8 ms·

Whats the point of these submissions? ARM has been around forever and yes theres software for it.

sys_64738 6y ago
It's the bread and butter of hacking new hardware to the point that it can boot Linux in some form. I think there's great prestige knowing that everything can boot Linux eventually as it means it has a shelf life after the company owning the proprietary solution has thrown it away. Given how Apple treats iPads and iPhones, I wouldn't be surprised if these M1 Macs have a much shorter usability period than Intel Macs.
- jeromenerf 6y ago
  iPhones are quite well supported in my experience. I have a 6 and a se, both running the latest OS. My wife uses old MacBook Pro and air, pre retina, yet i5, running Debian stable, Firefox, zoom and some VMware horizon client for remote work. Stable, usable, just great. In my experience, intel macs weren’t supported as long as the iPads and iPhones but they are for sure easier to upcycle to something else. They are just fancy PCs.
  - sgerenser 6y ago
    Do you mean the 6s? I don’t think the iPhone 6 can run iOS 14. Which is unfortunate but the support that phone had was still far better than almost every Android phone.
    - jeromenerf 6y ago
      Indeed 6s plus. It was replaced under warranty because of the battery drain issue a while back.
  - miles 6y ago
    > I have a 6 and a se, both running the latest OS. The iPhone 6 does not run the latest version of iOS (14) nor the previous version (13): https://osxdaily.com/2019/06/04/ios-13-compatible-iphone-ipad/ https://osxdaily.com/2019/06/04/ios-13-compatible-iphone-ipa...
nakovet 6y ago
This is industry revolution happening before your eyes. Excluding smartphones/tablets, X86 has been the defacto computer architecture of personal computers. Microsoft tried an ARM processor but the tradeoffs were evident and it was considered half baked, leading to poor reviews. For quite some time in our industry the main limitation has been clock speeds, nowadays the main limitation is temperature control. Apple launched an ARM chipset that remains as cool as 50C when intel reaches 95C, this will forever change the industry of personal computing. That's why people are raving about it.
- forgotpwd16 6y ago
  I ain't keeping up with hardware but from I can remember Surface Pro X that came out last year was received positively, packed enough power, worked fine but wasn't trending for some reason. Thus the real question is, though there are ARM laptops since mid-2010s why is Apple taking once again credit for making a "revolution"?
  - mikhailt 6y ago
    Surface Pro X is a great hardware device but it is definitely not a great software experience. Same problems with the old Surface RT with the ARM chip, backward compat with existing software made the whole experience difficult for almost all folks. As for SPX with Windows 10 on ARM, you can't use any 64bit app and existing x86 32-bit apps were incredibly slow and not reliable (look at photoshop for an example). 64-bit emulation support is coming next year[^1]. Many of their development tools are not native either, some folks are still waiting for MS to ship Visual Studio to ARM [^2], .NET 5 was just shipped a week ago with some basic ARM support but no WPF for ARM until next year. The difference here is Apple has a very fast x86 translation layer called Rosetta 2 that can run almost all Intel apps at 80% or so of the native M1 performance. Most folks don't even notice the difference. Windows 10 on ARM (SPX) had to emulate it at all time, with massive performance regressions. What Apple has done is a complete transition that includes both hardware/software to ARM at the same time. All of their apps including development tools (Xcode) were native, huge number of macOS devs already shipped native support on day 1 or within the first week and Rosetta 2 made waiting for native support okay. And that's just the software. The hardware? Super fast, long battery life, fanless in MBA, very quiet fan in MB and more. For a lot of people, it's a complete experience that worked out for them. Note, not all developers are going to be ready for this, there's no docker support, some tooling will take awhile to update but they're going at much faster pace than MS at this point. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/30/21495510/microsoft-windows-on-arm-x64-app-emulation https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/30/21495510/microsoft-window... [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/visual-studio-on-arm-devices?view=vs-2019#:~:text=Visual%20Studio%20is%20only%20supported%20on%20devices%20using,emulation%20on%20ARM%2C%20which%20Visual%20Studio%20can%20run https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/visual....
_ph_ 6y ago
This is Hacker News. If getting Linux running for the first time on a completely new cpu/soc running just with the help of the barebones API from Apple isn't hacking, I don't know. When Parallels ships their ready-done product, it gets much less exciting, but for now it is pretty interesting.
- lupinglade 6y ago
  Anyone can do this easily, the API is super simple but the resulting VM isn’t all that useful. The title implies someone got it working without Apple’s closed source APIs. That is not the case.

