Linux

Inb4 apple locked down components to motherboard serial number

But seriously, I guess the only hope is to wait for the Chinese second hand market takes off.

their hardware feels great to use

I tried using a friend's m1 MacBook pro, and it's the worst laptop I've touched in a while. Like my oldest budget core2duo laptop has a better keyboard than a brand new $2000+ device. There's a very good reason it's permanently docked.

it makes me wonder how people could say that the components are so bad.

I've mentioned a few reasons in this thread. They basically used subpar components to offset the cost of developing their own CPU.

If in 10 years you can get an old MacBook Pro for 200$, I might jump on it even if upgradeability has been lowered.

It's not lowered, it's absolutely removed, unless you count replacing the entire motherboard as upgradeability.

16gb ram is too small? New motherboard.

Crappy SSD is dying? New motherboard.

When m1 came out, some tech guy on twitter did a review of MacBook Pro and studio storage. Apple literally used components that are so bad they had to disable data safety protocols to go above HDD speeds. The end result was that losing power is likely to corrupt your data.

Besides that apple was cutting out "unnecessary" parts of the arm specification in order to cut costs. The result is that the first 2(?) generations have hardware level exploit "m1racles" on top of others like "pacman".

I really wouldn't trust them to last

I did some actual measurements just to confirm it, here is minecraft in default configuration running @ 100fps and the cpu+gpu consumption is around 6w in total. If you add about 5w for display backlight and other components the total would be 9-10 hours of play time on my 100wh battery.

https://imgur.com/a/C5QuC9v

Can you please take the same measurements on your system? Maybe ryzen system is better than intel, never had one.

The thermals and battery life of my Apple silicon MacBooks are unlike any other laptop I’ve owned. When I first got one, I started thinking of recharging it not in hours, but in days. 3-4 days between charges was normal for typical use. Mind you that was not full workdays, but the standby time was so good that I didn’t have to consider that the battery would decrease overnight or in my bag. I’ve used multiple Dell, Thinkpad, and Intel Mac laptops over the past decade as well and none of them come within spitting distance on battery life and thermals. I really hope that Qualcomm can do for other manufacturers what Apple silicon has done for MacBooks.

there is no chance you would get back to the Intel system and plug it in every 2 hours.

don't be irrealistic. most laptops in the Macbook price range will have 8 hours of usage in low consumption mode or around 6 or 5 if you need more power.

While I completely agree on the repairability front, which is really quite unfortunate and quite frankly a shame (at least iPhones have been getting more repairable, silver lining I guess? damned need for neverending profits), it’s just… non unrealistic.

That being said, unified memory kind of sucks but it’s still understandable due to the advantages it brings, and fixed-in-place main storage that also stores the OS is just plain shitty. It’ll render all these devices unusable once that SSD gives out.

Anyhow, off the tangent again: I have Stats installed for general system monitoring, as well as AlDente to limit charge to 80% of maximum battery capacity. All that to say, by now after around 1.5 years of owning the M2 MacBook Air (which I’ve been waiting for to buy/to release since late 2019, btw), I know pretty well which wattages to expect and can gauge its power usage pretty well.

I’ll try to give a generalized rundown:

• High-intensity workloads (mostly in shorter bursts for me): typically around 10W. I’ve installed Minecraft before once just to test it, and I get reasonable frames (both modded and unmodded), where it seemed to draw maybe 15W, thus still being able to charge (!) the battery off a 30W power supply. It doesn’t ever really go above 20W as a rule of thumb, and the CPU/GPU will be capable enough for easily 80-90% of the general population.
• Idle/suspended: unnoticeable. I use my machine every day with maybe an exception or three per month, but from what I’ve read from others, battery will dip slightly after a month of standby, but that’s mostly due to battery chemistry I’d assume, not actually background usage.
• Idle/running, light usage (yes it’s the same category*): It actually depends on the screen ~~size~~ edit: whoops, brightness. Energy consumption due to CPU usage is by far the minority portion. I’d say 2-4W, maybe. Screen usage when really bright makes it jump to 8-9W, darker-but-not-minimum screen brightnesses leave it at… 5W maybe.

Given the spec sheet’s 52 Wh battery, you can draw your own conclusions about the actual runtime of this thing by simple division. I leave it mostly plugged in to preserve the battery for when it becomes a couch laptop in around 5-8 years, so I can’t actually testify on that yet, I just know the numbers.

I didn’t mean for this to come off as fanboi-y as it did now. I also really want to support Framework, but recommending it universally from my great-aunt to my colleagues is not as easy as it is with the MacBook. Given they’re a company probably 1,000 times smaller than Apple, what they’re doing is still tremendously impressive, but in all honesty, I don’t see myself leaving ARM architecture anytime soon. It’s just too damn efficient.

*At least for my typical usage, which will be browser with far too many tabs and windows open + a few shell sessions + a (may or may not be shell) text editor, sometimes full-fledged IDE, but mostly just text editors with plugins.

I did some actual measurements just to confirm it, here is minecraft in default configuration running @ 100fps and the cpu+gpu consumption is around 6w in total. If you add about 5w for display backlight and other components the total would be 9-10 hours of play time on my 100wh battery.

https://imgur.com/a/C5QuC9v

Can you please take the same measurements on your system? I'd like to see how good is the alternative.

I wouldn't say hated, but definitely possessing of many ui/UX choices that were about as well thought out as how windows had old/new control panel plus the new new settings app and yet everything was still counterintuitive. I merely gave it a chance repeatedly because I ran a computer business up until covid hit and needed basic familiarity, and people kept telling me it was better than everything else and really if you don't game it mostly is for many workloads, but I still found things to be rather clunky especially system navigation on iOS. Not saying android is better or anything either because while it suits me more, there is so much infuriating dumb shit.

Basically because of every other offering feeling like it's ripping me off, Linux being free and having tons of customization beyond simply cosmetic and several people making different solutions to each problem most of the time and also free, coming back to anything else with any combination of hardware, software, and money entry barriers just feels like the worst value proposition possible. Maybe if I was born into wealth and a social media addict I would have been an apple fanboy.