One reason is for continued software support after Apple drops macOS compatibility for your machine. Intel Macs could be patched to run newer, unsupported OS versions (essentially hackintoshing your real Mac) but from my understanding that's basically impossible for Apple Silicon Macs.

> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years

I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.

The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.

I still haven’t felt much urge to upgrade my 64gb MacBook Pro M1 Max.

The biggest issue I have with it is macOS Tahoe. Guess I really should be checking out Asahi on it!

Apparently there's changes to boot that are more or less understood, but require some heavy work to handle.

Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.

Public information seems to describe the M4 GPU as mostly a performance-oriented refresh of the one from M3. M5 has brought bigger changes, not least neural/tensor accelerators on chip.

I just like the build quality and they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market. I bought one with 16GB RAM and a small black strip one the side of the screen (don’t bother me) for 230€ last week

I think the dev that was responsible for the bootloader or some security chip having the option to be opened posted on twitter a while ago. Pretty sure he implied or mentioned that this was what he was hoping for.

Edit: this was what I was remembering: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704

They are aware. They are also aware of the designs sitting in the cabinet right next to them in Cupertino that would make all the reverse engineering instantly unnecessary.

Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.

If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.

I don't think they care. It brings more customers to Apple.

IIRC Marcan mentioned something he found that had been deliberately put into the Mac boot loader that made booting alternative operating systems easier and perhaps making it possible altogether.

Certainly they know about it. There is no way they don't.

My favorite feature of the Touch Bar was that, if memory serves well, force push was right next to cancel in one of the IDEs, can't recall if Xcode or Intellij.

Yeah it could have been useful but I feel like they nerfed it from the start. Still wasn’t a big fan.

I was hoping it was a tease for a fully software defined haptic feedback based keyboard. There’s the obvious usefulness and coolness of that, and then the fact that you could make a laptop closer to the sealed clean-ability of a phone. Probably not quite submersible/waterproof due to ports and fans but able to survive a spill and be cleaned well.

They accept financial help on OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/asahilinux

There is no support for M3/M4/M5 GPUs, period. Asahi Linux is only installable on M1 and M2 Macs.

For me, it has been ready as a daily driver for more than a year. Battery life is shorter than macos but still long enough that I don't have to think about it (which I can't say about any x86 laptops, even when they use iGPUs).

The notable missing features are external displays (an experimental kernel branch is publicly available though) and the fingerprint sensor. That's about it, though. Given the amount of polish combined with the hardware, it's arguably the most polished Linux laptop experience you'll get.

Sorry, typo. Meant macbook air m1.

For me lack of thunderbolt is a showstopper, when it’s supported a lot of needed peripherals will be supported automatically. They have apparently been working on tb support since the m1 was released 4 years ago.

They could have done that day 1 of Apple Silicon.

It’s clear Apple went out of their way to make Asahi possible in a secure way. I believe people on the Asahi project have said as much.

macOS is a capable UNIX, but it's not Linux - which has since become the standard platform for most cloud/web/ML development.

As a developer myself who uses Fedora Asahi Remix as my daily driver, I can also tell you that Linux runs 2x faster (often much more) for everything compared to macOS - on the same hardware! And that performance gain is also important for my work :-)

They could which is ultimately why we need regulators in the EU to premeptively ban those kinds of anti-repair anti-ownership kinds of business decisions.

Consumers should be allowed to install whatever software they want on decides they own.

I read a great article that explained that. It's called "The one we're commenting on"

M1 and M2 hardware isn't going anywhere. They're still great machines. And progress will be faster once the project finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distros. They have a first alpha of M3 ready, they're just refraining from releasing it in that state because they're so busy with everything else they're doing - a key difference compared to when they first came out with alpha support for the M1.

Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.

But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.

Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.

But we have still the power of choice: moving consumers away from such closed platforms would affect their business.

Apple launched the M5 in October, they sell 2 devices already with it:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...

Will the gap remain just as big once earlier architectures are fully covered? I would expect some inertia bringing positive feedback in the development loop.

At least Apple usually supports their hardware for ~7 years so that's plenty of time to get Asahi working on newer Ms. I don't care too much about getting instant support but I definitely care about having the option to use my hardware more than 7 years

And that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had locked it down like they do on every other product then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the looming possibility that they'll just change their mind with future models.

Thankfully, hardware progress is relatively slow in a way that makes the m1 still a perfectly capable machine. Maybe we’ll have a future of “flagship community devices” where only one of every X is chosen as the supported option.

What do you expect when you nerds keep buying their closed systems?

> why, with all the crypto and tech money floating around, does Asahi not have a fully funded staff of fifty people?

Because all that crypto and tech money is trying to turn money into much more money, and Asahi isn't a great candidate for doing that

Perhaps you should make the first step towards funding?