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I have immense respect for the incredible work that the Asahi team does, but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency I wonder w

• benoau 21d ago
  It depends on how long Apple want to support the devices, if the support matches the longevity of the devices maybe nobody really needs Asahi. I believe all Intel Macs have received their final macOS version now so it is almost time for Apple to make that decision for the M1 generation. I think an M1 Pro, Max or Ultra (or even an M1 with 16GB of RAM) still has many good years left.
  • selfhoster1312 21d ago
    OS LTS support barely matters when planned obsolescence is baked in at the hardware level. Wearing parts (eg. SSD) are soldered on newer macs and there's intensive efforts to make sure even if you have the tools you can't repair it. Parts aren't available but if you get your hands on there's cryptographic parts pairing so it more or less can't be replaced: https://rossmanngroup.com/services/ssd-data-recovery/macbook/m-series-soldered-nand-recovery https://rossmanngroup.com/services/ssd-data-recovery/macbook... Overall, i wouldn't count on "many good years left".
    • kalleboo 21d ago
      My MacBook Pro M1 is 5 years old now and the SSD wear level is at 4%. SSD wear is not a problem for normal users. Meanwhile Apple's standard OS support period is 7 years, that's a much more imminent limit. Not saying that I support non-user-replaceable SSDs, but if your goal is reducing e-waste, there are more impactful changes to make.
      • selfhoster1312 21d ago
        Thanks, that's a fair data point. Although i'm sure it depends on actual user workloads. I'm not saying that I support closed-source firmware, locked bootloaders, or even that replacing SSDs is the one true path to sustainability. I believe it's a whole field and we shouldn't tolerate compromises on any level. It should be 100% illegal in any civilized country to sell the kind of lame hardware we have today. It should be 100% repairable, 100% open bootloader & free firmware, 100% public tech docs/datasheets. Original manufacturer OS support is not insignificant, but i believe it's only significant because we have so little control/understanding of the hardware/software stack.
        • hnaccount_rng 21d ago
          You have trade offs though. Both with added effort during the development but also just physical limits with the amount of additional losses you have over clicked vs soldered connections
          • selfhoster1312 21d ago
            That's true. I can't say i'm 100% against soldering parts, that would be silly. What concerns me is that undocumented parts that are unavailable to buy as spare parts are soldered and have firmware that enforces pairing with a specific other part. It would be reasonable if all components on a motherboard had to be sold as spare parts by law (not just the entire board that costs the same as the entire device, that's malicious compliance) and all spec sheets were made available. That might just make the economy of a repair shop work again.
            • hnaccount_rng 19d ago
              Sure, and in a zero marginal cost world that would be fine and dandy. In practice, it would mean significantly increased development and documentation costs for a low percentage increase in sold units. Selling spare parts was worth when things broke often and labor was cheap. We don’t live in that world anymore. That means a broken device will no linger get fixed. But on the plus side there are far fewer broken devices. I’m pretty sure that has the same problem shape as “there is no glory in prevention”
• euio757 21d ago
  But, power efficiency isn't the primary reason I'd like Apple hardware with linux software. Display quality, trackpad quality, overall form factor, and very high RAM space in a laptop would be the primary reasons I'd go with Asahi Linux.
  • rowanG077 21d ago
    This is exactly why I run asahi. There really is not a laptop that comes close to the hardware quality of an apple laptop. I have even sacrificed x86 at the altar which is a much bigger step than battery life imo.
  • Gud 21d ago
    I agree. I’ve been a big Lenovo fan, settled on the X1 carbon. I’ve had three of them, G5, G6 and G9. The USB-C port broke on both G6 and G9 models. Apparently it’s a common problem. Unfortunately the ports are soldered directly on the motherboard making it difficult to fix(should be a small separate board for easy replacement). I was going to desolder and replace the ports, but haven’t gotten around to it. I’m now using a MacBook Pro M2.
    • danw1979 21d ago
      Ummm if repairability is a concern, I’ve got some news to share about your new Macbook.
      • simonh 21d ago
        If the ports don't effing break in the first place, who cares?
