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Comment by andrewmcwatters

8 hours ago

You’re not missing out on a lot. Coming from someone who has used their products for many years now. Their products have more compromises and trade-offs now than they did during Apple’s Intel era.

What you will tangibly miss is low noise, low power draw hardware and very, very specific workloads being faster than the cutting edge AMD/Nvidia stack people are using today.

3 comments

andrewmcwatters

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LeFantome  4 hours ago

I would also like to hear about those compromises. I have been wanting this hardware and would like to know what I don’t know.

  • linguae  3 hours ago

    I have a work-issued M3 MacBook Pro, and at home my daily drivers are a Ryzen 9 3900 PC (still on Windows 10) and a Framework 13 laptop with a Ryzen 5 7640U running Windows 11. The hardware on my MacBook Pro is fantastic; I get amazing battery life that lasts far longer than my Framework 13, and the performance is excellent. I also love my MacBook Pro's build quality.

    However, the reason my personal laptop is a Framework 13 and not a MacBook Pro is because I value upgradability and user-servicability. My Framework has 32GB of RAM, and I could upgrade it to 64GB at a later date. Its SSD, currently 1TB, is also upgradable. I miss the days of my 2006 Core Duo MacBook, which had user-serviceable RAM and storage. My Ryzen 9 3900 replaced a 2013 Mac Pro.

    Additionally, macOS doesn't spark the same type of joy that it used to; I used to use Macs as my personal daily drivers from 2006 to 2022. While macOS is less annoying than Windows to me, and while I love some of the bundled apps like Preview.app and Dictionary.app, the annoyances have grown over the years, such as needing to click a security prompt each time I run lldb on a freshly-compiled program. I also do not like the UI directions that macOS has been taking during the Tim Cook era; I didn't like the changes made during Yosemite (though I was able to live with them) and I don't plan to upgrade from Sequoia to Tahoe until I have to for security reasons.

    Apple's ARM hardware is appealing enough to me that I'd love to purchase a M4 Mac Mini to have a powerful, inexpensive, low-power ARM device to play with. It would be a great Linux or FreeBSD system, except due to the hardware being undocumented, the only OS that can run on the M4 Mac Mini for now is macOS. It's a shame; Apple could probably sell more Macs if they at least documented enough to make it easier for developers of alternative operating systems to write drivers for them.