I’ve been rocking my hackintosh for almost 4 years now. It’s still holding together, but battery life and performance (with battery) are not great, also intel support will be gone soon.
I have to say that I’m not big fan of Liquid Glass redesign, so if I’m getting a new Mac, it’ll be an M4 15” MBA with 512GB and will keep it on Sequoia.
My other option is to move over to Linux (probably Debian), but I’m not confident I’ll be able to find something compelling for a reasonable price with great performance and battery life (mostly because RAM and storage shortage)
Any thoughts on that? On one hand, it’s probably a bad idea to buy a new Mac just to keep it forever on sequoia but I also feel like my laptop will hold me back any time soon.
For a little bit more context: I’m a computer engineering college student, I do programming in different languages, I make heavy use of virtual machines and I like Apple iWork for office related workloads. I have an M1 Mac mini, but I still need a mobile computer.
Nothing comes close to the battery life, performance, and formfactor of the MBA. A ThinkPad X1 Carbon might get close, but Linux always struggles with brand new devices. It looks like a base model starts at $1700 (USD) and it's going to perform worse and get worse battery life. It does have twice the RAM and storage at least.
That said liquid glass on Mac is much less obnoxious than on a phone. UI elements take up far less of the screen and it's mostly just actual content. Also it's a lot less glassy than than on iOS, even without it being set to tinted glass. Also future versions of Mac OS could fix it.
I made up my mind and I went to the Apple Store just to check if they still had 15” MBA.
It turned out that they did and were giving them away with a wholesale discount (sorry I’m not sure if that’s the term) plus the student discount I got it from 1519€ to 1219€. I think it was a great deal.
I have a 15ILL9 and it’s fine on Linux. There’s issues with Microsoft modern standby but the Arch wiki has a fix to resume fan control. I’m using the EAS scheduler with schedutil. I have it tuned to comfortably sit within 5-6 watts while performing acceptably. Its battery is 70wh.
Yeah, but my 13" Air felt much harder to use after the update (I was running the dev beta back in June, but they didn't change the spacing since) because I felt I was getting far less usable space for almost no benefit. They did finally make those damned window buttons bigger though.