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I would love to be able to socket one of these suckers in a Linux desktop for a reasonable price. I'm loving seeing competition in this field, but I don't like using MacOS and don't want to pay the Apple hardware tax.
I run desktop linux at home, and agree with the concerns/frustrations about running MacOS but I've never understood the complaints about Apple's pricing.
The products do come at a bit of a premium, but, in my experience, it's well earned and is a premium experience as well. There have been occasional periods of sub-par hardware, but generally (and especially current generation) Apple's hardware is extremely well designed and durable.
On top of that, I don't get the software engineer aversion to paying for quality tools. How many hours a year do you spend on a computer? How many hours over the lifetime of the computer will you spend? Even if devs weren't generally in top income brackets it would still be easily justifiable to spend several thousand dollars on tools that you were happy with.
Again, I completely understand not wanting to go with Apple in order to have much finer grained control over your system. But if Apple is selling what you're buying, then the pricing is more than fair imho.
> don't want to pay the Apple hardware tax
It's called the "price". Unlike taxes, you can choose to not buy it and not pay it.
$3,999.00 is the entry price for the M2 Ultra. The M1 Ultra is supported by Asahi Linux and I have to say the memory bandwidth makes things like running llama.cpp way faster than Intel CPUs. The rust GPU driver is also a joy to use.
Compared to the price of Two very good nvidia cards and the PC to host it I think the price is reasonable for running Linux on high end Apple Hardware.
Another thing is that the memory consumption is under 20W when idle and 100W when compiling the Linux Kernel. I think you make up the money just in electricity after a few years.
Apple's hardware tax funds their R&D, which is why Apple develops stuff like the M2 ultra when the Intel and Linux OEMs sit around waiting for Intel or Qualcomm to shit out some useless chip that's undifferentiated.
You probably can have a better AMD setup. Just look at things they brag about [1] - our newest 24-core machine is UP TO 4x faster than 8-core Intel from I don't know how many years ago. I have no idea about actual performance but it doesn't look great, especially given that they are running software for which these chips were specifically optimized.
I currently use macos, the software is tolerable, but when I need some serious computation power the server is running Linux. You can have more cores, you can have more memory, what else do you need?
> and don't want to pay the Apple hardware tax
Why do you believe that the "Apple hardware tax" here is being applied to some pieces of aluminium, rather than to their extremely-high-CapEx investment into a new SoC?
I would bet money that when the Mac Pro logic board becomes available as a component through the repair program, that a replacement of it will be 90-95% of the cost of replacing the full machine.
The Apple hardware tax is arguably what funds the development of these suckers.
Apple hardware is genuinely better in so many ways large and small: case, keyboard, hinges, touchpad, etc. I wish I could pay the Apple "tax" and without having to use MacOS (RIP Bootcamp).
There's nothing impressive about Apple's chips in a desktop environment.
If you've got a high end current generation Intel or AMD workstation processor plus an RTX 4090, you've got a more powerful and probably cheaper system than Apple's desktops that have the M2 Ultra (which start at $4000).
Performance per watt is where Apple Silicon shines, so the only thing a Windows/Linux user should have envy over is the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. I would personally stay away from Apple's desktops even though I like macOS well enough.
given that it's a pro-sumer product the price isn't even that absurd (I mean look at the cost of Threadripper PRO workstations)
the main issue I would have with buying such system is repair-ability
For one the questionable anti-repair, e.g. what they did with hard drives on their last desktop systems. I mean wtf. do you mean I can't just easily replace a worn hard drive that is a _must have basic essential feature for commercial usage in larger scale.
for the other that fact that RAM can not be replaced at all, which is most times not an issue for desktop systems on normal consumer use, but is an issue for a workstation system which might run 24/7 for most days on high utilization
I'd rather build an AMD machine that'll be much cheaper and way better at performance than these.
Linux is awesome on the desktop but the only place where we are lagging behind is the laptop space.
There's an Ampere workstation with like 128 arm cores as an alternative you can run Linux on. But it's going to run $5k+
It wouldn't be what it is if you could "socket it in" to a desktop. Having everything integrated is part of why it can perform so well.
Why? Do you want to save electricity costs?
Depends how far down the rabbit hole of support you want to go I suppose.
Asahi Linux :)
What’s the Apple hardware tax? I’ve never seen it applied, but maybe that’s because I live in Oregon, no sales tax.
macOS can virtualized Linux
There is no hardware tax. And why would you want to hobble your awesome hardware with the shit show that is desktop Linux?
Is there a name for this kind of speak?
>"(...) further than ever"
>"(...) largest and most (...) Apple has ever created"
>"(...) the most powerful (...) ever made"
>"performance to a whole new level (...)"
You can say this thing at every release, what's the point? Of course you aren't going to release product which is going to be slower, right?
The closest term I can think of would be the legal jargon "puffery". See https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/puffing or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffery
Yeah, it's called "Apple speak". I'm not even joking. For whatever reason, it's been Apple's thing for probably at least a decade and a half. Yes they say it at every release.
Don't ask me why, but it's Apple's thing, and I'm not aware of any other major company that does it in quite the same way. You can find plenty of parodies of it on YouTube if you want.
For a long time, I thought this was bullsh*t too.
But I think they make a subtle dig at many other consumer products.
I have seen too many examples, where the "latest" product is inferior to previous-gen.
