I think the way this conversation played out was "given how I use my device, is there an optimal device to buy?" A lot of the answers are, in turn, "why don't you use your device differently? having ignored your use cases and preferences, this is the device I'd recommend."
It might be a valid opinion to say "I don't use Linux and I enjoy using MacOS on Apple Silicon" but... it doesn't actually help the original poster, does it? So why post that at all?
I guess I could point out to the poster that I use Windows 10, and I built a desktop PC. It doesn't really meet any of their criteria (except #3 computing power), but... it works for me. So maybe they should change and be more like me!
I use a Mac Book from time to time and the keyboard alone is special... I don't think Mac is a good universal machine for development to be honest. The devices overall are nice, out of the question, but a Linux machine is ultimately more powerful.
As a previous BSD engineer please explain further, this entire thread is just horrendous and should be downvoted to oblivion.
Nobody cares what laptop you decide to use, nor are you incapable of doing your own research. My grandmother calls me for laptop recommendations.
My M1 Max 14" MBP has 64gb ram, mucho cores and is the fastest machine I've used. My gaming/dev desktop is a 12core ryzen with 64gb and I prefer to use the Macbook which can sit on my lap without even having a fan running.
Did I used to hate Apple? Yes. Do I have a $2500 Dell XPS 13z sitting in a closet that I never use because it throttles so horribly it's useless? Yes.
Well, you might be able to make it work, but the OS simply leaves you less freedom compared to a Linux machine.
And you would need to jump through hoops. I am an embedded dev and I have tried. Theoretically it is possible, but you would miss a lot of tooling on the way.
I don't really care about performance that much. I have an MB Air with M1 and I like it because the battery and display is very good. But it isn't really used for productivity. I also work in industry and everything here is Windows and maybe Linux. MacOS doesn't exist here.
Good luck attaching your Mac to a reflow soldering machine (I have tried too). It just doesn't play well with others and is rather exclusionary itself.
I had to connect a work Macbook to Ethernet. It didn't have a port so I bought a no-name brand USB-to-RJ45 adapter off Amazon. Come to find macOS doesn't have driver support for the adapter even though Windows and Linux are both plug and play. And I wasn't willing to do some backdoor process to install drivers on a work laptop. I had to buy a Apple branded adapter, which was 2x the price and only USB 2 vs the other one being USB 3.
I have a random off-amazon 2.5gbps usb ethernet adapter on my M1 and it works great. I did specifically make sure someone said it worked on a mac, but wasn't sure about on ARM.
I too have an M1 MBP and XPS 13. I pretty much always use the XPS. Side by side, there is no noticeable difference in speed for my everyday work. The MBP is more efficient for sure, but I get 8+ hours of battery from the XPS which is good enough - and I can run Linux without jumping through hoops.
Edit: Missed the 'z', sorry, possibly explains different experiences.
I had to jump through a few hoops to get Linux working right on my XPS 15, and it was actually a major reason I switched to a MacBook. The backlight didn't work with the original kernel released with Debian Bullseye. That got fixed with the next release of Bullseye, but I still only got something like, 4 hours of battery life? I'm almost certain it wasn't properly switching between integrated graphics and the Nvidia GPU, but there are only so many hours in the day to set this stuff up.
I really liked my XPS when I got it, but I'm pretty jaded about Linux support for laptops ever being good enough to compete with something like Apple. And at the end of the day I care a lot more about having a high quality Unix based OS than whether or not that OS is libre (sorry to say).
Same boat as you, waiting for the second generation, I don't event want to jump to the apple ecosystem but the battery life + performance at that price range makes it a almost a non-brainer for me
I got the 14" Max when they first came out and it's an absolutely fantastic laptop. I love it. The Max battery life is quite a bit worse than the regular M1, if thats your main concern go with the non-Max.
Mine is the ultrabook, the XPS 13z 2n1. It throttles nonstop, I've even gone so far to rip it open and attempted to re-paste everything inside of it. Unfortunately the ultrabook CPU can't be de-lidded and pasted without breaking things, I was actually the first person on /r/dell to rip this laptop open..
