I’m sad because the WiFi on my M1 MBA is dying/dead and there’s no way to replace it without swapping the whole “logic board.” Apple also doesn’t support any USB WiFi adapters in recent versions of MacOS, so it’s now tethered to a wired network connection. I’m just waiting for the M5 refresh to hit at this point. Anyway, all that’s to say that at least some M1 hardware is going to to the trash heap soon :(

To add to that, they'll continue to be great machines running Linux even after Apple has bloated MacOS to death. Tahoe has made my M1 MBP feel significantly less snappy for no good reason.

Except they did with Wine, in a way. They got to the point where sufficient number of third party software developers target the common base between Wine and Windows (Steam/Proton), electing to have broader compatibility rather than catching all the newest Windows-only APIs.

I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.

First you have to convince consumers to give up on systems that work with support to development kits that are build it yourself with (lots of) caveats, which is why the year of the Linux desktop still hasn’t arrived.

Pretty much this.

This is my main concern. I applaud the effort that the Asahi team is doing, but there's no way that I would rely on a small team of inarguably passionate and talented hackers to maintain a system that uses reverse engineered software running on hardware manufactured by a company historically opposed to everything they're doing, even if they left this small door open for that.

It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.

Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.

The problem is, many "nerds" have little other options in hardware. Which ARM laptop would be the alternative? Even if you allow x86, which ones are as nice as the Macbooks? Then, there is the problem, that not everyone wants to be Linux-only in their setup. I definitely prefer macOS to W11.

I've never bought any Mac, but I've been issued several at jobs. At one company, I scandalized the Apple fans by wiping OSX and installing Linux on a 10th gen Macbook Pro.

So all of the nerds that care about open platforms stop buying their systems. Everyone else is going to keep doing it and they number us massively.

And then there's the fact that it's still a dark ending if the best hardware out there — even if we all refuse to buy it because we're on a moral high ground — is a closed platform that we have to refuse to buy.