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It's not that these are must-haves: it's that it removes any such anxiety about these to begin with. I can take the laptop with me wherever I'm going, and not have to worry about charging it, or that the heat will make it unbearable to use on my lap, or that the fan will be noticeable. It means I can work at a cafe, in a car, on a bus, on a train, on a flight without power, and not have to worry.

And these things compound, as the other poster mentioned: 24 hours of light use means longer heavy use, which actually does matter to me. I often move around while using the MacBook because it's good to change up my (physical) perspective - and it means I can do that without the charger while hammering every core with rustc.

Once you see that better things are possible, it's very hard to go back to the comparatively terrible performance-per-watt and heat generation of equally powerful x86 laptops.

2 comments

I'm not saying that these things are not appealing. I would certainly like to enjoy them as well. But there are always compromises.

With Apple, you first have to pay whatever exorbitant price they want to charge you. The Air is relatively affordable, but bump up the specs on a MBP and your eyes will start to water.

That's fine. You get what you pay for, right?

Except now you're stuck in their walled garden and have to pay the same tax for overpriced accessories, software, and anything else they decide to charge you for.

OR you go the Asahi route and live with the stress and uncertainty of depending on a small team of contributors to keep your machine running. I already experience this stress with Linux on supported hardware, and couldn't imagine what it would be like if the hardware had to be reverse engineered for this to work.

That said, I'll probably end up buying a used MacBook Air just to follow the progress of Asahi. If nothing else I'll have a more informed opinion the next time this discussion is brought up.

> Once you see that better things are possible, it’s very hard to go back

Yeah, there’s something a bit freeing about being able to go all day or more without charging. Just not needing to think about power or charging when you’re busy focusing on other things.

I’m glad other manufacturers got a bit of pressure to catch up as well. Now people come to expect laptops to just run for days at a time without charging.