I feel like we’ve gone full circle. For decades Apple hardware sucked and was badly overpriced, but you paid the price to enjoy running Mac OS X. Now Apple makes amazing hardware (especially laptops) but the drawback is that you have to run macOS on them.
I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.
That's going the opposite direction not full circle. Hardware bad, OS good is now hardware good, OS bad.
Without knowing your specific workloads, I'd imagine an M2 Pro Mac mini (which is supported by Asahi) is still plenty fast.
That's not a full circle, a full circle would be if Apple later returned to badly overpriced yet enjoyable macOS again
If Asahi Linux had support for Thunderbolt and DP alt-mode I would be running it today, but those are dealbreakers for me unfortunately.
I'm donating to them and hoping they eventually get those implemented.
If you don't need the battery life of a MacBook and you're happy getting a desktop device, there's plenty of machines running new AMD chips that are just as fast as an M series mac, if not faster. And they'll run Linux with no compromises. Check out Bee-Link (https://www.bee-link.com/) for some mac-inspired hardware.
>I really wish Asahi Linux had more support, I would have bought a couple M4 Minis.
Me too. Just wonder instead of reverse engineer to SOC to get Linux running? Why can we just use the Darwin Kernel (which is suppose to be Open Sourced right? ) and build something like FreeBSD desktop for the M3/M4? Would that be more long term viable than reverse engineering SOC? Is there any project in that direction?
Actually, save power efficiency, Apple is still behind the curve and has been for decades. Nvidia has reigned uninterrupted for longer than I can remember and regularly beats Apple in raw performance on available hardware, and AMD has regularly topped benchmarks for years.
In fact, AMD and Nvidia have been the de facto high-performance combination for so long, that I can't remember when it was any different. But prior to that, it was Intel and Nvidia. Apple was never a real high quality hardware competitor. The only thing they ever had to offer were products produced by a production process almost no one replicates.
Razer started used CNC unibodies for their laptops 14 years ago, but they're maybe the only company I can think of that does so other than Apple.
And MSI has shipped high performance laptops for so long that even Apple used their laptops for comparison during the M-series chip releases in the MacBook Pro.