I’m looking for an Apple MacBook Air M2 alternative that could run Linux.
I need something fanless, super lightweight with very long battery life. The only apps I use are Shotcut video editor, Chrome and Firefox.
Any advice?
Is it a good idea to get a MacBook Air m2 and use something like Asahi Linux or should I wait for arm linux laptops to become available.
OK it seems all ‘15W’ cpus from those brands boost much higher so the wattages aren’t as good as I thought but here are some that still compete:
M3 - 3nm, 20W
Amd 7840U - 4nm, 30W, 15% slower on single thread and 20% faster on multi thread.
Intel 1365U - 10nm, 25-55W, 15% slower on multi thread
AMD can compete in performance and power/Watt mid to high load, but is shit with low load efficiency. intel has nothing at all. Apple scales nicely over the complete range.
If you want a relatively small notebook with lots of RAM you also don’t have options (not really AMDs fault, but hardware manufacturers seem to produce mostly shit now). Framework is pretty much the only somewhat decent option with 64GB max, if you want more there’s pretty much only apple - which is way overcharging for that.
What’s the application of a laptop with more than 64GB of ram?
Mobile workstation. There are some Xeon notebooks which also can take more than 64GB - but they have bad availability, cost about the same as a high end mac book pro, are significantly larger and heavier, run hot and have shitty battery life for comparable performance.
The overall hardware situation has been ridiculous for many years now. I recently got a new Dell Latitude for a customer project - runs hot, performance and runtime suck. Runs out even faster than my tiny GPD pocket 3, while providing worse performance. Compared specs - they indeed stuck a smaller battery into the business notebook than into the portable toy. We’re now at a point were a Chinese niche hardware maker does better thermal management for x86 systems than any of the established manufacturers. Current AMD mobile CPUs are great - and I’d love to have a good notebook with one, just nobody bothers building it.