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Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

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Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#81

Post by peoplefromibiza »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #50
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 1200€ 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 bea…

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.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#82

Post by peoplefromibiza »

gigatexal wrote: post #66
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 would…

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.

> 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.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#83

Post by peoplefromibiza »

dagw wrote: post #47
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

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.

> But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality.

Or branding...

Which I can accept.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#84

Post by dagw »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #83
dagw wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality. Or branding... Which I can accept.

Or branding...

Which I can accept.

As could I, easily. As long as that was all I was sacrificing.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#85

Post by peoplefromibiza »

hpen wrote: post #45
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

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.

> 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.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#86

Post by noisy_boy »

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.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#87

Post by loeg »

simonh wrote: post #17
automatic6131 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 t…

The competition isn’t other ARM players, it’s Intel and AMD. Both are on larger nodes for now.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#88

Post by peoplefromibiza »

dijit wrote: post #37
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

well, truth is Apple MacBook Air 13 with 16 GB of RAM is listed at € 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 € 729 My 3D artist friend an Asus ROG 14 with an NVidia GPU and 32GB of RAM for € 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. A…

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.

> 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.

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#89

Post by lillecarl »

cassianoleal wrote: post #57
peoplefromibiza wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 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)

Re: Asahi Linux for M1 Macs Progress October-November 2021

#90

Post by WastingMyTime89 »

peoplefromibiza wrote: post #81
WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 1200€ 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 bea…

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…

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.

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