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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Reading some of the doomer comments in this thread feels like taking a glimpse into a different world.

We're out here with amazing performance in $600 laptops that last all day on battery and half of this comment section is acting like personal computing is over.

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Two different populations — those interested in computing, and those interested in computers.

Personal computing and IBM PC clones are not the same thing. The fall of PC clones can happen while other personal computing devices continue to be produced. The $600 laptop is not a PC.

Apple laptops are PCs (Personal Computers). They are not IBM PCs. But IBM hasn't made PCs in years, and there hasn't been any IBM PC hardware to clone in years.

They don't run the software I want to run (Linux, Windows games) and/or with the performance I want.

Raspberry Pi is way cheaper than those things, and I'm sure you could hook one up with an all-day battery for $100-200.. Doesn't mean it's "better".

They trade blows performance wise with the M1 MacBook Pro sitting on my desk. And theres nothing stopping asahi linux running on them except for driver support. They look like fantastic machines.

They’re not ideal for all use cases, of course. I’m happy to still have my big Linux workstation under my desk. But they seem to me like personal computers in all the ways that matter.

Asahi Linux is NOT an option and may never be one due to: The A18 Pro (and M4) introduced SPTM — Secure Page Table Monitor — which runs at a higher privilege level (GXF EL2) than the OS kernel. Unlike M1/M2/M3 where m1n1 can directly chainload Linux, on A18 Pro/M4 the page table infrastructure is owned by SPTM and must be initialized by XNU before anything else can run. You cannot bypass it. (source: https://github.com/rusch95/asahi_neo)

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