Comment by jdibs
6 days ago
What is it about it that makes it unsuited for anything serious? The way you describe it, the only thing it's not suited for is gaming, which is not generally regarded as serious.
Many people including myself do serious work on a macbook, which is also ARM. What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?
> What's different about this qualcomm laptop that makes it inappropriate?
Everything else around the cpu. apple systems are entirely co-designed (cpu to work with the rest of the components and everything together to work with mac os).
While i'd love to see macbook-level quality on other brands (looking at you, lenovo) tight hardware+software co-design (and co-development) yields much better results.
Microsoft is pushing hard for UEFI + ACPI support on PC ARM boards. I believe the Snapdragon X2 is supposed to support it.
That still leaves the usual UEFI + ACPI quirks Linux has had to deal with for aeons, but it is much more manageable than (non-firmware) DeviceTree.
The dream of course would be an opensource HAL (which UEFI and ACPI effectively are). I remember that certain Asus laptops had a microstutter due to a non-timed loop doing an insane amount of polling. Someone debugged it with reverse engineering, posted it on GitHub, and it still took Asus more than a year to respond to it and fix it, only after it blew up on social media (including here). With an opensource HAL, the community could have introduced a fix in the HAL overnight.
I get the lacking Linux support, but what about Windows? Most serious work happens on Windows and their SoCs seem to have much better support there.
Apple's hardware+software design combo is nice for things like power efficiency, but so in my experience so far, a Macbook and a similarly priced Windows laptop seems to be about equal in terms of weird OS bugs and actually getting work done.
On my iPhone, even though I'm not on the latest "upgrade" (I made sure to avoid the Liquid Glass crap), the widgets just refuse to update most of the time. I have to tap them to get an update. Which completely defeat the purpose of having widgets in the first place. I am tempted to do a full reinstall from scratch but I think I'll just wait and bite the bullet for some Android in the near future. Apple software just isn't reliable at all, it makes the expensive hardware largely pointless.
I’m getting about 2 hours with current macos on an arm macbook pro. I used to get 4-5 last year.
This is out of the box. With obvious fixes like ripping busted background services out, it gets more than a day. There’s no way normal users are going to fire up console.app and start copy pasting “nuke random apple service” commands from “is this a virus?” forums into their terminal.
Apple needs to fix their QA. I’ve never seen power management this bad under Linux.
It’s roughly on par with noughties windows laptops loaded with corporate crapware.
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I run an old T480 with FreeBSD and get about 17 hours of battery out of it. Sure, it’s a bit thicker but gets the job done as a daily driver.
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for this to happen we would need to see a second company that controls both the hardware and the software and that's not realistic, economically. You can't just jump into that space.
You could argue that is exactly what Tuxedo is doing. In this case, they could not provide the end-user experience they wanted with this hardware so they moved on.
System76 may be an even better example as they now control their software stack more deeply (COSMIC).
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Microsoft with their Surface line? They don't control every part of the hardware, but neither did Apple control even the majority before the M series.