It's the bread and butter of hacking new hardware to the point that it can boot Linux in some form. I think there's great prestige knowing that everything can boot Linux eventually as it means it has a shelf life after the company owning the proprietary solution has thrown it away. Given how Apple treats iPads and iPhones, I wouldn't be surprised if these M1 Macs have a much shorter usability period than Intel Macs.

jeromenerf 6y ago
iPhones are quite well supported in my experience. I have a 6 and a se, both running the latest OS. My wife uses old MacBook Pro and air, pre retina, yet i5, running Debian stable, Firefox, zoom and some VMware horizon client for remote work. Stable, usable, just great. In my experience, intel macs weren’t supported as long as the iPads and iPhones but they are for sure easier to upcycle to something else. They are just fancy PCs.
- sgerenser 6y ago
  Do you mean the 6s? I don’t think the iPhone 6 can run iOS 14. Which is unfortunate but the support that phone had was still far better than almost every Android phone.
  - jeromenerf 6y ago
    Indeed 6s plus. It was replaced under warranty because of the battery drain issue a while back.
- miles 6y ago
  > I have a 6 and a se, both running the latest OS. The iPhone 6 does not run the latest version of iOS (14) nor the previous version (13): https://osxdaily.com/2019/06/04/ios-13-compatible-iphone-ipad/ https://osxdaily.com/2019/06/04/ios-13-compatible-iphone-ipa...

nakovet 6y ago

This is industry revolution happening before your eyes. Excluding smartphones/tablets, X86 has been the defacto computer architecture of personal computers. Microsoft tried an ARM processor but the tradeoffs were evident and it was considered half baked, leading to poor reviews. For quite some time in our industry the main limitation has been clock speeds, nowadays the main limitation is temperature control. Apple launched an ARM chipset that remains as cool as 50C when intel reaches 95C, this will forever change the industry of personal computing. That's why people are raving about it.

forgotpwd16 6y ago
I ain't keeping up with hardware but from I can remember Surface Pro X that came out last year was received positively, packed enough power, worked fine but wasn't trending for some reason. Thus the real question is, though there are ARM laptops since mid-2010s why is Apple taking once again credit for making a "revolution"?
- mikhailt 6y ago
  Surface Pro X is a great hardware device but it is definitely not a great software experience. Same problems with the old Surface RT with the ARM chip, backward compat with existing software made the whole experience difficult for almost all folks. As for SPX with Windows 10 on ARM, you can't use any 64bit app and existing x86 32-bit apps were incredibly slow and not reliable (look at photoshop for an example). 64-bit emulation support is coming next year[^1]. Many of their development tools are not native either, some folks are still waiting for MS to ship Visual Studio to ARM [^2], .NET 5 was just shipped a week ago with some basic ARM support but no WPF for ARM until next year. The difference here is Apple has a very fast x86 translation layer called Rosetta 2 that can run almost all Intel apps at 80% or so of the native M1 performance. Most folks don't even notice the difference. Windows 10 on ARM (SPX) had to emulate it at all time, with massive performance regressions. What Apple has done is a complete transition that includes both hardware/software to ARM at the same time. All of their apps including development tools (Xcode) were native, huge number of macOS devs already shipped native support on day 1 or within the first week and Rosetta 2 made waiting for native support okay. And that's just the software. The hardware? Super fast, long battery life, fanless in MBA, very quiet fan in MB and more. For a lot of people, it's a complete experience that worked out for them. Note, not all developers are going to be ready for this, there's no docker support, some tooling will take awhile to update but they're going at much faster pace than MS at this point. [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/30/21495510/microsoft-windows-on-arm-x64-app-emulation https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/30/21495510/microsoft-window... [2]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/visual-studio-on-arm-devices?view=vs-2019#:~:text=Visual%20Studio%20is%20only%20supported%20on%20devices%20using,emulation%20on%20ARM%2C%20which%20Visual%20Studio%20can%20run https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/install/visual....

_ph_ 6y ago

This is Hacker News. If getting Linux running for the first time on a completely new cpu/soc running just with the help of the barebones API from Apple isn't hacking, I don't know. When Parallels ships their ready-done product, it gets much less exciting, but for now it is pretty interesting.

lupinglade 6y ago
Anyone can do this easily, the API is super simple but the resulting VM isn’t all that useful. The title implies someone got it working without Apple’s closed source APIs. That is not the case.