That is a tremendous update. Thank you for providing a great read about the diligent efforts of an increasing number of talented contributors: Oliver and Janne and Alyssa M and Shiz and Robert and Sven and James and Neal and chaos_princess and Davide and Lina and Michael and Sasha and Alyssa R have been killing.
Great work. I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years, like the Thinkpad T420 used to be. For different reasons, of course.
Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.
I've yet to see a desktop SSD wear out from writes. The only dead desktop SSDs I've seen have been due to buggy firmware (early drives or that recent batch of Samsungs) or well before their wear level is down (cheap noname drives off amazon).
S**, I haven't felt much urge to upgrade from my 16GB M1 Air and I even use it to play some Windows games under Crossover. Quite possibly the best laptop I've ever owned.
Public information seems to describe the M4 GPU as mostly a performance-oriented refresh of the one from M3. M5 has brought bigger changes, not least neural/tensor accelerators on chip.
I just like the build quality and they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market. I bought one with 16GB RAM and a small black strip one the side of the screen (don’t bother me) for 230€ last week
>they are reaching the 200€ threshold on the used market.
Where?! I just cheeked the used market in Austria and 2020 M1s go for at least 350 for the 8GB RAM models and 450 for the 16GB model. Your 230 for the 16gb one fells more like a rare exception but not them norm everywhere.
Apparently there's changes to boot that are more or less understood, but require some heavy work to handle.
Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.
In fact, the current state of M3 support is about where M1 support was when we released the first Arch
Linux ARM based beta; keyboard, touchpad, WiFi, NVMe and USB3 are all working, albeit with some local
patches to m1n1 and the Asahi kernel (yet to make their way into a pull request) required. So that
must mean we will have a release ready soon, right?
I often wonder whether the folks at Apple have the Asahi team on their radar. Are they in awe of the reverse engineering marvels coming out of the Asahi project, or are they indifferent to it?
I think the dev that was responsible for the bootloader or some security chip having the option to be opened posted on twitter a while ago. Pretty sure he implied or mentioned that this was what he was hoping for.
In fairness; that decision predates the existence of Asahi. Unless Apple was working with the community before Apple Silicon dropped, this isn't much acknowledgement of their existence.
They are aware. They are also aware of the designs sitting in the cabinet right next to them in Cupertino that would make all the reverse engineering instantly unnecessary.
Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.
If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
I'm sure Apple has data showing that their extremely lockdown strategy is good for their business but I feel like I'm one of the potential customers Apple could gain if they didn't have that.
They're a fantastic hardware company. But my admittedly very limited experience with Apple software, from iPad to their streaming service website, has been miserable. The UX doesn't work for me, the software just doesn't do what I want. Understandable, Apple very much designs their software to work for a particular workflow they come up with, if you like that workflow it's great, for someone like me it's miserable. But I would gladly buy their hardware if I could freely run an OS of my own choosing.
As opposed to what hardware, then? Because this is pretty much how most other drivers became a thing in the first place. Linux has come a long way and due to it "winning the cloud" many hardware vendors started properly supporting it, but this was absolutely not the case for the longest times.
The problem is that now one else is currently making hardware that is competitive with apple silicone. Apple is the only one offering both performance and battery time.
I love my Thinkpads, I really do but they are bulky, loud and the battery doesn't last very long. They are not an option for many people.
If I have learned one thing it's is that current corporate strategy is no guarantee for the future. If you want to purchase a laptop now and want a great linux experience, then the M2 Is a great option. But don't assume that M(n+1) will ever get support.
This reasoning is essentially just as true for any other laptop maker Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Framework, HP etc might also decide to bomb linux support at any time.
IIRC Marcan mentioned something he found that had been deliberately put into the Mac boot loader that made booting alternative operating systems easier and perhaps making it possible altogether.
That's apparent enough from the fact that you don't need a jailbreak exploit to boot non-Apple-signed kernels on a Mac, unlike iPads with exactly the same silicon. They are intentionally configured differently.
Yes, because if they didn't, the fact that macOS doesn't lock you down in a sandbox means that is more like the entire boot chain would've been jailbroken. The boot chain shared for the most part with iOS devices, where Apple 100% does not want "jailbreaks" because it means App Stores that they don't get to take 15-30% from.
