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Comment by auganov | Hacker News Reader

Never owned an Apple product and generally don't have too great of an opinion of this ecosystem.

But the M1 MacBook Air is perhaps the first Apple product that really caught my attention. A fan-less (without overheating issues) ultrabook with crazy batter life outperforming every comparable offering out there for $1,000. Pretty much the best deal on the market, unless you have specific issues with it. Which in my case is the keyboard. And general dislike of the ecosystem, but I already see it as completely locked down, this one being more so doesn't change anything for me. If it had a trackpoint and a few more keys I would get it despite hating the platform.

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> generally don't have too great of an opinion of this ecosystem.

+1.

> Pretty much the best deal on the market, unless you have specific issues with it.

For example, if you try Linux or BSD, and you'll find none of the peripherals works, and the community reverse engineering efforts will take years before getting basic functionality, and even then, the battery will only last for 2 hours and nobody besides Apple knows how exactly the power management mechanism works, thus PM will forever be broken. I learned my lesson the hard way on Windows tablets.

There was a time when "non-x86" is automatically developer/hacking-friendly (ancient examples are SPARC, MIPS, and those ARM Chromebooks were probably the last examples...), now the landscape has changed. I always want to use a non-x86 machine as my desktop, but perhaps it's time to abandon this idea.

AMD was originally going to release a desktop ARM CPU along with the x86 ryzen. The crazy part was they were meant to be pin compatible. AMD abandoned the idea due to complications and to focus on ryzen instead. We were so close to ARM desktops, probably wont see one for another 8 years.

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/181867-amds-project-sk...

Wow... I hasn't heard of the project before, knowing its failure makes me unhappier ;-(

BTW, In my dream, I hope there exists an ATX compatible motherboard and a standard specification for its CPU-board, so that you can fit an ARM machine inside an existing computer chassis, and allowing you to upgrade the chips by simply swapping CPU boards. On paper it looks possible, but in practice there are some potential problems (based on my limited electronics knowledge): signal integrity (PCI-E should be solvable, but DDR3 is extremely problematic) and heatsink. However, a compromise to put DRAM on the CPU board (soldered or socketed) should be fine, and heatsink is hopefully solvable if the CPU is power efficient. The HoneyComb LX2K workstation [0] is essentially designed based on this idea, it has a CPU board on top of a Mini-ITX board, and it doesn't need heatsink.

Still, without many high-performance ARM CPUs for selection, it's essentially only a big Raspberry Pi...

[0] https://www.solid-run.com/nxp-lx2160a-family/honeycomb-works...

People who don’t use Macs keep saying it is completely locked down but that has never been my experience. Windows feels far more locked down to me. It is much easier to use Unix software on Mac than on Windows. File formats tend to be easy to read. On Windows there tends to be a lot more binary formats aimed at keeping the competition out.

Mac software is usually easy to install. In PC there is all sorts of authentication and verification. Digging up a long license key for the OS is not a thing on Mac.

Those butterfly keyboards are no longer shipped, they reverted to their prior designs.

As a counterpoint...I've been using Mac laptops for 10 or 11 years after having grown up staunchly anti-Apple and previously using Linux for some years. I will not be buying an M1. I was already about to ditch Mac after the escape key debacle, but they realized their mistake and lured me back this year. Well, no more. I'm not willing to support the vendor lock-in and privacy invasions with the recently discussed ocsp phoning home.

Sorry Apple, this is a bridge too far. I'm out.

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