Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.
I think repairability is important, but I don't think it will stop those laptops from being popular.
A single bad key or trace and any Apple laptop is basically toast. $800+ to have Apple replace the top cover.
Maybe an independent shop can do it cheaper, I don't know.
The biggest issue I have with it is macOS Tahoe. Guess I really should be checking out Asahi on it!
Where?! I just cheeked the used market in Austria and 2020 M1s go for at least 350 for the 8GB RAM models and 450 for the 16GB model. Your 230 for the 16gb one fells more like a rare exception but not them norm everywhere.
Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.
In fact, the current state of M3 support is about where M1 support was when we released the first Arch
Linux ARM based beta; keyboard, touchpad, WiFi, NVMe and USB3 are all working, albeit with some local
patches to m1n1 and the Asahi kernel (yet to make their way into a pull request) required. So that
must mean we will have a release ready soon, right?Edit: this was what I was remembering: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704
Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.
If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
They're a fantastic hardware company. But my admittedly very limited experience with Apple software, from iPad to their streaming service website, has been miserable. The UX doesn't work for me, the software just doesn't do what I want. Understandable, Apple very much designs their software to work for a particular workflow they come up with, if you like that workflow it's great, for someone like me it's miserable. But I would gladly buy their hardware if I could freely run an OS of my own choosing.
As opposed to what hardware, then? Because this is pretty much how most other drivers became a thing in the first place. Linux has come a long way and due to it "winning the cloud" many hardware vendors started properly supporting it, but this was absolutely not the case for the longest times.
Just why?
I love my Thinkpads, I really do but they are bulky, loud and the battery doesn't last very long. They are not an option for many people.
This reasoning is essentially just as true for any other laptop maker Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Framework, HP etc might also decide to bomb linux support at any time.
^ This
Also, the security teams at Apple must be watching Asahi closely from an exploit-perspective. They are basically holes that must be patched.
The happy path on the Mac was provided so the talent capable of booting Linux on it could take the happy path that hides all of the stuff Apple would rather not have a bunch of reverse engineers sniffing around.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
So depending on what you want to run, not only did Wine catch up bit also surpassed.
I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.
And then there's the fact that it's still a dark ending if the best hardware out there — even if we all refuse to buy it because we're on a moral high ground — is a closed platform that we have to refuse to buy.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.
Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.
At least PCs are open to a greater degree, despite Microsoft's attempts otherwise.
Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!"
The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
I was hoping it was a tease for a fully software defined haptic feedback based keyboard. There’s the obvious usefulness and coolness of that, and then the fact that you could make a laptop closer to the sealed clean-ability of a phone. Probably not quite submersible/waterproof due to ports and fans but able to survive a spill and be cleaned well.
Because all that crypto and tech money is trying to turn money into much more money, and Asahi isn't a great candidate for doing that
But I would gladly match my 1% of my monthly income to anyone here who can pledge the same 1% who makes over $500k a year. So that would be my $20/month vs their $416/month.
If that's true - I'd say MacBook air M2 is probably the new sweetspot - depending on how cheap you could get an M1.
My impression is that until now, MacBook air M1 was the sweetspot.
With the attention this project is getting, I'd be surprised if they can't get the equivalent of a small startup's seed round, just by crowdfunding. Do they have all the funding and resources they need or not? that's really my ultimate question. I know you can't just throw money at these things and make them happen faster sometimes.
That said, my question to those interested is why? I've been a daily user of both Ubuntu since 2005 and Mac since 2012. There are some edge case differences but for the most part they are so similar that I nearly always run the same code on both without modification. Clearly I'm missing something important but I'm curious what it is. Thanks in advance.
The notable missing features are external displays (an experimental kernel branch is publicly available though) and the fingerprint sensor. That's about it, though. Given the amount of polish combined with the hardware, it's arguably the most polished Linux laptop experience you'll get.
Apple is probably the most mainstream supplier of ARM computers at the moment, but Valve is likely to soon have the most mindshare amongst ARM-shippers who actively support Linux. I expect that will improve ARM support in the ecosystem, which should be good for Asahi also.
It’s clear Apple went out of their way to make Asahi possible in a secure way. I believe people on the Asahi project have said as much.
They have been watching talented folks waste their lives away reverse engineering hardware/software that they possess all the schematics of.
If they really wanted to help, all they had to do is send a single e-mail with a zip file.
The distortion field is unbelievable.
Consumers should be allowed to install whatever software they want on decides they own.
As a developer myself who uses Fedora Asahi Remix as my daily driver, I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS - on the same hardware! And that performance gain is also important for my work :-)