I was seduced by Apple Silicon after experiencing the exceptional battery life and performance. Those things are great, as are the screens and the speakers.
But I'm still excited about the Framework 12 because I don't love macOS. I don't need an alternative to beat Apple on every line of the spec sheet. I just need them to align with my values, support Linux well, and cross a certain "good enough" threshold. The latest laptops from Framework meet all of those requirements, and I'm excited to buy one after I've saved up enough money. I've missed Plasma for a long time. At the same time, I wouldn't even consider a MacBook Neo.
I'm constantly surprised by just how bad macOS is as a Linux user. I currently have to deal with it sometimes as I run my local LLM server on it and it's painful. That said the hardware is great, I run Asahi on another M1 MBP and Linux makes it the best laptop I've ever used.
> Until you need to repair something or change some hardware
How often does this happen, though? I have a 2013 MBP that still works perfectly. And I'm not even talking about the screen, which is ridiculously better than most new pc laptops. And then, of course, there's the touchpad, which, for some reason, is still unmatched in pc land.
It has 512 GB of SSD and 16 of RAM. This is basically what the new "upgraded" PCs people get at my office. In 2026, 13 years later.
Yeah, I'd use my decade-old mac any day rather than the crappy HPs at work.
in my day job doing enterprise web apps at a mac shop 16G became unusable for the engineers 3-5 yeas ago. i managed to weasel into them getting me a 64G M1 Pro in 2022 (now they won't buy us any higher than 32G). i'll probably still be using this thing in six years!
to be fair, given the choice between a decade-old macbook and basically any current windows box with same specs, i'd take the macbook every time. but, if i could put linux on it...
What web stuff are you guys working on that 16GB didn’t cut it a few years ago? I’m not questioning your statement, it’s just completely different world from my day-to-day and I’m curious.
In my case, the corporate MDM solution consumed so much resources that a 16GB MacBook was basically unusable for dev work (my personal Mac, also with 16GB in those days, was fine)
(Many) Windows admins have no idea what to do with Macs. It’s very easy for overzealous agent antivirus and firewall software to suck up CPU resources. Particularly when it is written by a company with no idea how to write Mac software, bought and installed by admins that don’t use Macs.
I had one set of “enterprise” software destroy the battery in my work Mac because of how it worked (and crashed). Meanwhile, my personal Mac was completely fine. Apple moving MDM related security software out of the kernel was the best thing they could have done for stability.
Probably building web stuff. This is how you end up with software that needs buckets of RAM. Because the dev never felt the pain. The classic “works on my machine”. Every dev I know works on the beefiest machines they can get their hands on.
Building web stuff doesn't require crazy hardware. Working on React and Vue apps, 16GB on a 6th gen Intel processor is fine today. Google Docs or Meet are more likely to cause issues.
Indeed. I have an M1 Pro from work, but I honestly can't stand macOS anymore. The machine itself is great, especially the touchpad. And I love the aluminum body. But I hate that empty window chrome eats up half the screen.
But now I'm typing this on a Lenovo P14 something-or-other, under Linux (I run Arch, by the way), and it's an all-around nicer experience than the Mac. The touchpad is somewhat inferior, but good enough. And the screen is actually better: it has a slightly higher resolution, but, most importantly, it's matte. It's not as bright as the Mac, but it's bright enough that I rarely set it above 20-30%. The machine is overall very snappy and quiet, but this is probably more due to my DE not going crazy with animations.
> The Framework is more expensive, slower (in most cases), louder (its fan ramps up quite often), has a pretty poor display, but it is a touchscreen, has a 360° hinge, and is more repairable and upgradeable.
> While the Neo is probably one of the easiest Mac laptops to repair in recent memory, the Framework 12 allows you to upgrade components including a DDR5 SODIMM, 2230-sized NVMe SSD, WiFi card, and even four modular ports around the sides. I outfitted mine with 2x USB-C, 1x USB-A, and 1x full-size HDMI.
