Or, to quote the progress report (https://asahilinux.org/2025/03/progress-report-6-14/#is-this...): "This is Apple though. Nothing is ever simple."
If you've got headphones with a wraparound microphone on its own arm then it could be better, but everyday headphones are limited by the position of the microphone
Apple puts a ton of R&D into making things work well. As another example: Macbooks have been, for 15+ years now, the only laptops that I can trust to actually sleep and conserve battery when I close the lid and slip into a backpack for a few-hr flight. Windows and Linux on laptops seem to have about a 70% chance of either not sleeping, not waking up right (esp with hybrid graphics), or trying to do forced Windows updates and killing the battery, then waking back up to 20+ minutes of waiting for updates to resume / finish with no meaningful progress indicator or way to cancel / delay.
Not everything they do is perfect, and I'm not some huge Apple fanboy, but they do offer a significantly better experience IMO and feel "worth" the premium. It's not as if modern gaming laptops are any cheaper than MBPs, but they certainly feel much jankier, with software and UX to match. As an example, the IEC plug on the power supply of my Asus Zephyrus Duo wiggles enough that it disconnects even with different IEC cables. I've had to wrap some electrical tape around the plug body to get it to be less flaky. Asus Armoury Crate is a terrible buggy and bloated piece of software that runs about a dozen background processes to deliver a "gamer" UI to...control fans, RGB lights, and usually fail to provide updates. They also have utilities like https://www.asus.com/us/content/screenxpert3/ and "ROG ScreenPad Optimizer" that are largely buggy garbage, but sometimes required to get their proprietary hardware to work properly.
Does Apple gouge users for extra RAM and SSD space? Absolutely, but you're paying for the R&D as much as the actual hardware. I wish they'd just price that into the base models and make upgrades cheaper, but their pricing strategy seems to be lowering the base entry point to something more appealing with "it barely works" levels of spec, while making increasingly ridiculous margins on higher specs -- an additional $4,600 to go from 1TB -> 16TB on the Mac Studio is pretty bold considering consumer QTY=1 pricing on a fast M.2 SSD is around $600 for 8TB, and I'm sure their BOM costs are around the same for 16TB worth of silicon in huge quantities.
As a photographer, this is a bit maddening.
In my experience, the fastest option for this is NFS without encryption, which is only really viable on a local network as it's hecking insecure (sure, wrap it in Wireguard, but now you're slowing it down again) and over Wifi at least, it's definitely slower than using an NVMe drive plugged into the Macbook, at least for 40 MP files coming out of my Fuji.
The external NVMe drive w/ Thunderbolt works... OK. But it's annoying (both physically and in terms of sleep/wake causing dismount warnings, etc.)
I just want a heatset aux port and I'm GTG. I want my money put into the GPU/CPU/Display/Keyboard.
Now my macbook pro for work? Yeah; high expectations there for AV quality in terms of joining meetings etc.
+1 on this one... I can close my lid (from on) and set my M1 air aside for a few weeks and still have plenty of battery left. I don't use it much when not traveling, it's mostly my desktop, work laptop or phone.
Also +1 on the hardware feel... it's got an above average stiffness, keyboard feel (for what little that's worth) and the best touchpad experience hands down. The screen is also on the higher end (I've seen slightly better in some really expensive laptops). All around, it's a pretty great value on the mid-high range. What I don't like is the aging UI/UX, the variance from other platforms (I use Linux and Windows pretty regularly) and some things that I just find harder on the platform in general.
I don't think I'd every buy a maxed out Apple product all the same, I don't use an iPhone or anything else but my laptop. That sometimes makes the ecosystem integrations slightly annoying. That said, my current laptop is still running well, and my prior laptop from over a decade ago is still running fine for my Daughter's needs... though she may get my m1 if/when I move to a Framework 13 (strix halo).
Even the cheapest of Chromebooks sleep and resume reliably. I suspect the reason is not purely R&D, but limiting the number of supported devices/chipsets and testing the supported configuration thoroughly. Chromebook OEMs can only manufacturer specific hardware combinations blessed by Google, and in exchange Google updates the drivers during the support period.
They don't actually sleep. Apple remarketed the concept of never sleeping as "Power Nap".
