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It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that

by p_l 6y ago

It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors. Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side, this means that they can escape the trap that cripples performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to deal with price competition for SoC itself), but it also means that they don't have to follow any form of standard with hw/sw interface. Thus you have the reason for majority of hackintosh tricks, special cases in Linux for running on Macs, and Bootcamp. Because if it's quicker to "quirk it" in Mac OS X than fix it properly, it will be quirked. This goes all the way to simple things like putting HDA configuration data in wrong place in memory (so standard HDA driver is lost trying to init hw on mac, and macos is lost trying to init it on standard-compliant machine), to things like making such a hash out of boot process (in order to implement similar behaviour to old Macs) that in some models if you accidentally used standard boot interfaces you'd brick the laptop. Similar issues are how ARM is still, effectively, not an usable open platform, especially open source boards, because making an SBSA-compliant machine that has properly done ACPI and UEFI is much harder than slapping minimal effort on top of uboot where the only reason you can run a kernel not specifically built for the device is that people complained about lack of upstream kernel, and kernel devs refused to add more machine defs. It's still a giant hack in the end.

vladvasiliu 6y ago
> It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. If I understand correctly, seeing the rest of the comment, your point is that it's cheaper to not have it adhere to some fixed standard. While I fully understand this position, and think that it's actually something that can help a vertically integrated company such as Apple, I think that the situation isn't an either or. Rather, things could be shades of grey. The way I see it, Apple could keep on doing their specific things because it's better for them. But once a given system (which can be as restrictive as a given combination of laptop size, generation and spec-level) is out to mass manufacturing, it becomes its own standard of sorts. As in each and every "late 2020 MBA 13" 8 GB RAM 256 GB SSD rev 1" or whatever are exactly the same. I suppose this has to be, since macOS has to know how to handle them. If I'm not mistaken this is what DSDT patching was/is about in the Hackintosh community: make the hardware present a "known" interface, such as MBP 15 13,1 so that macOS knows what quirks to load. So instead of Apple adhering to some "fixed" standard for all of their models for several years, they could just publish the "quirks" of each model. You want to run Linux on your MBA? This is how it works. You're on your own adapting Linux to this, mind, but this is how it works. And of course, you want next year's model? Better get busy adapting again. I think that would still be immensely better than the current situation and would help prevent the waste GP was talking about. I always concur with the claim that this would probably not lose Apple money. They don't make money any more through selling macOS itself and people looking to run Linux are probably not the biggest spenders on the mac app store either. But they could probably sell more macs.
- p_l 6y ago
  Publishing such quirks list would require tracking them better, and possibly making sure they don't reveal anything bad about your devices. As is, they remain locked somewhere on Apple's institutional secrecy and they don't have to care except for Bootcamp as they do not officially support anything else, and just publishing a "quirk database" possibly means more support calls (not that anyone will pick them up)
paulcarroty 6y ago
> It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. It's done also to protect the brand, make it fancy, exclusive and costly for sure. Some fashion brands even destroys tons of wear just to not let them out with cheap price. "Walled garden" is very helpful here.
jacobmischka 6y ago
I don't think this is the reason. It is ingrained in Apple's ethos to prevent users from tinkering with their "perfect" devices, it was a core belief instilled by Jobs from the earliest days of the organization. Certainly, that could change given that he's no longer around, but change in a large organization often takes a long time or some external force. Since it's the most profitable company in the world, I don't expect them to go to the trouble of changing something that works for them. Edit: I obviously don't or have never worked there, so I am willing to stand corrected if anyone who has refutes this.
- fattire 6y ago
  The original Apple Computer schematics were distributed by the company.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    They were, and then there was NuBus, Apple's own floppy format, OS used a mix of Object Pascal and Assembly, Quickdraw, Quickdraw3D, NuBus, NetTalk,...
    - Someone 6y ago
      I don’t think those are good examples. The. ‘80s were an era of rapid evolution, in which about everybody had its own low-level stuff. NuBus, being a standard predating it’s use in the Mac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus) technically was more open than the ISA bus on the PC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture: “The ISA term was coined as a retronym by competing PC-clone manufacturers in the late 1980s or early 1990s as a reaction to IBM attempts to replace the AT-bus with its new and incompatible Micro Channel architecture”) In 1984, floppy formats were still changing all the time, so Apple picking something non standard for hardware that wasn’t used much by anybody else wasn’t unheard of. Writing an OS in assembly was normal, too. Shipping graphics libraries with it wasn’t, but you can’t blame them for writing their own. What should they have picked? X Windows is from June 1984. Quickdraw 3D, one could argue, should have been based on OpenGL, I don’t think it was clear that would be a winner on the desktop in 1995. Also, they started with usability in mind, supporting easy copy-paste of models working, something OpenGL doesn’t aim for (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL%2B%2B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL%2B%2B did, but it started after QuickDraw 3D (and, like it, died)) AppleTalk, similarly, started with usability in mind, leading to the use of thinner cabling (at the time, ethernet cables had a diameter of almost 1 cm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5, required terminators, etc), easier configuration (plug in the cable, and you’re good) and also predates the realization that TCP/IP is the winner, networking wise. I don’t think anybody could have picked the
anoncake 6y ago
It may be cheaper for Apple. For society, it's a huge waste of resources.

