In the long term interconnected nations might make electricity cheap everywhere. Currently it's mostly making it more expensive everywhere else. (As someone living in south of Sweden.)
Edit: But to be fair... The biggest reason it's expensive is likely that companies like to make money.
For the problems ASICs exist they vastly outperform general hardware. Typically both in absolute speed and efficiency.
But it's only possible to make custom ASICs when you have a specific problem to solve. For newer crypto systems they can vary enough parameters that building a flexible enough ASIC to recoup the investment before the algorithm changes and makes your hardware useless.
For problems where the problem to solve remain in the problem space the ASIC can solve there is no point to use a thing else.
The PC platforms have anemic memory bandwidth in comparison. Eg, Strix Halo is 256GB/s max. If money is a bigger limiter than performance it can be an option though. As can Nvidia DGX Spark machines. (Also limited to 128GB memory and comparatively low bandwidth, but higher compute than Strix Halo.)
It's worth noting that the 5090 (or the RTX Pro 6000 big brother with 92GB VRAM) will run rings around the Mac when it comes to compute.
My old 3090 is typically significantly faster (almost 2x token/s) than my M4 Max 128GB machine, as long as the model fits in the 24GB of VRAM.
In most situations it's a better idea to just buy tokens. But there are definitely cases when that's not an option. And then a machine like the M5 Ultra can allow you to do things locally for a fairly limited budget. And in a simpler package to manage than a machine with multiple GPUs.
One case where Apple can be very useful is if you're traveling a lot for work.
Wherever you are you can probably find a local store that sells and services Macbooks. So if your machine is damaged during a trip you can get it fixed, or buy a replacement on the spot, and at least get through the work you are there to do.
For small-ish companies that can be a very useful feature.
Except it's still a slightly different challenge each time to "get it working", each different PC. A Mac is a Mac is a Mac, more or less.
I have a nice Framework laptop on my desk running Kubuntu alongside my Macs. Every now and then I check in, make sure I could switch to it if I needed to, test all my important tasks, plug it in so the stupid mainboard battery does not go flat.
And then I go back to my Mac, because I prefer it and even Tahoe isn't painful enough to switch. KDE is fine and I'll use it if circumstances dictate I have to.
I think critics misunderstand the extent to which Mac-using devs are "locked into Apple's ecosystem". Unless you're writing iOS apps, you aren't. You perhaps even exist in a more heterogeneous world (Mac and Linux, Mac and Windows, all three) than a Linux-using web dev does.
Essentially everything I run is not at all "locked in". I would miss the ease of keychain, handoff and Apple Notes (which I like despite its flaws). And then I'd deal with it. I'd probably carry on using an iPhone (I am very ambivalent about the iPad)
FWIW my "Apple ecosystem" is why I have been able to teach myself open weights/open source AI at a pragmatic level, because my secondhand off-the-shelf kit does an acceptable job of it without me yet having to specify a PC I don't have enough use for as a non-gamer. A lot of people have solved a lot of general problems that I don't have to tinker with too early.
This isn't a fanboy thing (I would consider myself a qualified critic). Both KDE and GNOME have some nice things. It's just a question of energies.
IIRC it was Adrian Cockcroft who said he used Sun at work, and a Mac at home, because performance tuning was his day job and he didn't want to do it at home; I think this resonates.
It has been my own choice for 28 years, largely: Mac plus linux.
Right but a secondhand thinkpad is not a laptop you find in the travel context of the thread.
(I dispute the main point, too — I spent flipping hours trying and failing to get trackpad speed right on a Surface Go in GNOME/Wayland. Ended up having to abandon that combination.)
On the contrary it (faster Surface Go 2) was one of the most practical little machines I’ve ever used, and was really impressive in Windows 11.
I am totally happy to lay the blame for the poor trackpad performance in Gnome/Wayland on the software, because the hardware was super. Absent that problem I would have used it for almost anything and I loved taking it on trains and to coffee shops; Apple has no equivalent machine at all.
But you’re making the point for me. Success in Linux involves either tinkering or constrained hardware choices, even now. That’s fine but I think the Linux world pretends the situation is better.
> But you’re making the point for me. Success in Linux involves either tinkering or constrained hardware choices, even now. That’s fine but I think the Linux world pretends the situation is better.
Have you heard of this new Windows thing that everyone's going on about? Almost nothing supports it out of the box and it's just all tinkering - and that's for something you have to pay a lot of money for.
You're equally hardware-constrained with Apple too. Can you find me an Apple laptop with four "proper" USB ports, a Displayport socket, and swappable battery?
> You're equally hardware-constrained with Apple too. Can you find me an Apple laptop with four "proper" USB ports, a Displayport socket, and swappable battery?
This is now a circular argument.
As I said, a Mac is a Mac is a Mac. Nobody is arguing it is otherwise.
That's the whole point of the thread I was replying to.
Of course it does! I'm exactly suggesting that those constrained hardware choices have value in the context discussed (agreeing with an earlier poster) and that in fact, if you're out on the road or you're under pressure and something fails, the Mac does have that advantage: you'll easily find one and there is no setup time to speak of.
Buying on the spot - sure. Anything that requires repair has to be usually booked in advance with some waiting time. Relatively short, usually days, but still not really possible to go into the store and get your laptop fixed right away in most cases.
Not for C++ code generated by whole program optimizing compilers. Your "human entered" is doing the heavy lifting. Now that AI is writing code your assertion might be on shaky ground.
C++ can be slow to compile, but as I said, parsing is not the bottleneck. Even for really huge automatically generated C++ files, or old-school concatenated "unity builds", the parsing step is generally tiny compared to everything else.
Coroutines, cooperative threading using fibres, type classes, generics, type deduction, easy interface with C++. The functional style, pattern matching. Flow based programming using 'chips and wires' abstraction.
It has many other interesting capabilities, for example, the ability to change its own grammar, that is rather too much, not for a pleb like me. It has unique (linear and affine) types too. It is really quite a handful.
Go did bring coroutines back into limelight but Felix predates Go by a margin.
Skaller, Felix's author, used Felix as a playground for novel language design ideas, so it was always in a state of flux.
Huh, that does sound like quite the grab bag of features. Think I'll have to find time to further investigate. Thanks for taking the time to elaborate!
Sounds like this is similar to a decompilation (pay walled article so I haven't read it).
A while back a listened to a podcast where they interviewed people doing this and it was quite interesting. (And it's an engineering podcast so many technical details.)
Edit: But to be fair... The biggest reason it's expensive is likely that companies like to make money.
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