Apple MacBook M4

Nonsense. I've been running Linux just fine as my daily driver on Macbook M4 for a year. Besides battery life (VM is kinda heavy on it) and some minor issues (fewer than you'd think, especially with Vulkan landing in UTM today) it's the best Linux laptop I've owned ever so far. I like macOS as much as the next Linux user here, but it's fairly decent as a hypervisor. If anything, at least it comes with UI unlike Intel ME.

Same. My personal laptop is an M1 Air and I also have an M1 Studio desktop. My work machine is an M4, and in "regular" use I can't tell the difference between them.

That summarizes my whole computer use. I used to believe it was my tolerance, but then I took out a good old YP-G70CB (Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 5.0) from a drawer and everything felt much snappier than my S25. The only computer that's the exception is my macbook m4. This thing was and still is ridiculously snappy.

True, storage wasn't really a concern, my M4 has 512GB. Enough for my everyday tasks, and anything larger I store on my NAS anyways. I got it in April 2026, but afaik they also raised prices since then again. Also yes as far as gaming goes, I really only need it to run Factorio well so that also was not a concern.

I think the laptop hardware pre Apple M chips was just terrible and has pretty much stayed that way. There’s a reason why Apple moved away from Intel. Before M chips an Apple Intel laptop was just a shiny wrapper for a PC laptop experience: fans turn on to full blast all the time, battery lasts <3 hours under any regular usage beyond just browsing (say having an IDE open, and frequently switching between apps). Laptop would get hot to the point where you need padding if you keep it on a lap so you’re not boiling yourself. Made for a good leg warmer during the winter though haha. With an Apple M4 laptop, the only time I’ve heard the fan turn on is when I almost 100% filled the memory with some local LLM model. I can’t recall any other times. Battery life is finally as advertised, can last many hours, laptop is consistently fast, never gets hot and any CPU throttling is not perceptible under medium to high CPU usage.

I had a ton of issues with my Macbook pro M1 16GB, memory pressure would be in the yellow always and into red frequently which caused sound stutter and all sorts of issues. My M1 air (I think 8GB?) had similar issues My M2 24gb was amazing - especially since it allowed dual monitors. I recently upgraded to the M4 32GB and it is my "do everything" computer and is absolutely awesome. My personal experience with the m-series is that get as memory as possible. I do feel the M1 had issues based on the couple I owned. EDIT: Even on 32GB my memory pressure is constantly in the yellow, but have not seen it go to red

Tbh I'm not even sure what the issue is here. I have a personal M1 macbook and a work M4 and a 4k display. I don't see any issues or differences between them on my display. The M4 seems to be outputting a 4k image just fine. The article could just be AI slop since it just contains hyper in depth debugging without articulating what the problem is.

Honestly I don’t know the answer to that but it’s a good question and something interesting to look into. The PRX model I used ran pretty well on my MacBook M4 so you could play around, although I guess it will depend on the specifics of the model. When I was building this I did have to rework the prompts quite a bit so they worked nicely with the word-by-word reveal visualisation, i.e. they mention the subject early, then add adjectives about setting and light etc.

Anyone know if the M4 GPU support has improved? I might not use Asahi "today" but I'm sure the day will come when my M4 laptop will be deemed "vintage" despite being perfectly fine hardware, and on that day I am most likely to flip over. Hopefully by then the GPU support is much richer.

Hey Ned developer here, there is a target fps slider in settings. I am able to get 800+fps on my MacBook m4. There is a mode where it reduces fps until user input on Mac to save battery life. However this only works with shaders turned off, as the shaders depend on continuous rendering.

> M1 macbook is a locked down Sure, iOS is certainly restrictive, fully locked-down, app store only etc etc, and I'd love a full-fat firefox with its plugin system available on my phone. But what are you doing on a non-Mac laptop that you can't do on an M1 mac? I'm a big fan of linux and have used it as a main machine for many years, but use an M4 macbook as my daily driver at the moment (everyone else I work with does too, it's just easier). I haven't felt limited at all . I can build and install whatever I like, I have brew for my tooling needs... Yeah I don't see it with Mac. Unless you're actually needing linux and dockerisation won't cut the mustard I guess.

Funny you say that, as a long term Linux user who was in the exact same boat as you, I actually find Mac M4 my best Linux laptop purchase ever so far. I think what you're missing is its virtualization story. Put UTM on it, and you're back to a familiar environment, just on much nicer hardware. The first time I booted into my Linux desktop on it, I was blown away by how much snappier it felt compared to my ~5 year old top-of-the-line PC build. I'm as much of a fan of Mac OS as the next Linux user here, but it's a very decent hypervisor and Stuff Just Works out of the box, for the most time. No more screwing around with half-baked qemu wrappers for me, vfio, virgl and what not. And running stuff without virtualization is a non-starter for me, I've been concerned about supply chain attacks before it became fashionable. Of course it would be even nicer if new Macs could run Linux natively, and I hope Asahi project will succeed with that, but until then I'm pretty happy running Linux desktop virtualized on it. arm64 support is very decent across all the different OS now, I hardly miss Intel. I can even reasonably play most AAA games up to maybe mid-2010s on a Windows VM that's just a three finger swipe away from my main Linux desktop.

If Apple keeps improving things, you can run the model locally. I'm able to run models on my Macbook with an M4 that I can't even run on my 3080 GPU (mostly due to VRAM constraints) but they run reasonably fast, would the 3080 be faster? Sure, but its also plenty fast to where I'm not sitting there waiting longer than I wait for a cloud model to "reason" and look things up. I think the biggest thing for offline LLMs will have to be consistency for having them search the web with an API like Google's or some other search engines API, maybe Kagi could provide an API for people who self-host LLMs (not necessarily for free, but it would still be useful).

I feel like when I'm presented with most modern criticism of Apple devices/software I tend to agree, but despite all the mostly valid criticisms I see batted about, who is doing consumer tech better? I've recently (finally) managed to purge the last instance of Windows from my life when I replaced Windows on my gaming desktop with Linux. So I've got Linux on the (gaming) desktop, a Steam Deck and Debian stable on a server, which is great. But I mean, that covers my home office? I still need a phone (iPhone), a smart watch (Apple Watch) and while not critical, certainly adds a lot of value for me. The things that connects to the TV (AppleTV) is the best of all I've tried when compared to any other type of solution (Firestick, Chrome Cast, Home Media Server, Built-in TV Smarts). I've also got an M4 MacBook for dev, which is frankly fantastic when compared to whatever other hardware I could get here in NZ and would involve going back to Windows anyway? So I mean, what are the actual valid options really? Apple still offer great devices and the integrations between them are the best on the market imo. Perhaps in a perfect world Pine64 devices would be rock solid and I could run Linux everywhere, but failing that, what else ya gunna do?

m4 laptop checks the boxes on ram options (albiet a high price) and battery life. The m4 macbook is running AI slow compared too..... what competitive alternative? I'm impressed at how fast gpt-oss-20b ran on my m2 24gb system.

I’ve used Firefox for years and really wanted to stick with it, but too many sites keep breaking. I originally ditched Chrome because it chewed through my RAM, but on the new M4 MacBook I’ve got headroom, so I’ve reluctantly gone back to Chrome. Painful switch, but I don’t have much choice right now.