Fair enough, Germany isn't all of Europe, though of course it's part of it. Still, Germany, which completed its nuclear phase-out by permanently closing its last three reactors in by 2023 even while energy prices were sky-high. I know this firsthand as I was living there, and our energy bill jumped from around 100 to 250. Belgium followed a similar path, shutting down one reactor in September 2022 and another in February 2025.
If you are OK with the closed apple ecosystem, sure, but I mean, 20% is not that much for 99% of the population.
Don't get me wrong, I really admire what apple has done with the M CPUs, but I personally prefer the freedom of being able to install linux, bsd, windows, and even weirder OSes like Haiku.
> but I mean, 20% is not that much for 99% of the population.
As long as you're ok being tethered to the wall, and even then, guzzling power.
The whole point of Apple Silicon is that its performance is exactly the same on battery as tethered to the wall AND it delivers that performance with unmatched power efficiency.
Its the same on pure desktop. Look at the performance per watt of the Mac Mini. Its just nuts how power efficient it is. Most people's monitors will use more power than the Mac Mini.
My “fancy” Windows work laptop has 45 minutes of battery life, while my M3 MacBook Pro will go 14 hours compiling C++ or running JavaScript and Docker images, and do so twice as fast as my work laptop could. I’d say you get what you pay for, but my work laptop was around the same price as my M3.
I wouldn’t be opposed to going back to Linux. But once you stop looking for power sockets all the time and start treating your laptop like a device you can just use all day at any moment, it’s hard to go back.
My company literally has four different apps “protecting” me now, including two different malware scanners. Neovim runs like it’s a 286. That said, before they’d installed everything it still wasn’t any faster than my Mac.
I was just looking at an HP laptop with a snapdragon X processor that claimed 34 hours of battery life while watching video.
It'd be tempting if I had any idea what the software compatibility story would be like. For example, the company I'm contracting with now requires a device monitor for SOC2 compliance (ensuring OS patches are applied and hard drive encryption remains on). They don't even want to do it, but their customers won't work with them without it.
Surprise surprise, a quick check of the device monitor company's website shows they don't support ARM architecture devices at all.
It may still work. The prism emulation is pretty good, almost on par with Rosetta2.
I have the surface laptop 7 with the X elite in it. The only thing I've ran into that outright didn't run was MSSQL server.
It's not my main machine, that is still an M4 Macbook pro but I hop on it occasionally to keep up with what Windows is doing or if I need to help someone with something windows specific. I've got WSL2, Docker, VSCode, etc. all running just fine.
It's decent, but not amazing. Feels a little slower than my M2 Air I have but not much, most of that is probably just windows being windows.
Would be nice to be able to get Linux running on one of these
Sadly, I'm doing dotnet work, including a legacy webforms codebase. Not running mssql server directly, but lots of other tools- visual studio, sql server profiler, sql server management studio, that sort of thing. EVEN IF all of that worked, I have already verified from the company that supplies the device management software that they don't support non-x86 architectures.
Bummer. They are neat little laptops, and with the X elite 2 (assuming they end up in some windows laptops and aren't exclusively for the new android chromebooks) it's about the closest we'll get to a MacBook on Windows for now.
I wish Microsoft put more pressure on vendors to support ARM.
I keep hearing this, but I'd venture that a majority of those making it will most likely end up on Windows full time anyway. Which is not materially worse than MacOS, no matter how much MacOS is shooting themselves in the foot.
Even if it was better than lima (and the builtin posix/unix environment), which: it ain’t, it doesn’t nearly make a dent in the mandatory online account, copilot shit and all the rest.
If you like Windows, you’ll find it better with WSL2. In fact, I see many developers at my org who claim they’ll switch to Windows (from Mac) when we make it available internally.
However, if you love Mac, you'll never find Windows palpable no matter what.
You may like Windows better, but WSL2 is just a virtual machine with all the downsides (slower, no docker) that brings . In fact, on my windows PC I still use WSL1 for that reason.
As far as I understand, the only Linux you can install on an M CPU is Asahi linux. Apple is not doing anything actively, but is also doing nothing to help linux be ported.
20% is just the performance difference. They noted the low cost for an Air model as well. What would an equivalent be at that price point? Would it have the same passive cooling and weight features?
How about running your Linux and Windows etc virtually on a Mac? From what I've understood, people say it works great. But I haven't any experience myself.
Agreed. Even as an enthusiast if I could take the performance hit and keep the M4's battery life, I'd do it in a heartbeat just for the ability to run linux.
Huge majority people don't really case about whether an ecosystem is closed or not. Power users, such as developers, actively chose Macbooks, and those users are most likely to care about that.
You really think an average person shopping for a computer at Bestbuy cares about installing a different OS on their machine?
The majority of the population is running a $300 laptop from Amazon. They certainly aren't popping used car money every 2-3 years like the real enthusiasts are.
> They certainly aren't popping used car money every 2-3 years like the real enthusiasts are.
Sorry, I don't get the reference. What sort of expenses are you referring to? For the price of a used car you can get pretty much any workstation money can buy.
Linux is different. Decades of being tied to x86 made the OS way more coupled with the processor family than one might think.
Decades of bugfixes, optimizations and workarounds were made assuming a standard BIOS and ACPI standards.
Specially on the desktop side.
That, and the fact that SoC vendors are decades behind on driver quality. They remind me of the NDiswrapper era.
Also, a personal theory I have is that have unfair expectations with ARM Linux. Back then, when x86 Linux had similar compatibility problems, there was nothing to be compared with, so people just accepted that Linux was going to be a pain and that was it.
Now the bar is higher. People expect Linux to work the way it does in x86, in 2025.
Linux runs perfectly on MIPS, Power, Sparc, obviously ARM - cue the millions of phone running Linux today, RiscV, and at least a dozen other architectures with little to no user. It's absolutely not tied to x86.
This doesn't pass the smell test when Linux powers so many smart or integrated devices and IoT on architectures like ARM, MIPS, Xtensa, and has done so for decades.
I didn't even count Android here which is Linux kernel as first class citizen on billions of mostly ARM-based phones.
Most leagues face the same issue: just one to three wealthy clubs dominate, winning around 70–80% of the time, which makes the competition less exciting. The German Bundesliga is one of the starkest examples: Bayern Munich has taken 16 of the last 20 titles.
Because of ridiculous transfer rules & markets - if these would be killed, there would be much more competition, and it was that way, 20-30+ years ago....
You can see this in most everything: 5 companies dominate IT, 3 companies dominate sodas, 3 companies dominate credit cards, etc. I think it is a byproduct of the way our current system works.
* Windows 10 (IoT LTSC) will actually be supported to 2032.
* Microsoft is forcing hardware requirements that are just there because reasons as Win 11 IoT/LTSC have lesser requirements.
* Because Microsoft sold Win 10 till 2023, so it is basically shooting it down after 2 years.
* Because Win10 still has 40% of market share.
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