Can’t run Windows natively but you can run it using Parallels or so i’m told.
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I bought one, had it for a few weeks now, went for the mid-spec M2 Max chip.
The screen is nice, and the laptop speakers sound great when the machine is on hard surfaces, apart from that it’s pretty shit for the money you pay. Certainly the Max chip is pointless, maybe the smaller 8-core CPU one is a happy medium if it works out to less than half the price.
Unless you use Logic Pro or Final Cut Pro and your business depends on it, I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone, it doesn’t really seem to have any purpose other than that. The Apple Silicon GPU is basically useless because nothing is optimised for it, and there are no (zero) games without Crossover/Wine or virtualisation, the latter only really being possible via Parallels which is a yearly subscription licence fee. There is UTM which harnesses Apple Virtualization, but it’s mostly QEMU using software emulation which is just shite.
If I could send it back (which I can’t, even four days after receiving Apple said it was not eligible for return - did not give a reason) I’d buy a decent Windows machine instead or just cobble something together in my traditional post-apocalytic scavenger-survivor style.
It’s going in the cupboard until I forget how much I paid for this thing, or before it gets lodged sideways up the arse of the nearest Apple “Genius”.
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Sounds like you bought a lorry when what you needed was a van.
I have the M2 air as my laptop, its excellent for my work in adobe or CAD, no lags but I also don’t play computer games (not for the last 30 years or so).
I wanted a fairly meaty one that would last me a long time. The problem is that for me (and I can’t really see an exception) there doesn’t appear to be much point in buying the heavier hitting Macs because there isn’t the software to require it outside of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro. I’ve seen corpo shill youtube “reviewers” state the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is completely pointless too as the Mac Studio has all of the same features.
Will have to wait until hardware support for Linux/BSD improves, then I can tear macOS off it and actually have some use for all that hardware
masOS is already Unix, you can default the terminal to Bash or keep Zsh and work up from there.
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There’s only so far you can go, though. Can’t enable 32-bit backwards compatibility, or OpenGL, for example, despite the hardware supporting it. These are things where Apple have just said “No, you’re not having it anymore”, SoCal-style
No 16 or 8 bit too, I suppose somedays you just need to let go 
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Ideally you want to disable Rosetta since it kills battery and performance. It depends what software you are running, but for software dev I was able to find apple silicon builds so it ran much better than on PC. Some games also support silicon.
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The chicken and egg problem
Too few potential customers to port games to mac, without any games that will stay that way.
Only way this could be solved, if Apple would pay the games studios to port the games.
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The markets will respond to the markets, as your article kind of confirms. It would be a lot easier if Apple hadn’t deprecated OpenGL and not really provided any support for Vulkan (reliant on that MoltenVK mess) - and I think them deploying GPTK is essentially a gimmick at this point. In terms of hardware, for Apple Silicon the GPU is technically quite far behind due to not supporting RTX anyway so hardware wise it’s a bit dead in the water, it wouldn’t be competitive even if you could load Windows 11 onto it, but you can’t. Not for any technical reason other than the corporations are fucking idiots.
Asahi Linux is coming along but is still way off. I’m pretty deep in the Linux/BSD world and noticing some pretty big efficiency problems in the display manager layers with dropping frames and GPUs overheating when given menial tasks, so there’s not really an alternative at the minute.
Interestingly, though, Apple still has a massive gaming market share due to mobile games, so you’d think the architecture alignment of it’s laptops with one of the biggest gaming platforms would make it better.
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Had this thing six months now.
Summary: complete waste of money.
Detail: I’ve spent several hours trying to get pyTorch and Tensorflow to work on it, it just won’t. There’s some plugins or extensions that supposedly make it work with the Metal API but I can’t get it to run at all.
I’ve also spent several hours developing a C++ application which tests the Vulkan/GPU features available, and the M2 Max neither supports geometry shaders (too old) nor mesh shaders (too new) rendering it fucking useless in this regard.
Meanwhile, my £30 used 2006 Mac Pro has a £60 AMD graphics card upgrade which can do all this stuff! And people wonder why I only own “junk”!
It’s a nice laptop, I went way over-spec because I thought the above stuff would work. It’s basically now a very fancy chromebook for 100 times the price. Or maybe I’ll buy Logic Pro and synthesize an album, just to reduce the bitterness I have towards its lack of ROI.
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Perhaps run Windows with Parallels?
The gaming performance on Parallels is quite good now with Silicon last I checked
Only if your apps run on the ARM version of Windows, which is to say, “maybe”, and “slow”.
I’ve got the Xbox for gaming, I wanted this for software development.
It’s not an operating system limitation, it’s hardware, it physically has less features than a Dell or a Lenovo of half its value.
Princess and the Pea effect in full-force when they ask the price they are asking.
Not to nitpick, but probably “price” would be a better word than “value” there then! As in, the Dell or Lenovo is better value (and maybe even better value at half the price!).
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Yeah, you’re right.
It does have the 16-core Neural Engine which is expensive and fucking worthless.
Obviously I’m just sitting here in my ivory tower moaning about my expensive laptop while you guys deal with the aftermath of a major earthquake, cos you know, entitlement 
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This is amazing with the AI built into adobe products and Topaz, which I use everyday for work, so probably just the wrong tool for the job.
This is besides the fact that their stock model comes with too little memory and storage, and addition to them costs a LOT.
1200 NT$ to upgrade to 4TB?! Holy shit that’s impressive!
Price is in USD