Excellent power efficiency in apple silicon - good battery life and good performance at the same time. The aluminum body is also very rigid and premium feeling, unlike so many creaky bendy pc laptops. Good screen, good speakers.
Aluminum and magnesium non-Apple laptops are just as stiff. There's just a wider spectrum of options, including $200 plastic ARM Chromebooks available.
the whole pc laptop industry really is an embarrassment right now. It has been 5 years since the M1 Macbook release, and there is no real equivalent. I'm on a thinkpad x9, which might be the closest I've seen, but the cpu performance just isn't as good.
Vizio made a good laptop once and then they just existed the computer industry. They had a vision of high quality approachable laptops, desktops and pro platforms and their first gen was a good attempt, but they just didn’t follow on.
I think it was fine 20 odd years ago. I had a Thinkpad T41p in 2004 and it was a great laptop. Even my Sony Vaio Z was nice in 2008 compared to the competition (although it had serious issues with the screen flexibility causing it to fail multiple times).
Since 2012 I've had 3 Macs, a 2012 Air, a 2020 M1 (this was a massive upgrade and the nicest laptop I ever used, even compared to my relatively new work thinkpad). I just cracked the screen on my M1 so bought a discounted M4 air on black friday. I can't tell the difference other than I like having magsafe back and only miss the touch bar slightly.
Yes! I had a Vizio laptop (the thin one ala a macbook air) and it was absolutely fantastic, probably the best PC laptop I have ever had. It was lightweight, powerful, had a good screen (for the time) plus some things that few other laptops had at the time, like a TPM.
The gaming laptops that have been made a bit less game-y without the RGBs and thick chassis turned out to be the sweet spot for me. Some compromises here and there, sure, but they mostly have the hardware I want. Asus has a good line up that works very well with Linux from 13 to 16 inches, all with dGPUs, AMD CPU (though Intel is also there), high-refresh rate OLEDs etc.
The tablet itself has been good. The firmware support is good. The charger died, and the keyboard case is on its last legs. I had to solder the pins back on to keep it working. It's an acceptable keyboard case, but the 'a' key doesn't work super well. Still a decent product, particularly for a Linux convertable, but definitely not something I would give my dad.
XPS 13 has snapdragon x elite and is very well built. Not sure how good Linux support is, tho. I run Linux on my Intel-based XPS 14 and it's pretty good, apart from the webcam being totally uncalibrated and looking kinda shite, but at least it works.
Maximum 32GB of RAM, which is a bad joke if you want to use it as developer system nowadays.
TL;DR: Waited for a decade for somebody to make a non-shitty notebook, went for macbook as the least bad option when the old one was falling apart.
Also the modern thinkpad keyboards are crap, and the trackpoint is unusable in the low profile style.
I switched to a macbook pro last year after having some contact with apple hardware in a customer project, from a thinkpad x230 with a x220 keyboard I've kept barely alive over the years. Now _some_ non-Apple notebooks (mostly from framework) can take sensible amount of memory, but at the time of purchase that was the only 14" notebook capable of taking a decent amount of RAM. The only other ones that could take RAM were some xeon workstation type builds - big display, shitty battery runtime, and same or more expensive than a fully specced out macbook.
Apple also seems to have put some effort into keyboards - with the current macbook pro keyboard being one of the best notebook keyboards currently out there. Not as good as the classic thinkpad keyboards, but better than anything lenovo made in over a decade. Dell never was that great, and did a massive step back in their latest model. HP is somewhat close, but still noticeable difference.
Since I switched to a macbook from a (proper) thinkpad I just carry a trackball with me when I expect to do longer stuff that requires mousing - the track pad isn't bad, but gets annoying over time. That also finalized my switch away from mice - before that I had both a mouse and a trackball on my desk, and while I still have that I can't remember when I last touched the mouse.
I suspect it does not work well outside Apple world. And that's kind of the thing with "I want Apple hardware but with Linux software": Software is actually important in the user experience with the hardware.