The XPS 13 is a much larger device (better cooling). The 13z ruined me ever buying another Dell. I really wanted to love that laptop and NOT buy a $3k macbook. I really want the 2n1 feature.
My wife has one of those things for work. She had to downclock the CPU in order to prevent it from running the fans at full speed for her workflows. After that, it was OK, slow, but at least no longer too loud to have a conversation next to it.
Different strokes for different folks. My Macbook collects dust whenever I'm home because I'd vastly prefer to do my work on a desktop Linux box. I don't have to spend my time updating coreutils, fighting Homebrew, fixing my screen sharing permissions for the 6th time this month, or really much of anything. My desktop and the systems we deploy to have almost complete parity.
I believe that's fixed upstream. Afaik, those issues stem from some strange FileVault/APFS inconsistencies, and have patches coming to fix it (in it's current incarnation). I don't dev on Macs unless I have to though, so I really couldn't say for sure.
I have a 2020 Mac with the highest fucking configuration (32GB RAM and i7 8-core 10th gen) and the fans on it are always going off.
I figure a laptop with a discrete GPU can handle external screens and graphics much better than integrated, but was wondering what your take on the M1 mac for this would be.
I use a 49" Samsung monitor that does 4k and like you mentioned my Intel work macbook pro is constantly spinning fans/hot. The M1 I honestly haven't noticed it making any noise while plugged into it. It also runs a lot better, less graphic glitches and weirdness. I don't like having to use my work mbp at all anymore.
I had an M1 MBA and it ran my 4k monitor fine. I would use it and the laptop screen at the same time. Great machine. I ended up giving it to my wife and getting an M1 MBP because I needed more than 16gb RAM for my workflows.
I think you misunderstood "more powerful". I don't think they were referring to the hardware being more powerful, but the OS in terms of its flexibility.
It's being sent to my mom this week, if you make that $1k I'll do it. It's barely 2 years old and has been awful since I got it. I think I just had higher expectations out of its form factor which can't keep itself cool at all.
Apple keyboards are miserable. I don't know why people keep saying that it's so wonderful.
I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.
As an Emacs user I find the whole concept of a "touch screen esc key" as deplorable and regressive.
And this is on top of the poor reliability and high cost of repair.
Agreed. I can't stand the feel of the MBP (16" 2019) keyboard. For one thing, it's too far to the right. But I also agree with you on the weird flat keys and soft F keys. At least mine has a real esc key. And this is purely habit & preference, but the control/option/command nonsense is infuriating. Everybody else does this the right way, get with the program Apple.
> I have a Macbook pro I get from work and the keyboard on that thing is borderline unusable. With it's weird flat keys, no travel, and the elimination of function keys for this terrible GUI thing.
You have an older version made sometime between 2016-2019. They got rid of the butterfly keyboard for the 2020 models.
The keys on the new ones still have pretty short travel though. Much shorter than the pre-butterfly generation, which wasn’t very deep in the first place.
I can well understand that people who like / want deep key travel would dislike them.
Am I the only one who thinks the touchbar isn't that bad? I have a MBP that has the touchbar and a real escape key. I'm a little sad they ditched the touchbar, I wish they had kept it but put it above the row of function keys. There are some things for which it's handy.
I can't stand the touchbar. Aside from having to look down to know what I'm pressing and Monterey introducing bugs causing it to disappear forcing me to restart my computer, when it does work an entire row of keys shouldn't be able to "go to sleep". My media controls disappearing because I haven't touched my computer in 60 seconds or however long it takes is ridiculous. There's no way to disable it without hacking together a script[1]. It's one of the most frustrating designs of any product I've ever used.
edit - I just timed the sleep functionality. After 60 seconds it dims, and then 15 seconds later it goes to sleep completely....such a horrible implementation
Having the touchbar and the function keys would have been nice (e.g. if they had kept the function keys half-height, possibly with the exception of the escape and touchid keys).
