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Comment by rr808 | Hacker News Reader

I'm waiting for this. I like low powered laptops as more of a terminal. I dont want the apple ecosystem, but I'm getting really tired of windows, high end chromebooks kinda disappeared, I have Linux servers at home. Do I have to wait much longer?

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An alternative that is available right now is to get an M1/M2 MacBook Air and run Asahi Linux on it. The older models are pretty cheap, but still quite fast. There are some missing features, but it runs really well. I've been using it as my home driver for over a year and it's really solid.

I am so tempted. Is battery life good with Asahi?

It's unfortunately not (yet) as good as in MacOS, but acceptable.

I have a think pad I use this way. Super light, battery lasts forever but it’s super low powered. However, I use Tailscale to connect to my beefy desktop at home with ssh/tmux and Zed remote editing. It’s perfect.

A laptop with a recent ryzen processor and a large battery goes a long way already. It is not as good as my m1 macbook but it is really good

If you can avoid eye rolling at the stupid name, the new Ryzen AI lineup (codename strix point) is really, really good. Very efficient.

OK interesting. I'm not interested in AI stuff, but looks like they are lower power too which is what I want.

Performance per watt is not far at all from M4. The Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 actually beats a M4 Max in e.g. Passmark per Watt (652 vs 625), and it's not much behind in other benchmarks.

With some tweaks, it can also be silent. Good ThinkPads are not far from the user experience delivered by the latest MacBooks, and they have the advantage of running free software and x86_64.

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