I’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems
Yes, because being non repairable, being non upgradable, having early thermal throttling due to subar cooling, and having a mediocre keyboard is SO much better than anything else that is out there.
I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts. Whats next, you are going to tell me that your Macbook is great for local LLM usage because 10 tok/sec while your laptop gets too hot to use on your lap and makes your fingers hot is all that anyone needs?
It definitely is. Apple's mistake with the Intel Macs was refusing to throttle the chips before they hit their T junction temp (~95c). This is why a lot of Wintel machines will max out around 70-80c in sustained load while Macs will fly past those temps.
The same behavior is present in both Intel Macs and Apple Silicon chips - you can very nearly boil water on your Macbook if you push the GPU with sustained load like LLM prefill.
Compute is compute, Apple didn't circumvent physics. It just managed to take chunks of that compute that represents the most average use case, and make it more efficient, in the same way that ASIC mine bitcoins more efficiently than GPUS
As for keyboard, it still sucks. Impossible to clean without taking the thing apart, so if you get any dirt under the keys, its gonna be there for quite some time.
Also the keyboards have improved a lot since the original butterfly design.
How ironic. There is no “blatant lie” in “their hardwares aren’t comparable to MacBook” if you don’t know what aspects they are comparing, but there are in your comment.
You can absolutely compare various chips and laptops to a Mac and end up with a fair comparison.
Comparisons are very subjective, you've got to look at the big picture and not the solipsistic one if you're going to call other people blatant liars.
My workload: web development, video call, running VM.
I basically could not find any laptop comaprable in those aspect AT THE SAME PRICE.
I was a (mostly) happy Asahi Fedora user for a while, but eventually went back to macos (for the battery life). I'm not sure how much better it is, but I actually trust that it will sleep and wake properly when I use its lid.
The prices and ram have been fucked though, long before the latest ram crisis. I have a macbook m1 air, which I bought second hand. I'm looking at maybe upgrading to a second hand m3 or m4 air (with more ram), but honestly the prices are just wrong. Whatever I buy will be too expensive and unable to run decent llm models.
But with fast charging and basically an outlet most everywhere you would actually use your laptop, that ship has sailed.
I am totally a Linux person, but I have to say: I run Alpine with Sway, and my battery life is nothing compared to a Macbook. It's just another world, it doesn't remotely compare.
Like honestly look into it and compare 1 to 1. Your talking points are outdated.
For people who mostly use their browser and a few programs, I understand why they would want to use a Macbook. I mean, I can go for a full weekend without charging it, and I do programming stuff where I compile regularly.
This is the weal-and-woe of reverse engineering. It's awesome that these machines now have native Vulkan 1.2 drivers, but it took years to get there. There are still unsolved problems 7 years after Apple Silicon hit shelves, and most newer hardware is broadly unsupported. The lesson here is a reiteration of what Linux users have always said - proprietary drivers suck.