However since apple decided that only "either" was an option, I'm much happier with having the function keys back.
The new macs are (for me) a return to the pre-2015 era but on steroids. My M1 Macbook Air is a blazing fast dev machine for what I do (dockerized full-stack web dev). I do sympathize with all the mac hate during the dreaded 2016-2020 era. I'm glad I held out and skipped that era entirely.
I had a pre-2015 macbook for a while and I can honestly say that I've never had a worse keyboard. It hurt my fingers and it felt like Apple was trying to destroy my hands. A cheap $10 keyboard felt better.
This will come with a lot of problems and requires extra work. Apple Hardware is not intended by the manufacturer to be used as general purpose computer but to run MacOS.
I can walk into any office store, plop down 350 dollars, and get a laptop that will probably work very well with Linux. Any problems I end up hardware-wise is probably going to be the same sort of problems I would run into if I was running Windows.
With plenty of companies providing great support for Linux I don't know why anybody would want to deal with Evil Corp Apple and then spend day struggling to get a mostly working system. Apple are the people who make a living on creating and pedaling spyware ffs.
Not my words but yes. Giving a corporation money encourages them to keep going that direction further. I would spend more money on Linux certified computers from (e.g. Lenovo, Dell, Purism, System76, Tuxedo...) which hopefully encourages this companies to keep going and improving. A single customer of course doesn't change much but 10.000 do.
Right, but the parent poster is presumably going to spend most of his time under linux, at which point a native linux box seems like the reasonable choice.
The OS and first-party software are at least 50% of the reason I buy Mac hardware, personally. Safari (+20% battery life), Notes (missing a couple features I'd like, but has also never crashed or glitched on me in a decade of use, so...), Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Digital Color Meter, Preview (I love Preview), the excellent and remarkably low-latency Terminal, Mail, et c.
Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
I get and respect that this is true for some people, but goodness, I am exactly the opposite. I find all of their builtin software to be irritating and unobvious.
It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security...
Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock.
Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser.
Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades?
Mail is great too unlike Windows' very poor default one.
Windows now looks 10 years behind with no ability to catch up to the ARM standard and Linux, well, never.
> It's inspector is just so different from the rest and you can't even have a custom font to be used! because, security...
Yeah, it's far from perfect but it's really light on battery and is ~never the cause of beachballs while I'm using some other program, neither of which were the case with FF or Chrome, for me :-/ My ideal browser doesn't exist, but Safari definitely feels closer to it than FF or Chrome do. They get all the add-on stuff right, while Safari gets the fundamentals right.
> Terminal is almost good but somehow it doesn't vertically stretch to 100% height when I automatically hide my dock.
Bizarre. I'm a dock-hider (carried over from being a start-menu-hider on Windows for years and years) and hadn't noticed that. If I open a terminal window and drag the bottom down, sure enough, there's a little bit at the bottom I can't get it to go past. Oddly, if I use Spectacle to "maximize" it or send it to the left or right half of the screen, it manages to go a little lower (still not quite all the way!), but then the top has a tiny gap, like it's splitting the bottom gap between the top and bottom. Thanks, now that will bug me forever :-) I wonder if it's got something to do with line height?
> Pages and Numbers are decent but no one else uses it, so I have to keep my Office 365 subscription to use Office in the browser.
Yeah, it's no Office replacement if you need Office. I'm fortunate that it's just for my own use or for generating PDFs. They're like Abiword and Gnumeric on Linux (which were what I preferred over the bloated mess of OpenOffice on that platform) in that they're relatively lightweight but still fairly capable—except they don't crash as much and just, you know, work better.
> Preview surely is a godsend when other OS can't somehow make the same basic app for almost 2 decades?
It's straight up stupid that Preview can be an actual selling point for macOS in the year 2022, and yet, I can't point to a single similar program (or even just a PDF reader) on another desktop OS that's even close to it, and I've used tons of them over the years.
