Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.
Oh, I’m sure they exist. There’s Christian versions of any genre you can think of. That’s partly why I ended up adding in the 8-track part, to make it more ridiculous.
Maybe I should have made it Mongolian gangster rap.
Nuvia started because a few Apple engineers wanted to make server CPUs and sell them. Apple management didn’t want to do it so they left and started their own company. They were acquired by Qualcomm.
There are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
Pretty much soon. Nuvia's design has been incorporated into 8 Elite and X Elite/Plus series. It was generational leaps ahead of 8 Gen 3, where 8 Elite is already close to Apple M1.
I'm looking for a cheap 8 Elite phone to root it and run a special kernel module that let me run LXC containers and run arbitrary Linux ARM64 program. And run a couple of services on it, maybe I can port Kubernetes whatsoever
> here are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
At the very least they ought to consider doing a macOS-based server chip. Given how many providers are racking Mac Minis these days. It's mostly for CI testing for code deployed to Apple platforms, so it very much supports their business.
The Server market is enormous with a much higher average selling price. It would make perfect sense for Apple to make servers if it meant more revenue and profit than they could make not doing it. There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.
Apple tried to address the server market 20 years ago during the PowerPC days (and later Intel). Their Xserves were really well
designed machines and worked well. And yes, they also ran Linux (Yellowdog, IIRC).
It failed.
But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.
We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.
Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.
But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.
A lot of Apple's advantages come from tightly-linked memory and compute in a fully integrated design. I somewhat doubt that advantage can fully translate to servers, where features like hot-swappable memory are standard. Maybe they should skip mid-scale and head straight to mainframes?
Hot-swappable memory is probably much more common in mainframes than mainstream servers. A typical x86 server still requires you to power it off before replacing DIMMs. Meanwhile, NVIDIA and AMD have both recently done some rather Apple-like server processors that solder CPU, GPU, and RAM to the same package/module.
If Apple cared about the server market, they would have added syncookies into their TCP stack. Seems like they should have done it during the time of Xserve... it would have been somewhat straightforward to pull it in from upstream BSD back then. But they still haven't (last I checked).
Apple doesn't have the business to business support organization to make this kind of thing work either.
Libdispatch is a burden to use for a server because of its book keeping overhead, and their history with kqueue makes it hard to convince someone to use it.
epoll isn’t very fast, kqueue is indeed much faster as a primitive.
MacOS’s implementation is an order of magnitude or more slower than (say) FreeBSD though, so its not a valid comparison that the syscall simply exists.
Another example of a syscall performing differently would be gettimeofday() in OpenBSD vs linux, its an extremely cheap operation in Linux but quite costly in OpenBSD despite being identical at the kernel boundary.
Sure, they can, but they've done servers several times in their past and I think it's reasonable to guess that results will be similar. Sure, they have a very nice CPU, but they don't have a good reputation for enterprise support and that's more important to selling servers than having the best cpus. If their cpus were 10x as good as the competition, maybe, but they're not, especially in a server context where power and cooling are abundant.
The rumors are that it’s for internal use. It’s already known that they have custom M2 or M3 servers that they don’t sell to the public. Source: multiple episodes of the Accidental Tech Podcast that discuss articles about this.
> There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.
The issue is that the current Apple way of designing hardware doesn't really work for servers. An individual 1U server can easily cost $50,000 or more. Soldering everything together so that if a single memory chip goes bad you have to replace the entire machine instead of that one stick is going to make customers unhappy. Likewise, they expect to be able to add storage or network ports, and expect the software to have enough openness that the new systems will work with their existing enterprise SAN or what have you.
Obviously Apple could make open server hardware, but then people might start wondering why they can't make open laptop hardware.
They could use sockets for the memory. Easily justifiable because there is much more available space in a server than their other products. Just look at how bare the Apple Silicon Mac Pro mainboard looks.
The problem was never space. They solder the RAM even in the laptops that have 8GB and the same memory bandwidth as ordinary PC laptops with modular RAM, and DIMMs take up less space on the board because the memory chips can then be attached double-sided to a DIMM that only needs as much space on the board as it takes for an edge connector.
The primary advantage of soldering compared to DIMMs is that the traces can be slightly shorter without routing them through an edge connector, but if you need that then you can use CAMM.
They solder the memory because then you can't upgrade it. Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD, for which there is no even plausible other justification.
The main reason is definitely just overcharging people for upgrades but size also includes thickness. SOCAMM would add at least the thickness of an extra PCB. I don't really agree with Apple's obsession to make their devices as thin as possible (they're thin enough!) but it would be a valid concern for them.
> Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD
Worse, they have a proprietary module that they use in the Mac Mini. Couldn't have just used M.2.
That still doesn’t overcome the issue that they are selling every single one they can already. They have no need for additional chip sales.
All the capacity at all the fabs is booked up for years. They can’t make more if they want to.
So any hypothetical sales of OEM style guts would only cut into the number of Macs they can sell to existing customers. And there’s no way they would ever do that.
Servers need a lot of RAM. Apple can either make 42 iPhones with 12GB or one server with 512GB RAM.
42 people with iPhone will buy airpods, some subscriptions and apps. They also be vendor locked into Apple ecosystem and almost guaranteed to bring more iPhone sale in 3 years.
Apple must be dumb to canibalize their own market.
They tried it with various open systems that allowed licensed powerpc clones of their systems and they ended it because it reduced their profits as people bought the clones instead of mac hardware. I don't see them redoing that anytime soon.
> How many people really care about linux on a mac?
Me and most developers I know IRL would switch to Apple hardware (for laptops, not everything obviously) if Apple just cared one iota about Linux users, as the hardware is simply so good, and the software/OS so trash. But, we're also all professionals who can't be bothered about having to hack in our own support for a OS, at least anymore. So we end up staying with our Carbon X1s, workstations, desktops and Thinkpads.
There are those of us that also remember when they were at the verge of being nothing, and even turned to Linux as possible rescue alternative (mkLinux).
Indeed, buy the idea was you could have built a much more powerful system for much less money for hackintosh back then. I'd rather now use their hardware as it's cheaper than anything else comparable, but run it on Linux.
> Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware.
Why should it matter how big Apple is (to Apple itself, or anyone else)? How does being that, or aiming to be that, motivate people to work at Apple? Versus, say, making the 'best' product they can, or making the 'most useful' product for people/customers?
Given how "big" Apple is already, it seems that not aiming to be big got them pretty good results (using their current motivations), and IMHO it's pretty questionable that they would have reached the same place in 'bigness' if bigness had been their goal.
Define big. They're one of the biggest companies in history. You're saying that if they appealed to 1% of the market that already uses Macs... what? And then they have to support these users?
They got Steve Jobs, so it was probably the right decision, but I will wish they'd bought Be instead. It was super fast, instead of the (still!) super slow Nextstep.
I wonder how macOS would've turned out then. For me, the Smalltalk-ness of Objective-C is one of the things that makes it feel so much different than the likes of Windows and Linux. So much of the UX falls naturally out of it that I doubt we'd have ended up anywhere similar otherwise. What could Be have been like?
You would have had a C++ userspace, and POSIX would likely not be as relevant as it is today.
Note that BeOS wasn't POSIX compatible, that came with Haiku rewrite.
However without UNIX/POSIX to sell Apple to those frustrated Linux users looking for shinny UNIX laptops, and the management skills from Steve Jobs (vs Gassé), probably Apple would be no more instead.
Haiku has archived what BeOS programming looked like,
Looks very Windowsish... which makes me even more grateful for Objective-C! Not to mention that C++ is far more difficult to mix with other languages, too.
That's true, and Interface Builder is quite a step up from what I had seen GUIs do before.
Mind you that this (me dabbling around with it) was 2004, with most other GUIs still in stone age, and I think it was developed back in the Nextstep days.
Of course they will not because they don't want to be a commodity seller, they want to sell a complete product of premium quality and premium price and that works mighty well for them.
However I am afraid I bought a macOS Air with M1 and recently a Neo for my daughter, because, while they are excellent computers, their closed ecosystem hardware goes directly against free software projects like Linux and others as well.
Microsoft has always been much criticised but, for its own interest, it promoted from the '90 a general purpose ecosystem of hardware where free software thrived. It just got a little bad later for the GPUs where proprietary, undocumented hardware becomes the norm and Direct3D the only viable abstraction layer to use them, making it Windows only. It was this ecosystem that made free software thrive, including Linux, GCC, Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk and a lot of wonderful project that empowered people and make computer better to use.
