The stuff Hacker News actually recommends.

Laptops

Apple M1 Mac

8owners with an opinion
57%of verdicts positive
1/0positive/negative since 2024
0happy after 3+ years

Praised for performance and battery; criticized for ease of use and repairability.

What people wrote

Likes it
Most Linux users don't use Macs because running Linux on a Mac is difficult. But I think many people would like to run Linux on Apple hardware. That's what I do and I haven't found better hardware yet. You just have to be careful in choosing something that's well supported. If I had to change laptops (I didn't choose mine and I'm just lucky that M1 Macs are well supported by Asahi) I would definitely take a Framework and hope that it's sufficiently Apple-like hardware wise.
Neutral
Depends on what your use case is and what you consider worth. In terms of hardware, M1s are portable, and battery life is great IF you use sparse apps that don't hog up the cpu all the time (running Slack, VSCode, and a bunch of docker containers isn't going to make your battery last anywhere close to advertised, although still respectable). The processor is great, but not significantly faster than competitors at similar price points. External monitor support sucks, external hubs are annoying, keyboard is good but not the best. Long term repairability is also probably not a thing, Apple wants you to buy a new laptop instead. Software wise, this is personal preference on what you like/want or dislike. Personally, having used Mac OS for work on my work issued M1, I still prefer Linux every time. The two main reason is being able to run a lightweight tiling windows manager like i3wm that starts up way faster than Mac's UI, and not having to deal with permission system for things like camera, microphone, e.t.c. If you don't travel often, I still maintain that the best possible use of 2 grand for computer is to build a desktop for around $1500, monitor included, and then get a cheap used laptop.
Likes it
M series is an unmitigated win. M1 Macs can chew through compiles at rates comparable to my Ryzen desktop, while consuming very little power and not even heating up enough to make the fans spin. Apple is two or three CPU generations ahead of the rest of the industry. It's an objective fact that the most performant personal computing equipment in the world is made by Apple, and its power consumption is such that Apple laptops beat PC laptops on battery life by a factpr of 1.5-2 or more.
Doesn’t like it
I am currently using M1 at work and it sucks Ass. The two main painpoints are the unpredicble window manager and the keyboard layout. WM: 1. There is no deterministict layouts available 2. You can not tab between windows of the same application, (problematic if you use multiple chrome profiles) 3. Switching to a window USUALLY opens the wrong one. In my case, I somehow always endup in VS Code when tabbing to Teams 4. Switching between workspaces (or maximized windows if) sometimes causes the computer to hang. The second painpoint is the keyboard layout, which also sucks ass; 1. ~|"@, are all in the wrong places. 2. Some idiot decided to prioritice control keys ahead of functions keys, so I have to press fn to use standard debugging keys. My i3/arch setup is far more reliable and ergonomic.
Likes it
The effect to me is noticeable. If I gave it to my SO or some average user I dont' think it would be noticeable. But at the same time, we're all here, so we're not average users. However, on that monitor I have terminal or documentation so for me it works quite fine. Increasing the tracking speed or mouse refresh rates won't help in this case. I will say though that the system is rock solid for me. I've read complaints about monitors not waking up or similar, but I've never experienced anything like it. Also the mouse does keep up. The 60Hz refresh rate will keep up with it. There is just a small amount of lag, but that's that. Better than not having additional monitor in my case.
Recommends it
We're moving our whole company to this product right now. Instead of buying (and upgrading) more and more powerful laptops for our (fully remote) dev team, we just get them whatever thin&light stuff they want, and a dedicated server with large RAM so that they can run the whole test environment easily. There are some rough edges here and there, but it's a game changer.
Doesn’t like it
Sigh, no. A barrier is not a full flush. A barrier does not guarantee data persistence, it guarantees write ordering. A barrier will not make sure the data hits disk and is not lost on power failure. It just makes sure that subsequent data won't show up and not the prior data, on power failure. NVMe doesn't even have a concept of barriers in this sense. An OS-level barrier can be faster than a full sync only because it doesn't need to wait for the FLUSH to actually complete, it can just maintain a concept of ordering within the OS and make sure it is maintained with interleaved FLUSH calls. I don't know why you keep pressing on this issue. macOS has the same performance with F_FULLFSYNC as Linux does with fsync(). Why would they be different things? We're getting the same numbers. This entire thing started because fsync() on these Macs on Linux was dog slow and we couldn't figure out why macOS was fast. Then we found F_FULLFSYNC which has the same semantics as fsync() on Linux. And now both OSes perform equally slowly on this hardware. They're obviously doing the same thing. And the same thing on Linux on non-Apple SSDs is faster. I'm sure I could install macOS on this x86 iMac again and show you how F_FULLFSYNC on macOS also gives better performance on this WD drive than on the M1, but honestly, I don't have the time for that, the isssue has been thoroughly proved already. Actually, I have a better one that won't waste as much of my time. Plugs in a shitty USB3 flash dr…
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
Sure, but running Docker and Teams will put an M1's CPU at 70c when a similar x86 Linux box would run it at ~40c. Maybe Apple's fan curves are to blame here, but I much prefer a Linux laptop for local dev.
Likes itDoesn’t say they own it
From Hector Martin, who's working on the project: "- This is with software rendering. Seriously, these CPUs are good. Better than some other ARM laptop GPUs. - Notice how it picked the right keyboard layout automatically. This was not an accident nor was it based on the locale; it's based on the hardware. Details matter! :-)" https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/15046298186459750...
Doesn’t like itDoesn’t say they own it
Probably more like downvoted because missing the point. Sure fsync allows that behavior, but also it's so widely misunderstood that a lot of programs which should do a "full" flush only do a fsync, including Benchmarks. In which case they are not comparable and doing so is cheating. But that's not the point! The point is that with the M1 Macs SSDs the performance with fully flushing to disk is abysmal bad. And as such any application with cares for data integrity and does a full flush can expect noticable performance degradation. The fact that Apple neither forces frequent full syncs or at least full syncs when a Application is closed doesn't make it better. Though it is also not surprising as it's not the first time Apple set things up under the assumption their hardware is unfailable. And maybe for a desktop focused high end designs where most devices sold are battery powered that is a reasonable design choice.