This is a great deal. I use a 2017 intel MacBook Air as a daily driver for browsing and light coding (takes about 15 minutes to generate a stable diffusion image).
It only has 8GB of ram, but is still chugging along.
Has anyone used OpenBSD or Asahi Linux on the M1? I have no interest in running MacOS on one but if the battery life is good it might make an excellent laptop for Emacs and light web browsing purposes.
OK, but what did you find after a few cursory searches? Many of the results would lead you to HN threads... where you would find that quality you are looking for.
I think the consensus is if you’re ok with Fedora’s arm64 package selection, don’t need external monitor or TB, shut down your computer every time instead of closing the lid to sleep, you’ll get really good performance on Asahi Linux but not as good battery life as on macOS
This seems to have a slightly shorter support lifetime than you'd normally get with a Mac. https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772 is all phrased in terms of "when Apple stopped distributing them for sale", which happened in March.
It's funny, lots of people complain about it, and I tend to be sensitive to performance issues, but honestly I have zero complaints. I've been using a min spec M1 Air for years and it works great for me. I mostly browse the web and use VSCode remote tunnels and for those purposes it's by far the best laptop I've ever used.
Well, yes, if you mostly do things which don't require much memory, then the device's low memory won't be an issue.
8GB is not a lot in this day and age, though. I paid for the upgrade to 16GB in my current (2016 13" MBP, now seriously showing its age) and am very glad I did.
You’re missing the (slightly better than) 2K OLED monitor. Seems like you can get something like that for $200, which will downgrade your hardware significantly. The linked computer probably uses more power than a Macbook for the same task even if the Macbook is running its display.
I don’t love Apple’s gated ecosystem (which isn’t as bad on Mac as on iPhones) but this thing is an absolute steal for what it is, especially considering 90% of what people on these days is in a browser or electron app.
A little while ago I got a $250 Ryzen 5 laptop with 16GB of ram and a HD display. The keyboard is awful and its not great at gaming but it has a lot for the price.
You need to start thinking outside the box with ram. These new chips have a unified bus and so swapping to disk is not nearly as costly as it is on normal machines.
Yes, it will suffer compared to an M1/2/3 with 16+ GB of ram but again for 649 you will be running circles around a comparative x86 PC even if it has more memory. Asahi Linux is a huge perk, too. Battery life and chassis strength are also things that should not be discounted. This is a chromebook on steroids.
So the solution to running out of RAM is more wear on the disk? Doesn't this thing have soldered-on storage that you can't replace when you wear it out?
Isn’t that’s even worse? It would cost almost 0 to add more RAM and make it a durable machine. What Apple does here is basically the definition of planned obsolescence.
We still have a ton of these in use for general office work and they are still more than fine. For light use these should be good plenty longer, but I would not pay full price for them anymore.
Yes. It'd be limited more by the disk space taken by 4K footage than anything else, but a decent external drive with USB 3 or Thunderbolt 3+ would cover that.
> Please don't use HN primarily for promotion. It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
walmart is the largest company in the world and will have tentacles in bloody everything, likely through 3rd party marketers and a whole lot of automation.
entirely possible that other ad companies flagged HN as a juicy target for selling Apple products, and that ended up on a large, weighted list of marketing targets. awful lot of tech-bro programmers on HN.
lower priority means just a couple of posters / AI bots, instead of a full-court press with dozens of well crafted accounts posting long responses.
It only has 8GB of ram, but is still chugging along.
I can’t believe these are cheaper than iPhones.