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I'm personally much more worried about the power Apple will gain from switching their hardware to ARM. This gives them such immense power, allowing them to crea

I'm personally much more worried about the power Apple will gain from switching their hardware to ARM. This gives them such immense power, allowing them to create an even stronger walled garden environment. For all we know they could force the system to only run Mac OS? Is this goodbye to choosing your own operating system now? Are the only people Apple cares about web and app developers? Are kernel engineers forgotten about? What about low-level hackers who like to tinker with their hardware or poke around in UEFI? I'm more worried than excited about this.

detaro 6y ago
They could have done all of that on Intel too.
95014_refugee 6y ago
Nothing here prevents you from doing this in a VM. The problem with being able to tinker at will with a consumer system is that you have no way of choosing who is tinkering with your system. If as a vendor you take the security and privacy of your customers' information seriously, you cannot deliver an "open" and "tinkerable" system. The two are fundamentally at odds. This has been sufficiently obvious for long enough now that anyone still complaining about how they can't run their own kernel on their desktop is almost certainly a surveillance-state troll.
- quickthrower2 6y ago
  Or a “hacker” as in the “hacker news” usage of the word.
donarb 6y ago
Not sure what the problem is. Apple is merely transitioning to a new CPU architecture. If you're a low level developer, you'll be working in ARM assembler rather than x86 assembler.
- jason0597 6y ago
  They may be moving to a new CPU architecture, but given Apple's track record of trying to lock you into their ecosystem, I wouldn't be surprised if they made your life a living hell if you tried to install anything other than Mac OS. Think about android smartphones for instance. I can't simply load up a new operating system by downloading the .iso file into my phone and boot into the boot selection menu just by holding down a correct button combination. No, you have to go through custom ROMs, shifty looking Russian/Chinese forums, sometimes you even have to send a kind email to your phone manufacturer to get a key so that you can load a custom ROM onto your phone. I mean, it's bad enough already on Android. But don't you know how absolutely impossible it is on iOS? I literally buy a computer (an iPhone), and I cannot write my own programs and run them on my new computer. Is this the company we can trust with such a major transition into a new platform and architecture? How on earth can I trust Apple so that they don't require me to literally jailbreak a macbook so that I can install another operating system? Christ, look at how annoying newer versions of Mac OS are! Locked down to oblivion, everything requiring to be signed, no i-know-what-im-doing option in the settings anywhere to just disable everything and get on with your day. It's a real effort to get control of your own computer back. There's a reason some of us still run Linux. Got a binary? Run it. Just like that. No messing about. I can never trust Apple to make it as simple as this.
  - filleduchaos 6y ago
    And what, exactly, does all of this have to do with ARM vs x86? > Locked down to oblivion, everything requiring to be signed, no i-know-what-im-doing option in the settings anywhere to just disable everything and get on with your day. If you really know what you are doing, you should know how to disable and enable SIP.
    - jason0597 6y ago
      >And what, exactly, does all of this have to do with ARM vs x86? The transition from x86 to ARM gives them the opportunity to impose these restrictions. Back in the day, companies wouldn't even dream of trying to pull something as radical as this, but now that we've had a decade of smartphones proving how you can get away with not allowing customers to install their own operating system on their phone, the leverage is there. It's not ARM itself that worries me, it's the transition from x86 to anything (POWER9, ARM, etc.)

detaro 6y ago

They could have done all of that on Intel too.

95014_refugee 6y ago

Nothing here prevents you from doing this in a VM. The problem with being able to tinker at will with a consumer system is that you have no way of choosing who is tinkering with your system. If as a vendor you take the security and privacy of your customers' information seriously, you cannot deliver an "open" and "tinkerable" system. The two are fundamentally at odds. This has been sufficiently obvious for long enough now that anyone still complaining about how they can't run their own kernel on their desktop is almost certainly a surveillance-state troll.

quickthrower2 6y ago
Or a “hacker” as in the “hacker news” usage of the word.

donarb 6y ago

Not sure what the problem is. Apple is merely transitioning to a new CPU architecture. If you're a low level developer, you'll be working in ARM assembler rather than x86 assembler.

jason0597 6y ago
They may be moving to a new CPU architecture, but given Apple's track record of trying to lock you into their ecosystem, I wouldn't be surprised if they made your life a living hell if you tried to install anything other than Mac OS. Think about android smartphones for instance. I can't simply load up a new operating system by downloading the .iso file into my phone and boot into the boot selection menu just by holding down a correct button combination. No, you have to go through custom ROMs, shifty looking Russian/Chinese forums, sometimes you even have to send a kind email to your phone manufacturer to get a key so that you can load a custom ROM onto your phone. I mean, it's bad enough already on Android. But don't you know how absolutely impossible it is on iOS? I literally buy a computer (an iPhone), and I cannot write my own programs and run them on my new computer. Is this the company we can trust with such a major transition into a new platform and architecture? How on earth can I trust Apple so that they don't require me to literally jailbreak a macbook so that I can install another operating system? Christ, look at how annoying newer versions of Mac OS are! Locked down to oblivion, everything requiring to be signed, no i-know-what-im-doing option in the settings anywhere to just disable everything and get on with your day. It's a real effort to get control of your own computer back. There's a reason some of us still run Linux. Got a binary? Run it. Just like that. No messing about. I can never trust Apple to make it as simple as this.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  And what, exactly, does all of this have to do with ARM vs x86? > Locked down to oblivion, everything requiring to be signed, no i-know-what-im-doing option in the settings anywhere to just disable everything and get on with your day. If you really know what you are doing, you should know how to disable and enable SIP.
  - jason0597 6y ago
    >And what, exactly, does all of this have to do with ARM vs x86? The transition from x86 to ARM gives them the opportunity to impose these restrictions. Back in the day, companies wouldn't even dream of trying to pull something as radical as this, but now that we've had a decade of smartphones proving how you can get away with not allowing customers to install their own operating system on their phone, the leverage is there. It's not ARM itself that worries me, it's the transition from x86 to anything (POWER9, ARM, etc.)