by p_l 6y ago

vladvasiliu 6y ago

> It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. If I understand correctly, seeing the rest of the comment, your point is that it's cheaper to not have it adhere to some fixed standard. While I fully understand this position, and think that it's actually something that can help a vertically integrated company such as Apple, I think that the situation isn't an either or. Rather, things could be shades of grey. The way I see it, Apple could keep on doing their specific things because it's better for them. But once a given system (which can be as restrictive as a given combination of laptop size, generation and spec-level) is out to mass manufacturing, it becomes its own standard of sorts. As in each and every "late 2020 MBA 13" 8 GB RAM 256 GB SSD rev 1" or whatever are exactly the same. I suppose this has to be, since macOS has to know how to handle them. If I'm not mistaken this is what DSDT patching was/is about in the Hackintosh community: make the hardware present a "known" interface, such as MBP 15 13,1 so that macOS knows what quirks to load. So instead of Apple adhering to some "fixed" standard for all of their models for several years, they could just publish the "quirks" of each model. You want to run Linux on your MBA? This is how it works. You're on your own adapting Linux to this, mind, but this is how it works. And of course, you want next year's model? Better get busy adapting again. I think that would still be immensely better than the current situation and would help prevent the waste GP was talking about. I always concur with the claim that this would probably not lose Apple money. They don't make money any more through selling macOS itself and people looking to run Linux are probably not the biggest spenders on the mac app store either. But they could probably sell more macs.

p_l 6y ago
Publishing such quirks list would require tracking them better, and possibly making sure they don't reveal anything bad about your devices. As is, they remain locked somewhere on Apple's institutional secrecy and they don't have to care except for Bootcamp as they do not officially support anything else, and just publishing a "quirk database" possibly means more support calls (not that anyone will pick them up)

paulcarroty 6y ago

> It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. It's done also to protect the brand, make it fancy, exclusive and costly for sure. Some fashion brands even destroys tons of wear just to not let them out with cheap price. "Walled garden" is very helpful here.

jacobmischka 6y ago

I don't think this is the reason. It is ingrained in Apple's ethos to prevent users from tinkering with their "perfect" devices, it was a core belief instilled by Jobs from the earliest days of the organization. Certainly, that could change given that he's no longer around, but change in a large organization often takes a long time or some external force. Since it's the most profitable company in the world, I don't expect them to go to the trouble of changing something that works for them. Edit: I obviously don't or have never worked there, so I am willing to stand corrected if anyone who has refutes this.

fattire 6y ago
The original Apple Computer schematics were distributed by the company.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  They were, and then there was NuBus, Apple's own floppy format, OS used a mix of Object Pascal and Assembly, Quickdraw, Quickdraw3D, NuBus, NetTalk,...
  - Someone 6y ago
    I don’t think those are good examples. The. ‘80s were an era of rapid evolution, in which about everybody had its own low-level stuff. NuBus, being a standard predating it’s use in the Mac (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NuBus) technically was more open than the ISA bus on the PC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture: “The ISA term was coined as a retronym by competing PC-clone manufacturers in the late 1980s or early 1990s as a reaction to IBM attempts to replace the AT-bus with its new and incompatible Micro Channel architecture”) In 1984, floppy formats were still changing all the time, so Apple picking something non standard for hardware that wasn’t used much by anybody else wasn’t unheard of. Writing an OS in assembly was normal, too. Shipping graphics libraries with it wasn’t, but you can’t blame them for writing their own. What should they have picked? X Windows is from June 1984. Quickdraw 3D, one could argue, should have been based on OpenGL, I don’t think it was clear that would be a winner on the desktop in 1995. Also, they started with usability in mind, supporting easy copy-paste of models working, something OpenGL doesn’t aim for (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL%2B%2B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenGL%2B%2B did, but it started after QuickDraw 3D (and, like it, died)) AppleTalk, similarly, started with usability in mind, leading to the use of thinner cabling (at the time, ethernet cables had a diameter of almost 1 cm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/10BASE5, required terminators, etc), easier configuration (plug in the cable, and you’re good) and also predates the realization that TCP/IP is the winner, networking wise. I don’t think anybody could have picked the

anoncake 6y ago

It may be cheaper for Apple. For society, it's a huge waste of resources.