mac

My old 2015 MacBook Pro has finally been retired. The battery was looking suspiciously bloated and I’d rather not start a fire on my desk (or worse, on an airplane). The replacement is a 2020 MacBook Air M1. I debated whether or not it was worth going to a higher end model, but I don’t do much beyond Office apps. My calculation might have been different if I did video editing or something but the most I’ll do is compile a project in XCode and that’s pretty quick.

The new M2 MacBook Air looks very good both aesthetically and perfomance wise. I like the new midnight blue color and the squarish profile just looks solid. However, it’s 20% more than the pretty good M1 MacBook Air. Normally, you would think that the 20% would be money well spent for the newer system, but apparently the M2 has some performance shortcomings so you probably want to spend another $200 for the bigger and faster SSD.

While I soldier on with my 2015 MacBook Pro, I got my daughter a M1 MacBook Air for Christmas. She likes it and it’s a nice upgrade from her vintage MacBook Air. I’m not the only one who did this as Apple had an absolutely great quarter.The most interesting numbers in the report are how strong the M1 Macs have been. Truly stunning performance for a fairly risky (no pun intended) replacement of Intel chips with the Arm-based M-series.

Many things are beautiful or impressive but impractical. A beautiful thing that I’ve been casually following is the Ashahi Linux project to bring Linux to the Apple M1 platform. Progress is being made but there are some stumbling blocks with the graphics drivers. The skills and dedication of the people involved are impressive. The idea of creating a virtual machine to intercept the calls to the subsystems and mimic them without looking at the source is brilliant.

As I’ve written before, I’m interested in the Apple M1. I’m due for a new work computer so maybe I’ll get one sooner than later. It seems that progress is being made (or at least a start is being made) on Linux on the M1. The Registry has an article about the Asahi project. It’s a crowdfunded effort to get Linux working on the M1 by Hector Martin who has quite a history with Linux ports to closed systems.

The recently announced mac1.metal instance type on AWS is interesting. I can imagine it would be very useful for building iOS apps and the like that require a Mac or running site tests with the Safari browser. The aren’t running the new M1 chip, but are on some pretty decent Intel i7 processors, so they should be plenty fast. I don’t suppose you care too much about power consumption if it’s in the cloud.

I’m very curious about the new Apple M1. The specs sound really great and the battery life is impressive. However, I don’t need one now and have other things to spend my money on. I probably have about a year or so with my MacBook. It’s slow but seems to still get the job done for what I do with it. Plus, that should give them the time to get more stuff ported natively to the new chip.