> Until you need to repair something or change some hardware
The overwhelming majority of people would just go buy a new one. The downtime for ordering parts and waiting repairs has a price tag, likely greater than the laptop's price. Maybe that will change with how the prices of everything have been soaring lately.
By the time something breaks, you’re so far behind in tech that you’re not buying parts for it anymore. I used to be in the “must be able to fix/upgrade” and then realized in practice it never happens.
I've upgraded my desktops more with GPUs and power supplies accordingly, but old laptop SSDs make fine backup enclosure drives (no I haven't seen them lose data when unplugged) and upgrading RAM for larger models on a AMD Zen 2 laptop worked pretty great for me. None of these were needed, they were just nice to be able to do mostly before the higher RAM prices started.
The author does mention it, they just don't deeply analyze it. Frankly, it goes without saying. If you are considering a framework and reading articles about it, you almost certainly understand the tradeoff and it was mentioned in the article. Given the build quality of Apple and the option to lock in Apple care vs. the insane cost of computer parts, it isn't that important. Especially for an entry level laptop.
I’ve had MacBook Pros for as long as they’ve existed and, honestly, I’ve never needed a repair.
The only real issue I’ve had was when I dropped one and destroyed the screen. It was covered by AppleCare, and Apple replaced it.
I usually get a new laptop every 3 to 4 years and pass the old one to family members. My dad is still using one that’s about 10 years old and it works fine for what he needs. No issues.
So the repair argument is a bit hard for me to relate to. I understand things break. But I also think taking reasonable care of your stuff goes a long way. “A stitch in time saves nine,” right?
I guess I’ve replaced the feet on a few of them but that’s a $5 dollar kit from Amazon and a screwdriver and a little bit of glue…
And for normal wear and tear, like battery life, Apple laptops can get a battery replacement through the Apple Store for a pretty reasonable cost.
Anyway, Apple makes good product products that don’t really break from me or my family. I’ve been really happy with all their stuff.
I had way worse luck, for example, building a PC to game on. Two or three years and I had to replace the power supply and I think four years and I had to replace the SSD. Like those things were annoying. I’ve never had hardware from Apple go bad on me.
(Not since I had a Performa 5200 and they had to send somebody out to fix the logic board.)
Consider that maybe you've just gotten lucky? Laptop components do break. I haven't had Mac laptops in a bunch of years, but just off the top of my head I've had a keyboard key break (MacBook Air), and a mainboard die (MacBook Pro).
But if you don't need repairs, you might want upgrades. I have a Framework 13 from 2022 and I expect I won't be buying a full new laptop for many many years. It's great that you've been able to repurpose your old laptops for other family members, but every new laptop manufactured eventually becomes e-waste.
The whole selling point of the Framework is easy upgrades, thanks to modularity. It is a laptop that’s designed to be your laptop for at least two or three upgrade cycles, which, for Apple, implies a new laptop.
> "It is a laptop that’s designed to be your laptop for at least two or three upgrade cycles, which, for Apple, implies a new laptop."
In all fairness, most Apple users are technically illiterate (hardware-wise). And running upgradeable machines to optimum efficiency necessitates running a redundant setup, e. g. the main bird and a compatible support unit, usually an older one, but capable enough to take over relatively seamlessly for a while, enable diagnostics, facilitate maintenance, and so on.
Most Apple users have only one computer, with their secondary machine the iPhone, itself a neutered simulacrum of a pocket computer, just good enough to do some basic outsourcing of troubleshooting, and to place an order for the next computer of course.
People who gravitate to Frameworks offerings, or similar machines, are just of a completely different mindset than the typical Apple customer. As evidenced by threads like this one. That's also one of the reasons why the F-12 was a misfire. You don't "half-ass" machines built for long-term support. And in this climate, an entry-level LTS machine that's supposed to become popular needed and needs a different approach. Which begins with the form factor.
Apple's upgrade cycle (for me) has moved from 4 years to ~6 years.
Maybe upgrading the RAM or HD could be useful, but wear and tear on all components is a bigger concern for me than just one. My laptop is a critical part of my life. I can't risk being out of service for a week while parts arrive.
