The Asahi developers have repeatedly and publicly asserted that were it not for Rust they would not have been able to achieve the level of quality required for the project, at the speed they did, with as small of a team as they have. From the article:
> Rust is the entire reason our GPU driver was able to succeed in the time it did.
Nobody ever claimed that it's impossible to write these drivers in C -- C is "Rust-complete" in the sense that you could in theory write a compiler that translates any Rust program to C.
They're just claiming that Rust allowed them to write much higher-quality code, much faster, which seems plausible.
The existence of other ARM laptops is irrelevant; the reason MBPs are so good has little to do with ARM. Yes x86 makes the processor frontend more complicated but this doesn't make a big enough difference to come close to accounting for how much better the MBP is than its competitors. I would guess the biggest factors are Apple's ability to buy the entire run of TSMC's best process node, and the fact that they have a high level of competence at designing CPU cores and other hardware. The instruction set the core uses is just not that important in comparison.
Really?
What is so great about a locked down hardware, locked down software machine, that phones home to Apple all the time?
The only reason to get Macs is if you have a niche case of needing long battery life (most people don't, even if they say they do), but this is where the other ARM laptops are gonna also be good, without all the proprietary crap.
Even if you consider the hardware "tech jewelry", isn't it strictly better to have a way to run Linux on it instead of sending it to landfill? Seems silly to exclude a particular set of hardware from consideration for arbitrary reasons?
>isn't it strictly better to have a way to run Linux on it
In a perfect world, Apple would open source the firmware, which would let people just compile the linux driver for it. While Asahi project is cool in terms of figuring stuff out, ultimately its a lost cause because Apple will never be on board.