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Comment by virtualwhys | Hacker News Reader

Was just in an Apple Store yesterday mulling over whether or not to switch back to macOS after 15 years on Linux PCs.

Both MacBook Pros and Airs are nice machines, but macOS, for me, it's a huge step back.

Unfortunately the Asahi project is underfunded (likely one of the reasons the project founder/lead jumped ship recently), and as a result M4 support is likely a year+ away.

Oh wells, let's see what Dell and Lenovo have on offer this spring/summer. Should be able to get a pretty decent PC laptop for less than the $4k+ an MBP 16" with 2TB/64GB will cost.

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If you have a perksatwork account, you can get a thinkpad with those specs for about $1.2k. During national holidays it goes for under $1k.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/le...

Might be worth taking a look at https://frame.work/.

I love my Framework 14. I'm absolutely sticking with this company for all future PCs.

I’d love to try out their products, but as an European it could become a problem in the near future that they’re an US-based company.

Why? They operate via multiple subsidiaries (the EU one is registered in Eindhoven), most notably Singapore and Taiwan, and do their main manufacturing in Taiwan.

Many US companies operate via subsidiaries and manufacture their products in Asia. But that doesn’t matter if the main business is based in the US. The current US government, its seemingly random tariffs, and their plans to cut their country off the rest of the world make it hard for me to invest my money and energy into products from the US if I’m not sure if in a year from now I still will get support for them as a customer from Europe.

Until now I'd only heard of Framework laptops, but am blown away by the build-your-own process -- incredible, spec the machine just as you want it.

Going to dive into the details now, thanks...

Just purchased a 13" framework with the 'old' AMD 7840u, 2.8k screen, and speced as you desire - 64gb , 2 TB (with ram and storage coming from Amazon).

It's only been a week but thus far it has worked very nicely and I think ended up running me around $1,500.

We see what the future brings, but for now, seems a very solid purchase.

(Edit: as someone mentioned below, the speakers are not very good at all. This was not super important to me. If it is super important to you, you'll be let down)

I would strongly recommend you _don't_ get a Framework.

I bought one. It lasted less than a year. One day I pulled it out to use it and it just stopped booting. It had been barely used up to that point. No drops or anything like that.

Support was giving me the runaround, too -- by not using info I provided them, not answering direct questions, and asking me to provide info I had already provided.

Do some research on Framework support. You'll find it is atrocious.

The idea is absolutely amazing and I hope it succeeds. The expansion cards are an AMAZING feature. The problem is that the quality bar just isn't being met, yet.

I love the idea behind Framework, but my admittedly old one is nowhere near comparable to a MacBook. It's really unpleasant to use, feels cheap, and performance/battery life are shockingly poor on Kubuntu. It's not a patch on a ThinkPad even, much less a Mac. Have they gotten considerably better since I bought mine (end of 2022)?

Framework started selling larger batteries in 2023 (61 Whr vs the base 55 Whr), and from looking through older reviews it looks like battery life significantly improved (>25% better) with the 13th-gen Intel upgrade [1]. I've got their 13-inch AMD 7840U but can't speak to the battery life as it mostly sits docked.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-framework-lap...

Have the bigger battery, battery life is still bad.

It's just a bad laptop: has "hot bag" syndrome, speakers are terrible even with the upgraded kit, the hinge that turns the screen off is very temperamental.

Still no open BIOS, they've hired a “Linux guy” who is super condescending in their official forums and locks topics when he feels the heat.

Stay far away.

I was pretty much in the same boat recently. Pulled the trigger and got M4 MBP - no regrets, great machine! Blows Intel-based competition by far away, double the speed of my beefy desktop build from 5y ago. Yea, I wish it could run Linux, but Mac OS works very well as a hypervisor and I still do all my day-to-day work in a familiar environment in Linux VMs. With all the supply chain attacks lately, I don't usually dare to develop on baremetal host anymore anyway. Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42541508

In fact, it's even better than Linux as a VM desktop host - finally a reliable suspend on lid close, smooth graphics in VMs, easy context switching between VMs, no silly fiddling with virgl and GPU passthrough etc. It Just Works. I can even play almost all the Windows games I care about - and at totally acceptable frame rates despite x86/ARM translation layers and lack of discrete GPU.

If you don't need a discrete graphics card and want maximum battery life, LG gram laptops are totally worth a look. I could easily write code and develop all day without plugging in at all.

I got a Thinkpad T14 AMD Gen 5 a few weeks ago to use aside my MacBook Pro. Filled it up with 64GB RAM and a 2TB SSD for about 160 Euro each. In contrast to my previous Thinkpad experience 4 years ago, all the hardware just works out of the box. Even suspend/resume comes back without any devices lost, etc.

Don’t forget to make a donation to Asahi, maybe it will be ready in time for your next laptop.

ThinkPad P1 is fine, if Intel chipset works for you.

Great keyboard and touchpad and nice display.

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