Its like buying a car... you can repair and maintain it to 200k miles, but the reliability will go down as more things break. Or you can buy a brand new machine to reclaim your time.
You are probably correct, but... there is still higher risk of unplanned or extended service time as the car ages.
For example, my 2018 Honda fit has a part recall. The service center needs the car the entire day and the tank to be less than 25%. This isn't something new cars would have to deal with.
It's not that uncommon experience with Apple hardware. I hand my old Macs off to family members, and currently in the house are 2, 4, 8 and 10 year-old MacBooks.
Only thing wrong with any of them is that the 10 year old one only runs about 20 minutes off the charger.
That said, I do skip all the problem models (no butterfly keyboard switches, etc), and ~12 years ago I did need a logicboard replacement under AppleCare
I'm in the same category as dbg31415. I've owned mbps since 2007. Never had any serious issues with them. I kept them for about 4 years each, before upgrading. My 2021 m1 has at least another year left in it.
Certainly if you're in the 0.01% of Apple purchasers that just have a terrible experience (broken device, out of warranty, etc) and one of your largest purchases doesn't work the way you want it, then that is terrible.
but I think the vast majority of Apple users have a stellar experience.
In a roughly 50 person company with refresh every 3 years, we send a macbook back for repair/replacement roughly three times a year. I would estimate that as a 2% hardware problem rate, 200x higher than what you quote.
Work computers have different usage profiles than personal computers. Employees move their laptop to and from home 5x per week, into offices, use them on trains, buses, etc. Work laptops are used 40+ hours per week. Whereas personal devices are closer to 5-20 hours.
Employees also take worse care of work laptops than their personal machines.
Even in the extremely rare case my device has issues. I can take the device to an apple store in any city I am in and they will hand me a loaner laptop while a professional performs the repair.
If your Framework laptop dies, you have to debug the problem yourself, wait for parts to arrive, and pray that the part you ordered is the only part you need.
This. Working with a mac again feels so limiting and the amount of stupid UX is actively hurting my productivity. Sure can be just practice, but the ability to customize my Linux machine exactly to how I like to work was so powerful.
There are also what I would call bugs that I don't understand how they are a thing.
Like how window/desktop switching is slow to change app focus.
My understanding from a friend who has one of these machines is that while 120Hz works, VRR does not and so the panel can’t clock down to save battery life when you’re just idling staring at a terminal.
(Not that I know all that well how good Linux machines are at clocking down anyway - my XPS and desktop both have VRR panels, but for all I know Niri runs them at full bore at all times - haven’t tried to measure, wouldn’t even know where to start)
Funny it’s the opposite for me. What if I want to switch between desktops of multiple users; easy with fast user switching, not really a thing in Linux (yeah I’m sure it can be hacked up, but bleh).
The biggest papercut preventing me from being productive on macOS is it's horrible window management which cannot be traversed with keyboard shortcuts like one does in WMs like bspwm and others on Linux and that absolutely insane ~500 ms delay in setting the focused window when moving between virtual desktops.
For some reason, Apple's ideal desktop experience is tailored around focusing on one application at a time. Which is certainly true for some workflows, but that's not me.
> For some reason, Apple's ideal desktop experience is tailored around focusing on one application at a time. Which is certainly true for some workflows, but that's not me.
This is a very weird-sounding take to someone who has used Macs for three decades and recalls that for most of that time they never even had a full-screen mode.
Apple's desktop experience DNA is still, for better or worse, deeply anchored to spatial arrangement of partially-overlapping windows (or non-overlapping, if screen is big enough and window small enough), driven by mouse (Expose hot corners back in 2004 were basically the end-game after which they haven't made any new significant changes to this, and haven't had to). Their full-screen/single-app modes are IMO a weird half-baked Windows-maximize alternative.
But yes, it's a very mouse-oriented, single-desktop spatially-organized-and-layered world.
>> For some reason, Apple's ideal desktop experience is tailored around focusing on one application at a time. Which is certainly true for some workflows, but that's not me.
