I wanted to build a Linux PC but there is no way in hell that I’m going to pay 500$ for a RAM kit but my old M1 MacBook is showing its age due to it having 8GB RAM.
Macs are great and fluid to use and I’m used to MacOS anyways. Plus no AI bullshit like Windows 11.
The deal is also pretty good and you can get a really powerful computer for a reasonable price. Like an M4 Air with way better baseline specs is cheaper than when I bought my m1 MacBook.
So should I give up on my Linux dream and get another Mac or should I wait for OpenAI to collapse? I’m afraid that Macs will also get a price bump next year due to the RAM situation.
There is also the option to get a similarly powerful Mac Mini for even cheaper. That is actually one of the most powerful PCs for it’s price. But I prefer portability with my work rig.
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I’ve just been issued a 15” M4 Air 16GB for work (up from a 14” M1 Air 8GB). Doesn’t choke or slow down with anything I throw at it. Much lighter than my personal 15” M1 Max Pro too so it’s easy to relocate during the day.
Even if OpenAI collapses tomorrow supply chains won’t recover for at least 18 months and there’s nothing stopping them from keeping prices as they are (see Covid).
We’re in an interesting place right now with respect to appliance vs build your own (e.g Mac vs PC) supply chains, but it won’t last forever so if you’re on the fence now is the right time to buy before appliance makers exhaust their lines and need to repurchase/renegotiate.
<500$ can get you some pretty good used Dell or Lenovo machines.
Not in India unless you have connections.
Depending on your timeline, you may want to wait for the M5. It’s just around the corner according to some recent leaks.
Problem is that the pricing is unpredictable. While I expect Apple to have reserved their RAM and memory supply, I doubt that Tim Apple will let go of a chance to raise prices.
They’re nice machines. You pay a premium for Apple stuff, but I must admit that every piece of Apple hardware I’ve ever owned has worked well and lasted a long time. I kinda can’t stand MacOS personally, but it sounds like you’re in the opposite camp. The M4 is shockingly fast for CPU dependent tasks. Very good power management (suspend actually works). A mediocre gaming experience, but decent if you’re playing older stuff with native support. The very limited storage is my only complaint.
Right now apple provides some of the best computing value in the market. The Mac Mini is unbeatable for what it is. The base MacBook air is also a great deal compared to most other high end laptops.
Gaming is definitely lacking but with crossover support you can play a bunch of games on it. I mostly play CRPGs and all of my favorites work great on Mac. EU5 works well on Mac afaik.
Storage is also fine since MacOS allows you to offload to external SSDs. My only gripe is that RAM pricing for Mac is the same as DDR5 ram pricing nowadays. I would consider the upgrades if it was half the price but 200$ for 8gb RAM is insanity.
RAM should always be upgradable. My M1 Mac is still insanely good in terms of processing but the lack of RAM is making it obsolete. It still holds up very well compared to any similar windows laptop though.
You can use asahi linux to port Linux onto macbook models m1 and m2 (https://asahilinux.org/fedora/) and those could probably be found cheaper on the second hand market (especially for the more powerful pro models).
Speaking from personal experience (I live in the United Snakes), I bought a maxed out M1 air from BackMarket at max resale condition (mostly that the battery is >90% health) for $750 (the retail asking price for that same model was $1650). I shoved asahi and my favorite distribution (nixpkgs) and have been very impressed. The battery life isn’t MacOS quality, but it is still competitive with similarly priced x86 laptops, the main sources of draw is the laptop in suspend and keeping the display bright. Otherwise, the software support is extremely good (FEX for emulating x86 applications, Vulkan 1.4 and OpenGL 4.6, pretty much any non-proprietary application is going to have an ARM version).
If you really want an upgrade you could probably get a M1 or M2 pro second hand and put asahi on it and then you can keep your linux dream afloat. The best part of asahi is that you get to keep your macos installation alongside it so you’re never going to find yourself locked out of any features that might need at that moment (running proprietary applications, hardware features asahi doesn’t have yet, etc).
edit: just read about the second hand market being shady af, well, I’d still buy the m4 air then since asahi support will probably come soon in the future anyway.
Yeah, you should. I got the 750 USD one and it’s better than I thought. Really wish it had more than 256 GB of storage but it costs too much to upgrade. The only thing it sucks for is Docker and no reverse debugging.
You can use an external ssd on a Mac and move your applications there.
I will probably do that at some point. Maybe sooner is better than later. Who knows how much prices are gonna go up
You could do both no? Get a M4 and throw linux on it.
I think full hardware support in Asahi Linux is only up to like M2.
Yeah that seems to be the case
I don’t think installing Linux on Apple’s m-whatever hardware is trivial or fully supported
Asahi exists but I don’t think it can match Apple’s ecosystem or Rosetta level performance.
fair enough. There’s lots of $200-300 mini PCs that are half decent if you wanted to go that route with linux.
Another option is looking into refurbished enterprise notebooks. There are usually some decently priced options for refurbished think pads. Although tbf I haven’t checked this in a few months so the prices may be stupid now.
edit: yeah prices are kinda dumb but it looks like refurbished pc sites are selling windows 10 pcs with no OS installed at a discount due to the end of win10.
2nd hand market is fucked in India. Sellers charge crazy amounts for old tech.
Is it not feasible to buy a postconsumer device online? I can’t imagine that the $150 secondhand laptops here would cost very much to ship.
Refurbished thinkpads are a classic
Rosetta level performance.
Apple is planning to heavily strip out rosetta 2 from MacOS soon as they’ve already deprecated all intel macs for MacOS 26. Rosetta is also afaik only for Intel Mac software and gets its performance from hard-coding intel mac binary translation.
Asahi, on the other hand, can run Windows x86 applications very well without having to shill out hundreds of dollars for software licenses or worrying whether or not the feature will be removed or not.
Apple’s ecosystem
Linux’s suite of software support is far more vast than the built-in apps that come with MacOS.
You should install Linux on your M1 and see whether that RAM limitation is really a problem in practice.
What do you use your computers for?
