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Comment by SantiagoElf | Hacker News Reader

To me its getting a bit surreal with Apple Silicon performance. Sure, it's great.

I know it's shocking that the company that produced in-house ARM chips that are top performers in the mobile space for the last 10+ years - has made a bigger chip and shockingly(!!!) it's good.

So, the biggest company in the world has created a semi-custom closed ARM design, running on their properiatery Operating Systems - iOS/iPAD OS/MacOS, that run only on their absolutely unable to repair/upgrade machines, that are essentially bricks of alliminium with a display.

Me personally have a

ASUS ROG STRIX G15 laptop with Ryzen 9 5900HX and 2 x 32GB DDR4 3200 of memory - I can run ot it Windows, Linux, MacOS, BSD, etc.

99% of the time it's connected to the power outlet and I can overclock it.

I don't get the Apple Sillicon excitement, tbh.

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>99% of the time it's connected to the power outlet

This.

Now go outside and try this laptop as a mobile device.

What's the point of comparing what is basically a workstation to a relatively thin mobile device?

>I don't get the Apple Silicon excitement, tbh.

You get very power-efficient mobile device. If the mobile part is of no interest for you - than there is nothing to talk about really.

I already have a very power-efficient mobile device - it's called iPhone. :)

now try to replace your laptop with it because that’s what was being talked about

I can join teams/zoom meetings, read emails, reply to emails with my iPhone :)

Yeah and you can write code as well. That doesn't mean it's a laptop replacement.

One part of the excitement is about “look what’s possible!”, but frankly this is also worrying to me. Now that people know you can get this level of performance with that power efficiency, they will demand it from other vendors. That is going to pose an interesting challenge: remain with an open architecture with separate parts limited by their interconnects, or like apple go to a closed architecture with everything on an SoC. Most buyers will not care that the architecture is closed, they just want a light and fast laptop with good battery life. We may be witnessing the beginning of the end of the open pc platform and its wide array of vendors. If the mass market of laptops uses SoC’s the volume will not be there to support OEM parts vendors, and that market will thin out.

Also, I look forward to even more bloated websites and applications now that developers have faster computers.

It will be fast enough on their machines, but they will forget some people don’t like/can’t afford these machines.

AMD tried to do this a decade ago with their APUs. It flatly flopped because they couldn't get the buy-in from software makers. That buy-in problem still exists today.

I can see why you might be sad about the loss of a component ecosystem, but I think the integrated architecture is primarily a result of physics rather than commerce. This doesn’t mean it can’t be open, like RPI, and maybe we can hope that this will be Intel’s response in the medium term.

But the trend towards on-chip integration and SoCs has been decades long. CPUs also used to be made from discrete components. So I think, for better or worse, the transition to SoCs is inevitable.

Linux boots on the M1 and the Asahi Linux project will soon have a reasonable installer. NetBSD and OpenBSD also having working ports. Sure all of the bells and whistles don't work now, but none of the bells and whistles worked in the beginning for any of the FOSS OSs until people had time to reverse engineer it. I've got an M1, and once NetBSD has gotten to a certain level of maturity on the M1, I will be replacing MacOS with it.

I still have my healthy skepticism over that.

It would join the very short list of usable reverse engineered GPU drivers, and not for lack of attempts. Just look at noveau for an idea of what to expect at most...

And for people who need a GPU, thats fine. The way I uses a computer, I don't really need GPU rendering. CPU rendering to a frame buffer is good enough for me. When I started using Linux many moons ago, very many things were handicapped because driver support wasn't there, and plenty of us were happy enough to continue using it. I imagine there are people who feel the same way about support for BSDs and Linux on M1s.

Say goodbye to any semblance of performance and/or good power management, though.

You cannot legally run macOS on that device.

What sort of battery life does your laptop get?

~7 hours if not using Visual Studio 2022. If using it for real work - maybe 2-3 hours max.

Dang that sounds more like a desktop that you get to briefly unplug than a competitor to any M1 laptop.

Not only that, but they are a node ahead of the competition thanks to TSMC and they place memory on package. This accounts for the performance gains.

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