> This is a very weird-sounding take to someone who has used Macs for three decades and recalls that for most of that time they never even had a full-screen mode.
Sorry about that. I should've clarified better. What I meant was that Apple's opinion of an ideal desktop is closely matching a cluttered desk where only the owner knows the position of something and the focus shifts back and forth from one primary task to another task/interruption.
Not sure I agree with this considering they have the double whammy of maximising giving you a new desktop, and also their default behaviour of shuffling your desktops to make sure you're disoriented.
The ideal desktop is a cluttered desk, where only the desk knows where it has stuck your tasks.
I'm stuck with macOS at work and these have also been the most painful parts of the experience for me. Luckily, I recently found Rectangle[0] and InstantSpaceSwitcher[1]. The former gives keyboard based arranging (though not focus; still just use cmd+tab for that) while the latter gives instant transitions between virtual desktops (including shortcuts for navigating directly to a target, rather than sliding over sequentially).
Oh, wow, thanks for that pointer to InstantSpaceSwitcher - looks like it might help with my biggest annoyance.
I have "reduced motion" switched on, so don't get the animated transition - instead there's a brief fade, followed by a few seconds where any input is silently ignored. So, if anything, it's even shoddier.
Honestly, the modern MacOS experience feels slightly worse than Linux from 20 years ago.
It is bizarro. With multi monitor sometimes I click windows and things don’t show. Dragging when more than one dialog is open is unpredictable. The corners are huge, even when maximized. Even the vaunted application bar is so weird - and windows is trying to copy it! Why can’t we use the entire bottom of the screen? Apps don’t show there anyway! You can’t get rid of it and replace it with something else? Just not allowed.
Stretch an app across two monitors? Not with that config! Display port? Oh no! Scaling cleanly? Never heard of it.
Seriously bad stuff. I’ve thought about writing a book with everything wrong with it. It’s bonkers.
cmd + ` switches between windows of an app. Unfortunately, that's the most awkward key combo imaginable on non-US keyboards. Still better than having to mouse down to the (hidden) dock, but only marginally.
GNOME does it right, and uses super + <the key above tab>. Works the same as the Mac in the US, but is infinitely better in the rest of the world.
(you might be able to remap it on macos using an undocumented 'hidutil' command, but I've never got it to work on an external keyboard)
Interesting. I used to daily drive <https://github.com/asmvik/yabai> for almost a year until a major macOS update broke it and I just didn't have it in me to diagnose the issue. I'll bookmark this for future adventures, thanks!
The first link is about arranging/tiling the windows. There are zero keyboard shortcuts to move the focus from the window on left to the window on right. It looks like someone used the equivalent of monitor codenames for keyboard shortcuts. Some operations don't even have a keyboard shortcut.
Additionally, while it does show how tiling is performed on macOS, tiling is not treated as a serious feature of the desktop. When "tiling" is used in context of window managers on Linux and BSDs, it implies that the windows are tiled automatically by the WM. It is done for several purposes, but ones that are important to me are:
1. Determinism (for the lack of a better word) of window placement. When I open n^th window, I know where to move my eyes. At the moment, this is arbitrary-ish on macOS.
2. Not having to tile every window manually. I only do this when I have a specific layout in mind. Default tiling behaviour can be configured by the WM's config file(s). At the moment, on macOS, I need to be explicit in tiling every window.
3. Keyboard oriented traversal between tiled windows. This is an extremely important part of a tiling WM. I can move my window or just the focus anywhere, without ever needing to reach for my mouse. Granted, I'm not a superhuman who can take advantage of this speed but I like control over my navigation of the desktop I am interacting with.
None of these are satisfied by macOS natively. Unless some app/plugin is used, which has no guarantee of working in future if Apple wishes to break something. On Linux, this is not the case, the WM is part of the desktop, even more so on Wayland.
This is about setting keyboard shortcuts for custom actions for applications, not window traversal on the desktop. Something like Ctrl+Left and Ctrl+Right which moves the focus between virtual desktops, but for the current desktop, moving the focus between the windows. I am not aware of this being possible at the moment.
