MacOS is great, but someday they will stop updating MacOS for this. I see it as a device with incredible longevity because of the fanless thermals and how it sips energy. I could see myself using it 10 years later. I want to run MacOS or Fedora Silverblue, with Silverblue being my true love. Immutable OS images <3
HAH, downvoted in seconds. Would not be surprised if there are Apple employees brigading this.
You broke more than one site guideline with this. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here? We'd appreciate it.
I think you're downvoted because:
1. Linux is coming to Apple Silicon sooner or later. You can buy now, enjoy macOS, and then install Linux later.
2. It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it. In addition, Macs have insane resale value. So you can sell it in 5 years, and then buy a new one. This is a more reasonable approach than yours.
3. Apple tends to support their laptops for a long time. Usually 7-8 years. And given that this is their own chip and it's extremely powerful, I can see it being supported for 8 years at least.
2) I used my Powerbook G4 for 12 years; this is mostly because I was a kid with no money. When I got something else, my sister used it for another 3 years. With thermals as they are in this device, instead of selling it after 4-5 years I'd rather keep it for one-off projects as a server like a Mac Mini. I know laptops aren't designed for server work, but I love that it's a server with a builtin terminal. Also a device I'd use for hiking, because I could charge it from backpack solar.
3) The worst experience I've had was telling my dad MacOS Catalina couldn't be installed on his $3.5k iMac.
As you said in your other comment, M3 will be 3nm TSMC? Maybe Linux will look good on Apple Silicon then.
Just in case you'd be ok with unofficial way - there are patchers to enable macOS install on older machines:
https://www.macrumors.com/how-to/install-macos-catalina-unsu...
I don't expect Apple to support the Linux community. It feels like this is trending in one direction. It felt like things stopped being "favorable" to us when they stopped supporting OpenGL and made no effort with Vulkan. The touchbar and some wifi chipsets were poorly supported for years before M1 debuted.
What has been implemented in Asahi is impressive, but it's not ready to be a daily driver. I hope this becomes my mobile device of choice someday. I'd use MacOS for work-work, and I would choose Linux every time for fun-work. So tired of everything having telemetry and vendor lock-in and basic pieces of software moving to subscription models.
Apple laptops became the dev machines of choice because they embraced the OSS community in pretty big ways. Right now the water feels tepid.
I might have missed a trackpad update but I don't think it will take them long.
You could triple boot Windows, MacOS and Linux with Intel Macs. A Mac was a great choice because you could develop for and support all 3 of those platforms (plus Android and iOS). Aside from having bad GPUs, expensive storage, and little modularity, they were great machines for development.
Now, with no Linux or Windows support, not so much (unless you don't need to use anything but MacOS.) Unfortunately, if you need to support MacOS or iOS, you don't have much of a choice. Just really unfortunate that what used to be possible with one machine may soon require two. So long as Apple supports any Intel Mac, many Macs will be able to get OS updates thanks to the OpenCore Legacy Patcher [1]. I'm not sure when Apple will drop Intel Macs though. The last Mac to use an Intel processor released in 2020, so there will hopefully still be quite a few years left of support for Intel Macs for the time being.
1. https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...
Plus there is no guarantee that Apple will ever allow Linux again.
If you're wanting to use your laptop for development work, you're going to pick the best job for the task. Moving to OSX would not only slow things down due to how slow non-native Docker is (no it is not negligible, yes I have an M1 Mac and I have tested it in a side-by-side comparison), but you have much less control over your environment compared to Linux.
The vast majority of the people I've worked with choose to use Linux laptops over Macs, and I don't think CPU efficiency is something that's going to get them to change. While working from home, I can think of zero scenarios where I need more than 8 hours of battery life, which my x86 Intel laptop already exceeds.
Silverblue is my favorite, but it's becoming common for me to develop everything within a docker image. As quickly as we're committing to a project, we're updating the env and rebuilding that image at the same time? I'm new to this.
I have a friend who's really big into k8s and ansible. Right now it feels like I'm toying around in 1 pod. He can bring up a set of services around the thing he's developing in a few minutes. I want his power. :x
Are you running arm64 containers? Is x86 a requirement for you?
All of my work goes into (local/alpha/beta) production linux box that's why the mac is technically just a display.
And when I say local, I refer to a linux server, the mac connects to it. the macOS terminal does a nice work doing that, don't think there would be any difference in that regard if the laptop was running linux.
The new mac checks all of the hardware boxes that I wanted. Even occasional gaming if I felt like it.
Why is that? I still use my 2015 15" MacBook Pro which released 7 years ago, and I have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. This isn't the 70s, 80s, 90s or early 2000s: the improvements in performance from one year to the next are far more modest and the utility of further improvements are far less impactful than they once were. My 2015 MBP is still as capable of browsing the web, writing code, and video editing as it was back in 2016 when I got it. It's not in any way slow doing any of those tasks.
The performance of an M2 MacBook would undoubtedly be much better, but am I actually going to be able to browse the web faster or write code any faster? Probably not.
A new 16-inch MacBook Pro with 1TB storage emits approximately 620kg of CO2e in its manufacturing process (The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee, 2020 second edition, page 140). Why should someone emit more than half a ton of CO2e for a new laptop unless they really need it?
If you have a Mac that no longer gets OS updates by Apple, as long as it was released within the past decade you should be able to use OpenCore Legacy Patcher to update it to macOS Monterey (and later Ventura when it releases) without much issue. If it's older than that, you might run into some issues, but generally speaking everything from late 2008 and beyond is supported, with everything from late 2012 and beyond being fully supported.
https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/START.htm...
If this is a serious concern for anyone, it looks like carbon capture runs around $22/ton. So this is an $11 problem.
I split my coding time between a 2017 retina MacBook and a 2018 Mac Mini. Code compiles very much faster on the Mini -> faster iterations. So yes, you may literally code faster on a faster computer.
Went through a few generations of that, it was "ok".
Bought the cheapest 13" M1 I could because I had to debug some stuff on the iPhone, I was pretty angry about it.
That day I switched over to it as my daily driver.
The performance absolutely blew my mind.
Stuff I'd wait for one to two minutes to build on the SB would build in a few seconds on the M1.
Debugging + video call + building went from crushing my laptop to being not really noticable.
I was using it heavily for two days and realized I forgot to plug it in. Was only down to 50% battery.
I'm very far from being an apple fan boy, but this little laptop has completely blown my mind. Simply the best hardware I've ever owned, and makes me easily 2x as productive.
And that's all with the cheapest 8 gig of memory model.
Understandable. Great vintage year!
That is insane.
* values converted to USD. Prices may differ in countries actually using USD.
If it is not reasonable why can you resell it for a large amount after 5 years?
Why ever not? I have 14 year old laptops that run fully up to date Linux just fine. Why can unpaid volunteers do better than one of the most profitable companies on earth?
> So you can sell it in 5 years
That just makes the looming end of support someone else's problem, it doesn't actually solve anything.
This is not something, a person that wants Linux, will enjoy.
> It's not reasonable to expect to use it for 10 years. Even if Apple stops supporting it, you can still use it
I'm not sure, my friend has M1 Macbook Air and he complains that it looses performance after a year.