You can choose to have it actively updating the system or not, but it never actually sleep, just go into a ridiculously low power mode. You'll get the same on Surface Pro laptops or Chromeboks for instance.
Actual sleep only happens when the battery is about to die.
https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/turn-power-nap-on-o...
Power Nap is just fancy name for scheduled wakeups; it was supposed to be more but my understanding is that this never really materialized.
I might be confused on the name they chose to market never sleeping (never do full suspend to RAM with CPU shutdown except on special circumstances), as it was announced with Power Nap as the front facing feature.
From MS's doc:
> This option was designed for laptops and might not be available for all PCs. (For example, PCs with InstantGo don't have the hibernate option.)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/shut-down-sleep-...
In the interim, they raised the price and added a ton of bloat so I don't use it anymore. (The bloat killed it, not the price. And the popup that's like "you're so stupid that you can't even figure out how to enable Krisp Speaker, you idiot". I'm well aware of how to enable it, but I have chosen not to, as I do not want to heavily process the audio that I'm listening to. Only emitting. "Don't ask again" would have probably made them an extra $110 at least.)
Don't know that I've had anything as loud as a fire truck, but more than a few times I've had a 75lb dog a few feet away from me barking like mad, whining at me, playing by throwing a cow femur up in the air and letting it crash down on the vinyl floor, etc and apologized about the noise only to have people look at me funny and tell me they didn't hear anything but that explains why I seemed like I was having trouble speaking.
I think the only time I had anyone say anything about anything was when I accidentally had an air conditioner blowing directly on my microphone. They couldn't hear it, but my voice was coming through a little less crisp than usual as the noise cancellation was trying to remove the constant, high volume white noise.
Don't know what OS you're on, but on Linux I can definitely recommend Easy Effects (https://flathub.org/apps/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects). Been using RNNoise + Speex along with some other filtering for quite a while now to great effect.
One thing I found worked _really_ well if you're already using an external microphone of some sort--using the webcam microphone as part of a noise gate. On top of the filtering and existing gating, my audio only opens if my webcam _also_ picks up sound of sufficient volume. Lets me keep the microphone in front of my face fairly sensitive while still entirely eliminating echo and most off-axis sounds.
Doing some things like disabling an input/output device, or an internal keyboard, or a webcam. Almost impossible. Even if there are some ways, they change so often. Let's say you have two cameras and an application that always picks the internal one. I couldn't find a way to disable the internal camera so that this app would pick the only available one.
mic = hs.audiodevice.findInputByName("MacBook Pro Microphone")
function handle_deselected(_, type)
if (type == "gone") then
if not mic:inUse() then
mic:setDefaultInputDevice()
end
end
end
mic:watcherCallback(handle_deselected)
mic:watcherStart()LE Audio is great though - and is already, as "the full stack" has had support for quite a while... Assuming you don't happen to get your equipment from a certain fruit supplier that is notoriously slow at implementing open standards, almost as if they want to not give you a choice outside buying their own proprietary solutions...
It reminds me of the telephone network, where even though the whole thing is just another packet-switched network these days, the abstraction exposed to the handset is an analogue baseband audio signal.
---
Why can't we get another type of "Bluetooth audio", that works like VoIP does between handsets and their PBXes — where the two devices will:
1. do a little handshake to negotiate a set of hardware-accelerated audio codecs the devices (not the Bluetooth transceivers!) both support, in descending order of quality, constrained by link throughput + noise; and then
2. open a (lossy, in-order) realtime "dumb pipe" data carrier channel, into which both sides shove frames pre-encoded by their separate audio codec chip?
Is this just AVDTP? No — AVDTP does do a capabilities negotiation, sure, but it's a capabilities negotiation about the audio codecs the Bluetooth transceiver chip itself has been extended with support for — support where, as above, userland and even the OS kernel both just see a dumb PCM-sample pipe.
What I'm talking about here is taking audio-codec handling out of the Bluetooth transceiver's hands — instead just telling the transceiver "we're doing lossy realtime data signalling now" and then spraying whatever packets you the device want to spray, encoded through whatever audio-codec DSP you want to use. No need to run through a Bluetooth SIG standardization process for each new codec.