> This is about setting keyboard shortcuts for custom actions for applications, not window traversal on the desktop.
The "All Applications" section lets you define global shortcuts. As long as there is a menu bar item for it (in this case, one from the Window menu) you can define a shortcut for it.
Wow, this feature is so broken on macOS (I have a family shared Air M2) since at least a full decade that it's really not what I would have take as an example.
OTOH, switching users on Gnome or KDE login managers is flawless.
It's funny how Apple has come full circle. Back in the 90s, when they were in deep crisis (before the second coming of Jobs), it was almost conventional wisdom that they should just stop selling hardware, and focus on their superior software. And here we are today when a lot of people lust for the hardware, but just can't deal with MacOS.
I'm a "Linux on Desktop" person, and the reason I use macOS on laptops is it's the best non-Linux OS which works great with Linux and comes with great hardware.
The funny thing is, I'm using macOS for ~20 years now, and there are "still" things which are way better on Linux. As a result, macOS is a laptop-only secondary OS for me.
I have a couple of Desktop computers both for work and personal use, and they run Linux exclusively, for 20+ years.
I'm sure a lot of the crowd that's using Windows as more than a browser OS would also find things to complain about. There's a ton of differences in how to do things at OS level, having to find other software, from time to time poor hardware support, different security mechanisms, being locked out of 80% of PC gaming by OS more than ARM... I guess the list could go on.
I'd partly count. I've always run a mix of Windows and Linux (these days mostly through WSL), but for whatever reason I find MacOS bothersome compared to a Linux desktop.
Strictly speaking, I'm not yet ready to move off x86 either, but it's getting harder to find high quality hardware in the PC world.
I switch between Linux and MacOS on a daily basis, and have been running Linux since Ubuntu Warty Warthog, and I don't get why people don't like MacOS. It's a fine OS and in some ways superior to Linux. And the Mac hardware is second to none. Power management alone is much better than Linux.
The thing about the framework 12 is that they are giving you an open device that is meant to be upgraded. The value of that is different to everyone, but to place it side by side hardware wise and try to compare it as if it is equivalent on the software side to the closed source bullshit Apple has on offer feels at the very least a false equivalency
I don't believe that they have (yet) released a new display for the 12. But the 13 has gotten several upgrades, and I think the 16 just got it's first. So, most likely eventually yes.
Yeah if your Macbook smells like that you need to be contacting Apple. That's obviously a manufacturing flaw. I've had multiple M series Mac pros from M1 up M5 and none of them have ever had an unpleasant smell.
The reply was likely referencing Apple's infamous "You're holding it wrong"[0] rebuttal to design flaw criticism - as in, that's what Apple would say if you contacted them.
I've never had a smelly Mac, and I've owned maybe 10 different ones across personal and various work laptops. And 90% of devs I've ever met have used Macs and none of them smell either, so it's zero out of maybe 200+ in my personal experience.
Reminds me of when Dell laptops started smelling like cat urine. Dell denied it for a long time then admitted it was an issue with the manufacturing process.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-24741832
My Mac Mini M4 has a distasteful smell when I pin in with AI prompts. And MacOS isn’t super great either. The Remote Desktop options suck and if I leave mine running for a week it can’t function without a reboot.
The tech industry might actually be worse than it was 20 years ago.
Software has been riding on the backs of the insane hardware growth curves for the last 20 years. I miss the days of reading about how software engineers had to delete standard C libraries in build time to shave extra memory so they can stream more of the level in.
I also fully acknowledge that change starts with me, unfortunately those changes don't pay the bills.
I can almost excuse Apple for not being concerned about the relatively niche “mac as a server” use case. The thing that boggles my mind is how their keyboard and autocorrect experience get steadily worse with each release. This is the primary way to interact with their flagship device—the thing that generates an enormous share of their revenue. Why go out of your way to make that worse?
100% I’ve used iPhone voice dictation for years. My voice has r changed, but its speech to text makes me sound like a stroke victim. AutoCorrect is not quite as bad, but it’s definitely regressed over the years.
