- No jank at all. The most comfortable-to-use laptop I’ve ever had, desktop latency wise.

- The ability to use nix-darwin for configuration management. It may be incomplete, but there’s no Windows equivalent.

- Higher single thread performance than any other device.

There's no doubt that Apple makes good hardware. But you can find decent hardware elsewhere, even at lower cost and with better configurability.

Everyone betting on the same horse is usually a bad strategy.

By the way, here's what Linus Torvalds (the creator of Linux) thinks about using the M1:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linus-torvalds-would-like-to-u...

> But you can find decent hardware elsewhere, even at lower cost and with better configurability.

The problem is, you pay the same price for a Thinkpad/Elitebook and you get ridiculous gotchas like missing wireless antennas (at most you can find 2x2, if you're lucky). Or the configuration you like doesn't come to your country, or the vendor doesn't allow custom configuration for your country unless you buy 10+, etc.

OTOH, I pay the premium, I get what I configured, with top notch small specs (antennas, wireless chips, etc.). You can't find a spare 40mm SSD for your Elitebook after three years, but Apple will service your device happily.

If you get the said SSD from the vendor, its quadruple the price, so it's Apple's price territory again.

At that price range, there's no advantage in hardware prices between Apple, HP, Lenovo and Dell. They're equally cheap/expensive. So, IMHO, you pay less on the long run for an Apple laptop, which you can use for 7-8 years without problems.

Maybe so. Anyway, talking about Apple's hardware specs completely misses the point that started this entire subthread.

I’m not sure this is true? The $1000 version has absolutely ridiculous performance for it’s price class. To the point it’s nearly as good as my desktop system.

My desktop system is a 24-core Zen 2. The M1 shouldn't be faster, and I'm certain the difference is almost purely a matter of software, but in reality the M1 certainly feels a lot faster.

Yes, the desktop has higher throughput. Of course it does. But that doesn't mean I don't feel a fraction of a second's lag whenever I do basically anything, and on the M1 that just... doesn't exist.

FWIW in a benchmark of a lua parser my friend is writing my M1 beat my 5950X Ryzen by a factor of 2x. According to him the L1/L2 cache makes the difference.

So it's not just a matter of feel.

On the other hand, my i7 16 inch MacBook Pro consists of purely lag. Half of the time it’ll be the ‘kernel process’ so I don’t even have a clue what’s causing it.

If we are talking about ARM64 devices specifically, the prices of the new M1 products are actually very competitive.

Is the M1 keyboard significantly better than MBP (with the touchbar)? because that keyboard was crap. To be absolutely fair, good keyboards are hard to come by these days, and that's also why i'm using a logitech from 2006 via ps2 adapter.

> Is the M1 keyboard significantly better than MBP (with the touchbar)?

Yes. It's slightly deeper, much more resistant to dust and one can write with very low effort, but with crisp feedback. It allows me to write at least 10% faster with no effort. I similarly use an old Microsoft Sculpt Comfort at office and Logitech G710+ at home.

Good keyboard is something hard to find.

- No dumb LEDs keeping you awake.

Of course this would anger the PC crowd.

Nearly all the HW items have equivalent or superiour replacements, and a fair amount are dependent on the Apple ecosystem. Without Apple's ecosystem it's a good system but overpriced, and that's before you run into Linux compatibility problems.

For example, take the monitor - there are monitors with higher refresh rates or more resolution (Retina does 'only' 6K). Also, Mac OS colour processing has no good equivalent elsewhere, so you won't see as much benefit from Apple's monitor without Mac OS.

M1 is nearly a year old now, and the replacement (M1X, M2?) is rumored to be released in a couple of months. So far no other SoC has been able to come close to even the current-gen M1 in terms of performance + efficiency, with a remarkable x86 emulation on top.

On the software side, Apple has the unique position to force every developer who cares about their user base to rebuild their stuff for a completely different CPU architecture.

M1-based products are anything but overpriced. The Air’s price is comparable to modern flagship smartphones.

The context of the thread is the idea of "avoiding Apple ecosystem while still buying M1" (See paulcarroty's post and my reply). If you install Linux, you don't get their Rosetta x86 emulation or any advantage from 'forcing developers', etc. etc.

I was more focused on the "equivalent or superiour replacement" part.

At this point in history, you can't avoid Apple's ecosystem if you want to use their ARM-based laptops/desktops unless it's a hobby of yours. And it's sad, because this is the best hardware I've ever owned.

Don't higher density displays take more power? Can we actually start making laptop displays that cap out at 1080 or 1440p?

For me (and many out there) DPI is more important than slightly higher battery consumption which becomes less of an issue with other components such as SoC mitigate that with more optimized power usage.

Retina Display when it first arrived was literally THE reason I started switching to Apple ecosystem as it was exponentially better to look at that screen, and I'd even pay more for a 4K display on a MacBook if they brought it.

My comment was for laptops primarily. On the desktop side, I'd not buy an Apple branded system unless I need macOS specifically, but on the portable space, their systems are superior to most of the offerings.

They're not EliteBook/Thinkpad tough, but they're more than enough unless you're going to handle it rough.

I can calibrate a screen regardless of the OS I use with the help of a good calibration device, and having a good panel is a good start for that. On desktop, there are possibly better panels for pure color accuracy, I won't argue that.

OTOH, on the portable space, their hardware formula is pretty robust.

I did think more about desktops, but I think same applies to laptops. I think that if you tilt the field by not allowing Mac OS (that's the context of the thread) the top PC laptops are better, since you lose many Apple advantages given by integration.

Worse, it would take some time for me to even trust Linux on M1 laptops to not fail exactly when I need it - that's the nature of reverse engineering. Since they don't have the specs, the only real test is lots of people running it for some time and reliability is more important to me than specs.

As for monitors, Apple's colour advantage is more than good calibration - the entire ecosystem can handle 10bit HDR. That's something AFAIK you won't get elsewhere.