I imagine there are still some rough edges (and it seems like distro choices are probably a bit lacking at the moment if you prefer something outside of a few specific mainstream options) but given how niche ARM support was before the first M1 machines, the progress that's happened so far is honestly pretty astounding. Given that the iterations from M[n] to M[n + 1] seem less large than the initial leap from Intel to M1, it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop.
As for Apple "supporting" Linux, my perception is that if they wanted to make it harder than it was for the people working on Asahi to even get this far, they almost certainly could have. It seems like they're probably doing the same thing that most laptop vendors do, which is not explicitly support it but also not go out of their way to block it either. For a company with the reputation and history Apple has, I think that's a pretty huge win for the community, and even as someone who overall has a somewhat negative inclination to purchase from them, I have to admit that they seem way less hostile to Linux on their ARM machines than I would have predicted.
That's only because they are focusing on upstreaming all of their work into the kernel first. A handful of them spent a small amount of time building some device trees for M3 and it didn't take them long to get to the point M1's were at at the first release of Asahi.
I imagine once a lot of the cleanup and maintenance is done on what they have, they'll be in a better spot to accelerate support for other SoCs, and it probably won't be half a decade before the M6 or whatever is supported.
All said, Apple could just spend a tiny tiny amount of their warchest and just ship some goddamn drivers for Linux a la Boot Camp and save the Asahi team the time divining it from the tea leaves.
Unfortunately, Apple is not one to revisit their previous decisions very often. With the move to Apple Silicon, the capabilities of the bootloader were locked in (chain-of-trust, ability to load other OS and keep chain-of-trust on macOS) and that was it. Apple is telling you what they support; there's never any damning secret with them. You want to run Linux? Run it in a VM on macOS. That's what marketing has been saying since day one of the M1.
I don't mind using Apple's native Hypervisor framework, it's better then QEMU (speed/overhead), but Apple has no support to passthrough USB ports. https://github.com/utmapp/UTM/issues/3778
Sure, I don't disagree. I feel like I was pretty explicit about what I was claiming though:
> it doesn't seem that crazy to imagine they'll end up closing the gap even further to the point where you could probably assume a similar level of hardware support from Asahi for a year-old Macbook as you would for a year-old non-Apple laptop
Is it? I have my old M1 Air and I am very curious but don't want to go through the trouble of fiddling about with linux for a few days just to leave it rotting after. I would be inclined to maintain a dual boot situation as well and SSD space is at a premium.
As far as I can tell, Asahi actually requires dual boot. There doesn't seem to be an option to install it standalone. (But I have an M4 Air, so I'm not able to install it yet)
Just looked into it - MacOS is required for installation - and they firmly recommend leaving a minimal installation on the drive for things like firmware updates and disaster recovery.
The jist is that Apple don't want to prevent you from running your own bootable code on a Mac (which isn't true for iPhone and iPad, sadly), as long as you don't compromise the security of Apple's bootloader, code, etc.
Good news, intel panther lake (and the laptops they come in) are on par with M5 macbooks in almost every way.
This year is a lot more competitive than any of the past ~4 years for premium laptops.
The asus expertbook ultra even has a much better screen, a much better keyboard, and a very similar haptic trackpad. Weighs less than a 13 inch macbook air too. There's cheaper options too that are close to as good (minus the screen).
PTL’s highest SKU is comparable to the base M5 for only multicore perf at double the power use in every benchmark I’ve seen. It lags significantly behind in single core.
But I’d love to see a benchmark showing otherwise.
It's ridiculous to claim high and mighty that a chip that's not out yet is competitive. The only real way to test a laptop chip is in a laptop with the thermal choices made by the laptop maker. Hell, the M5 has been mostly benchmarked on the Macbook Pro, and that has a fan! The M5 is not going to be as impressive in the Air.
It's been five years since M1 and Intel has never been competitive in single-core perf per watt with Apple. It would be surprising if it changed.