I think we must be aware that free software needs general purpose, well documented hardware to thrive and I think we - the power users, developers, etc - we should choose responsibly what hardware we purchase to choose those that are favorable to free software. We should be also aware that in some cases this means getting a machine with lower performances or that costs a little more but there is a trade-off to be done.
Some people may say: who cares about free software, we just want the best product that works and proprietary, closed, stuff is fine. However, when we think that we are forgetting that we enjoy today a free software ecosystem that was made possible from the open hardware ecosystem of 20 - 30 years ago. We need to remember that when companies are unchallenged they inevitably begin to produce shitty products and make the user's life miserable as long as they can. This can as long as to stifle progress and significantly diminish the usefulness of a computer system.
So, no, apple will not make open hardware but we, the developers and power users, may consider to not buy their computers when they use proprietary, undocumented hardware that is hostile to free software.
Microsoft has never promoted general purpose hardware. From paying OEMs to install Windows on all computers no matter what the customer wants, to locked down proprietary drivers, to ACPI tables that only worked because Windows knew about their specific bugs, to getting Secure Boot force-enabled on all hardware from a certain era...
The reason I buy it is because it’s a vertical. I know the hardware and software work together. The trackpad on my 11 year old MacBook Pro is better than the one on my 1 year old work laptop, and it’s a mix of the software and hardware clearly
They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
I was required to use a Macbook Air in my last job. I hated small things like the window management, the keyboard lack of delete, home, etc keys. There were ways to work around this. Cold aluminium in an aircon office though was no fun, and the keyboard lacked travel.
For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
Are you sure about ESC? I looked at MacBook Air pictures on DDG, and they all had an escape key in the upper left. I've never seen a Mac without one. If you're using it for VI, Ctrl-[ is also ESC (and avoids stretching your fingers).
For delete, if you mean delete-under instead of delete-before (what the key labelled "delete" does), Fn-Delete is delete-under.
Home/End are either Cmd-Up/Down (doc begin/end) or Opt-Up/Down (line begin/end) (I haven't used a PC in a while, so I can't remember what Home/End do)
On a Mac keyboard, Home is Fn+Left arrow, End is Fn+Right arrow, Page up is Fn+Up arrow and Page down is Fn+Down arrow, and as you said, Delete is Fn+Backspace. The Fn key is at the bottom left of the Mac keyboard, which is diametrically opposed to the top right position of the Backspace key. You need to use your two hands to produce any of these combinations. Also, the arrow keys are half the size of the other keys.
Obviously, this is not a problem for most Mac users. Personally, I've used a MacBook Pro for more than a decade, and I eventually found that so annoying that I bought an external keyboard with full size arrow keys and dedicated Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys.
MacOS is a lovely desktop OS, even now. I stress "desktop" because you can use a proper full-sized keyboard with Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, Ins/Del, etc and they all do exactly what they should. Apple has built in keymaps for PC keyboards for all the localisations so that I get UK English on a PC keyboard, and then I can swap Cmd and Ctrl so Linux keystrokes work as I expect as well.
And a proper external wired mouse, with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel.
It's lovely.
I sold my Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and may their new owners enjoy them. I am happy I never need to touch the damned things again. I have a centimetre of key travel and a big fat mechanical click, and it's lovely.
It's laptops that are the pain. There, you have no choice. When I travel with this MBA I take a Lenovo USB keyboard and a cheapo 3rd party Bluetooth mouse, but I still need to fsck around with hubs and external power adaptors and so on and it's a pain. The all-day battery life sort of makes up for it. Sort of.
Most of that sounds like trivial misconfiguration and printer compatibility problems.
In other words, things that you would have had to touch in Linux too, but because they didn't work at all, here work but until configured, do not work like you'd want them to.
I was assuming the people complaining about macOS are coming from Linux, cause modern Windows is horrendous. Also don't get what's so bad about macOS unless we're talking about license or compatibility. There are small things for sure, like the green button shouldn't be fullscreen. There are big things it does better.
> Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
You answered that: _Corporate_.
Normal Windows doesn't have all those problems, and most of them sound like they're network, configuration or specific tools related, exactly where corporate setups tend to do things "their own way".
I'm fortunate enough to have WSL so I frankly do everything in bash. I am also in control of the Intune endpoint exceptions for development machines, to make sure they are allowed to run stuff like cargo, but it has the advantage of letting me remove my devices from the Adobe Acrobat group.
It's still hilarious when defender does it's thing and the fan goes mach 1, or when the firmware updater force reboots in the middle of a meeting after you've clicked the 10 minute extend two times.
It is what it is. I'm sure we'd figure out a way to make enterprise IT horrible on any OS.
> it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off.
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
There is no doubt that it throttles. For the most part I don't notice. I've build a rust SDK around apache arrow which produces Typescript, Python and Go interactions with our datalake. Compiling that is rather slow. It'll take 5-10 minutes on myh corporate pc vs the 15–30 minutes on the air. Whenever I absolutely have to work on it on myh mac I'll usually end up letting Azure DevOps spend it's 30-60 minutes while I do something else.
That is the thing, all corporate laptops suck regardless of the OS.
Unless one is lucky to work for small to medium size companies whose organisation hasn't yet grown to such politics and processes, with certifications, IT tickets for admin actions, and so on.
I use an M3 mbp with corporate crap like Windows Defender on it. Two cores are maxed out all day, so if I do anything else intensive it goes up to 80 C and turns on the "vacuum" fan. Still, most of the time it's absolutely quiet (barely audible, and I'm someone who really hates laptop fan noise!), and the machine doesn't get more than lukewarm.
With battery saver mode it even lasts over 6 hours.
Same here. Have a Base M1 Air. Will trade that for M7 Base Air maybe if I can drag this one for a while. I can't go back to computers with noisy fans. It seems too last generation since the M1 launched.
I'm still astonished at how good this little thing is. The only problem I've had is the realization that 256GB isn't enough for me, but save for that I really have no excuse to upgrade. Can't justify a newer machine when this thing does everything I need!
Even for pretty intense workloads it rarely struggles or slows down. And even with some pretty intense battery degradation (reasonable, to be expected after five years of heavy use) it still runs for more than long enough for me on a single charge, although I really can't go to a coffee shop without a charger if I'm doing development work. All that, and it's dead quiet? I could never go back to the old ways!
I understand the thinking of "I'd like to do local inference on a laptop", but as long as I have a beefier Mac Mini sitting at home that can do all of that for me remotely, why bother?
I can see myself putting Asahi on this thing and giving it to my yet-unborn kids for them to finally drop it down a staircase someday. I've been rough with it and it hasn't broken yet!
My M2 Pro rarely spins up the fan. Usually when it does, it takes me a while to notice. When I do, sometimes I need to stay quiet for a second to even locate where the low purr comes from. Then I usually smile a little and think “hey, the fan is on!” and forget about it again.
In fairness, my Franework 13 Pro is the same, only it gets less hot than the MacBook.
I really do not know when I will replace my five year old M1 Pro. I'm not even starting to begin to get to the point where I start thinking about replacing this thing which I'm frankly astonished by.
I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
That was the case with the M1 indeed. Subsequent releases have been allowed to consume more power. My M5 Pro gets too hot to use on my lap when full out compiling or playing games.
The Intel period of MacBooks allowed a more direct comparison. Don't think macOS itself is the differentiator vs Windows.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
A significant portion of the Apple Silicon efficiency gains would have come from shifting away from discrete GPUs. At that time it was very normal for the integrated GPU to be minimal (slow) because people who need it get a discrete GPU. Things are very different now because we push far more onto the GPU now vs. back then, which made Intel and AMD scale them up out of uselessness. Now most people don't really need a discrete GPU because the integrated ones are fast enough to even handle some gaming.
The majority(?) of Intel MacBooks didn't have dGPUs though. That was a higher-end option on the larger models. I also vaguely remember there being a big leap in iGPU performance with Intel Iris around 2013. I had a high-end MBP from work and wished I could perma disable the dGPU, cause I didn't need it and it just made the thing get hot.
But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
Skimming Wikipedia it looked like you get discrete graphics unless you have a MacBook Air or 13-inch MacBook Pro. A higher-end option, yes, but probably the more likely one that people actually had here.