> Take those away and I'd just go back to buying used Windows laptops on Ebay, putting Linux on them, and being sad.
Same.
It's also interesting to think of this in terms of the real $ value of the OS. If I had to choose between a $1000 Windows laptop or a $2000 macOS laptop, I'd still go for the macOS laptop, even if they had the same specs. The specs of a laptop matter far less to me than the OS and surrounding ecosystem.
Same as how a $10K Mac Studio would still be useless for gaming. Could have the world's best GPU, and it would still have no value to anyone looking for a gaming computer.
I'm really, really not happy about there not being a single OS I consider comparable, when it comes to getting work done. It's like the rest are all competing with each other and macOS is just off doing its own (better) thing, while they don't even try to compete with it. I'm tentatively hopeful that Google's new OS will be good enough to compete—after a couple decades of using desktop Linux full-time, then off-and-on, I think its GUI model (and by extension those of the BSDs) is just fundamentally not capable of producing something really good. Too fragmented for mostly-bad reasons, whole stack's too big and creaky and Wayland doesn't seem to be helping with that very much, having it not just separable from but very separate from the base OS causes lots of support-related trouble if you try to target it as a platform, and so on.
BeOS was nice. Windows could be nice but they decided to make it adware and spyware and completely ruin the settings screens for no good reason. Sigh.
Safari annoys the heck out of me but I use it for the battery life, I would say it's adequate (except when stuff only works on Chrome, but not really safaris fault as far as I know). I dropped terminal instantly for kitty. Preview is the PDF viewer right? Will definitely say that thing is amazing.
First thing I did when I got my M1 though is partition the drive and dual boot asahi though.
> Safari annoys the heck out of me but I use it for the battery life
I wish it had more and better extensions, but the battery life savings and general lighter feel/effect on overall system responsiveness is so large that I put up with that unless I really have to have better dev tools or something. All my normal browsing happens in Safari. Took me like 3 years to convert after starting to use Macs, as I initially dismissed it, but damn, it's way lighter than FF or Chrome.
> Preview is the PDF viewer right?
It's a lots-of-things viewer, but its PDF support is so good that it made me go from hating when something was in a PDF, which had been the state of things with every PDF viewer I'd ever used since first encountering the format some time in the 90s, to liking PDFs. It's lightweight (like most of Apple's tools, I can just leave it in the background and forget it's there), crashes are extremely rare (maybe one or two in a decade or more of use?), and it supports all kinds of nice-to-have stuff like compiling a PDF from pages of other PDFs, removing or re-ordering pages, signing, light image editing and markup capabilities, et c.
Just started notes a couples weeks ago. Fantastic - disappointed I missed this for so long. Agree preview is great for what it is. Probably should go back to safari instead of chrome.
Notes is great. One time I was like "it'd be nice to put a PDF in this note. LOL, bet that won't work" but no, of course it did, embedded it exactly like I'd hoped it would. Drag & drop, there it is, can view it inline.
The two things that bug me: no markdown support, and no built-in export (but the format's simple and well known and there are existing 3rd party tools that can do it). Everything else is so good and so stable that I've been hesitant to go looking for something else to try to fill in those two features. I can live with a formatting bar and export being a little annoying if everything else is basically perfect.
YMMV. Linux on the 2019 16" MBP has a lot of issues that make it irritating. It works, but not perfectly by any stretch. And yes the machine is nice, except for the keyboard, which is probably one of the most important parts!
Maybe, maybe not. I'm a Linux person. I run Debian in a UTM VM on my MacBook Pro and do all the work in that.
Why? Because the host machine sucks less at all the desktop stuff that Linux is horrible at and the VM wins at all the server and dev stuff the Mac sucks at.
