I picked one up to tide me over until I can get the Mac Studio, and it has been amazing. I have to be somewhat disciplined about resource use – closing tabs, unused apps, etc. But it's an excellent machine by every measure at this price point.

Most shocking is the battery life:performance ratio coming from a maxed out 2017 MacBook Air. I really liked (and still like) that computer, but there's no comparison in terms of performance. If I run the 2017 machine pretty hard, it'll die after 3.5 hours or so. The new model lasts about twice as long, but out-performs the old one by a wide margin.

The only downside with the M1 I got is the lack of RAM. Even so, 8GB has been surprisingly sufficient for a lot of tasks. Most people would be just fine with this machine.

Me too, especially given that the M1 Air is (i) fanless and (ii) relatively friendly to Linux.

In the US you might also want to consider ThinkPad X13. With some discounts, it can be a good alternative if you prefer a standard architecture. In the EU sadly ThinkPad is sold via a third party reseller which has an atrocious customer service.

For around $600, depending on current deals, you can get a Surface Laptop Go which has a nice screen and just works on Linux. Avoid the baseline model if you can as it has an eMMC HD which is quite slow.

> relatively friendly to Linux.

What makes you say that? Apple has never been friendly to Linux, and the M1 having zero support porting Linux by Apple continues this trend. What's more disturbing is that NVIDIA is friendlier.

Asahi Linux is relatively easy to install and is pretty usable, even at this early stage. The key to Asahi's creation is the open nature of Apple's boot loader. No, Apple isn't supporting Asahi as such, but neither is it actively or passively standing in the way.

One could place a bet Asahi will get to such as stage at some point but at this stage you have to be a pretty die-hard tech nerd with a corner case usage scenario to claim it's "pretty usable" though. The speakers don't work, the USB ports won't work with 3.0 devices, the webcam doesn't work, the display brightness isn't adjustable, the touchbar doesn't work, and everything renders on the CPU since the GPU is unsupported killing the battery life. Eventually these things may be well supported or they may not.

The only response I can offer to this is that I can browse the web, read email, and edit text with it. That's probably 85% of my computer usage right there. My MacBook Air doesn't have a touchbar, I can generally get by without video or games so CPU vs. GPU rendering and sound aren't critical, and I haven't needed to use a webcam (on that machine, that is) for months. Yes, USB is slow and battery life is shorter. But I use the Mac side most of the time anyway. Asahi is a fun experiment for me.

It doesn't support the majority of the hardware and Apple hasn't provided any specs.

> Apple isn't supporting Asahi as such

That isn't Linux friendly, that's Linux indifferent.

I prefer x86 machines but M1's bootloaders are unlocked and Apple made some changes to facilitate running Linux: https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1471799568807636994?ref_...

I still prefer open architectures, but the situation is better than with previous Macs, Chromebooks and even some PCs.

Apple did something that they don't know why, so that meams it has to be to support Linux!

The majority of the hardware is not supported, and Apple has not provided any specs. Just having an unlocked bootloader is not Linux friendly.

If you’re ok with Apple/macOS, this is the correct answer. Picked mine up at MicroCenter for $839. It’s been perfect for my workload.