macbook is dead, I don't have reason anymore to get another one, maybe if Apple support Nvidia again somehow.