And yes, Intel Iris was a good leap forward for their iGPUs at the time! But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Oh yeah, I was thinking of 2015 and earlier. They used to have "IG" and "DG" models. https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2015.h... And I never wanted the 2016-2020 ones because of all the issues, so my personal MBP was a 2015 model until like 2024.
> But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Dang, didn't notice until you pointed it out. So it's a really good thing I got the 13".
I don't remember exactly what the chip options were back then, but currently Intel enforces that by ensuring that the laptop chip with the larger iGPU doesn't actually have enough PCIe lanes to connect a dGPU.
But you could use an external GPU on any of the up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports. Intel is stingy with PCIe lanes but there's definitely enough. A dGPU doesn't need the full 16 and will do just fine with 8, maybe even 4. Especially the low power ones found in laptops.
Intel Macbooks were really really terrible. Slow OS, noisy fan, bad battery life, awful keyboard, little connectivity.
The current ones are really good, but honestly I'm kind of afraid Apple would build crap like that again, because it's not like you can "just" switch to a competitor.
Not just single core perf though. Very efficient idle TDP, efficient all core boost, efficient all core TDP, and efficient mid-high performance tier accelerator (GPU, NPU) TDP.
And the benchmarks seem to understate this. That i9-9001THIKK doesn't matter when it thermal throttles a few seconds into a task. Are they testing these laptops inside freezers or something?
Apple is one of the biggest companies on earth. If every single person on earth who wanted to use Desktop Linux were to buy the most expensive Apple sells to do that, the revenue would not be material relative to Apple's existing size. Please exit your bubble.
Who said anything about desktops? The ARM datacenter is being taken over by Nvidia's Grace and Vera CPU products. If Apple supported OpenBSD, Linux or Solaris, they could destroy Nvidia in CPU performance and kick Graviton and Ampere to the curb forever. But instead they've left the low hanging fruit as another trillion dollar market for Nvidia to eat up.
they deliberately do not want to enter the server market. it is literally an entirely different thing than what they're doing right now. they can't do any of their vertical integration there, there's no moat for them.
like Tim Cook said (quoting Steve I believe) - it's about knowing how to say no 1000 times so that you can say yes to the right thing once, and then put your all into that
They have the resources to be able to do what Jobs described as “hobby projects” (he was referring to the Apple TV which definitely is the best streaming interface for video available, albeit one which is on the expensive side). They did kill their car project after spending a decade on it (and reportedly having thousands of people working on it).
When the same code can run on multiple chips from different vendors, how to write that code becomes a standard, regardless of how you obtained the knowledge. Documentation may not be the standard itself, but it sets one.
Not related to this but the other day I was searching for a good external trackpad that would work with macOS and there are very few (and not good) and every discussion was about how nothing comes close to Apple magic trackpad. The question is why can't other companies create such a good trackpad for macOS, it turns out they can't because the whole protocol for touchpad/gestures etc are proprietary and closed on macOS side so essentially any 3rd party trackpad has to emulate a mouse device. Thats what you get when a company makes computer and its OS and also its accessories and also software services, the whole stack, you either use their whole thing or not.
Your explanation isn’t true at all. It’s very easy to spoof NSEvents. Many tablet drivers and mouse drivers do this and have been for decades. The software side is easy to create.
The part that makes the Apple trackpad good isn’t even the software integration with the OS. It’s the actual trackpad hardware, its surface and haptics. On the software side it’s largely just good acceleration curves.
I’d argue the reason very few competitors exist is just cost and lack of understanding what feels good and why , much like your own comment does.
This is not true. It’s not about protocol or touchpad etc. Apple is just ahead of everyone else when it comes to user experience. Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and a whole lot of other companies have not been able to replicate Apple’s trackpad for their own devices. Why not?
Please search for "find any windows latpop that have same kind of haptic trackpad as macbook" and you will find your answer. There are many such laptops.
I was blown away by how good the multi-touch gestures were on GNOME when I tried Fedora Silverblue a few years back, also with a Magic Trackpad 2. Everything just worked.
The debug_putc moment resonated with me. I once spent two days on an ARM board where early boot died silently, and the fix turned out to be a single misconfigured UART pin mux. Bisecting with one 'a' character at a time looks silly but is the only thing that works when nothing works, and the WFI register-zeroing chicken bit is the kind of hardware behavior that would be genuinely maddening to hit without docs.
Is Apple taking steps to purposefully blocking open stuff, or are they just pointedly ignoring it and continuing to develop new hardware? I am genuinely asking, I don't know myself.
edit: speaking mostly about macOS here, mobile OSes are much more locked down
For desktops and laptops, the latter. But for phones and tablets they do not want user control. And even where they do allow it, even a tiny effort in hardware documentation that would make it so much easier never happens. So it's quite hostile overall.
Give it up. People have been predicting this for 15 years.
You can’t have a development machine locked down like iOS. As long as the Mac is the development machine at apple it will need to be able to run arbitrary code.
What support? Asahi had to fight to exist, especially early on when they essentially had to reimplement much of the graphics pipeline. And now its in mainline linux - short of a complete hostile lockdown of the bootloader, it’s not like they support other OS’s very much as is.
Asahi appears to be dead. It wont even boot on anything apple released in the past 2 years.
Sure, their M1-M3 support is okay (as long as you're fine with no hibernate or sleep support, so have to plug in the laptop or risk losing all your open stuff), and it was a lot of work by lots of volunteers... But at this point it's starting to look more like a retrocomputing project. As time ticks on, it'll become less and less viable using an ancient laptop, especially if local AI becomes commonplace.
Wtf do you mean? They just enabled M3 in the official installer and they're working on M4 bringup too. Keep in mind it took them like 16 months to even support M1 at first. Then they supported M2 within a few months, then M3 threw in a wrench that they're still working on, but there is no evidence of death at all, just a lot of work left to do.
M4 has no support and was released in May 2024, over 2 years ago, and looks at least a year from usability - doesn't yet boot. M5 also has no support. M6 also has no support.
I did say they're working on M4 bringup, which means it doesn't boot yet, yes. I don't see how that means they're "dead" though. Or that they'll never catch up ever. In fact, the very recent progress in this area suggests the exact opposite.
I had a bad experience with my Lenovo laptop. It had a firmware issue that caused the trackpad to become unresponsive after suspend and Lenovo never fixed it.
Made the laptop miserable to use, so I went for a MacBook instead which wouldn't have such an obvious issue be unfixed because Apple has so few SKUs to support.
Also went for it in part because I do not like Windows and macOS typically would save me when Linux support was lacking. Just had to hope for a quick port of Asahi Linux to become (unfortunately didn't happen for my M3, but thankfully it's been progressing recently).
That is a good point, but not exactly what I meant.
When I was picking out that Lenovo laptop, there were dozens of different laptops just from Lenovo alone with lots of hardware variety. Then consider all the different manufacturers I could have also chosen from.
With that much hardware, it's hard to find comprehensive reviews matching the exact laptop I was looking at. And from the few reviews I did find, none of them mentioned that issue.
A model of non-Apple laptop could have serious issues, but since it's not Apple, it wouldn't have anywhere near the same media presence an Apple laptop would. With their few SKUs and popularity, the issues are visible. I did not need to follow Macs closely to know about the butterfly keyboard issues, overheating issues, etc. I wouldn't have purchased a Mac back then given those issues.
But Apple got their stuff together and fixed that. And when I was considering the M3, there were no hints of any hardware issues from the reviews I saw and discourse I read online. And thankfully that matches my experience, it's the most robust and "it just works" laptop I've used.
The point is about how it was produced in first place, having taken six years to get a proper replacement, despite the supposed quality of premium Apple products.
Then there is the Antennagate on iPhone, the buggy OS releases, and plenty other examples that I can refer from what is totally unacceptable given the price point of their products.
Others aren't better, but at least they don't pretend otherwise.
Apple is held to a higher standard because they have historically reached it on a semi-regular basis. Enough that people expect it. Enough that people get personally offended whenever they fall short.
There are enough examples since Apple I, where they historical failed to do so, so much of them, that they are only around because NeXT "acquired" them, and the old founder came back into the bridge with enough time to steer the ship away from the iceberg.
The quality cult is even worse among those that never experienced old Apple.
