I don’t see anything particularly wrong with Apple’s developer relations. You certainly might hope they would give us more than they do, but you always hope for that. Bottom line is, Apple gives us what we really need — a market.
Today’s presentation was almost devoid of discussions of software… because it was about hardware. It’s not like WWDC doesn’t exist. You can hear about Apple’s software as much as you would care to.
“Apple doesn’t care about pros anymore” is a perpetual refrain, but it seems to go through phases of being more true and less true (there are many kinds of pros, so it’s never going to be all true or all false.) We’re in a middle state at the moment, IMO, mainly due to the uncertainly about what the higher end pro Apple silicon story will be. Still, these current laptops look awfully good for many “pros”.
Linux has a lot of nice points and some pretty good distos that are improving all the time, but that’s not near enough to displace Windows or MacOS.
The average consumer is more likely to switch to ChromeOS (which I guess is Linux underneath, for now) than to any Linux distro.
You're also describing Mac with that one. But worse.
You can't release a driver for Mac without Apple's permission. Apple won't allow Nvidia to release drivers for newer cards. Nvidia has stated this on multiple occasions.
Literally what? This isn't WWDC. It was an event for presenting new hardware. There was zero chance of it being software or (especially) developer focused.
And it always follows the announcement of the release at WWDC around July.
Going out on a limb here, but as a firm believer in open systems I think it's fine to buy an M1 Mac to the extent it's guaranteed to run Linux (or OpenBSD, or whatever) without any problems.
System that can't do that are the ones to really avoid.
The last few months have been watershed times for both Apple and Microsoft. Starting with Apple, their developer relations are starting to crumble in a major way. Not only have developers stood up against their highway robbery, but other companies like Microsoft have one-upped them just for the hell of it. Today's presentation was almost completely devoid of any software discussion, which is really what puts the nail in the coffin for me. A 5nm laptop chip will always be more powerful than the 14nm one I've got, but at least my chip runs the software I want. Without a commitment to replacing 32-bit libraries, updating their coreutils or making a package manager developers actually want to use, I think Apple's message is clear: We're pivoting away from the 'Pro' market and heading straight into 'Prosumer'. To their credit, it seems like they've made a fine prosumer laptop.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has usurped their enthusiast community with Windows 11. The strict CPU requirement in particular was a bad move on their behalf, and it's going to leave a lot of their install base out in the cold. While I don't expect a whole lot of consumers to pivot to Linux, I can imagine a lot of developers making the switch. Many devs already use WSL, so they're pretty familiar with Unix systems as-is. The Windows-to-Linux onboarding experience is getting better and better as Wine is continuing to close the gap in compatibility. Especially for the gamer/enthusiast market Microsoft traditionally caters to, the value proposition of using Windows is diminishing by the day. Windows 11 does nothing to change that, and actively impedes your workflow if you're on a Ryzen CPU.
I think for a lot of people's workflow, Linux will be the only thing left that "just works" in a few years time.