> Though I will say, my workload didn't see the sort of absurd speedup that some reviewers ogle about.

Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster.

It’s almost as fast as a modern AMD/Intel desktop, which is really amazing in a laptop form factor. But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.

Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.

> But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.

I don't know. The M1 Macs (we have two of them now) accomplish what Intel/AMD spent 2013+ trying and largely failing to do - maximizing battery life without compromising on performance. The suckers are fast. They're not the fastest kits of hardware out there, but they're certainly within shooting distance.

They do this without having a bulky chassis, multiple fans running constantly, or needing to be tethered to a power chord. They've been available for close to a year and a half now(?) and, unless if I've missed something, Intel/AMD still don't have a viable competitor.

Now, I completely agree that the software environment still hasn't completely caught up. But for my use case that's ok - give me a working shell terminal, web browser, and word processor, and I'm happy. I'm also lucky enough that I have a very well equipped remote system that I can push my actual work to. If I had to use my laptop for development, it may very well be a different story, but that's the trade off you make for being an early adopter.

> Same here. It’s a very efficient laptop, but the way reviewers repeated the Apple marketing hype made me expect something even faster.

You make it sound like the reviewers mindlessly regurgitate Apple’s material. Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s have numbers very close to Apple’s figures.

Now, you get diminishing returns in a lot of daily tasks so perceived performance is not proportional to benchmark scores (a 2x speedup when you open an application is not very meaningful when it took 0.5s anyway). But it does not mean that the reviews were inaccurate.

> But if you’ve been using anything other than last-gen Macs to compare against, the M1 feels more like catching up to current performance standards as opposed to the media narrative about being faster than anything else out there.

More like leapfrogging. Which is fine, AMD and Intel are doing it all the time and the world is not ending for either company.

The narrative is that it is faster than anything else at equivalent power consumption. Sure, you can get overclocked i9s that are faster, but not in a laptop with a ~1 day battery life.

> Same goes for the graphics. It’s really impressive for a laptop but the slides about the Mac Studio performing like a 3090 are a joke. At least the media has started to call Apple out on some of the exaggerated GPU claims.

We’ll see. As usual, the truth will be in the numbers.

It’s not completely absurd that something larger than a 3090 with vastly better memory bandwidth could be competitive. The M1 is going to be worse at things like ray tracing, most probably, but the 3090 itself is not more magic than M1s.

> Actual proper reviews like Anandtech’s

This. They wrote that M1 takes second place after Ryzen, while needing way less power.

I feel that the M1 still has the real distortion field working for it. But on the other hand I just bought the new iPad Air (my original Air still works fine but I thought 10years was enough). The fact that a decent pro laptop class or mini desktop class CPU fits in a tablet with no cooling and gives me over 10hrs of useful work is kinda crazy.

> I also still don't have a comfortable dev experience on the M1

Interesting. What is that you dev?

I'm not an apple developer at all, but my dev experience with both Java and Go has been pretty frictionless.

My Air is my secondary machine, but that's only really because my workstation is a 16 core/64GB AMD machine and does our product build and test run in about half the time the Air does, which itself is half or less the time previous laptops did. But in the few months that this machine was in transit, the Air did a great job.

> I'm not an apple developer at all, but my dev experience with both Java and Go has been pretty frictionless.

Same. Java, Go, and web dev is my every day. Not an exactly fair comparison, but my first M1 MBA replaced a 2017 MBP, and it cut my java test suit times in half. 16GB wasn't quite enough RAM for all I do so now I'm a 64gb MBP M1.

I've thought about building a Ryzen desktop and just running linux, but I don't want to split between two machines and need to be mobile.

> Interesting. What is that you dev?

I'll chime in here. I have the same experience (Julia, R, JS, and a little bit of C/Python). I have an M1 laptop that I use constantly, but I'm lucky enough to have the opportunity to remote into my working environment.

If I had to use my M1 laptop has my main development machine, I would think very hard about trying to pick up a T14 or something similar.

Can I ask for specifics on what the limitations are?

Early on there was docker weirdness for some of my work, but after a few components got updated it’s been great, better than any x86 laptop I’ve used.

Library compatibility issues, in particular with Julia and R.

It's gotten much better over the last year, but I still run into enough problems that I try to keep all of my actual development work on a remote machine.

A few years ago I was using R on OpenBSD. OpenBSD somewhat aggressively removes deprecated features as compared to Linux and macOS. It was really eye-opening to see how bit-rotted some parts of the scientific / numeric ecosystem are. I ended up submitting some trivial PRs deep in the stack for use of system calls that have been deprecated but not removed from Linux for a decade or more.

Once again it pays off to work in a Java shop :).

I ran into some of these. Many npm projects that use native plugins to node don't (or didn't) work on M1. Had to spend a bunch of time finding alternatives. For my needs though things are now working.

Have you tried AMD? I don't know if they're suitable for your work, but I personally think AMD is great. Works well with Linux. They're definitely more open than Intel.

And I felt (perhaps incorrectly) that you get more horsepower for your buck with AMD.

Of course, M1 is pretty cool too.

I always buy AMD, but for another reason altogether. The process market could very easily become a single-player monopoly. Maybe less today, but that was certainly the case for a very long time. Thus, I always try to buy from the second- or third- place market leader. Diversity in hardware, just like software or biology, is good for the environment as a whole.

Love me some AMD, running them on all my machines currently.

However on desktop where power usage isn't an issue, Intel 12th gen performance has pulled ahead of AMD. Theoretically even on laptops too but I suspect they have the common problem of powerful Intel cpus in laptops where they cooling just can't hack it and they throttle to make it worthless getting top end Intel. So I believe AMD is still better on laptops presently.

