> Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops?
And I personally hope that by then, GNU/Linux will have an M1-like processor available to happily run on. The possibilities demonstrated by this chip (performance+silence+battery) are so compelling that it's inevitable we'll see them in non-Apple designs.
Also, as it usually happens with Apple hardware advancements, Linux experience will be gradually getting better on M1 Macbooks as well.
I think we can look to mobile to see how feasible this might be: consistently over the past decade, iPhones have matched or exceeded Android performance with noticeably smaller capacity batteries. A-series chips and Qualcomm chips are both ARM. Apple's tight integration comes with a cost when it comes to flexibility, and, you can argue, developer experience, but it's clearly not just the silicon itself that leads to the performance we're seeing in the M1 Macs.
I think there are serious concerns about Qualcomm's commitment to competitive performance instead of just being a patent troll. I think if AWS Graviton is followed by Microsoft[0] and Google[1] also having their own custom ARM chips it will force Qualcomm to either innovate or die. And will make the ARM landscape quite competitive. M1 has shown what's possible. MS and Google (and Amazon) certainly have the $$ to match what Apple is doing.
I wonder to what extent that's a consequence of Apple embracing reference counting (Swift/Objective C with ARC) while Google being stuck on GC (Java)?
I'm a huge fan of OCaml, Java and Python (RC but with cyclic garbage collection), and RC very likely incurs more developer headache and more bugs, but at the end of the day, that's just a question of upfront investment, and in the long run it seems to pay off - it's pretty hard for me to deny that pretty much all GC software is slow (or singlethreaded).
Java can be slow for many complex reasons, not just GC. Oracle are trying to address some of this with major proposals such as stack-allocated value types, sealed classes, vector intrinsics etc, but these are potentially years away and will likely never arrive for Android.
However, a lot of Androids slowness is not due to Java but rather just bad/legacy architectural decisions. iOS is simply better engineered than Android and I say this as an Android user.
Not to mention it took Android about a decade longer than iPhone to finally get their animations silky smooth. I don't know if the occasional hung frames were the results of GC, but I suspect it.
And I personally hope that by then, GNU/Linux will have an M1-like processor available to happily run on. The possibilities demonstrated by this chip (performance+silence+battery) are so compelling that it's inevitable we'll see them in non-Apple designs.
Also, as it usually happens with Apple hardware advancements, Linux experience will be gradually getting better on M1 Macbooks as well.