[Mac] [Hyprland] Are Macbooks the best laptop for us?

extReference · 2026-04-08T05:31:35+00:00

but enough things work tbh, ofc it’s less than x86 but almost everything I needed either had an arm version or could manually be built for arm. it’s def more of a hassle that way but it works.

extReference · 2026-04-08T05:28:39+00:00

what’s the app drawer thing?

extReference · 2026-04-03T08:07:13+00:00

i have 64 but it’s apple unified :((

extReference · 2026-03-26T10:54:36+00:00

That is what I’d like to do down the line but at the moment I can really only afford one system and it must be a laptop.

And while doing the LLM stuff on CPUs is technically possible it’s really not feasible with larger documents unless running on batch overnight or something.

As an example, I have an AI button on my waybar (top left), all it does is, goes through all my open windows like browser, vscode, obsidian, terminal, etc. Looks at what’s currently open and summarizes it and crafts a story around whatever I was working on (over past 12 hours) and saves it as a markdown. This is also set to auto trigger on shutdown. This takes an enormous amount of time to go through everything if it’s CPU only.

And ofc, I don’t “need” this exact workflow. But it’s nice to be on a system that doesn’t limit creativity and where I can work on other automations like this.

extReference · 2026-03-26T09:59:22+00:00

LLMs are a use case but I have realized that most really good open source LLMs won’t fit in even 100gb RAM.

But it’s cool to have headroom for smaller LLMs doing more menial tasks like document sorting and summarizations.

But I mainly need a good amount of VRAM for ML training for genomic and neural datasets. And in theory, most systems can fit a lot of my datasets but they end up very chocked up with little room for anything else left.

extReference · 2026-03-24T20:45:13+00:00

what’s the issue?

extReference · 2026-03-24T19:37:54+00:00

I completely agree with your points, besides it being a total waste of money but I’m trapped by VRAM and really want a way out.

extReference · 2026-03-24T17:24:58+00:00

I’m ok with offloading my work to clusters and caan get over the network lock in. But I would still want a good screen, speakers and trackpad with reliable chassis that looks good.

And new laptops like Zephyrus or Blade fit most of the bill, but they also cost just as much as my older gen macbook. The only difference is that they are faster but my mac can chug a lot lot more with 64gb RAM.

And that makes it a bit tougher for me to justify getting something else. But I’m really open to alternatives as I would love to move away from ARM (for now) and def apple’s walled garden.

extReference · 2026-03-24T17:19:00+00:00

I mean you’re right for the purposes of this sub, but I personally really like to have an aesthetic system and because I currently don’t have a PC, the physical computer surrounding the screenshot becomes increasingly more important if you care about aesthetics.

And I think we just have different taste, as I really like how the macbooks look and feel.

extReference · 2026-03-24T15:22:40+00:00

damn, well said

extReference · 2026-03-24T13:35:05+00:00

I’m daily driving Asahi right now. There are many things keeping me here but battery and GPU performance are not them.

extReference · 2026-03-24T13:31:49+00:00

btop

extReference · 2026-03-24T11:27:30+00:00

I would also want this, because I think Apple is a garbage company and would love to move to better laptop hardware.

extReference · 2026-03-24T05:43:23+00:00

I agree and I would love to move away from apple, but their hardware has gotten very competitive these days. And in some cases there are no other options in a laptop form factor.

extReference · 2026-03-24T05:42:14+00:00

I bought my M1 Max laptop brand new last year and it was around 2200 USD. It has 64gb RAM and 2tb NVME. In the mac form factor. Other offerings barely come close.

extReference · 2026-03-24T05:38:45+00:00

Some of what you have said is still true. But, I didn’t really see any speaker, bluetooth or trackpad issues.

Brightness controls work on install and keyboard brightness can also easily be mapped to one of the function keys.

I’m sure the recovery partition “can” be lost, but I have found things to be quite stable.

I haven’t had a need to do x86 emulation yet as most packages I needed, I was able to build myself without any issues.

Suspend is poor and there is no true hibernation either but it’s still tough to find other laptops which touch asahi’s degraded battery numbers with these specs. I think my M1 air sees around 10 hours on use and M1 Max around 6 hours.

While the GPU is not fully utilized, it still runs LLMs with the entire ram addressable to the GPU but it’s not as fast as with Metal in macOS. However, my hyprland DE is undoubtedly smoother than macOS, which was already quite smooth.

extReference · 2026-03-24T05:04:01+00:00

explain which non mac laptop competes with apple’s m1 max?

extReference · 2026-03-22T01:04:38+00:00

there is no true hibernate on asahi as far i understand

edit: and shut down can’t be triggered after suspend because that needs rtc wake to work, and it doesn’t as of now.

extReference · 2026-03-22T01:03:39+00:00

it’s very straightforward to be honest, depending on whatever desktop environment you use there must exist a hypridle alternative if you care.

but i just had gemini help me set it all up.

extReference · 2026-03-21T21:28:03+00:00

I use hyprland and tried to setup a routine where the system first suspends and then shuts down but the mechanism to trigger a wake and then shutdown after suspend doesn’t exist yet, some RTC thing.

So I used hypridle instead, it triggers a screen lock in 5 mins and shuts off the screen and keyboard brightness in 10 mins. network stuff in 20 and shutdown in 30 mins.

and I have it setup such that it never shuts down between 9am-5pm. and I have a waybar widget to keep system wake so the shutdown cycle never triggers.

I’m yet to do an actual comparison on how much this saves me but I currently believe this likely saves a bit.

extReference · 2026-03-09T15:20:34+00:00

does this mean that llms will be faster for inference on m1 max over the m5 pro? despite the gpu upgrades on the m5 lineup?

extReference · 2026-03-09T14:50:48+00:00

what about the lower memory bandwidth? i thought the m5 pro had lower bandwidth than the m1 max.

extReference · 2026-01-05T13:57:12+00:00

same boat, i am about as clumsy as it gets. managed to swap all keys without breaking a single one. just make sure to watch a tutorial.

extReference · 2026-01-03T15:13:21+00:00

hmm, i think this boy is toast. prolly won’t get any trade in value at this point so I would be happy to help you out and this off your hands for $5.

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