Developers usually desire a fast platform. While it is true most OS hosts can virtualize Linux, there are at least three important caveats when considering macOS. The first is that the file system performance is poor and chews up CPU when using file sharing [1]. The second is that if you are targeting x86_64 containers, you'll want to avoid full-virtualization and/or the Rosetta x86 to ARM translation later. Finally, the third is that if you work in machine learning, chances are you use NVIDA on the server, so you may want to do simple smoke testing of your containers locally, but Apple no longer ships computers with NVIDIA graphics cards.
Now some of that is alleviated if you are building non-machine learning ARM images, but you may run the risk of not having ARM versions of third-party containers you need.
I personally regret not thinking ahead about this and buying a MacBook Pro a few years ago. Either with Linux directly, or with Windows WSL2, I don't think developers need to buy a macOS machine unless they need to build iOS or macOS apps. And even then, you can rent time on GitHub-hosted Actions macOS runners instead.
Not anymore. Not on the M1s. They're far and away faster than anything but the beefiest desktop. A lua parser benchmark I ran in a VM on my M1 beat my 5950X by a factor of two.
The only remaining limitation are missing some ARM docker containers (which is slowly being solved) and the machines not being suitable for ML (in which case you need a desktop or to rent server time on the cloud).
It is definitely not easier to passthrough an NVIDIA GPU that I require for machine learning to a virtual machine on an M1 Mac versus just buying a laptop with an NVIDIA GPU. I don't even know if M1 supports eGPU, have not heard anything about it, and I doubt PCI passthrough or whatever you use for eGPUs works on macOS. Sometimes hardware does matter, and it glaringly matters (esp. w.r.t. CUDA).
Also consider gaming. Considering that GPU virtualization is not really a thing still, I cannot imagine, for example, gaming being easier on macOS, and the VM requires additional setup too.
Only real limitations are lack of ML because no server/desktop-grade GPU and some missing ARM-based docker containers. But the latter is slowly being resolved and the former isn't gonna happen on a laptop anyways.
Before, there were a multitude of reasons not to develop in a VM: Poor support for accelerated instructions on laptops; Slow CPUs; limited RAM; slow file-sharing between the host and guest.
The M1 architecture solves most of the issues.
Modern laptops almost universally support accelerated instructions now. This means less overhead, so doing everything entirely in the VM is worth it now. So no more dealing with slow file-sharing.
The speed of the M1 also means you're not limited compared to your desktop. Depending on the benchmark (especially any benchmark relying on CPU cache size), it may be faster on the M1 air than on a 5950X. Even in workloads where the laptop is slower, it is now fast enough.
Running docker containers in a VM on a 16GB *non-M1* machine is untenable. The M1's RAM is not only higher bandwidth and lower latency, but the compression and caching has improved so much that you can fit much more in that same 16GB.
In use-cases where you need more than 16GB, the M1's NVMe disk is so low latency that swap usage is indistinguishable in performance from RAM usage. So the laptop has no memory limit, for practical purposes (though the wear on the disk is increased in this case).
In addition, ARM architectures were a pain to deal with before, so most people emulated x86_64 and assume that you'd still have to do that on the M1. Nowadays, there is no reason not to run an ARM Linux in the VM. Most programs run just fine, and the remaining holdouts are a few Docker containers that haven't been updated. But even those aren't a problem because recent improvements to Docker greatly simplify running x86_64 containers under QEMU.
Combine all of this with the Mac app ecosystem (which has its problems, but is generally OK to use, especially if your other devices come from Apple), improved battery, the return of the good keyboard, and greatly lowered TDP, there really isn't a choice to make anymore.
The remaining reasons not to use it are basically as follows:
1) Compatibility with external devices, or work on embedded controllers
2) Anything requiring significant GPU compute (ML, etc.). But this would likely be done on a desktop rather than a laptop, which wasn't the scope of the question.
3) Disk capacity requirements (though external NVMe over thunderbolt mostly solves this)
4) Extremely multi-threaded work (video editing, etc.) where a desktop CPU outperforms the M1's multi-thread score.
MacOS is literally useless for me, because I depend on the Linux kernel.