The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)
yuka.dev97 points by signa11 11 hours ago
97 points by signa11 11 hours ago
Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.
Apple is a vertical company. They don’t WANT to sell you hardware. They don’t want to sell you software.
They only want to sell the whole package. You might as well ask the Catholic Church to start a rap music 8-track only record club. Same probability.
The hardware is a means to an end, and nothing else to them.
Is the hardware so much better, or is their integration superior? macOS can be bloated but still more efficient, right?
I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
Same here. Have a Base M1 Air. Will trade that for M7 Base Air maybe if I can drag this one for a while. I can't go back to computers with noisy fans. It seems too last generation since the M1 launched.
The Intel period of MacBooks allowed a more direct comparison. Don't think macOS itself is the differentiator vs Windows.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
A significant portion of the Apple Silicon efficiency gains would have come from shifting away from discrete GPUs. At that time it was very normal for the integrated GPU to be minimal (slow) because people who need it get a discrete GPU. Things are very different now because we push far more onto the GPU now vs. back then, which made Intel and AMD scale them up out of uselessness. Now most people don't really need a discrete GPU because the integrated ones are fast enough to even handle some gaming.
their single core perf is just much better than anyone else
Not just single core perf though. Very efficient idle TDP, efficient all core boost, efficient all core TDP, and efficient mid-high performance tier accelerator (GPU, NPU) TDP.
They also seem to have the biggest memory pool attached to a GPU at a “reasonable“ price don’t they? There’s a reason people really want Mac Studios.
Apple is one of the biggest companies in the known universe. If every single person on earth who wanted to use Desktop Linux were to buy the most expensive Mac Apple sells in order to do that, the revenue would not be material relative to Apple's existing size. Please exit your bubble.
Who said anything about desktops? The ARM datacenter is being taken over by Nvidia's Grace and Vera CPU products. If Apple supported OpenBSD, Linux or Solaris, they could destroy Nvidia in CPU performance and kick Graviton and Ampere to the curb forever. But instead they've left the low hanging fruit as another trillion dollar market for Nvidia to eat up.
Weird to buy machine with company actively hostile to anything open to run open stuff
Is Apple taking steps to purposefully blocking open stuff, or are they just pointedly ignoring it and continuing to develop new hardware? I am genuinely asking, I don't know myself.
edit: speaking mostly about macOS here, mobile OSes are much more locked down
For desktops and laptops, the latter. But for phones and tablets they do not want user control. And even where they do allow it, even a tiny effort in hardware documentation that would make it so much easier never happens. So it's quite hostile overall.
Yep, good point. Their mobile OSes are annoyingly locked down, that is for sure...
The fact that they still allow this would point towards the latter. They are quite capable of locking it down like they do the iPhones.
And I suspect they will lock it down in a year or two.
It was only really open to ease the transition between intel and arm.
Give it up. People have been predicting this for 15 years.
You can’t have a development machine locked down like iOS. As long as the Mac is the development machine at apple it will need to be able to run arbitrary code.
It will still run arbitrary code... Within macos...
But they'll remove support for other OS's
I think you might be forgetting where you are. They call it "Hacker News" for a reason.
I wonder if AI could make this work? Have there been any attempts to have AI do the work needed?
So we get a good article finally on someone actually doing impressive hacking and the response is “give it up, let AI“?
Where is the challenge or the fun or feeling of accomplishment in that?