I don't disagree, but it is worth pointing out that Alder Lake released Nov 2021, one year after Zen 3 (Nov 2020). It'll be interesting to see what happens in the fight between Zen 4 and Raptor Lake. Right now feels like an awkward time to build a PC.

Add in ATX 3.0, ATX12VO 2.0, the new ATX12VHPWR connector, the I_PSU% feature, the beginning of PCIe 5.0, and the beginning and relative immaturity of DDR5…

… right now I say to wait until the end of 2022 for a build. Let Zen 4 and Raptor Lake come out. Then realize Zen 5 and Comet Lake are likely another very real step above that the following year, though at least you’ll be able to take your new PSU, memory and GPU along with.

Never mind the reality that Apple is just getting started.

Granted, you can’t wait forever. I did a build last year, and now get to see how things shake out as all the new stuff comes available over the next few years.

Currently, AMD is more expensive for the same performance.

Also, the AM4 socket is at the end of its life. Intel’s LGA 1700 is expected to be used for two more CPU generations, so there’s an upgrade path.

That would be a departure from the norm for Intel.

Do you have any sources? I was unable to find any info on Meteor Lake and board compatibility.

That said, AM4 is a dead end socket, so building right now is a coin toss between the 12900k and the 5950x as far as price and performance. I'm not sure the 13900k is going to be much of an upgrade.

No solid information on that third generation https://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-12th-gen-Alder-Lake-S-wi...

I just bought a 12400 mostly because it was 15% cheaper than the 5600x and it comes with an iGPU. You're right that it's unclear whether 13th or 14th gen will be an upgrade or possible, respectively.

> It's a great secondary computer, but unless you're an Apple developer, you should expect friction.

I moved 100% of my python web development to my M1 Max. Everything is running native. Zero downside. I run Debian ARM in Parallels VMs for my test suite, and deploy to both Graviton and Intel AWS instances.

> but I'm enjoying linux (again, for the type of work I do).

Same. Can't wait for Asahi Linux to be upstreamed, it'd be a great combination of price/performance/battery life/usability.

The real beauty of M1 architecture isn’t the raw speed, but the computing power per watt. This allows apple to throw a decent bit of wattage for solid performance. And very little wattage for perfectly acceptable performance (and amazing battery life). But it’s not blisteringly fast.

Would you be willing to share the details of your PC? I’d really like to build a custom Linux machine with the latest Intel CPUs, but I’ve never built a PC before and I don’t know which components are Linux-friendly.

I did no specific compatibility research, because it’s more than likely going to work out of the box with distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, and you can do some work to get things going on distros with less hand holding.

It’s an i9-12900k on a Z690 motherboard (tons of these, I got a gigabyte model). I got a terabyte of nice NVME and 64GB of memory; made it out the door for about $1600 with a case, taxes, and everything. I didn’t buy a graphics card because I don’t need to drive anything other than some text editors and browser windows, and it’s really not a buyers market right now. I’ll probably pick up something in a year or so.

If you’ve never built a computer, highly recommend! It’s really not difficult, though can take time and it can be frustrating. Really rewarding when you boot it for the first time, though.

This is extremely helpful, thank you! This is pretty much the sort of config I'd want (fast CPU and lots of RAM). I'm glad to hear you've had a good experience with this so far! :)

Historically network and graphics drivers (and maybe sound?), and sleep mode were the things to check for Linux support. These days, all three major graphics manufacturers have Linux drivers, and I haven't heard any problems with networking for a long time. Sleep is probably still an issue... And most everything is already included for you (networking, sound, graphics) on the motherboard. So just check how good Linux support is for the motherboard you'd like to buy (and any PCI cards you'll add, if any).

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the advice!

Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken, but you should be fine with most parts for most Linux builds. The main thing I would say is if you go with a dedicated graphics card go with Nvidia as their driver support is much better (though I’ve used AMD cards with no issue on Linux also). Outside of that and maybe the rare motherboard feature that doesn’t work quite as you expect (and noting that pretty much all first party software monitoring/control tools are built for windows) you should find little issue with making a build suitable for Linux.

I have two PCs at home, one with an AMD card and one with an NVidia card. I'd characterize the NVidia card on Linux as "Windows-level hassle" (i.e. small, but present) while I think about the AMD card about as often as I'd worry about USB mouse compatibility (i.e. haven't given it a thought).

EDIT: small edge to AMD for graphics cards, but both are fine if using a distribution like Ubuntu

Yeah, like I said with my own anecdote I also didn't experience any issues w/ AMD graphics cards. Actually after searching a bit maybe I had that backwards and it was actually Nvidia that was the problematic one. I haven't had problems with either, but have read about problems and I thought it was AMD, but perhaps I was mistaken.

That's really good to know! I assumed that it was generally hit-or-miss. I'm relatively new to using Linux (Ubuntu 20.04) as a daily driver and would like to keep things as turn-key as possible. At least with laptops, you seem to only get that if you're selective with which configuration you purchase.

Laptops are definitely more hit or miss given the proprietary nature of each manufacturer layout. Because PC building is so common on desktops you don't have to worry about idiosyncrasies to nearly the same degree. If this is your first build you should just expect some things escape your purview and thus you may have to troubleshoot a thing or two, but there's nothing fundamental about Linux and desktop hardware the precludes a turn-key experience.

Awesome. I’m okay with a bit of tweaking to get things going, I just want to avoid a consistently poor user experience or instability. It sounds like a sensible custom Linux PC build should be (relatively) smooth!

I agree with several siblings that if you're building a desktop the only thing you really need to think about with compatibility is graphics card, because the driver situation is complicated.

For best compatibility (and lots of other reasons) I recommend Fedora - it usually has a much more up to date kernel than most other distros.