They get so personally offended that they renew hardware almost yearly, regardless of the bugs and software issues.
For what it's worth, my first Apple was a IIe, followed by a 512K Macintosh, and I still have a first-edition NeXTWorld magazine I bought at the time.
The definition of quality in the Apple world isn't quite the same as in the nerd world, much as an Alfa Romeo fan and a Toyota fan may mean different things by quality. Joy and reliability both matter, and it's very easy for people who value them differently to end up talking past each other.
Yeah, the distortion field exists for a reason, given Liquid Glass, Swift UI issues, Tahoe and Golden Gate bugs, it is hard to have joy when they prevent work on premium hardware.
The Mac went through an OS dark ages in the 1990s.
It went through a silicon dark ages in the 2000s.
It went through a hardware dark ages in the 2010s.
It seems to be going through a user layer software dark ages in the 2020s. And it's especially frustrating because Apple is on an absolute tear with their OS, silicon and hardware right now. They've never made a better hardware product and, love it or hate it, the core OS is pretty damn solid. It's the shit they're piling into the distro—and the shit they're forcing developers to deal with—which sucks balls.
As for joy: It's hard to have joy in an Alfa Romeo that has unsolvable electrical gremlins and the engine mounts are rusted away. Except people do. It's hard to have joy in a Toyota when all driving feel is engineered out of it. Except people do.
From a hacker's perspective, yeah the feeling of accomplishment in figuring out something manually is great. But from the end user's perspective, if I get to choose between "shit ain't working" vs "it's working flawlessly but AI was involved in getting there", I'm picking the latter every single time.
It's not an unsympathetic position. macOS' current direction is controversial; many people want an alternative. They see Linux less as a hacking curiosity and more of an escape hatch.
Even with years of excellent, tireless reverse-engineering, Asahi's power management for M1 is not on-par with macOS, let alone what AMD/Intel chipsets get on Linux day-1. It's just inevitable that the hacking efforts will fragment into a fast-and-loose vs slow-and-steady mentality. And both of them will be equally right, since there is no official support for any of this hardware.
I get why someone may use AI to try to speed things up. Let’s put aside if that would even be useful at that point on the M4
I don’t understand complaining someone who spent their own time doing something isn’t using AI instead.
Is it all that different from asking why someone painted something when AI could generate an image of a painting for you?
It probably wasn’t intended as such but the sentiment that comes across to me is “why did you bother?”
There are certainly people who would always be anti-AI. But there are a lot of people like me who continually bristle at how an AI booster seems to show up in every discussion implicitly implying you’re dumb for wasting your time by not using it.
You know how people got really sick really fast on HN of people asking “why not Rust” on any discussion vaguely related to programming no matter how little it made sense? Or “A blockchain would fix that”?
> Is it all that different from asking why someone painted something when AI could generate an image of a painting for you?
I don't agree. In this case it's asking AI to analyze the high-res photos of Van Gogh to learn what paint he used, what techniques, how he held his pencil and how did his strokes look like.
Sure, you could then also ask to paint one for you in similar style, but that's not what is being suggested here.
Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.
Apple is a vertical company. They don’t WANT to sell you hardware. They don’t want to sell you software.
They only want to sell the whole package. You might as well ask the Catholic Church to start a rap music 8-track only record club. Same probability.
The hardware is a means to an end, and nothing else to them.
https://catholicvibe.com/artists/foundnation
Oh, I’m sure they exist. There’s Christian versions of any genre you can think of. That’s partly why I ended up adding in the 8-track part, to make it more ridiculous.
Maybe I should have made it Mongolian gangster rap.
That has to exist, right? Especially a rap genre - gotta stay hip with the kids to save them from Satan's influence.
https://soundcloud.com/realdesant
Nuvia started because a few Apple engineers wanted to make server CPUs and sell them. Apple management didn’t want to do it so they left and started their own company. They were acquired by Qualcomm.
There are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/16/apple-may-return-to-ser...
And how are Nuvia folks going for their server dreams?
Cause neither Apple is bringing back OS X Server, nor Qualcom is that great on server space, other than now maybe with their Modular acquisition.
Nuvia cores are beating stock Arm cores in benchmarks so far. It seems like a pretty good acquisition for Qualcomm.
They are releasing a server cpu soon I believe. It’s called Dragonfly C1000.
Pretty much soon. Nuvia's design has been incorporated into 8 Elite and X Elite/Plus series. It was generational leaps ahead of 8 Gen 3, where 8 Elite is already close to Apple M1.
I'm looking for a cheap 8 Elite phone to root it and run a special kernel module that let me run LXC containers and run arbitrary Linux ARM64 program. And run a couple of services on it, maybe I can port Kubernetes whatsoever
The point was which hyperscalers are buying them.
Meta
Production starting in 2028....
So yet to happen and prove their worth on the market?
Correct, not proven. Apple doesn't have a product, nor is it guaranteed they will sell to external customers. Qualcomm hasn't shipped yet.
No one is saying they're proven.
> here are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
At the very least they ought to consider doing a macOS-based server chip. Given how many providers are racking Mac Minis these days. It's mostly for CI testing for code deployed to Apple platforms, so it very much supports their business.
I think so. It makes too much sense to at least sell virtual macOS servers.
Time to relaunch XServe.
They don't want to sell software, but they do sometimes. They did more in the past.
But Apple could make a lot of money selling Linux servers with their CPUs.
Why would they want to? They make even more money selling their own computers with their CPUs.
The Server market is enormous with a much higher average selling price. It would make perfect sense for Apple to make servers if it meant more revenue and profit than they could make not doing it. There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.
Apple tried to address the server market 20 years ago during the PowerPC days (and later Intel). Their Xserves were really well designed machines and worked well. And yes, they also ran Linux (Yellowdog, IIRC).
It failed.
But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.
We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.
Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.
But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.
The extremely important difference is that now Apple has some of the best CPUs in the world.
Apple CPUs are good except most of server workloads benefit more from 128+ core monsters and not just fewer better cores.
MacOS is not a server OS either and actually maturing M* support in Linux will take years. And for inference Nvidia is years ahead of Apple.
So best Apple can hope for is some niche market.
A lot of Apple's advantages come from tightly-linked memory and compute in a fully integrated design. I somewhat doubt that advantage can fully translate to servers, where features like hot-swappable memory are standard. Maybe they should skip mid-scale and head straight to mainframes?
Hot-swappable memory is probably much more common in mainframes than mainstream servers. A typical x86 server still requires you to power it off before replacing DIMMs. Meanwhile, NVIDIA and AMD have both recently done some rather Apple-like server processors that solder CPU, GPU, and RAM to the same package/module.
If Apple cared about the server market, they would have added syncookies into their TCP stack. Seems like they should have done it during the time of Xserve... it would have been somewhat straightforward to pull it in from upstream BSD back then. But they still haven't (last I checked).
Apple doesn't have the business to business support organization to make this kind of thing work either.
Apple also has no api to write a fast server.
Libdispatch is a burden to use for a server because of its book keeping overhead, and their history with kqueue makes it hard to convince someone to use it.
Isn’t kqueue pretty much as fast as epoll?
There’s no io_uring, but in practice, almost all servers run epoll anyway, don’t they?
epoll isn’t very fast, kqueue is indeed much faster as a primitive.
MacOS’s implementation is an order of magnitude or more slower than (say) FreeBSD though, so its not a valid comparison that the syscall simply exists.
Another example of a syscall performing differently would be gettimeofday() in OpenBSD vs linux, its an extremely cheap operation in Linux but quite costly in OpenBSD despite being identical at the kernel boundary.
epoll is kinda slow compared to io_uring, I am typically getting double the perf just switching to uring.
If Apple can create one of the best CPUs in the world they can create and support a server that uses it.
Sure, they can, but they've done servers several times in their past and I think it's reasonable to guess that results will be similar. Sure, they have a very nice CPU, but they don't have a good reputation for enterprise support and that's more important to selling servers than having the best cpus. If their cpus were 10x as good as the competition, maybe, but they're not, especially in a server context where power and cooling are abundant.
The rumors are that it’s for internal use. It’s already known that they have custom M2 or M3 servers that they don’t sell to the public. Source: multiple episodes of the Accidental Tech Podcast that discuss articles about this.
And it makes a ton of sense in that context. I don’t think it makes any sense as a commercial product.
A mega-AI workstation could.
