Drifting to Linux
08 April 2026
Staring down both barrels of spending a lot of money on a new MacBook Pro, I found myself wondering "Do I really need a Mac?".
The truth is, no, I don't any more.
I entered the Apple ecosystem back in 2009 or so when I tried my hand at iOS development with a cheap(ish) MacBook and iPhone 3GS, but I'm not doing that any more. The family are all on iPhones but they will continue to work perfectly well if there isn't a modern MacBook around.
If I do ever need an actual Mac, I could pick up a Mini, Neo, or older M-series laptop for a lot less than I'd be spending on a MacBook Pro to be my "main machine".
I will need a new main machine though as Intel Macs are becoming obsolete. The upcoming macOS 27 will not support Intel so I would be stuck on macOS 26 with no hope of mitigation of Liquid Glass with future releases. I'm also reliably informed that 26 is sluggish on Intel. Altogether that's not a future to look forward to.
I could buy an older M-series, maybe an M3, but I feel now like Apple would need to radically change direction with macOS to convince me to stick around.
Asahi Linux is interesting, and impressive, but it's a small project that exists only at the whim of the Apple M-series bootloader allowing unsigned kernels to run on the hardware. It also only really supports M1 and M2 machines at present.
So I am left looking at a mainstream x86 machine to run Linux on. I'm a fan of the ThinkPad T-series, and the Asus Zenbook S also look good right now.
The thing is, the Apple M CPUs are still well ahead of the x86 competition in terms of performance (I made a spreadsheet). AMD and Intel's latest mobile chips are in the Apple M3 ballpark in single core benchmarks, faring better in multicore where they approach the base M5. I'm not routinely encoding 4K video, running local LLMs, or doing similar other cycle-hungry tasks, so I need to persuade myself that the paper performance gap won't matter in practice for my uses. It probably doesn't really.
There's nothing to be done at the moment though. WWDC and macOS 27 are pending, and there will likely be Apple M6 chips later in the year, as well as better availability of Intel Core Ultra 300 and AMD Ryzen AI 400 series laptops to look at. Intel Nova Lake with its revamped microarchitecture might sneak in there too.
Not switching to Linux, but definitely drifting in that direction now.