The happy path on the Mac was provided so the talent capable of booting Linux on it could take the happy path that hides all of the stuff Apple would rather not have a bunch of reverse engineers sniffing around.
This is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
M1 and M2 hardware isn't going anywhere. They're still great machines. And progress will be faster once the project finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distros. They have a first alpha of M3 ready, they're just refraining from releasing it in that state because they're so busy with everything else they're doing - a key difference compared to when they first came out with alpha support for the M1.
I’m sad because the WiFi on my M1 MBA is dying/dead and there’s no way to replace it without swapping the whole “logic board.” Apple also doesn’t support any USB WiFi adapters in recent versions of MacOS, so it’s now tethered to a wired network connection. I’m just waiting for the M5 refresh to hit at this point. Anyway, all that’s to say that at least some M1 hardware is going to to the trash heap soon :(
To add to that, they'll continue to be great machines running Linux even after Apple has bloated MacOS to death. Tahoe has made my M1 MBP feel significantly less snappy for no good reason.
Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
Except they did with Wine, in a way. They got to the point where sufficient number of third party software developers target the common base between Wine and Windows (Steam/Proton), electing to have broader compatibility rather than catching all the newest Windows-only APIs.
I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.
First you have to convince consumers to give up on systems that work with support to development kits that are build it yourself with (lots of) caveats, which is why the year of the Linux desktop still hasn’t arrived.
I've never bought any Mac, but I've been issued several at jobs. At one company, I scandalized the Apple fans by wiping OSX and installing Linux on a 10th gen Macbook Pro.
The problem is, many "nerds" have little other options in hardware. Which ARM laptop would be the alternative? Even if you allow x86, which ones are as nice as the Macbooks? Then, there is the problem, that not everyone wants to be Linux-only in their setup. I definitely prefer macOS to W11.
So all of the nerds that care about open platforms stop buying their systems. Everyone else is going to keep doing it and they number us massively.
And then there's the fact that it's still a dark ending if the best hardware out there — even if we all refuse to buy it because we're on a moral high ground — is a closed platform that we have to refuse to buy.
At least Apple usually supports their hardware for ~7 years so that's plenty of time to get Asahi working on newer Ms. I don't care too much about getting instant support but I definitely care about having the option to use my hardware more than 7 years
And that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had locked it down like they do on every other product then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the looming possibility that they'll just change their mind with future models.
This is my main concern. I applaud the effort that the Asahi team is doing, but there's no way that I would rely on a small team of inarguably passionate and talented hackers to maintain a system that uses reverse engineered software running on hardware manufactured by a company historically opposed to everything they're doing, even if they left this small door open for that.
It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.
Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.
Thankfully, hardware progress is relatively slow in a way that makes the m1 still a perfectly capable machine. Maybe we’ll have a future of “flagship community devices” where only one of every X is chosen as the supported option.
Will the gap remain just as big once earlier architectures are fully covered? I would expect some inertia bringing positive feedback in the development loop.
I don't own Apple hardware, but just reading through it made me appreciate how gifted these souls are, doing the god's work. I hope they succeed with upstreaming their contributions and have a first-class Linux on ARM support.
I was watching Bladerunner last night, specifically the part where Ford is zooming in on the photograph using voice commands.
Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!"
The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
My favorite feature of the Touch Bar was that, if memory serves well, force push was right next to cancel in one of the IDEs, can't recall if Xcode or Intellij.
Yeah it could have been useful but I feel like they nerfed it from the start. Still wasn’t a big fan.
I was hoping it was a tease for a fully software defined haptic feedback based keyboard. There’s the obvious usefulness and coolness of that, and then the fact that you could make a laptop closer to the sealed clean-ability of a phone. Probably not quite submersible/waterproof due to ports and fans but able to survive a spill and be cleaned well.
Just came to praise the seven heroic souls who are working on this wonderful project that my M1 is just waiting to install once battery life meets my needs. And may I ask why, with all the crypto and tech money floating around, does Asahi not have a fully funded staff of fifty people?
Well, wish I could contribute something which could help, but I am homeless living with Schzioaffective disorder and the inflation and wealth inequity caused by the tech industry has left my life on a razors edge when it comes to money.