      • nicce 21d ago
        > I’ve got some news to share about your new Macbook. As long as you pay for Apple Care, not a problem. But maybe not the point…
      • mschuster91 21d ago
        Apple saves itself a lot of the trouble with superior build quality. With Samsung devices (so no cheap crap), USB ports last me about three years of heavy use. With my old iPhone 12, 2019 16-inch MBP or my 2022 MBA? Not a single issue. The housing is simply constructed so tight and, being made of solid metal, rigid that the housing bears the torsion load and not the tiny PCB solder pads. The only problem I have with my new USB-C iPhone 15 is that it is hard to clean pocket lint out of the socket, compared to the old Lightning connector.
• dmitrygr 21d ago
  > but at the rate that Intel and AMD have been catching up on power efficiency Have they? What AMD or Intel laptop with Linux on it can hold a candle to and M4 air or an M4max pro? Genuinely curious, cause I found none...
  • oblio 21d ago
    AMD Strix Halo?
    • dmitrygr 21d ago
      "up to 9 hours for light web browsing or everyday tasks" that is 1/3 the battery life of a macbook in the same use case. seems completely incomparable
      • prmoustache 21d ago
        Who works 27h straight far away from a power or usb outlet?
        • pmontra 21d ago
          Probably nobody and I remember when a phone battery lasted one week: nevertheless sometimes we forgot to charge and we run out of battery. So a long lasting battery is good, too long lasting is a waste, which maybe it's your point. However nowadays it could mean running some agents all day long (remote models) and plug in to power only at the end of the day.
        • cosmic_cheese 21d ago
          It’s more about not having to drag a cable + brick around everywhere and not needing to care about the location of the nearest power outlet, potentially for multiple days depending on usage patterns. You can instead leave the charging bits at home or the hotel and charge overnight. This also means that battery cycles accumulate more slowly and the battery’s lifetime is stretched further. Also, generally more efficient chips don’t get hot as easily which makes the laptop more comfortable to use and prevents fans from becoming audible unless you’re really pushing the system.
• oblio 21d ago
  > wait several years for full Linux hardware compatibility I'm not convinced it's only "several years". Asahi was launched in January 2021. So 5 and a half years ago. Asahi, as far as I can tell, supports most of M1 and M2 features, so generations launched in November 2020 (6 years ago) and June 2022 (4 years ago). I would be very surprised if a decade from now the story won't still be the same thing: 90% of features for systems half a decade old with software package gaps in important areas and everything slightly less optimized than MacOS. Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation.
  • regexorcist 21d ago
    > 90% of features for systems half a decade old This can be a good tradeoff. An M1 Ultra still runs circles around 90% of consumer hardware sold today, and with Linux it has easily another 10+ years. Now support for M3 is coming. > Asahi is doing incredible work but it's still 5 people in a garage vs the huge corporation. Not sure why the "vs" scenario, this is a project that makes no promises. And I think they do have some support from Fedora / Red Hat fwiw.
    • selfhoster1312 21d ago
      > This can be a good tradeoff. That's a good tradeoff for durable hardware with available spare parts. That's not a good tradeoff for hardware that was designed so it cannot be repaired, such as newer Macs.
    • oblio 21d ago
      > Not sure why the "vs" scenario, this is a project that makes no promises. And I think they do have some support from Fedora / Red Hat fwiw. They are building something in an environment that's not supportive of what they're doing. Contrast with Intel or AMD.
• gehsty 21d ago
  Does anyone have to run Linux on an M series? I’m fairly confident it’s one of the most complex ways of running Linux…
  • soganess 21d ago
    Yeah, but there was a time when running Linux on a laptop was one of the most complex ways of running Linux. Now I just expect everything to work, especially if I buy from Lenovo, Dell, or HP. There was a time when Wi-Fi, or Wayland, or XComposite, or Linux gaming, or just accelerated graphics at all or, or, or... People get excited, they work on it, other people get excited and mess about, and eventually it just works. I would love to one day pick up a decommissioned M1 Ultra and use my OS of choice on it, and I'm grateful for the people who are doing the hard thing now.
• gigatexal 21d ago
  Even if amd or intel caught up the Apple hardware is just built better and is far higher quality.
  • reeredfdfdf 21d ago
    Higher-end Thinkpads are pretty nice in terms of build quality. Trackpads and screens are worse, but they will physically last just as long.
  • monegator 21d ago
    i snatched a lenovo yoga slim aura with a core 5 226 for 650 euro. Its build quality is on par if not better than the colleague's macbook, it's pretty good for working, runs fedora natively, battery last at least 12 hours unless i'm playing games.
