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Comment by vondur | Hacker News Reader

I think this is going to be a tougher sell for laptops as the M1 chip seems to be a game changer for battery life and performance. Once the majority of software gets native ARM support, it will only get better, not to mention this is only the first iteration of a desktop class Apple Silicon. I do understand from a philosophical point of view why people may not want to use MacOS, particularly after last weeks code signing fiasco.

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Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux. So if you're building software to run on an x86 Linux server, dealing with ARM-based MacOS is going to be even a bigger PITA: as both the arch and the OS will be different. I am definitely in the camp of replicating server setups on my laptops, so as sweet and incredible as M1 is, I won't be able to use it.

But for new projects, I honestly do not know what will people do.

If Amazon continues to evolve their Graviton chips, and other cloud providers follow, it will be quite tempting to try a 100% ARM setup...

> Docker performance on current Intel Macs is much worse than Linux.

One can only wonder why running linux containers on OSX would be slow.

Soon people will be running x86 Linux containers virtualized on ARM Macs, making it even slower.

Becuase macosx containers run inside a Linux VM, not on the native host OS, same with Windows;

> Becuase macosx containers run inside a Linux VM, not on the native host OS

My comment was sarcastic.

> same with Windows

Significantly less so as Microsoft themselves provide the virtualisation glue, with a custom kernel and a dedicated / special-cased VM, in the form of WSL2.

We don't yet know what the M1 can do with a higher power budget in desktop form. Very surprising though to see they can generate some reasonable seeming performance especially with native apps.

Yeah it sucks I was going to buy my Dell XPS 15 on Black Friday... now I dont know what to do.

You can find GNU/Linux ARM laptops, too: https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/ (slow, but it's a start).

> slow, but it's a start

That it's slow makes it a bad one.

It's the issue endemic to existing ARM laptop offering: in the best cases, either the performances are lackluster and the battery life is good, or the performances are terrible and the battery life is great. Sure the pinebook is super cheap, but the performances are bad and it gets 6-8h battery.

The real problem is the driver situation for the GPU on ARM. If we could have more mainline supports, the Desktop Linux ARM ecosystem would be a lot better.

Agreed, it is quite pathetic that the entire rest of the world is getting taken to school by one chip.

I hate to fall back on the "good enough" argument, it's absolutely pathetic that we're here, but PCs are, generally, good enough. Battery life and performance are both pretty stellar in ultrabooks. I'm looking forward to larger & larger tablets becoming a thing, with Apple again alas having to lead the charge there too by introducing 12 inch tablets, which thankfully, others are doing.

In general, a fixed closed ecosystem can advance wonderfully, especially fueled with a multi-trillion dollar market capitalization. But a lot of people are betting on literally everyone else on the planet, to suss & finagle better ways forward, organically, over time, with hopefully building inertia, and I think, maybe not for this decade but some decade, those bets on everyone are good bets.

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