> A Mac with subpar support for a webcam, energy saving, suspend/resume, the trackpad, brightness/volume controls, etc is not a laptop, it's an expensive paperweight.
There are Mac desktops as well. That said, I'd say the list of mandatory components on a laptop is:
- Decent GPU Drivers
- Workable power management with sleep/ awake
- Trackpad (this should be straight forward)
The webcam, and brightness controls are stretch goals. I can't imaging the trackpad is vastly different from currently shipping ones. The Webcam might cause some significant headaches since Apple secures that fairly tightly.
The onboard wifi modem is likely worthless, from what I recall, many of them are even in Windows laptops due to proprietary drivers.
Most Windows laptops thankfully use Intel Wi-Fi. Apple is unfortunately completely married to Broadcom. There are open drivers for Broadcom Wi-Fi, at least not-the-newest ones, but they do suck.
Good, sounds like things have improved a lot since I was using Linux. Sucky drivers are a starting point, last time I was on Linux as a daily driver, I had to use a PCMCIA card with a binary blob from Broadcom because the internal wireless card was dead.
Hopefully with a little bit of money and some enthusiasm from the team, they'll be able to make more progress.
A lot of people bitching about this being a waste of effort, but all the things they do here have follow on effects. If they improve the Broadcom drivers for the M1, much of that work will directly benefit everyone else on Broadcom.
There are Mac desktops as well. That said, I'd say the list of mandatory components on a laptop is:
- Decent GPU Drivers
- Workable power management with sleep/ awake
- Trackpad (this should be straight forward)
The webcam, and brightness controls are stretch goals. I can't imaging the trackpad is vastly different from currently shipping ones. The Webcam might cause some significant headaches since Apple secures that fairly tightly.
The onboard wifi modem is likely worthless, from what I recall, many of them are even in Windows laptops due to proprietary drivers.