Not just Zoomers. I'm nearly 40 and also thought it smelled weirdly good. Though there's a difference between the original LCD and OLED models, with the latter's smell being much weaker and more like generic plastic off-gassing.
Confirmed: Gen1 LCD smelled about the same as the gen2 LCD units, but the OLED version doesn't smell as strong/good. I still huff it. I'm also over 40.
On an M4 Macbook Pro it's mild and faintly sweet but not really pleasant the way the LCD deck is. Requires a lot of heat for a long time to become noticeable. Vent is less convenient for sniffing.
Some conformal coatings, which protect PCBs from dust and moisture, can emit ethyl acetate or butyl acetate if they weren't fully cured. The smell is sweet but absolutely revolting.
There's always something with apple, from the breaking keyboards, scratched screens, antenna-gate, cracking gpu solder, ...
The comparison itself seems moot, comparing a consumer-grade consumable device built out of a phone, to a more sustainable, modular, upgrade-able device.
battery life is not only factor of the laptop. having moved from Linux (ran gentoo quite minimal...) to freeBSD default install makes my laptop last about twice or thrice as long.
the art of idle software and efficient energy consumption is not landed in windows and Linux takes too much work..
mac does it not too bad + having good batteries, but thats not to say a laptop with a lesser battery should be trashed by a bad OS.
mobile operating systems are usually much more tuned to being good with battery life. I suppose Linux and perhaps windows do not seem to have laptops as main target even for 'desktop' distros or versions.
i am not sure why btw but i read some articles on here about software not being idle on background properly a lot of times (fancy terminals etc.). for me tho 'it just happens' because im unsure how to measure it precisely..
maybe my linux had a big or wrong setup u know, but it was running very lean. Freebsd runs about as lean tho.
cannot be bothered ofc to go back and measure
it is some hp-elitebook withh a ryzen and iGPU in there.
If i run things like Claude it sucks my battery. But if i just run my editors code all day myself its all gd..use firefox as browser on both. other then that its x,i3,hx,rg,fd,fzf. thats about all i use..(so u see i hate it when any laptop empties soon.... i hardly use anything of it). usually i dont even open x/i3.
I run openbsd on an old latitude and that tracks. I mostly have only application active at a time. The others are idling. I believe on Linux, especially with DE, there’s always some polling or scanning going on.
That also means that any desktop Linux user who goes to play on OpenBSD or FreeBSD and runs a full-fat desktop environment that they like will probably discover similar battery life to what they're used to.
I love Windows Arm. My latest machine, an Asus Zenbook A16 is great. 18 core Snapdragon X2 extreme, 48 GB of memory, and OLED screen--all for $1699. It feels very fast, faster than my 24-core Xeon desktop (though benchmarks would put my Xeon ahead) and has great "all-day" battery life.
You can remove the screws on the bottom and replace the battery (which is screwed in, too, no glue to peel) or the M.2 NVME which is enough "servicability" for me....
You should try Linux on it someday, to really see what the CPU can do, night and day difference :)
With that said, I'd probably prefer a Windows laptop over a MacBook too, their hardware is great, but the software is just so awful. But whatever you do, don't get Microsoft's hardware, I got a Surface Pro 8 some years ago and throughout my ~25 years of computing I've never had a worse laptop, and just 2-3 weeks after the warranty went out, the entire machine bricked itself during an update and it no longer boots at all, basically threw 1500 EUR into the sea with nothing to show for it.
I got a Surface Pro 7 soon after it was released and it was really great for the price. A good size to work on, decent battery, and actually worked well as a 2-in-1 device. The keyboard was a bit flimsy but still good enough for on-the-go work. Ran Windows on it for a few years then installed Linux and made it be a manager for my media setup, still working fine today.
I would happily jump ship for any competitor that offers solid AI inference benchmarks at a competitive power efficiency, but as far as I can tell Apple owns that market by a pretty big margin. I’m sure someone will point out if I’m wrong.
