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Comment by minimaul | Hacker News Reader

It's still not really ready for prime-time, but I've got a M1 mac mini running debian as an arm64 build bot (and a few other small things) now, and I can say that the bits that work, work really well.

Storage is fast, CPU performance is solid, PCIe for ethernet works just fine.

Now if I could just get one with 64G of RAM and 2TB of SSD... ;)

edit: the setup process is still far from polished but that's not unexpected this early, and it's still in a 'build your own kernel' state. But it was easy enough to get going in an hour or two with a pointer or two from IRC and from reading the wiki.

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> Now if I could just get one with 64G of RAM and 2TB of SSD... ;)

Careful what you wish for. With the way Apple marks up memory and storage upgrades, you might be looking at a $5,000 machine there...

I literally just dropped £4,099 on a fully loaded MacBook Pro 16" with those specs. I could not be happier. Its going to be a great daily driver for many years to come. Also the construction is A+ and solid, makes my 2015 MacBook Pro feel cheap in comparison.

I spent about £3k on a 14" with 1TB and 32G and I'm very very happy with it - the experience is just ridiculously better than the older 15" MBP I had - or any of the x86 laptops I've used recently too - it has a good screen, a reasonable keyboard, a good touchpad, it's much faster, quieter, has better battery life, and is more portable without losing a lot of screen space.

Fantastic, enjoy it.

According to MBP 16" price, Apple charges $800 for 64 GB RAM and $800 for 2 TB SSD. IMO that's a reasonable price.

2 TB of NVME storage is little more than $200 off-the-shelf. 64 gigs of DDR4, high-bandwidth laptop memory costs ~$250. Even assuming Apple is springing for high-quality, high-speed RAM, $800 borders on insanity when other laptops offer similar configuration options at less than half the price. Apple's price gouging in this department is well-documented, I don't think I need to argue with HN users about that.

$250 will get you 64 GB of laptop memory but that will be operating at something like 1/8 to 1/16th the bandwidth. Similarly you can get 2 TB of NVMe for $200 but you need to go to the ~$350 range to approach the bandwidth, I haven't looked into IOPS.

I still think the prices are inflated over raw hardware but not as exaggerated as finding the cheapest parts with the same capacities would make it seem.

I just checked out some random Dell Precision laptop. They want $800 for 64GB RAM and $720 for SSD. Seems pretty comparable to me. Samsung 970 Pro 1TB is $270 on newegg, so it makes $540 for 2TB. Cheaper, but it's only PCI-E 3.

If you have the time to share the details, I would definitely appreciate them (looking to do something like this myself). In particular, on which hardware did you build the kernel? Or did you cross-compile it? Also which bootloader did you use? Thanks in advance!

Hey!

I built the initial kernel on an AMD 5800X running Debian - there are cross-compiling instructions on the Asahi Linux wiki.

For bootloader, I'm currently just appending the kernel & device tree to m1n1 (which is the first stage Asahi loader).

I suggest getting started with your rootfs and kernel under m1n1's hypervisor, as the virtualised serial ports make it much easier to debug initial issues.

edit: other than the install script which is linked elsewhere in this comment thread, everything you need is on the wiki in various places :)

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