Comment by rowanG077
10 months ago
I don't see how AI has anything to do with it. I have been running asahi Linux for more then a year with less issues then running a Dell XPS before that. I don't think calling it an intellectual exercise is fair here. These MacBooks are better Linux devices then a lot of laptops. With some hardware support still missing currently.
Huh. Well, maybe look at the "forest through the trees." You say 'Linux is great on these laptops, blah blah blah' and can't disagree, but point was that unlike those that came before, these particular laptops are dead meat in under 48 months, unworthy of the monumental effort to port and maintain Linux (or anything else) on them. Why spend valuable heartbeats porting and maintaining LINUX on a class of devices that are DEADER THAN A DOORNAIL? (Why not write a better 6502 emulator instead? /s)
That is to say, all GOOD data analysts, accountants, software engineers, lawyers, musicians, writers, editors, animators, illustrators, systems people, etc... will accomplish their jobs using multi-modal LLM-like interfaces with supporting application-specific I/O devices, or they will be blown away by those that do. They don't need/want Mac/Windows/Linux to accomplish this --it will start out as an app that they click on in those systems and eventually they will be able to buy machines that don't even have that old user experience anymore. Even the people creating the "agentic applications" for these users will themselves use agents to produce the most efficient systems possible, so they don't need Mac/Windows/Linux either (at least not in their currently recognizable forms).
It will all be clearer as Project DIGITS (and Apple's response to it) get into user hands in a few weeks/months along with the avalanche of agents that are coming (from Salesforce's pivot on down to productivity apps --heck there are already Youtube videos on how to create 3D models in Blender using AI, ultimately apps like Blender will turn themselves into agents, so it will be "help me create a 3D world for use in other agents that has features a,b,c..." and the governing AI will offer some premium agents for doing that, one of which will be functionality that was once found in an ancient desktop app called Blender).
Again, personally I'd like to see the 31337 SWE skills bringing LINUX up on these obsolete devices go into bringing up CUDA on external Thunderbolt-connected nVidia GPUs to squeeze a bit more life out of these lame duck machines during the transition,
Why are they dead meat? It makes no sense to me. They have NPUs that have been reverse engineered for use in linux and basically have strong integrated GPU. I personally doubt local AI is worth at all. All good models require insane hardware. But even if you disagree the M* macbooks are very well equipped to run local AIs. Better then most windows laptops coming out currently.
They have NPUs for running tasks like figuring out what your app usage pattern is. The TOPS number is too low to be relevant enough to preserve because Apple prioritized other features in its chip design during the years leading up to the sudden emergence of AI on the RADAR at 11 Wall Street. It's not even close. m1..m5 would need like 20x-100x more TOPS to keep up with what's coming (from Apple, nVidia, Microsoft and others) which will set a new bar for what's needed to do "anything." As far as Apple laptops being "better then most windows laptops" [sic], again, all laptops and desktops as we currently know them are dead meat, whether they run macOS, Windows or ... LINUX. Will they continue to exist? Yes. Will everyone from your school child to Supreme Court justices carry them around? No.
Take note: That you downvote people you disagree with (even when they have nearly half a century of experience) means you are not someone I'm terribly interested in engaging with even if I don't care about the downvotes themselves.
PS: My first Apple laptop was a PowerBook 170, connected to a Radio Shack bag phone via (USA) standard RJ11 jack. My first Mac laptop running Linux was a 17" PowerBook G4 running Yellow Dog Linux (whose legacy is "yup"). I've been writing software for Apple systems since the late 1970s (as well as my big systems and embedded background) and I'm far younger than 60. Bye.
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