Owning a human is much more problematic, and anyway a human’s peak efficiency might be higher, but humans have to sleep and take breaks so overall probably not.
Humans also tend to hallucinate a lot, but it’s not polite to use that word for them. With humans we say they were wrong, because offending a human reduces performance and you can’t reset their contexts.
I just have a desktop at home that I run inference off of. It is a great setup and I don't find myself wanting to inference models directly on my laptop.
That’s what I would do too, but I haven’t found a desktop build that can rival a Mac Mini or Mac Studio on performance per watt. I haven’t looked super hard, but it seems like Mac is in a different ballpark.
I mean, once it's a desktop, watts are pretty cheap, so it's a bit strange to optimize on that factor for the desktop form factor. For laptops it makes a ton of sense.
If I was optimizing solely for cost I wouldn't use a desktop in the first place. Watts are cheap, but they result in pollution and noise (e.g., fan) or you need some costly alternative. Also I just value efficiency.
I think the Framework 13 is something that completes reasonably with a MacBook Pro.
I don't have one but would consider a Ryzen AI based one instead of a MBP. The Intel based ones have upgradable RAM and Mac-competetive battery life on Linux. The shared RAM on the Ryzen is useful for local AI though.
Is it feasible to run Linux on the Apple hardware? Seems like that could meet your requirements, except possibly "align with my values." I saw https://asahilinux.org/ but don't know how usable it is, or whether the long battery life and hardware support is preserved.
I love the Asahi project and I'll probably keep my oldest M-series Mac around to continue to play with Asahi. But even for the oldest Macs it supports, the feature list is not quite complete. The way Apple does a lot of things is bespoke and involves a different division of labor between firmware and operating system than conventional UEFI systems. It's hard to support. I don't want to be required to wait years for features like full support for Thunderbolt docks, and I also want to give my money to a company that proactively supports Linux (e.g., sending hardware to kernel developers, FreeDesktop graphics driver developers, DE maintainers, and distro maintainers in advance of the release of new products) rather than always buying used or giving my money to a company that merely tolerates Linux support.
Again, I love the ambition of the Asahi project and what they've done. They're impressive hackers, and thousands of people will doubtless get years of happy Linux life out of their work— maybe including me! I have no complaints for them, and no wishlist I want to bring to them. In fact, I think maybe I should send them a donation or a kind email or both upon their next release.
But I want to give the bulk of my financial support to a computer vendor who offers me first-class, day-1 support for software environments that make me feel happy and respected. The Asahi team can't turn Apple into that by themselves.
Every generation of Mac has its own requirements that Asahi has to support through a painstaking process of reverse-engineering, so it lags behind quite a bit. Realistically it will probably be 2030 before you can use it on any current-generation Mac.
The current leadership team at Asahi decided to prioritize upstreaming their existing work over reverse engineering on newer systems.
Given that you can score a used M1 Air for half the price of a new Macbook Neo (and have Linux be supported), it's an even better value compared to the Framework, for those who prefer Linux.
Many people prefer to get new devices so that they can be covered by Apple Care. That completely removes Linux as an option because Asahi Linux never supports any of the recent models.
"Buy this computer, it's several generations behind and a bunch of stuff doesn't work" is not a ringing endorsement, even if it does work well enough for you.
Just to add, I also do my work from an M1 MacBook that I crammed Asahi onto. I got it used for a few hundred dollars last year and it's a perfectly fine experience (for me).
We’re already almost halfway through this year. A demo half a year ago isn’t shipped. This is like when Apple demos something at WWDC that doesn’t ship until 9 months later in spring the following year.
"Hey can you remove MDM from this Macbook so I can install Linux?"
Is there no MDM for Linux clients? How do the big tech companies with Linux developer machines (Google, Facebook, etc) manage their inventory? Do they roll their own MDM?
IT departments can mandate tools like ninjaone and kolide, which let them run queries across the fleet of devices, and (as I understand it) basically gives them root-level remote code execution.
The corporate VPN (or equivalent) can then perform 'posture checking' requiring that the tools be installed and working before connecting to the corporate network.