But I would gladly match my 1% of my monthly income to anyone here who can pledge the same 1% who makes over $500k a year. So that would be my $20/month vs their $416/month.
Readit News
Do the M4 and M5 GPUs also change a lot from the M3? I hope it's not too much work to get those going once M3 is usable.
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.
I think repairability is important, but I don't think it will stop those laptops from being popular.
A single bad key or trace and any Apple laptop is basically toast. $800+ to have Apple replace the top cover.
Maybe an independent shop can do it cheaper, I don't know.
The biggest issue I have with it is macOS Tahoe. Guess I really should be checking out Asahi on it!
Where?! I just cheeked the used market in Austria and 2020 M1s go for at least 350 for the 8GB RAM models and 450 for the 16GB model. Your 230 for the 16gb one fells more like a rare exception but not them norm everywhere.
Basically starting with M4 you have a choice between starting with Apple's page table monitor already running in their guarded mode extension, or all apple extensions disabled on the CPU cores.
Edit: this was what I was remembering: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914714055368704
Such a monumentally Sisyphean waste of effort in behalf of the Asahi devs in my opinion.
If you care about personal computing or Linux, don’t buy a Mac.
They're a fantastic hardware company. But my admittedly very limited experience with Apple software, from iPad to their streaming service website, has been miserable. The UX doesn't work for me, the software just doesn't do what I want. Understandable, Apple very much designs their software to work for a particular workflow they come up with, if you like that workflow it's great, for someone like me it's miserable. But I would gladly buy their hardware if I could freely run an OS of my own choosing.
As opposed to what hardware, then? Because this is pretty much how most other drivers became a thing in the first place. Linux has come a long way and due to it "winning the cloud" many hardware vendors started properly supporting it, but this was absolutely not the case for the longest times.
Just why?
I love my Thinkpads, I really do but they are bulky, loud and the battery doesn't last very long. They are not an option for many people.
This reasoning is essentially just as true for any other laptop maker Dell, Lenovo, Asus, Framework, HP etc might also decide to bomb linux support at any time.
^ This
Also, the security teams at Apple must be watching Asahi closely from an exploit-perspective. They are basically holes that must be patched.
The happy path on the Mac was provided so the talent capable of booting Linux on it could take the happy path that hides all of the stuff Apple would rather not have a bunch of reverse engineers sniffing around.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
So depending on what you want to run, not only did Wine catch up bit also surpassed.
I wonder how much similar behavior influence other buying choices. I’ve been eyeing an upgrade from M1 for a while - so far punting on it, mostly because of Asahi.
And then there's the fact that it's still a dark ending if the best hardware out there — even if we all refuse to buy it because we're on a moral high ground — is a closed platform that we have to refuse to buy.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
It would be like going back to the days of early Linux and all the Windows-specific hardware we had to deal with, but extrapolated to the entire system. As impressive as all of their work is, it's not worth the IMO minor UX benefits of Apple's hardware.
Mainline Linux on ARM is solid these days; new x86 chips from Intel perform very well and are reasonably power efficient; and battery life of most professional laptops in Linux is quite good. For example, I get a good ~12 hours of work done on an X1 Carbon Gen 13 from a single charge. This may not be as impressive as Macbooks, and the packaging certainly isn't as sleek, but it's good enough for me. The tradeoff for a solid software experience, modulo the usual Linux shenanigans, is worth it to me.
At least PCs are open to a greater degree, despite Microsoft's attempts otherwise.
Above the display is an amber horizontal bar that changes in sync with the activity on the display and my first thought was, "Finally they found a use for the Mac Touch Bar!"
The Touch Bar has so many uses in Linux I can't wait for it to work.
I was hoping it was a tease for a fully software defined haptic feedback based keyboard. There’s the obvious usefulness and coolness of that, and then the fact that you could make a laptop closer to the sealed clean-ability of a phone. Probably not quite submersible/waterproof due to ports and fans but able to survive a spill and be cleaned well.
Because all that crypto and tech money is trying to turn money into much more money, and Asahi isn't a great candidate for doing that
But I would gladly match my 1% of my monthly income to anyone here who can pledge the same 1% who makes over $500k a year. So that would be my $20/month vs their $416/month.