But server? Nah.
> There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.
The issue is that the current Apple way of designing hardware doesn't really work for servers. An individual 1U server can easily cost $50,000 or more. Soldering everything together so that if a single memory chip goes bad you have to replace the entire machine instead of that one stick is going to make customers unhappy. Likewise, they expect to be able to add storage or network ports, and expect the software to have enough openness that the new systems will work with their existing enterprise SAN or what have you.
Obviously Apple could make open server hardware, but then people might start wondering why they can't make open laptop hardware.
They could use sockets for the memory. Easily justifiable because there is much more available space in a server than their other products. Just look at how bare the Apple Silicon Mac Pro mainboard looks.
The problem was never space. They solder the RAM even in the laptops that have 8GB and the same memory bandwidth as ordinary PC laptops with modular RAM, and DIMMs take up less space on the board because the memory chips can then be attached double-sided to a DIMM that only needs as much space on the board as it takes for an edge connector.
The primary advantage of soldering compared to DIMMs is that the traces can be slightly shorter without routing them through an edge connector, but if you need that then you can use CAMM.
They solder the memory because then you can't upgrade it. Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD, for which there is no even plausible other justification.
The main reason is definitely just overcharging people for upgrades but size also includes thickness. SOCAMM would add at least the thickness of an extra PCB. I don't really agree with Apple's obsession to make their devices as thin as possible (they're thin enough!) but it would be a valid concern for them.
> Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD
Worse, they have a proprietary module that they use in the Mac Mini. Couldn't have just used M.2.
That's a helluva rumor. Apple tried b2b with Xserve, back in the day, but didn't have the stomach for it.
That’s because they tried integration with the rest of their SW ecosystem.
If they just did motherboards with cpu/ram/pcie and let other OEMs build complete systems the story would be very different
That still doesn’t overcome the issue that they are selling every single one they can already. They have no need for additional chip sales.
All the capacity at all the fabs is booked up for years. They can’t make more if they want to.
So any hypothetical sales of OEM style guts would only cut into the number of Macs they can sell to existing customers. And there’s no way they would ever do that.
> They have no need for additional chip sales.
Higher margins?
Servers need a lot of RAM. Apple can either make 42 iPhones with 12GB or one server with 512GB RAM.
42 people with iPhone will buy airpods, some subscriptions and apps. They also be vendor locked into Apple ecosystem and almost guaranteed to bring more iPhone sale in 3 years.
Apple must be dumb to canibalize their own market.
They tried it with various open systems that allowed licensed powerpc clones of their systems and they ended it because it reduced their profits as people bought the clones instead of mac hardware. I don't see them redoing that anytime soon.
Also in that case they didn’t even own the hardware. They were IBM chips. They just had a reference design and a BIOS.
With the Xserve, all Apple had to sell was repackaged Intel systems—with an Apple markup. They had nothing special to offer on the hardware side.
Now they have Apple Silicon.
It really isn't that great when comparing against server systems.
I think most people here never seen the inside of sliding pizza boxes on server racks, really seeing them.
Higher ASP but even higher COGS.
Lol they don't even have tun tap in the kernel, can't even host VMs properly without extra setup or hacks
One thing doesn’t cancel the other?
If they sell every CPU they can make there’s not much headroom to make more
Mentioning a church in this context, we know what had to be done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
I fail to see how that adds to the discussion. Is there a point I’m missing?
Or is this just “punch buggy” for Wikipedia references.
The “information wants to be free” folks worship at that altar.
Apple is the cathedral in that
Apple is fucking huge! It's like the biggest (and probably most valuable) consumer electonics brand.
Just a few short years ago apple was the most valuable company period.
How big do you want them to become?
Also, how much bigger will open harware really make them? How many people really care about linux on a mac?
> How many people really care about linux on a mac?
Me and most developers I know IRL would switch to Apple hardware (for laptops, not everything obviously) if Apple just cared one iota about Linux users, as the hardware is simply so good, and the software/OS so trash. But, we're also all professionals who can't be bothered about having to hack in our own support for a OS, at least anymore. So we end up staying with our Carbon X1s, workstations, desktops and Thinkpads.
And Frameworks. Which even at the new 13 Pro tier are still not even close to MacBook quality, although I do much prefer its keyboard to Apple’s.
There are those of us that also remember when they were at the verge of being nothing, and even turned to Linux as possible rescue alternative (mkLinux).
That NeXT acquisition turned out great.
Is that the case today, or are things different today?
Today they are the iPhone and accessories company, that is where most money comes from.
https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment
If macOS wasn't required for app development, it would be even smaller pie slice.
They would be bankrupt, if you actually knew Apple history would you have known they once upon a time tried exactly that.
Also we already have the PC clones with WinIntel for the alternative experience.
Support Linux OEMs if you care.
It's funny how it was the macOS that everyone wanted to run on non-Apple hardware, starting with the Sony Vaio rumour, ending with the Hackintosh.
Now it's the other way round.
I don't think many people were consistently using a Hackintosh as a daily driver, but that was also a time when OS X seemed less buggy than today.
Indeed, buy the idea was you could have built a much more powerful system for much less money for hackintosh back then. I'd rather now use their hardware as it's cheaper than anything else comparable, but run it on Linux.
> Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware.
Why should it matter how big Apple is (to Apple itself, or anyone else)? How does being that, or aiming to be that, motivate people to work at Apple? Versus, say, making the 'best' product they can, or making the 'most useful' product for people/customers?
Given how "big" Apple is already, it seems that not aiming to be big got them pretty good results (using their current motivations), and IMHO it's pretty questionable that they would have reached the same place in 'bigness' if bigness had been their goal.
Define big. They're one of the biggest companies in history. You're saying that if they appealed to 1% of the market that already uses Macs... what? And then they have to support these users?
A small percentage very loyal and very loud customer base has been the success ingredient of Apple for decades
And it wasn't enough, they got very lucky with NeXT reverse acquisition.
They got Steve Jobs, so it was probably the right decision, but I will wish they'd bought Be instead. It was super fast, instead of the (still!) super slow Nextstep.
I wonder how macOS would've turned out then. For me, the Smalltalk-ness of Objective-C is one of the things that makes it feel so much different than the likes of Windows and Linux. So much of the UX falls naturally out of it that I doubt we'd have ended up anywhere similar otherwise. What could Be have been like?
You would have had a C++ userspace, and POSIX would likely not be as relevant as it is today.
Note that BeOS wasn't POSIX compatible, that came with Haiku rewrite.
However without UNIX/POSIX to sell Apple to those frustrated Linux users looking for shinny UNIX laptops, and the management skills from Steve Jobs (vs Gassé), probably Apple would be no more instead.
Haiku has archived what BeOS programming looked like,
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/programming_the_be_oper...
Looks very Windowsish... which makes me even more grateful for Objective-C! Not to mention that C++ is far more difficult to mix with other languages, too.
That's true, and Interface Builder is quite a step up from what I had seen GUIs do before.
Mind you that this (me dabbling around with it) was 2004, with most other GUIs still in stone age, and I think it was developed back in the Nextstep days.
Delphi and VB were quite comparable.
As were Hypercard, Smalltalk and Lisp environments.
Interface Builder was originally a Lisp application, before being acquired by NeXT.
https://vimeo.com/62618532
Of course they will not because they don't want to be a commodity seller, they want to sell a complete product of premium quality and premium price and that works mighty well for them.
However I am afraid I bought a macOS Air with M1 and recently a Neo for my daughter, because, while they are excellent computers, their closed ecosystem hardware goes directly against free software projects like Linux and others as well.
Microsoft has always been much criticised but, for its own interest, it promoted from the '90 a general purpose ecosystem of hardware where free software thrived. It just got a little bad later for the GPUs where proprietary, undocumented hardware becomes the norm and Direct3D the only viable abstraction layer to use them, making it Windows only. It was this ecosystem that made free software thrive, including Linux, GCC, Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk and a lot of wonderful project that empowered people and make computer better to use.
I think we must be aware that free software needs general purpose, well documented hardware to thrive and I think we - the power users, developers, etc - we should choose responsibly what hardware we purchase to choose those that are favorable to free software. We should be also aware that in some cases this means getting a machine with lower performances or that costs a little more but there is a trade-off to be done.
