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Comment by paulcarroty

4 years ago

Not too lost 'cause you can run Linux on M1.

Until the manufacturer decides otherwise.

The selling point of Macs is the Apple ecosystem and UX. If you avoid Apple, what's the point of M1? Linux on equivalent AMDs is cheaper and more compatible.

  • > If you avoid Apple, what's the point of M1?

       - (Potentially) programmable top notch security chip with no overhead encryption
       - Fanless (Air), cool running, fast processor with very low power consumption
       - All metal body
       - Top notch HiDPI screen with color accuracy.
       - Top notch sensors
       - Excellent, illuminated keyboard
       - Big trackpad with pressure sensitivity and taptic engine
       - Excellent battery life
       - Excellent battery endurance
       - Very high sound quality, good speakers, good mics.
       - High quality webcam
       - Light for its class
       - WiFi with plenty of antennas, MIMO support and all modern standards, incl. forward facing ones.
    

    Need more?

    • - No jank at all. The most comfortable-to-use laptop I’ve ever had, desktop latency wise.

      - The ability to use nix-darwin for configuration management. It may be incomplete, but there’s no Windows equivalent.

      - Higher single thread performance than any other device.

    • Is the M1 keyboard significantly better than MBP (with the touchbar)? because that keyboard was crap. To be absolutely fair, good keyboards are hard to come by these days, and that's also why i'm using a logitech from 2006 via ps2 adapter.

      1 reply →

    • Nearly all the HW items have equivalent or superiour replacements, and a fair amount are dependent on the Apple ecosystem. Without Apple's ecosystem it's a good system but overpriced, and that's before you run into Linux compatibility problems.

      For example, take the monitor - there are monitors with higher refresh rates or more resolution (Retina does 'only' 6K). Also, Mac OS colour processing has no good equivalent elsewhere, so you won't see as much benefit from Apple's monitor without Mac OS.

      7 replies →

  • Wouldn't the M1's power efficiency be applicable on Linux as well?

    • In theory, sure. It’ll need a lot more work than simply getting Linux working, and we’re not even there yet.