EG:
- A few car models I am familiar with had adaptive cruise control a few years ago, standard. Now, you need some expensive package. Definitely not "our best model xyz ever"
- Consumer appliances like refrigerators and washing machines just get more expensive, and more complicated, and crappier.
- A key. A friggin door key. How can you make a "next-gen" key that is worse than a piece of metal? Hello, every "digital" key fob. They SUCK! Slow, cumbersome, annoying sounds. Did I say slow? No, many keys are not "the best ever key".
- Ever update Microsoft Windows to a new version? Through today, I am scarred that an "update" to a device will be a regress.
So yea, when Apple says "our best ever", it may sound obvious and trite.
But other companies can't say this for _so many of their product lines_...
So there's an M2 Ultra, M2 Max, and M2 Pro. I hate this naming scheme. It is totally unclear how you're supposed to order those in terms of performance.
I mentioned this before... As a Linux user I am getting more and more afraid of being left behind.
In the end this spurring Intel to innovate, but will it be enough?
I realize there are some Linux' running on Apple H/W, but due to do the closed nature (H/W specs anyone?) it will already be inferior to MacOS.
I have a MacBook from work, and strongly dislike (hate?) MacOS.
> For example, M2 Ultra can train massive machine learning workloads in a single system that the most powerful discrete GPU can’t even process.
It's interesting to see that Apple is explicitly targeting the M2 Ultra as an alternative to GPUs for machine learning.
I think it is great for consumers for Nvidia to have a competitor in this space. If you wanted to do ML, you really didn't have much of an option other than Nvidia, which allowed Nvidia to do things like disable certain features in consumer GPUs even though the hardware was capable and limit RAM. Having Apple as a competitor in the consumer space will force them to up their game.
With a unified 192GB memory, could this challenge nvidia's lock on ML training? Or is CUDA still insurmountable?
This paves the way for really large local LLMs coming to Apple's ecosystem.
Interesting that the chip still doesn't seem to support hardware acceleration for AV1 despite the fact that Apple is a member of the Alliance for Open Media consortium which developed the format.
"Better for the Environment"...
What's even better for the environment is not buying a new computer unless it's actually necessary.. my refurbished M1 Air 8GB still works great - I can comfortably run a Debian VM with Vivaldi & VS Code (doing .NET development), and when I need a GPU for a few hours a month I just use a cloud instance.
On desktop benchmarks no Apple CPU in top 20 (AMD beats the most powerful apple chip by 2.5 times):
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/desktop.html
On laptops it looks the same (AMD is 2.x times faster):
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/laptop.html
So where is the astonishing performance Apple claims all the time?
Yes, I know it consumes less power, but my laptop is docked 95% of the time, so I'd rather have more power than more battery life.
They have a silicon interposer to connect two dies. That’s a really cool way to effectively make a chip twice as big. Is this a new technique ?
They really missed out on the chance to call it MK Ultra.
great, I can't wait to buy a new Mac Air with the most powerful consumer chip ever made paired with 8gb ram and 128g HD.
Note: I have a M1 Air that I love, best computer I've ever owned.
134 billion transistors, impressive.
Today, I had an interesting encounter after work when I brought my Framework laptop to the store. I had a chance to closely compare it with the current MacBook Pro line and wanted to share some thoughts.
Firstly, I was not particularly impressed with the MacBook Pro cases and haptics. The build quality seems to have deteriorated compared to previous iterations. Granted, this could be a matter of personal preference, but it seems to me that Apple's relentless pursuit of thinness and lightness has come at the expense of the premium, robust feel of their older MacBook models.
As for the haptic feedback, it felt a bit off. Earlier MacBooks had a satisfying clickiness and responsiveness, but that didn't seem to be the case with the current model I tested. I suppose this could be subjective, and perhaps some may prefer the current haptic approach.
On a positive note, the brightness of the screen was impressive - it certainly stood out. Apple has always been at the forefront of display technology and it's evident they are maintaining their standards in that regard.
Comparing with other laptops in the store, I couldn't help but appreciate the Framework's design and user-focused approach even more. Other laptops felt plasticky and cheap in comparison, with subpar build quality and aesthetic.
Despite the MacBook's stellar screen, it's hard to beat the Framework when it comes to customization, repairability, and the ethos of the company. It's a refreshing change in an industry that seems to be moving towards sealed units that discourage user modification and repairs.
The old MacBooks were in a different league altogether, and it's disheartening to see how things have evolved. I would love to see a return to a focus on robust build quality and user experience beyond just raw specifications and form factor.
I find it laughable that they advertise “gaming performance” every year and fail to mention that they’ve actively kept gaming out of of the apple ecosystem for essentially forever (or at least as long as I can remember)
Waiting for MK2 Ultra
I’m guessing those might power the upcoming headset
Check here, Geekbench performance per dollar.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/12cza6j1QuSMbc5cOf3pB...
Made in Taiwan?
I would gladly pay Apple $30,000, like I will get financing and see this as a new car payment, for a machine where all chips are full open source and documented and detachable and auditable.
Ok why is it so expensive? Is it because there is no competition or because they have poor yields on that chip?
I mean after all this is just a phone in a fancy big case. I mean, they are not too constrained by the size nor the cooling. Extra connections on board add how much, $50?
I'd think the beefiest version wouldn't cost more than $2000. It doesn't have a screen like a laptop etc.