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Comment by ko_pivot | Hacker News Reader

I think the ARM platform is super cool and I’m glad Apple adopted it, but at the end of the day if the OS is closed source, I’m not that interested in hacking on the instruction set it runs on.

In fact the only reasons I’m on a Mac rather than Linux are because 1) they make the best consumer laptops by far and 2) I’m stuck in the ecosystem.

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> I’m not that interested in hacking on the instruction set it runs on.

This makes zero sense, frankly. Do you also feel this way about an x86 laptop, that x86 isn't worth learning anything about? Because it might run macOS? It's pointless. The main thing tied to the OS is the userspace ABI (e.g. callee/caller saved registers, parameter passing), but this is generally only one important-but-small part of actually using the CPU, or doing low-level optimization, and every major operating system (including macOS!) tends to have quite detailed ABI documentation for all the supported architectures. Actual fundamentals of the ISA, the supported instructions, etc all translate between operating systems cleanly, and for a given microarchitecture the performance characteristics will also broadly translate between operating systems. But I sort of doubt you're talking about low-level Apple Silicon-specific uarch optimizations, because that's not what the original guide is talking about.

Like, if you don't already know how to write ARMv8 assembly, macOS is not what's stopping you. You can take most of this knowledge, which is fundamentally generic, and just as easily apply it to an RPi for example, or the new Snapdragon X Elite, etc. macOS is mostly a non-issue in this regard, it just happens to be the operating system "of choice" for some of the best client-oriented ARM processors you can buy right now.

I thought Apple open sourced parts of it? "Darwin"?

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/distribution-macO...

they allow other OSs to be used, and notably Asahi linux is making great strides there, is that something you are insterested in?

>1) they make the best consumer laptops by far

Very debatable. That's just your opinion.

Name another company that makes debatably the best consumer laptops?

There is no undebatably best consumer laptop for the simple reason that different users have different requirements and priorities.

And for some, things that Apple do are a no go. Like glued parts, limited Linux support, no OLED screens, no post buy upgradability, overpriced RAM upgrades, limited and finicky multimonitor support for most models.

So clearly it is debatable and depends on who you ask.

Yep, everyone has different requirements and things they'll put up with. Personally, the touchpad on my Dell laptop is absolutely terrible, but it's not hard to get a wireless (or wired) mouse and plug that in, so I can have a reasonably-priced laptop that works well with Linux.

> limited and finicky multimonitor support for most models.

I’ve never had an issue, and I regularly plug in one or two at a time. Even two that lie and say they are the same monitor with same serial and it still just works. Although, only after m1 and beyond.

Yeah and you can't plug in a third. I'd call that limited

I plugin a third just fine.

You have to get a 3999€ max for that right?

I threw them all together in my mind and didn't check the display capabilities of the max MB.

I got a Max in the 14” notebook, yeah, but not 3999€ for me at least.

How about I name a company that sold us a laptop that required 7 motherboard replacements, and after the 8th time it crapped out they told us it would cost $1200 to fix it from then on out. We signed up on a class action lawsuit along with tons of other people having the same exact dead motherboard problem, and we won.

The company was Apple.

That was in 2012, right?

Their hardware has got a whole lot better in the past 12 years.

My guess is that they learned important quality lessons from that class action lawsuit too.

Curious, was that laptop running with nvidia?

Because the reason Apple really dislikes nvidia was because nvidia sort of lied about the thermal spec (much like intel does, except intel could downclock); and it caused a lot of GPUs to kill their motherboards: https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2021/10/13/apple-vs-nvidia-w...

Yeah, and now you know why Apple hasn't sourced NVIDIA stuff for years now, too.

And NVIDIA is now worth more than Apple, lol.

We’ve had our share of Dell lemons, too. Bad batches and problematic models happen, that’s life. If we have to go back 10 years to find an example of widespread problem, it’s not that bad.

its the trackpad for me, no other laptop is comparable afaik

it was the trackpad for me, now it's the trackpad and the battery life. nobody else comes close on either.

I wonder what exactly sets the Mac trackpad apart from the rest: is it hardware or software? I wonder if there's a way to improve it on other laptops.

I feel like on other laptops everyone is optimizing for specs/price and specs don't include quality of life features like a good trackpad. Sure, it would be nice to have a good trackpad, but chances are your customers are going to buy a cheaper laptop with a worse trackpad from a competitor.

there are some coming out, the lg gram for example, has a haptic touchpad

A lot of it is software. When the Chromebook guys were just starting out they wanted a Mac style touchpad, but discovered you couldn't buy one on the open market. They had to do a ton of custom work on drivers to try and get close to Apple's work. There's a lot of subtlety to palm rejection, scaling, haptics, etc.

I think it also helps a lot that the OS (or at least a version of it) was originally designed to work with a one-button mouse.

The two-fingers-tap for right click works great on the various Apple trackpads. Much better than the same gesture on my expensive Dell Precision. Both the two fingers gesture and the click on the right side of the trackpad, which is infuriating. I really don’t think the OS supporting one-button mice explains the difference in reliability.

So is it software in the OS, or is it firmware in the touchpad itself? Software in the OS should be very easy to improve, but it seems like it should be very device-specific. Firmware in the touchpad controller is another matter.

I recently purchased an M3 Max MacBook with a ton of RAM. It was expensive, but I love that I can run various containers, Emacs, Slack, and more, while never swapping a single byte. More importantly, I can have all of these containers running yet have battery that lasts a whole day. I usually charge my laptop once every two days. Most other laptops I've used would last 2-3 hours under the same workload, and produce tons of heat and fan noise when compiling software.

I will concede that some aspects of the laptop are pretty bad. For instance, the keyboard is subpar compared to even the cheapest mechanical keyboards. The trackpad seems overrated. On desktops, I always use an ergonomic trackball mouse, so trackpads and even "regular" mice put my hand in relatively awkward position and I can't keep it stationary. Something that isn't mentioned often is that the mini-LED displays have considerable bloom, especially compared to the previous generation of MacBooks that used IPS displays.

Personally speaking, the pros of this machine vastly outweight the cons I've just listed.

Mac laptop quality is just so good. Granted i DID enjoy the osx from back when jobs was still alive and imposed his visions. But the hardware is still, like back then rock solid. I have yet to find another producer that has the same build quality. If you know a product that can compete, please inform me, as i would ultimately want to have a linux setup.

Not very debatable though. Mention the many others that have;

As good a trackpad, As good a battery, As good speakers.

Just to mention a few. Lots of other stupidities like their RAM pricing, OS magick etc, but other companies have rarely come close to the hardware.

>>1) they make the best consumer laptops by far

> Very debatable. That's just your opinion.

Sorry, no, I'm not handholding PC manufacturers anymore. When Macbooks were Intel based there were trade-offs, you were buying a laptop that would overheat and underpeform for the spec. The keyboards were iffy to the point where they removed essential keys etc;.

Now, there isn't a better laptop that's an all-rounder for 95% of people. They are fast, cool, do not compromise on display quality or audio quality, afaik they're the only laptop manufacturer giving you full 40GB/s out of each and every USB4 port and they optically seal them (and always have) making USB-Killers ineffective.

They are stupid expensive for upgrades, this is true, however the comparable systems (XPS/Precision, Elitebook, Thinkpad X) are all within spitting distance of the price and still have significant compromises.

PC manufacturers need to do better.

They have nearly zero incentive to do better. Most PC users simply do not care. They are not really changing the world either, just gaming or plopping figures into Excel.

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