Number of reasons. Works well with Apple products, long battery life, way more powerful for most normal (sometimes applies to even some basic UI devs and small project video editing). It’s got great hardware. However Apple is a nightmare capitalist company that’ll try to dime and nickel you for every possible thing.
Comment on Thinkpad for the win
Realitaetsverlust@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
I honestly will never understand why people buy macbooks.
rippersnapper@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Speculater@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Unified memory. On a current gen Mac work station you can functionally have 512GB of VRAM for AI tasks for under $10k. Good luck getting anywhere close with Nvidia or AMD.
They’re also idiot proof, when I fuck up my CUDA drivers sending me down a 4-hour-long hunt for improperly installed visual studio files, a part of me is envious of Mac owners who will never know my pain.
People pay for the simplicity.
PseudorandomNoise@lemmy.world 2 months ago
They’re also idiot proof
Real reason right here. They want a machine that essentially protects them from themselves. It’s also why Chromebooks are so wildly popular in US schools; the kids can’t fuck up the software.
maomao@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It’s UNIX with a million and one creature comforts and high build quality. The ThinkPad touchpad gives me a rash.
spiritsong@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Disclaimer: Macbook user here.
Its okay for a lot of things. And its great for people who don’t expect much. But for power users, the moment you start installing stuffs for QoL or for more functionality, its there and then (the lack of RAM) really makes one want to bite the fingernails. I’m running 24GB, but even then my memory pressure is on yellow and i’ve “offloaded” a lot of stuffs into Ferdium (as that was the only reasonable way of maintaining certain things).
But for those who use on the web stuffs for almost everything, a macbook is a much better chromebook, and it works really well for those who don’t want to fiddle with anything.
But that price though. If Macbooks were priced lower (especially the RAM and storage upgrades) I think there will be a huge uptick of people buying the M-CPU Macbooks.
sudoer777@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Agreed. I got the 16/512 M1 Air for a decent price and run Linux on it, but I’m constantly bottlenecking both the RAM and SSD and it sucks that I can’t upgrade it, will probably get a Framework when it dies
spiritsong@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What Linux do you run and is it great? Now you are making me think I should plonk more money into a macbook once this macbook is too old and run both Mac OS and Linux.
Framework is a great hardware. I like their vision.
sudoer777@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Fedora Asahi Remix. Considering how the M1 has no official Linux support, it’s impressive that it runs as well as it does, and they have compatibility hacks to run Steam games and get Widevine to work. There’s still a lot of rough edges however, like no microphone (should be coming out soon though) or fingerprint, aarch64 software support is second class and tends to have more frequent bugs (cough Electron cough) that get ignored by package maintainers and some (even FOSS) software isn’t supported, full disk encryption isn’t supported (but there’s blog articles from people who figured out how to set it up), limited distro options, worse power efficiency so gets hot faster (just got a cooling pad to deal with this, get a Pro if you can so you have a fan) and battery life is barely different than what I’ve heard from Framework users so there’s not really much to gain atm. Currently only supports M1 and to a lesser extent M2, and also the fact that you’re dual booting makes the soldered overpriced SSD space even more limiting.
As far as distro support goes, Fedora Workstation is the only distro that has official support. There’s other options with community support but there’s a higher likelihood of stuff being outdated or not packaged (i.e. Arch Linux ARM doesn’t have the same level of community support as normal Arch Linux). I haven’t tried NixOS or Guix System on M1, but I use Nix/Guix on the Fedora install. aarch64 Guix packages keep breaking making it annoying to update and issues tend to be ignored (also certain core packages don’t like the tmpfs 16k page size so you need to make it use /var/tmp instead), aarch64 Nix is better but support is still slow to where Signal is several versions behind and has been broken for weeks despite there being multiple pull requests with fixes, and both Nix/Guix prioritize x86 over aarch64 for builds so it will need to compile a lot of things from source.
pat277@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Audio editing tools. I love linux but… its still catching up
ry_@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Honestly, I’d love a cost equivalent laptop in could put Linux on in Europe, but for the money the MacBook Air is just really hard to beat
Poem_for_your_sprog@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You must not have any tech illiterate old family that likes downloading sketchy stuff from the Internet.
sudoer777@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Great battery life on macOS, although turns out a lot of it involves software-related optimizations since with Asahi Linux it’s barely better than x86
simplejack@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Out here in Silicon Valley, the big driver is a) you need MacOS to develop for iOS, and b) people prefer the UX over Windows / Linux.
Also, the hardware tends be well supported and performant for many years…. As long as you’re not gaming.
dan@upvote.au 2 months ago
I work at a big tech company in Silicon Valley and maybe 80% of employees use MacBooks… I was using Windows for a while, but I switched to Linux around a year ago. AFAIK there were only a few dozen people like me (running Linux, using Firefox as default browser) until we were all forced to switch to Chrome because of some security features in Chrome enterprise.