Obviously, 99% of Linux users have root on their device so nothing stops them wiping it and installing something new from scratch. But then they'll fail the posture checks until the device is returned to the approved setup.
Kolide admin provides a web UI for osquery so you can query things. It allows remote osquery queries but not remote code execution. You generally pair it with CrowdStrike Falcon.
Kolide does a spot check like "is falcon sensor running" but if the user logs in, has the session token created, and then disables whatever the session token would still be valid.
Also Kolide doesn't actually count as an MDM. Has a bunch of missing features. I recently evaluated it.
It's a nudge. Like "update your OS". You could also just be logging into a machine after a few weeks away. The software tells you what you need to update before letting you in.
"On a personal note, the most interesting part here is that I did the release (and am writing this) on an arm64 laptop. It's something I've been waiting for for a _loong_ time, and it's finally reality, thanks to the Asahi team. We've had arm64 hardware around running Linux for a long time, but none of it has really been usable as a development platform until now."
i've tried getting linux to run on a 2018 MB Pro (intel/nvidia based). Even after a ton of research and installing a couple "compatible-ish" distros, I couldn't get it to work, and gave up. And then further reading suggested I was always going to live with a semi-bricked machine. I just wanted a simple writing and couch surfing laptop. But the version of MacOs running on that old hardware is so slugish, it's painful.
A Fedora live USB should just boot on an Intel MBP (maybe you have to hold Alt? Don't remember). Then you can install it to disk. I was happily running Linux on a 2015 model until recently, still a good machine for most things.
>I was seduced by Apple Silicon after experiencing the exceptional battery life and performance.
DHH showed the Framework laptops with latest Intel Panther Lake SoCs having similar battery life to AS Macs (~14 hours) under Omarchy linux while gaming benchmarks put their iGPUs in line or better than AMD's Ryzne SoCs at gaming.
The era of long battery life being the USP feature exclusive to Macbooks is slowly going away, especially if AMD pulls a similar move and heats up the competition.
Once the chip shortage from AI datacenters bubble pops, we could see even better SoCs from Intel, AMD, and even Qualcomm and Nvidia could join the ARM laptop battle in a serious way.
The (memory) chip shortage saga is not going away for a few years. Most fabs are going to be capacity starved. Apple will happily pony up billions to TSMC to set up a new plant in exchange for exclusive capacity. No other laptop manufacturer can do this. This will put them in an even more advantageous position. In all honesty, the Neo couldn’t have arrived at a better time for them.
Also, a completely new fab takes up to five years to come online. The best bet is investing in increasing throughput of existing RAM plants, but that isn’t fast either. The other is buying RAM from Chinese suppliers which are less oversold (but not much, and not for long anyway).
> Once the chip shortage from AI datacenters bubble pops, we could see even better SoCs from Intel, AMD, and even Qualcomm and Nvidia could join the ARM laptop battle in a serious way.
EPYC (the 2nm AMD chip being produced at TSMC Arizona) is still going to support the datacenter demand, not consumer devices. You and I are still screwed. Apple is the only behemoth, IMO, that wields significant power against other trillion dollar companies. Not Acer, not HP, not even Dell (I don’t think). This is my personal opinion, I don’t have specific facts at hand to back it. Just a strong intuition.
But hey, govts might step in at some point and say - we need to put a cap on how much supply data-centres can buy. Since computers and phones are the backbone of modern society. There may be some rationing happening down the line.
That, in the x86 universe, has some heavy penalties in performance terms. I got myself a fanless “student” laptop (another name for “rugged”, but sells for less) and, while performance is acceptable, it ain’t fast - like a 10 year old i3.
But I'm still excited about the Framework 12 because I don't love macOS. I don't need an alternative to beat Apple on every line of the spec sheet. I just need them to align with my values, support Linux well, and cross a certain "good enough" threshold. The latest laptops from Framework meet all of those requirements, and I'm excited to buy one after I've saved up enough money. I've missed Plasma for a long time. At the same time, I wouldn't even consider a MacBook Neo.