Some people may say: who cares about free software, we just want the best product that works and proprietary, closed, stuff is fine. However, when we think that we are forgetting that we enjoy today a free software ecosystem that was made possible from the open hardware ecosystem of 20 - 30 years ago. We need to remember that when companies are unchallenged they inevitably begin to produce shitty products and make the user's life miserable as long as they can. This can as long as to stifle progress and significantly diminish the usefulness of a computer system.
So, no, apple will not make open hardware but we, the developers and power users, may consider to not buy their computers when they use proprietary, undocumented hardware that is hostile to free software.
Microsoft has never promoted general purpose hardware. From paying OEMs to install Windows on all computers no matter what the customer wants, to locked down proprietary drivers, to ACPI tables that only worked because Windows knew about their specific bugs, to getting Secure Boot force-enabled on all hardware from a certain era...
The reason I buy it is because it’s a vertical. I know the hardware and software work together. The trackpad on my 11 year old MacBook Pro is better than the one on my 1 year old work laptop, and it’s a mix of the software and hardware clearly
Love the hardware. But I need an operating system with correctly working alt-tab (per window), which will pop up instantly rather than within 0-5s.
We’re in the windows Vista days of Apple.
Is the hardware so much better, or is their integration superior? macOS can be bloated but still more efficient, right?
I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
I was required to use a Macbook Air in my last job. I hated small things like the window management, the keyboard lack of delete, home, etc keys. There were ways to work around this. Cold aluminium in an aircon office though was no fun, and the keyboard lacked travel.
For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
Are you sure about ESC? I looked at MacBook Air pictures on DDG, and they all had an escape key in the upper left. I've never seen a Mac without one. If you're using it for VI, Ctrl-[ is also ESC (and avoids stretching your fingers).
For delete, if you mean delete-under instead of delete-before (what the key labelled "delete" does), Fn-Delete is delete-under.
Home/End are either Cmd-Up/Down (doc begin/end) or Opt-Up/Down (line begin/end) (I haven't used a PC in a while, so I can't remember what Home/End do)
On a Mac keyboard, Home is Fn+Left arrow, End is Fn+Right arrow, Page up is Fn+Up arrow and Page down is Fn+Down arrow, and as you said, Delete is Fn+Backspace. The Fn key is at the bottom left of the Mac keyboard, which is diametrically opposed to the top right position of the Backspace key. You need to use your two hands to produce any of these combinations. Also, the arrow keys are half the size of the other keys.
Obviously, this is not a problem for most Mac users. Personally, I've used a MacBook Pro for more than a decade, and I eventually found that so annoying that I bought an external keyboard with full size arrow keys and dedicated Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys.
MacOS is a lovely desktop OS, even now. I stress "desktop" because you can use a proper full-sized keyboard with Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, Ins/Del, etc and they all do exactly what they should. Apple has built in keymaps for PC keyboards for all the localisations so that I get UK English on a PC keyboard, and then I can swap Cmd and Ctrl so Linux keystrokes work as I expect as well.
And a proper external wired mouse, with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel.
It's lovely.
I sold my Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and may their new owners enjoy them. I am happy I never need to touch the damned things again. I have a centimetre of key travel and a big fat mechanical click, and it's lovely.
It's laptops that are the pain. There, you have no choice. When I travel with this MBA I take a Lenovo USB keyboard and a cheapo 3rd party Bluetooth mouse, but I still need to fsck around with hubs and external power adaptors and so on and it's a pain. The all-day battery life sort of makes up for it. Sort of.
Why the downvote?
The 2016 MacBook Pro and a few later years had no escape key. Those were the worst for other reasons too.
Most of that sounds like trivial misconfiguration and printer compatibility problems.
In other words, things that you would have had to touch in Linux too, but because they didn't work at all, here work but until configured, do not work like you'd want them to.
I was assuming the people complaining about macOS are coming from Linux, cause modern Windows is horrendous. Also don't get what's so bad about macOS unless we're talking about license or compatibility. There are small things for sure, like the green button shouldn't be fullscreen. There are big things it does better.
> Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
You answered that: _Corporate_.
Normal Windows doesn't have all those problems, and most of them sound like they're network, configuration or specific tools related, exactly where corporate setups tend to do things "their own way".
Using Windows since 3.1, UNIX since Xenix, introduced to Mac OS on LC II.
That looks like a corporation problem.
I'm fortunate enough to have WSL so I frankly do everything in bash. I am also in control of the Intune endpoint exceptions for development machines, to make sure they are allowed to run stuff like cargo, but it has the advantage of letting me remove my devices from the Adobe Acrobat group.
It's still hilarious when defender does it's thing and the fan goes mach 1, or when the firmware updater force reboots in the middle of a meeting after you've clicked the 10 minute extend two times.
It is what it is. I'm sure we'd figure out a way to make enterprise IT horrible on any OS.
> it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off.
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
There is no doubt that it throttles. For the most part I don't notice. I've build a rust SDK around apache arrow which produces Typescript, Python and Go interactions with our datalake. Compiling that is rather slow. It'll take 5-10 minutes on myh corporate pc vs the 15–30 minutes on the air. Whenever I absolutely have to work on it on myh mac I'll usually end up letting Azure DevOps spend it's 30-60 minutes while I do something else.
Try a Mac with corporate spyware installed. My company issued M2 pro was draining the battery in 3 hours while being super hot and noisy.
I think eventually they pushed a spyware update that improved a bit the situation but not by a lot.
Meanwhile my personal M1 Pro had truly full day battery life.
That is the thing, all corporate laptops suck regardless of the OS.
Unless one is lucky to work for small to medium size companies whose organisation hasn't yet grown to such politics and processes, with certifications, IT tickets for admin actions, and so on.
Try a corporate Chromebook haha
Thankfully never got to use them.
I use an M3 mbp with corporate crap like Windows Defender on it. Two cores are maxed out all day, so if I do anything else intensive it goes up to 80 C and turns on the "vacuum" fan. Still, most of the time it's absolutely quiet (barely audible, and I'm someone who really hates laptop fan noise!), and the machine doesn't get more than lukewarm.
With battery saver mode it even lasts over 6 hours.
Same here. Have a Base M1 Air. Will trade that for M7 Base Air maybe if I can drag this one for a while. I can't go back to computers with noisy fans. It seems too last generation since the M1 launched.
I'm still astonished at how good this little thing is. The only problem I've had is the realization that 256GB isn't enough for me, but save for that I really have no excuse to upgrade. Can't justify a newer machine when this thing does everything I need!
Even for pretty intense workloads it rarely struggles or slows down. And even with some pretty intense battery degradation (reasonable, to be expected after five years of heavy use) it still runs for more than long enough for me on a single charge, although I really can't go to a coffee shop without a charger if I'm doing development work. All that, and it's dead quiet? I could never go back to the old ways!
I understand the thinking of "I'd like to do local inference on a laptop", but as long as I have a beefier Mac Mini sitting at home that can do all of that for me remotely, why bother?
I can see myself putting Asahi on this thing and giving it to my yet-unborn kids for them to finally drop it down a staircase someday. I've been rough with it and it hasn't broken yet!
My M2 Pro rarely spins up the fan. Usually when it does, it takes me a while to notice. When I do, sometimes I need to stay quiet for a second to even locate where the low purr comes from. Then I usually smile a little and think “hey, the fan is on!” and forget about it again.
In fairness, my Franework 13 Pro is the same, only it gets less hot than the MacBook.
I really do not know when I will replace my five year old M1 Pro. I'm not even starting to begin to get to the point where I start thinking about replacing this thing which I'm frankly astonished by.
I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
On a base M1 air, running local inference (non tool calling).
please share your setup
LM Studio Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct (Q4_K_M GGUF) with metal offloading
[dead]
That was the case with the M1 indeed. Subsequent releases have been allowed to consume more power. My M5 Pro gets too hot to use on my lap when full out compiling or playing games.
To be fair. I can also make my m1 air hot if try playing civilization 7 on it. Compiling doesn't make it hot though, but it's not exactly fast.
The Intel period of MacBooks allowed a more direct comparison. Don't think macOS itself is the differentiator vs Windows.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
A significant portion of the Apple Silicon efficiency gains would have come from shifting away from discrete GPUs. At that time it was very normal for the integrated GPU to be minimal (slow) because people who need it get a discrete GPU. Things are very different now because we push far more onto the GPU now vs. back then, which made Intel and AMD scale them up out of uselessness. Now most people don't really need a discrete GPU because the integrated ones are fast enough to even handle some gaming.
