I imagine there are still some rough edges (and it seems like distro choices are probably a bit lacking at the moment if you prefer something outside of a few specific mainstream options) but given how niche ARM support was before the first M1 machines, the progress that's happened so far is honestly pretty astounding. Given that the iterations from M[n] to M[n + 1] seem less large than the initial leap from Intel to M1, it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop.
As for Apple "supporting" Linux, my perception is that if they wanted to make it harder than it was for the people working on Asahi to even get this far, they almost certainly could have. It seems like they're probably doing the same thing that most laptop vendors do, which is not explicitly support it but also not go out of their way to block it either. For a company with the reputation and history Apple has, I think that's a pretty huge win for the community, and even as someone who overall has a somewhat negative inclination to purchase from them, I have to admit that they seem way less hostile to Linux on their ARM machines than I would have predicted.
I imagine once a lot of the cleanup and maintenance is done on what they have, they'll be in a better spot to accelerate support for other SoCs, and it probably won't be half a decade before the M6 or whatever is supported.
All said, Apple could just spend a tiny tiny amount of their warchest and just ship some goddamn drivers for Linux a la Boot Camp and save the Asahi team the time divining it from the tea leaves.
Them's the breaks.
> it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop
https://media.ccc.de/v/39c3-asahi-linux-porting-linux-to-app...
The jist is that Apple don't want to prevent you from running your own bootable code on a Mac (which isn't true for iPhone and iPad, sadly), as long as you don't compromise the security of Apple's bootloader, code, etc.
This year is a lot more competitive than any of the past ~4 years for premium laptops.
The asus expertbook ultra even has a much better screen, a much better keyboard, and a very similar haptic trackpad. Weighs less than a 13 inch macbook air too. There's cheaper options too that are close to as good (minus the screen).
PTL’s highest SKU is comparable to the base M5 for only multicore perf at double the power use in every benchmark I’ve seen. It lags significantly behind in single core.
But I’d love to see a benchmark showing otherwise.
Just the latest I’ve seen https://youtu.be/7OxE7FwJPJM?si=b5T0PbmhUD1TXhX4
But I can find none that have PTL actually anywhere near M5 without strapping a much larger battery to the device
It's been five years since M1 and Intel has never been competitive in single-core perf per watt with Apple. It would be surprising if it changed.
Battery life in sleep (and in general) could be better, but on the whole I've been quite happy with it.
Only Apple has been laser-focused to give us this experience.
I do hope that it’s fixed though. I haven’t followed Windows laptops that closely, but my work laptop from a few years ago does lose battery surprisingly quickly when “sleeping”.
I was about to write a post mourning how much I wish Panther Lake really could compete, but lacked the memory bandwidth to offer a real challenge. But supposedly it can go up to 9600MT/s which would bring Panther Lake to ~150GB/s.
I am curious what the NPU on M5 has. The 50 TOp/s on Panther Lake is... fine. Apple is really seeing huge success with MLX, with an adoptable software stack that the PC world is super struggling to deliver.
I was on an M2 Macbook Pro with Asahi and it was great. It's really hard to fault Apple's hardware for most use cases.
I'm currently on a Strix Halo laptop (HP Zbook), which is about as expensive, and the hardware is great, but power efficiency and build quality lag leagues behind by Apple. A 4000 euro laptop still feels like a cheap toy.
Currently in a brief macos phase before I can be issued my Linux laptop at work. It's so clunky. A major annoyance for me right now is the lack of MST multi-screen over USB which means my nice daisy-chained home setup is fine on my near-decade-old Dell but doesn't work at all on the fancy Macbook. They have the hardware to support it, they just don't.
Generally the hardware with Apple is amazing but I'll take the hit on that and things like battery life just to get an OS that feels like it's on my side.
I'd maybe consider Asahi for home use but I'd be wary of it for work. Perhaps in a few years.
The only time Apple supported first class Linux on their consumer hardware was with MkLinux, and that was when everything was going down in flames and they needed to survive somehow.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
Buy the mac, try Linux in an hour, take it back if you don't like it.