Panther lake and the M5 have been out (I know fan makes a difference, but hey it's still a decent reference), and fully tested by a number of reviewers. The "almost every way" comment is with the exception of single-core scores. Outside of that metric, when you look at photoshop/premiere/davinci resolve/compilation/SSD speeds/multicore cinebench; both are about as fast as one another (with some back-and-forth wins on either side). How is it a ridiculous claim when so many publications/reviewers have arrived at the same conclusion?
The point is both achieve nearly the same experience (performance wise) averaged-out, doing real work, and any differences are small enough that it hardly matters. The tests are out there. See: Just Josh (youtube), Notebookcheck (various articles), Zip Tie Tech (youtube), Phoronix (article), Hardware Canucks (youtube), and Max Tech (youtube). Plenty of test results for actual panther lake machines.
The Max Tech review (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q77AzvY3FTE) directly doing a head to head of the M5 macbook pro vs the Expertbook ultra is a good enough summary of how close they actually are. Bunch of heavier tasks being run one after the next, all on battery, side-by-side, in a nicely edited video. As a whole, the chips are more similar than they are different. They are 100% in the same performance tier.
In the real-world, stuff like animation timings for switching virtual desktops are 100% more noticable than the single-core performance gap between those two chips. Or having a 120Hz vs 60Hz like these new macbook airs.
IMO, the main tradeoff with choosing these intel chips over the M5 is the price. Only the X7/X9 panther lakes have the strong GPU, and those are priced significantly higher than base M5 macs (which already have a strong GPU). But for someone who really prefers linux (like the parent comment), then I do think it's worth it.
It’s funny that this is even remotely a concern in 2026. We have computers you can talk to but Windows laptops maybe won’t go to sleep in your backpack.
I do hope that it’s fixed though. I haven’t followed Windows laptops that closely, but my work laptop from a few years ago does lose battery surprisingly quickly when “sleeping”.
I don't think going with windows is the move if you're trying to have sleep working like in a macbook. Too many stories of laptops waking up for no good reason.
Linux on the other hand has always been able to sleep as expected. I'm definitely advocating for panther lake + linux. Not panther lake + windows, which I hoped was clear given the context of the parent comment.
> What I do know is that Windows sucks and macOS has absurdly good battery life, both in active use and in sleep.
Ever since lunar lake (intel's prev-gen ultrabook chip), this isn't even true anymore.
And now with panther lake, competing windows and macOS laptops do have comparable active use battery life, especially when comparing against macbook airs which do sometimes lose because of their smaller batteries.
This guy: https://www.youtube.com/@JustJoshTech does really good battery tests (brightness at 300 nits, looped office tasks, wifi on, BT on), and a number of windows laptops match even the 14in macbooks pros. That macbook pro already gets noticably more battery life than both the 13 and 15in macbook air.
For a specific example ,the current XPS14 without the OLED (meaning the base 1200p screen) will have hours more battery life than any macbook. If you're looking for "absurdly good battery life", both macOS and windows laptops can give you this today. Your last comment hasn't been true (at least for active use) for at least since lunar lake came out (end of 2024).
Let me wax poetics here. Apple has been chasing the dream of the portable computer for so long, and has been at the forefront of the ultimate form factor of the personal computer, the laptop, since the early 90s. It's not surprising to me that the company that made an OS for everything, and a project to make an OS for everything, cannot figure out a reliable way to bring us a bicycle for the mind where you just close the lid.
Only Apple has been laser-focused to give us this experience.
I've had my Framework (w/Arch and KDE) since 2022 and have yet to have any problems with sleep. I can safely unplug from my monitor/dock, close the lid, and drop it in my bag. It's never tried to cook itself while in sleep.
Battery life in sleep (and in general) could be better, but on the whole I've been quite happy with it.
> M5 also features faster unified memory with 153GB/s of bandwidth
I was about to write a post mourning how much I wish Panther Lake really could compete, but lacked the memory bandwidth to offer a real challenge. But supposedly it can go up to 9600MT/s which would bring Panther Lake to ~150GB/s.