The majority(?) of Intel MacBooks didn't have dGPUs though. That was a higher-end option on the larger models. I also vaguely remember there being a big leap in iGPU performance with Intel Iris around 2013. I had a high-end MBP from work and wished I could perma disable the dGPU, cause I didn't need it and it just made the thing get hot.
But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
Skimming Wikipedia it looked like you get discrete graphics unless you have a MacBook Air or 13-inch MacBook Pro. A higher-end option, yes, but probably the more likely one that people actually had here.
And yes, Intel Iris was a good leap forward for their iGPUs at the time! But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Oh yeah, I was thinking of 2015 and earlier. They used to have "IG" and "DG" models. https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2015.h... And I never wanted the 2016-2020 ones because of all the issues, so my personal MBP was a 2015 model until like 2024.
> But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Dang, didn't notice until you pointed it out. So it's a really good thing I got the 13".
> But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU
I don't remember exactly what the chip options were back then, but currently Intel enforces that by ensuring that the laptop chip with the larger iGPU doesn't actually have enough PCIe lanes to connect a dGPU.
But you could use an external GPU on any of the up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports. Intel is stingy with PCIe lanes but there's definitely enough. A dGPU doesn't need the full 16 and will do just fine with 8, maybe even 4. Especially the low power ones found in laptops.
Intel Macbooks were really really terrible. Slow OS, noisy fan, bad battery life, awful keyboard, little connectivity.
The current ones are really good, but honestly I'm kind of afraid Apple would build crap like that again, because it's not like you can "just" switch to a competitor.
Touch bar, all ports replaced with USB-C with no transition period, no HDMI or SD, fruitfly keyboard, charge on left bug. I held onto my 2015 MBP.
That is my exact take - new Mac Book Pro M5. Love the battery, like the hardware quality, don't care at all for the rest of it. MacOS is annoying.
nice that you can simply run your favorite OS (virtualized)
their single core perf is just much better than anyone else
Not just single core perf though. Very efficient idle TDP, efficient all core boost, efficient all core TDP, and efficient mid-high performance tier accelerator (GPU, NPU) TDP.
And the benchmarks seem to understate this. That i9-9001THIKK doesn't matter when it thermal throttles a few seconds into a task. Are they testing these laptops inside freezers or something?
The 2020 era i9s were BAD even in macs. The modern Intel cpus run pretty cool depending on what you get.
They also seem to have the biggest memory pool attached to a GPU at a “reasonable“ price don’t they? There’s a reason people really want Mac Studios.
I will deal with everything I dislike about MacOS for laptops that never cook my lap and never, ever, ever randomly turn on full power while in my bag
Apple is one of the biggest companies on earth. If every single person on earth who wanted to use Desktop Linux were to buy the most expensive Apple sells to do that, the revenue would not be material relative to Apple's existing size. Please exit your bubble.
Which operating system is better?
The hardware can be better because they don't have to care about other systems.
[flagged]
Who said anything about desktops? The ARM datacenter is being taken over by Nvidia's Grace and Vera CPU products. If Apple supported OpenBSD, Linux or Solaris, they could destroy Nvidia in CPU performance and kick Graviton and Ampere to the curb forever. But instead they've left the low hanging fruit as another trillion dollar market for Nvidia to eat up.
they deliberately do not want to enter the server market. it is literally an entirely different thing than what they're doing right now. they can't do any of their vertical integration there, there's no moat for them.
like Tim Cook said (quoting Steve I believe) - it's about knowing how to say no 1000 times so that you can say yes to the right thing once, and then put your all into that
It's also a market they used to be in, over 20 years ago.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2002/05/14Apple-Introduces-Xs...
This is something they've tried, and later decided based on that experience that they do not want to be in the server business.
"Xserve is the result of listening to our customers," said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.
"like Tim Cook said (quoting Steve I believe)" haha. Let's hope the new CEO quotes Tim Cook on this.
There is a rumor that Apple wants to enter the server market again with new chips for AI.
Vision Pro would disagree
They have the resources to be able to do what Jobs described as “hobby projects” (he was referring to the Apple TV which definitely is the best streaming interface for video available, albeit one which is on the expensive side). They did kill their car project after spending a decade on it (and reportedly having thousands of people working on it).
Now they have them, in the 1990's they were almost bankrupt with similar projects, and got lucky with NeXT "buying" them.
Apple-NeXT is probably the most successful acquhire in the history of modern business.
[flagged]
Ah, big dreams, /s
Somewhat relevant:
https://gravitylinux.org/
Asahi fork for M4 (and in time later) Apple Silicon Macs.
BTW I wrote about this for El Reg:
https://www.theregister.com/os-platforms/2026/09/25/asahi-fo...
I think it's better to improve standard (x86-64) or open hardware (RISC-V)
x86-64 isn't more "standard" than ARM, and RISC-V systems aren't necessarily open.
x86-64 chips typically have architecture manuals that the general public can access, for one. That's one sense of a standard, however incomplete.
Documentation is not the same as a standard...
When the same code can run on multiple chips from different vendors, how to write that code becomes a standard, regardless of how you obtained the knowledge. Documentation may not be the standard itself, but it sets one.
Cool. Then you go do that. In the meantime why crap on others?
These bring-up debugging writeups read like detective novels. Impressive how much gets reverse engineered from a handful of weird symptoms.
Not related to this but the other day I was searching for a good external trackpad that would work with macOS and there are very few (and not good) and every discussion was about how nothing comes close to Apple magic trackpad. The question is why can't other companies create such a good trackpad for macOS, it turns out they can't because the whole protocol for touchpad/gestures etc are proprietary and closed on macOS side so essentially any 3rd party trackpad has to emulate a mouse device. Thats what you get when a company makes computer and its OS and also its accessories and also software services, the whole stack, you either use their whole thing or not.
Your explanation isn’t true at all. It’s very easy to spoof NSEvents. Many tablet drivers and mouse drivers do this and have been for decades. The software side is easy to create.
The part that makes the Apple trackpad good isn’t even the software integration with the OS. It’s the actual trackpad hardware, its surface and haptics. On the software side it’s largely just good acceleration curves.
I’d argue the reason very few competitors exist is just cost and lack of understanding what feels good and why , much like your own comment does.
This is not true. It’s not about protocol or touchpad etc. Apple is just ahead of everyone else when it comes to user experience. Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and a whole lot of other companies have not been able to replicate Apple’s trackpad for their own devices. Why not?
Please search for "find any windows latpop that have same kind of haptic trackpad as macbook" and you will find your answer. There are many such laptops.
You don't get the same nice and smooth trackpad on any other windows (or linux) laptops either.
Sure you do. I'm typing this on a NixOS/GNOME box with a Magic Trackpad 2 plugged in. Wireless, multitouch gestures, everything but Force Touch works.
Someone this week suggested changes to libinput to handle the pressure handling, so Force Touch support is coming as well.
I was blown away by how good the multi-touch gestures were on GNOME when I tried Fedora Silverblue a few years back, also with a Magic Trackpad 2. Everything just worked.
There are many premium Windows laptops that have same nice smooth trackpad.
Which ones, and do any of them run Linux well?
Which ones?
The debug_putc moment resonated with me. I once spent two days on an ARM board where early boot died silently, and the fix turned out to be a single misconfigured UART pin mux. Bisecting with one 'a' character at a time looks silly but is the only thing that works when nothing works, and the WFI register-zeroing chicken bit is the kind of hardware behavior that would be genuinely maddening to hit without docs.
[flagged]
[dead]
TLDR: the WFI (wait for interrupt) instruction used to preserve registers but you could configure it to delete register values, saving power.
Since M4 it always deletes register values and the configuration is gone, which made Linux assume they were preserved, but they are not.
Weird to buy machine with company actively hostile to anything open to run open stuff
Is Apple taking steps to purposefully blocking open stuff, or are they just pointedly ignoring it and continuing to develop new hardware? I am genuinely asking, I don't know myself.
edit: speaking mostly about macOS here, mobile OSes are much more locked down
For desktops and laptops, the latter. But for phones and tablets they do not want user control. And even where they do allow it, even a tiny effort in hardware documentation that would make it so much easier never happens. So it's quite hostile overall.