    • fooker 21d ago
      The build quality is not even close. And macbooks are reaching 18-20 hours usage on battery nowadays, I have stopped carrying the power adapter most of the time. Of course it’s significantly more expensive, but you do get what you pay for.
      • preg_match 20d ago
        On the battery life front, both Intel and AMD have caught up. Apple greatly inflates their battery numbers; to get 18 hours, you need the lowest spec model and you need to basically not use it. Chromium or Firefox open? Bluetooth active? Yeah, you’re looking at 12 hours, not 20. 12 is still good, but intel as of lunar lake (2 generations ago!) matched that. Now, the performance is still behind, particularly single core. But the efficiency is there, and these are standard x86 chips. The efficiency doesn’t come from ARM, it comes from the process node and chip design. Apple uses the latest process nodes with an SOC design. When intel does the same, as they have done, they match the efficiency easily on x86. The real gain is the SOC. When you shove the ram and chipset into the CPU you save massive battery.
• raybb 21d ago
  That's fair but also think about the ewaste. I'm still hoping one of these mega AI LLMs will figure out how to install Linux on the many old iPads that become nearly useless after Apple stops updating them and you can't install new apps.
  • ZiiS 21d ago
    Please send all "ewaste" Apple silicon macbooks to me.
  • dgunay 21d ago
    Oh definitely, there's great value in it for those who already own Macbooks for one reason or another. I just personally have found myself shying away from buying a Macbook multiple times over the years because the Asahi Linux experience was really really rough at the time & probably still is for the generations I would be interested in buying.
  • ryandrake 20d ago
    Yea, this project doesn't just benefit someone who goes out and buys a new Apple laptop. It's going to be most beneficial years from now, after Apple deliberately obsoletes today's hardware, stops updating them with software, and tries to turn them into e-waste.
• maccard 21d ago
  What Laptop would you purchase that gives hardware equivalent to a MacBook Pro?
• randusername 21d ago
  Yeah, I'm optimistic we're getting really close to "forever laptops" once competing hardware catches up on efficiency. What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life?
  • skohan 21d ago
    As someone who does a lot of work with local LLM's, today's systems feel woefully under-powered. I'm looking forward to a future where my laptop has 10x the memory, 100x the memory bandwidth, and optimized cores to make inference workflows that currently take minutes or hours go down to seconds or milliseconds. While we're at the point where traditional software is pretty much fast enough for all but extreme use-cases, with LLM's it feels like we're back to the days where you press compile and go have a coffee or chat to your colleague.
    • simonask 21d ago
      Right now there isn’t really a convincing use case for local LLMs outside of enthusiast or specific niches. It takes a lot of expensive hardware, and most people don’t have extreme enough requirements to recoup that investment. That might change, but it would require either that hardware gets much cheaper or everyone’s demands for LLMs increase significantly.
      • skohan 20d ago
        That's what I mean though. The comment I was responding to was talking about "forever laptops" - my point is there's plenty of room for new capabilities which will make current hardware obsolete. Just like how GPU's didn't exist at all, and became a standard part of computing. And given how fast the hardware and software is evolving, I can easily imagine a future where we all have very capable models running on our own devices for an embedded intelligence layer that's doing most of the day-to-day tasks, and only have to outsource to a super-smart cloud model for specific things.
  • preg_match 20d ago
    > What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life? To run poorly made software. Despite Apple having the best hardware around, they still manage to slow down M1 devices on Sequoia. Somehow. I think it’s a double-edged sword. Powerful hardware means powerful hardware. But it also means developers get lazy, and start writing poor quality software because it still runs OK on the latest and greatest. Luckily Linux doesn’t have that problem, which is why you can easily add 10 years to a laptops lifespan just by using Linux.
• GeekyBear 21d ago
  Intel has stopped pushing clock speeds to such ridiculous extremes, so battery life is getting better. However they still have to nail single core performance on chips that can operate without a fan before they can be said to have caught up.
• swozey 21d ago
  You can't run an egpu (amd or nvidia) on macos so that's one thing I could see switching for. I did just discover tinygrad though due to a hackernews comment, but not sure its performance. Also Tahoes absolutely horrendous performance for the last year..
• vb-8448 21d ago
  Make an example of something comparable to a MacBook Pro M series, and I'll buy it asap! I really want to go back to linux, but mbp is just too good!