I am curious what the NPU on M5 has. The 50 TOp/s on Panther Lake is... fine. Apple is really seeing huge success with MLX, with an adoptable software stack that the PC world is super struggling to deliver.
For something like my daily personal laptop the warranty is a big factor. I’d rather not deal with shipping it off to Asus for a couple months when it doesn’t boot or whatever.
Same. I was on macOS for work for about 3 years. Never gelled with me.
I was on an M2 Macbook Pro with Asahi and it was great. It's really hard to fault Apple's hardware for most use cases.
I'm currently on a Strix Halo laptop (HP Zbook), which is about as expensive, and the hardware is great, but power efficiency and build quality lag leagues behind by Apple. A 4000 euro laptop still feels like a cheap toy.
Currently in a brief macos phase before I can be issued my Linux laptop at work. It's so clunky. A major annoyance for me right now is the lack of MST multi-screen over USB which means my nice daisy-chained home setup is fine on my near-decade-old Dell but doesn't work at all on the fancy Macbook. They have the hardware to support it, they just don't.
Generally the hardware with Apple is amazing but I'll take the hit on that and things like battery life just to get an OS that feels like it's on my side.
I'd maybe consider Asahi for home use but I'd be wary of it for work. Perhaps in a few years.
Then support companies like Tuxedo, System 76, Dell, Asus,....
The only time Apple supported first class Linux on their consumer hardware was with MkLinux, and that was when everything was going down in flames and they needed to survive somehow.
I believe they'll enable it, actually, fairly soon. With this hardware at these prices, if they offered BootCamp again for Linux and Windows, they'd basically own the market almost overnight. Considering they have long-term contracts on RAM and SSDs and that they steep margin on their Mac hardware, there is hardly any reason to not make money off of those who actually wouldn't buy Mac hardware otherwise. Plus, there's a chance they'll also buy AirPods, mouse, keyboard, etc.
You must be new to the Apple world. Unless Apple starts failing again as a company (bad financials), they won't provide any official support for Windows or Linux.
I'm actually not an Apple user but I've seen them do their thing for close to 30 years now.
Apple is notoriously a control freak. They want to control the hardware, they way to control the software, they want to control the services, they want to control the entire experience.
What you're saying goes against everything they stand for.
Every time they open up, they do it because they're forced to.
They moved away from PowerPC (more control) to Intel (less control) because PowerPC couldn't keep up (despite them lying for half a decade about its performance, at some point it became too hard to distort reality).
They provided Windows dual-boot because they had to, their PC market share was too low and they couldn't get many applications so they had to accept it. After the iPhone took off and Mac started having a bigger marketshare and things were ported to it, they didn't need it as much so they stopped trying, they ditched dual boot for ARM. They never provided any real support for Linux, just some random hints and kind words, basically. They have more than enough money to sponsor an official port.
If anything, it's amazing that someone presumably technical can be "15 years into the ecosystem" and not understand these larger patterns so that I have to explain them like this :-)
Every time they open up, it's because they're weak. Once they're in a position of power:
* only XCode as an official IDE
* no JIT on iOS
* no first-class support for Ruby, Python, JS, etc to build iOS applications
* AppStore, no sideloading
* must use Mac to build for iOS
* ...
They're basically PC Nintendo. Always have been. The mega genius Jobs didn't want fans in a PC from the 1980s because they weren't cool, leading to said PC melting.
I find it funny that people keep excusing a multi-trillion dollar company for not finding pocket change to fund official porting efforts (such as Linux on Apple hardware, or Swift on Linux and Android) across decades. They're not doing it because they don't want to. They never will.
> If anything, it's amazing that someone presumably technical can be "15 years into the ecosystem" and not understand these larger patterns so that I have to explain them like this :-)
No support needed. Run Linux in a VM. Devices are limited, and you can't save/restore your state, but there's no real performance hit: my code runs faster on macOS(VM(Linux)) than macOS.