Yep, good point. Their mobile OSes are annoyingly locked down, that is for sure...
I'm glad we have the choice of an annoyingly locked down ecosystem.
The fact that they still allow this would point towards the latter. They are quite capable of locking it down like they do the iPhones.
And I suspect they will lock it down in a year or two.
It was only really open to ease the transition between intel and arm.
Give it up. People have been predicting this for 15 years.
You can’t have a development machine locked down like iOS. As long as the Mac is the development machine at apple it will need to be able to run arbitrary code.
It will still run arbitrary code... Within macos...
But they'll remove support for other OS's
What support? Asahi had to fight to exist, especially early on when they essentially had to reimplement much of the graphics pipeline. And now its in mainline linux - short of a complete hostile lockdown of the bootloader, it’s not like they support other OS’s very much as is.
Asahi appears to be dead. It wont even boot on anything apple released in the past 2 years.
Sure, their M1-M3 support is okay (as long as you're fine with no hibernate or sleep support, so have to plug in the laptop or risk losing all your open stuff), and it was a lot of work by lots of volunteers... But at this point it's starting to look more like a retrocomputing project. As time ticks on, it'll become less and less viable using an ancient laptop, especially if local AI becomes commonplace.
Wtf do you mean? They just enabled M3 in the official installer and they're working on M4 bringup too. Keep in mind it took them like 16 months to even support M1 at first. Then they supported M2 within a few months, then M3 threw in a wrench that they're still working on, but there is no evidence of death at all, just a lot of work left to do.
M4 has no support and was released in May 2024, over 2 years ago, and looks at least a year from usability - doesn't yet boot. M5 also has no support. M6 also has no support.
I did say they're working on M4 bringup, which means it doesn't boot yet, yes. I don't see how that means they're "dead" though. Or that they'll never catch up ever. In fact, the very recent progress in this area suggests the exact opposite.
The company making locked down laptops is Google.
I mean it'd be pretty easy for Apple to just make a special version of the OS/bootloader/whatever for their internal use
They could. They won't. Macs will never be bootloader locked, on that I'm confident.
aren't they literally already bootloader locked but Asahi contains an exploit?
No.
https://support.apple.com/guide/security/boot-process-secac7...
It’s the latter
I think you might be forgetting where you are. They call it "Hacker News" for a reason.
Yep. There's a post somewhere here about someone running Mac OS X on a Nintendo Wii. That's closed software on closed hardware.
Are you saying that closed systems are better for hackers?
It depends what you mean by better. Being closed can make them more interesting for hackers.
I had a bad experience with my Lenovo laptop. It had a firmware issue that caused the trackpad to become unresponsive after suspend and Lenovo never fixed it.
Made the laptop miserable to use, so I went for a MacBook instead which wouldn't have such an obvious issue be unfixed because Apple has so few SKUs to support.
Also went for it in part because I do not like Windows and macOS typically would save me when Linux support was lacking. Just had to hope for a quick port of Asahi Linux to become (unfortunately didn't happen for my M3, but thankfully it's been progressing recently).
You want a butterfly keyboard?
That is a good point, but not exactly what I meant.
When I was picking out that Lenovo laptop, there were dozens of different laptops just from Lenovo alone with lots of hardware variety. Then consider all the different manufacturers I could have also chosen from.
With that much hardware, it's hard to find comprehensive reviews matching the exact laptop I was looking at. And from the few reviews I did find, none of them mentioned that issue.
A model of non-Apple laptop could have serious issues, but since it's not Apple, it wouldn't have anywhere near the same media presence an Apple laptop would. With their few SKUs and popularity, the issues are visible. I did not need to follow Macs closely to know about the butterfly keyboard issues, overheating issues, etc. I wouldn't have purchased a Mac back then given those issues.
But Apple got their stuff together and fixed that. And when I was considering the M3, there were no hints of any hardware issues from the reviews I saw and discourse I read online. And thankfully that matches my experience, it's the most robust and "it just works" laptop I've used.
Show me the butterfly keyboard on MacBook less than 6 years old?
The point is about how it was produced in first place, having taken six years to get a proper replacement, despite the supposed quality of premium Apple products.
Then there is the Antennagate on iPhone, the buggy OS releases, and plenty other examples that I can refer from what is totally unacceptable given the price point of their products.
Others aren't better, but at least they don't pretend otherwise.
Apple is held to a higher standard because they have historically reached it on a semi-regular basis. Enough that people expect it. Enough that people get personally offended whenever they fall short.
There are enough examples since Apple I, where they historical failed to do so, so much of them, that they are only around because NeXT "acquired" them, and the old founder came back into the bridge with enough time to steer the ship away from the iceberg.
The quality cult is even worse among those that never experienced old Apple.
They get so personally offended that they renew hardware almost yearly, regardless of the bugs and software issues.
For what it's worth, my first Apple was a IIe, followed by a 512K Macintosh, and I still have a first-edition NeXTWorld magazine I bought at the time.
The definition of quality in the Apple world isn't quite the same as in the nerd world, much as an Alfa Romeo fan and a Toyota fan may mean different things by quality. Joy and reliability both matter, and it's very easy for people who value them differently to end up talking past each other.
Yeah, the distortion field exists for a reason, given Liquid Glass, Swift UI issues, Tahoe and Golden Gate bugs, it is hard to have joy when they prevent work on premium hardware.
The Mac went through an OS dark ages in the 1990s.
It went through a silicon dark ages in the 2000s.
It went through a hardware dark ages in the 2010s.
It seems to be going through a user layer software dark ages in the 2020s. And it's especially frustrating because Apple is on an absolute tear with their OS, silicon and hardware right now. They've never made a better hardware product and, love it or hate it, the core OS is pretty damn solid. It's the shit they're piling into the distro—and the shit they're forcing developers to deal with—which sucks balls.
As for joy: It's hard to have joy in an Alfa Romeo that has unsolvable electrical gremlins and the engine mounts are rusted away. Except people do. It's hard to have joy in a Toyota when all driving feel is engineered out of it. Except people do.
Used M4s will be cheap in a few years, and this makes them more useful and keeps them from being electronic waste.
Because it works, and it works well.
I wonder if AI could make this work? Have there been any attempts to have AI do the work needed?
AFAIK the M4 and M6 reverse engineering is AI-assisted.
There's this: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Gravity-Linux-M4-Mac-Mini-Alph...
So we get a good article finally on someone actually doing impressive hacking and the response is “give it up, let AI“?
Where is the challenge or the fun or feeling of accomplishment in that?
From a hacker's perspective, yeah the feeling of accomplishment in figuring out something manually is great. But from the end user's perspective, if I get to choose between "shit ain't working" vs "it's working flawlessly but AI was involved in getting there", I'm picking the latter every single time.
It's not an unsympathetic position. macOS' current direction is controversial; many people want an alternative. They see Linux less as a hacking curiosity and more of an escape hatch.
Even with years of excellent, tireless reverse-engineering, Asahi's power management for M1 is not on-par with macOS, let alone what AMD/Intel chipsets get on Linux day-1. It's just inevitable that the hacking efforts will fragment into a fast-and-loose vs slow-and-steady mentality. And both of them will be equally right, since there is no official support for any of this hardware.
I get why someone may use AI to try to speed things up. Let’s put aside if that would even be useful at that point on the M4
I don’t understand complaining someone who spent their own time doing something isn’t using AI instead.
Is it all that different from asking why someone painted something when AI could generate an image of a painting for you?
It probably wasn’t intended as such but the sentiment that comes across to me is “why did you bother?”
There are certainly people who would always be anti-AI. But there are a lot of people like me who continually bristle at how an AI booster seems to show up in every discussion implicitly implying you’re dumb for wasting your time by not using it.
You know how people got really sick really fast on HN of people asking “why not Rust” on any discussion vaguely related to programming no matter how little it made sense? Or “A blockchain would fix that”?
Yeah. That. Again.
> Is it all that different from asking why someone painted something when AI could generate an image of a painting for you?
I don't agree. In this case it's asking AI to analyze the high-res photos of Van Gogh to learn what paint he used, what techniques, how he held his pencil and how did his strokes look like.
Sure, you could then also ask to paint one for you in similar style, but that's not what is being suggested here.
reaching the goal is what matters. I never understood people who don't get satisfaction from getting there. I don't care that AI writes the code.