I don't know about the magic trackpad specifically, but on my HP Elitebook I can use gestures. I'm running i3 and it doesn't support much out of the box, but I was able to configure stuff using libinput-gestures.
> "the whole pc laptop industry really is an embarrassment right now. It has been 5 years since the M1 Macbook release, and there is no real equivalent."
True. I think that's mostly because they model their merchandise after Apple's products. I find Apple's hardware utterly undesirable, tho. The only product of theirs I ever showed any interest in was their Newton line of handhelds; my dream machine is quite far removed from the stuff that's mentioned in the OP's article, let alone anything that maps to Apple's portfolio (and even more importantly, product philosophy).
AGPL is not enough to prevent someone providing competing hosting options. They'd need to provide code if they make changes, but competitors are still free to offer the exact same service and not spend anything in development, which reduces the viability of the original project if hosting was the supposed source of income.
So the original project wants to restrict user freedoms, i.e. they _do not_ want the project to be open source; it's a legit choice, even if I personally prefer free software.
I think this comment is emblematic of a broader western trend underestimating recent Chinese technological development. It is understandable, given how backward they were for so long. The last five years though, things have really gotten crazy over there in terms of investment and progress.
Anyone claiming to have made a microkernel, seemingly quickly, with Linux ABI and driver compatibility while supposedly being 10-20% faster would also be getting the same amount of skepticism.
Especially if that was just one component of a supposedly entirely new OS that quickly replaced something decades established without regressing user experience or features
The whole point of restricting the block size was to ensure space in the blockchain was scarce to drive the price of fees up, better securing the network. Well, that and keeping the blockchain total size small enough to be processed on an regular user's PC for decentralization sake. While a loss of some decentralization is non-ideal,
increasing the block size dynamically, similarly to how difficulty is handled, would be a reasonable compromise to ensure the security of the network long term.
Monero does dynamic block size. It works fine. There is a penalty for large swings in size and that controls the fee which allows the fee to be appropriate during swells and luls in volume.
Something I would like to see from the cryptocurrency space is some way for the block size to fluctuate with daily and weekly transaction volume. For example, you would expect that the transaction volume would be greater when it is daytime on the east coast, so the blocksize should adapt to those temporal changes as well.
If there is a certain latentcy/bandwidth/storage/decentralization tradeoff with block sizes, then we ought to design cryptocurrencies to make the most of this tradeoff with respect to predictable low/high demand.
Ethereum changes the cost to use the network based on recent block sizes, and allows the block size to go up during high demand. So it's cheaper to use the network when blocks are less full, and more expensive if blocks are mostly full. I'm behind on the current parameters, but they're essentially doing what you ask for:
That wasn't the reason to restrict block size. There is no way to scale the number of transactions on the main layer to anywhere near the level required to cover daily transactions. The bitcoin main layer was always destined to be for settlements between financial institutions anyway. Making any accommodations for use cases that are fundamentally unsustainable never made sense. Buying coffee was always going to have to be on a second or third layer, so restricting the block size introduces an incentive to develop those layers that are needed anyway.
That's also nice, but the memory speed is also higher, Ddr5-7266 vs 5600 iirc. The resulting higher bandwidth translates more or less directly into more performance for the iGPU.
As noted elsewhere in this thread, one of their large supporters was VMware[0], which was aquired by Broadcom at the end of last year. Although I'm skeptical that the loss of a single 'community partner' would cause the whole organization to fold. There are teirs above community which presumably donate more to enjoy title[1]
VMware donated A LOT of money to causes like this and they not only made it really easy to match employee contributions, but they also had "pledge drive" style events to raise as much money as possible.
This is a part of our culture that I'm really sad to see going away.
Not sure why I'm being downvoted. I'm aware that VMware used to donate to a lot of causes and now Broadcom doesn't (source: I also work there :)).
My point is that I'm surprised that the loss of a single sponsor would make-or-break an organization like this.
I say this as someone that supports their mission, formerly helped run an affiliated club (shoutout EMich WiCS!) and donates annually, or used to anyway.