(Heck, presuming a PC/smartphone on the send side, and a sufficiently-powerful smart speaker/TV/sound bar on the receive side, both sides could actually support new codecs the moment they're released, via software updates, with no hardware-acceleration required, doing the codec part entirely on CPU.)
---
Or, if we're talking pie-in-the-sky ideas, how about a completely different type of "Bluetooth audio", not for bidirectional audio streaming at all? One that works less like VoIP, and more like streaming VOD video (e.g. YouTube) does?
Imagine a protocol where the audio source says "hey, I have this 40MB audio file, it's natively in container format X and encoding Y, can you buffer and decode that yourself?" — and then, if the receiver says "yeah, sure", the source just blasts that audio file out over a reliable stream data carrier channel; the receiver buffers it; and then the receiver does an internal streaming decode from its own local buffer from that point forward — with no audio channel open, only a control channel.
Given the "race to sleep" argument, I presume that for the average use-case of "headphones streaming pre-buffered M4As from your phone", this third approach would actually be a lot less battery-draining than pinging the receiver with new frames of audio every few-hundred milliseconds. You'd get a few seconds of intensive streaming, but then the transcievers on both ends could both just go to sleep until the next song is about to play.
Of course, back when the Bluetooth Audio spec was written, something the size of AirPods couldn't have had room to support a 40MB DRAM buffer + external hardware parse-and-decode of M4A/ALAC/etc. But they certainly could today!
So we define a custom BLE service and blast audio file through it
I think this isn't a problem if you're using Apple headphones with Apple devices, but anything else falls back to crappy BT quality, usually with some kind of terrible ANC to boot.
FOr me, crappy audio setups and apps trying to do too much audio processing are the primary reason of "Zoom fatigue". I've done a lot of calls over apps that transmit raw, high-quality audio with no processing whatsoever, and the experience is just so much better.
On an unrelated note, I tried doing calls with a stereo mic setup but participants were actually uncomfortable with the ASMR-like effect of the audio.
The MBP mic is generally preferable to most headset boom mics in my experience with good noise reduction. You also get the benefit of not picking up extraneous mouth noises (gum chewing, coffee slurping, whatever)
I feel like 99% of people I conference with use regular headphones + MBP mic
Main problem with that setup is not being able to hear your own voice in the headphones (feedback, or whatever that's called) which can be annoying sometimes if using NC headphones
Monitoring.
There are umpteenth ways to do that, and I find headsets themselves do it the most poorly of all (if they have the feature at all).
> The MBP mic is generally preferable to most headset boom mics
Another benefit is not paying the '90s GSM handsfree BT profile codec pain (at the cost of A2DP having slightly higher latency)
It's called sidetone. Headsets do it so your ears don't feel clogged and to avoid subconscious yelling.
Some headsets let you adjust it either through a regular Sidetone volume control or some dedicated app. Soundcards also often have this feature in the form of a Mic output volume control, done in hardware to reduce latency.
A significant difference in headset quality is in sidetone latency. The heavier the DSP processing required to get a reasonable mic output, the harder it is to hit latency targets. Headset SoCs have dedicated hardware for this - a user-space solution like Apple pulls on their laptops would not be able to meet a usable latency target.
> Another benefit is not paying the '90s GSM handsfree BT profile codec pain
LE Audio includes the LC3 codec, solving this once and for all.
In the meantime while this rolls out, various alternate codecs exist that are fairly widely supported. This is especially true when using fancier headsets with a dedicated bluetooth dongle as they have more flexibility when it comes to codecs and compatibility.
AirPods of various versions is common, as is many other buds. Enterprise headsets like those from EPOS (the old Sennheiser Communication) and Jabra (with or without boom) and speakerphones are common in corporate settings, casual headsets (e.g., Sony, Bose) and wired gaming headsets are common at home.
The point is, everything they make is vertically integrated. They want to deliver a feature (like Airdrop or Continuity), they will cut across the stack to get it done. If you go the DIY route (which is what Asahi is effectively all about), you get to also DIY the missing software pieces.
The upside is that the entire ecosystem gets to benefit from that work (see e.g. the new DSP in PipeWire). PC hardware is generally crap, and so is Apple's if you omit these extra bits. But "the whole package" sets the bar quite a bit higher. I want to see the FOSS ecosystem meet that bar.