This worry you have is only a worry if we assume that the M2 Ultra is unmatched by AMD and Intel. In reality, Apple doesn't make the fastest desktop chips money can buy.
Unbiased benchmarks need to be compared. Apple's press release doesn't compare performance to x86 with quantitative benchmarks and that is intentional. Don't just believe Apple when they tell us that this is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
For one thing, both Nvidia and AMD kick the pants out of Apple's graphics solution. Nothing comes close to touching the RTX 4090.
High memory workloads are completely off the table with Apple systems now. The previous Intel Mac Pro could handle more memory (1.5TB compared to 192GB), and it was modular.
Apple Silicon only really shines in performance per watt, but once you need a higher level of performance you reach a point where Apple has no product to compete. In a desktop environment, the advantages of Apple Silicon get whittled away.
They actually just today released an update [1] with fixes for sleep:
"We now have a cpuidle driver, which significantly lowers idle power consumption by enabling deep CPU sleep. You should also get better battery runtime both idle and during sleep, especially on M1 Pro/Max machines.
Thanks to the cpuidle driver, s2idle now works properly, which should fix timekeeping issues causing journald to crash."
The Lenovo T14s with an AMD CPU and Intel WiFi sleeps perfectly every time, the CPU scheduler seems to behave right too since I have a full days battery life normally.
I went into the BIOS and enabled S3 sleep though, since it's sold as a Windows machine and Microsoft is pushing the new hybrid sleep stuff really hard.
I sometimes feel the same. Then I have to deal with Homebrew, Docker or macOS equivalents of coreutils, and I'm happy to go back to my Linux-powered Thinkpad, thankyouverymuch.
Install the GNU coreutils and all the other much more featureful gnu variants, put them first in your path, done. I've been rocking this setup for years.
Docker on mac does really truly suck, namespaces in Linux is truly the killer app for the kernel, maybe Apple will adopt a port of runj one day.
You're listening too much to the biased Apple marketing, BSing you with comparisons to years old Intel CPUs locked into poorly cooled chassises on their laptops (they compared it for Intel MacBook Air ffs).
The new AMD and Intel CPUs are fine. There's a reason Apple never dares to mention them in their marketing shows - they always ignore things that are competitive.
Your FOMO reaction is exactly the emotional reaction their ads are meant to trigger - they're dialed in to manipulate you into this feeling to feel bad about not owning their products.
Intel (and AMD) reportedly have M2 Pro-like quad channel, GPU heavy laptop CPUs in the pipe.
Those will be very cool!
Technically they both have datacenter focused, M2 Ultra esque APUs too (the MI300 and Falcon Shores). Intel delayed and then canceled the CPU part due to a lack of demand (it is now just a big GPU). The MI300 was HPC only, but AMD is trying to spin it as a more general AI product now.
I got a base-spec MacBook Pro 16 inch with the M2 Pro chip from work last week. Before that, I was on my Linux workstation with an AMD Ryzen 3950x, a desktop CPU released 3.5 years ago.
The compile time for a debug build of LLVM and MLIR is basically the same on those machines, the desktop machine only winning by a little bit. Roughly 10 minutes. Yes, of course desktop vs. laptop is unfair, but it's also a 3.5 year old chip.
And if you really want all-out performance, there are still AMD ThreadRippers, which should easily beat an M2 Ultra in almost all multi-threaded workloads.
(Details on the benchmark run: Building LLVM from source using precompiled LLVM 15 downloaded from the official website, debug build, only clang;mlir;lld projects, using mold/sold linker on Linux/Mac respectively, ninja build tool).
How about using Qualcomm machines with linux. Microsoft is pushing for WindowsOnArm. Any ideas on how much support there is for linux? considering these chips are similar to the ones that are running Android
Qualcomm's processors aren't really comparable to the Apple Silicon ones. They haven't made anything like an M2 Pro/Ultra.
I'd also say that Microsoft isn't "pushing" for Windows on ARM. Rather, they're adding support for Windows on ARM with very little weight behind it.
This is where things get into a chicken-or-egg problem. There's no reason to buy a Qualcomm/Windows ARM laptop given that an Intel laptop will perform a lot better, have better compatibility, and not have to emulate x86/64 for all the apps that developers won't port to ARM. Given that there's little reason for someone to buy an ARM laptop and only 1 of those reasons is under Qualcomm's control (making a better laptop processor), there's little reason for Qualcomm to make a better laptop processor. Given all that, over the medium-term (say, 2-5 years), there's little reason for Microsoft to devote a lot of effort to Windows on ARM.
When Apple introduced M1, they gave users a chip that was way better than what Intel was offering. It was night and day. Everyone knew that there wouldn't be Intel Macs in a few years so we all bought ARM Macs and developers ported things to ARM (as users knew they would). By contrast, no one in the Windows world is betting that ARM is the future of Windows - not users when buying, not developers when compiling, and not chip makers when making processors. Without commitment, there's little chance for success and no one is willing to truly commit.
If you want Linux on ARM, you can go out and buy a Pinebook. The problem is that you aren't getting a flagship CPU. You're getting mediocre 2016 hardware. Even if you got a Qualcomm 8cx Gen 3 meant for laptops, it's half the speed of an M2 (regular, not Pro or Ultra) and slower than what Intel will be selling you.
The problem is that the options for non-Apple ARM laptops are just poor. Even if you could get the best Qualcomm has to offer, you wouldn't buy it because you could get a better Intel machine - and not have to deal with compatibility issues and emulation. Sure, Windows on ARM can run x86/64 code, but there are always things that don't quite work or work very slowly or chew through RAM or battery because you're on Windows/ARM and no one is expecting that.
You can run Linux on ARM today, but there just aren't ARM machines that are compelling to use that aren't coming from Apple (save for some stuff like the Raspberry Pi).
In the end this spurring Intel to innovate, but will it be enough?
I realize there are some Linux' running on Apple H/W, but due to do the closed nature (H/W specs anyone?) it will already be inferior to MacOS.
I have a MacBook from work, and strongly dislike (hate?) MacOS.