$4,300-$6,000+, wow you're not wrong. And that's just 32 or 64 GB of RAM.

Something has gone wrong at HP. They are also charging $7,000 for Strix Halo.

apple silicon is virtualization capable and the UTM app (on the app store, but open source so you can build it too) wraps Apple's hypervisor framework, allows me to run on my macbook air (m2 earlier, recently updated to m5 just to get more memory) macos as well as arm versions of both fedora and arch, with plasma and gnome (and i've used hyprland etc to toy around).

it's important to set UTM to use Apple Silicon _virtualization_, because otherwise it uses QEMU and is thereby emulating. With Apple Silicon virtualization, having macos and arch and fedora all going at once is amazing.

pertinent references :

https://github.com/utmapp/UTM

or search for UTM on the Apple app store, where it's prebuilt (and that's what i use successfully).

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor

Asahi still doesn't support a lot of basic things like: external displays, Thunderbolt, hardware accelerated video decoding, 120hz refresh rate, etc.

Because at the time of my purchase I mistakenly believed that fan-less was a given for an ARM laptop; and that ARM laptops were a lot more supported than Apple products; some big names were using ARM linux and raving about it.

It's still is a great laptop and I recommend it for the hardware overall, but not fan-less indeed.

Asahi is like a decade away from being 100% tho