11 ms·

I wonder to what extent the M1 has been designed with thoughts towards vendor lock-in?

lucasyvas 5y ago
Probably to the same level of everything else they do - "We are doing what we want, so get on board if you are interested" If that leads to lock-in, it's a happy accident.
- madia_leva 5y ago
  Accident, yeah
- burlesona 5y ago
  I think many will interpret this as sarcasm, but it’s actually spot-on. If you watch Apple’s history, they’re strongly opinionated and they always do what they believe is best for users, regardless of what developers or critics think. This usually works out well. I think the one big conflict is that Apple is also very diligent about it’s profit margins, and while this usually doesn’t conflict with “what’s best for the user,” where Apple gets in trouble is when it does. One prominent example: there’s really no reason to think that the 5GB of free iCloud storage is sufficient anymore. Maintaining cloud storage isn’t free, so I understand why they don’t want to offer more than a “free trial” so to speak, but I would guess this hurts a lot of users who have a degraded user experience on their phone because they don’t have enough storage for iCloud backups, for example. It would make more sense to me if they would offer something like “system backups don’t count against your storage cap” and then include two years of iCloud 50GB with the purchase of the phone. That conflicts with the profit margins, though, so the 5GB teaser stays around.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    I think it's part of an onboarding strategy, because remember that the next tier is $1/mo., or $12 a year. Peanuts. It could easily be rolled into the purchase price of the device for a year or two. Apple TV+ which come with a year free with purchasing an iPhone would be $60 a year, or 5 years of iCloud 50GB. However, by charging peanuts, you got the user into a subscription, which is the important bit. A person in a subscription who jumped the hurdle of not paying vs paying a little is much more likely to upgrade later. It also plays into a Steve Jobs strategy, for better or worse. Many people don't hear about this, but Steve Jobs had a view that people don't value things that are free. He made the Cafe at Apple HQ subsidized but require payment, not that Apple couldn't afford it, but because he knew people wouldn't respect free food. This view of Apple's, that people don't value things they didn't pay for, seems to permeate many of their business decisions.
    - smoldesu 5y ago
      > This view of Apple's, that people don't value things they didn't pay for, seems to permeate many of their business decisions. This would explain why their users are so quick to defend the 30% cut, with sunken cost taken into account.
    - burlesona 5y ago
      Yes, I think you’re exactly right. Overall it’s a good business strategy. I just personally think that in this case, it’s an example of “what’s best for profit margins” conflicting with “the best user experience for most users,” and the awkward place they’ve landed today is how they’ve split that difference.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Can anyone else name an industry where this would be allowed? Imagine if John Deere decided to switch all of their tractors to a proprietary gasoline formula, and said "We're doing what we want, so get on board if you're interested". They would be sued before the sun went down.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Except here's the twist: Imagine if John Deere made their tractors from day one with the proprietary gasoline formula. And that people liked their tractors from day one and grew them into the behemoth they are today despite the formula. That's more like what the current situation is.
  - macintux 5y ago
    A better analogy would be if Deere required a new fuel formulation that all the industry players had access to but no one else had sufficient clout/“courage” to use.
  - defaultname 5y ago
    Do Apple devices use special Apple Electricity? No? Then your analogy is nonsensical, as analogies always are.
  - rdsnsca 5y ago
    John Deer tractors are locked down... just go talk to a real farmer and see what he says.
  - nonameiguess 5y ago
    John Deere unfortunately does do this. To the court's credit, at least they keep losing right to repair lawsuits. To law enforcement's discredit, they don't change the behavior and suffer no punishment.
spacedcowboy 5y ago
The Apple ABI was burnt into physical hardware while ARM was still finalizing some of the 64-bit details, which is why there are minor differences. X18 is very specifically called out as “for the platform: do not use”, though, so things like GNU MP [1] moaning that Apple hasn’t specified how they use x18, and them using it anyway are just ridiculous. ‘While we added support for Apple's new Arm based computers, our support has a problem. The problem is that Apple reserves CPU register x18, but GMP's mpn/arm64 assembly code uses that register. While GMP runs fine in our tests, we expect things to go awry in some execution situation. (Apple has not been kind enough to specify how they use x18. Therefore, we don't know what the consequences of using x18 might be.)’ [1] https://gmplib.org/ https://gmplib.org/
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  Are they not able to stop using the register? Why keep touching a rail that you've been told might be electrified?
  - vetinari 5y ago
    Their code is older than M1. That rail, when supplied by other vendors, was not live.
    - chrisseaton 5y ago
      Yeah I get that... but that doesn't meet the current ABI so change it.
      - zorgmonkey 5y ago
        It is already fixed https://gmplib.org/repo/gmp/rev/5f32dbc41afc https://gmplib.org/repo/gmp/rev/5f32dbc41afc
    - stephencanon 5y ago
      But younger than Apple’s arm64 ABI, and younger than ARM’s ABI docs which reserve it for platform use. Any software intended to target multiple platforms should never have been using it.
adevx 5y ago
I'm in the market for a new laptop, but can't get myself to buy an Apple laptop despite some nice innovation on the CPU front. The lock-in, the dragging their feed and outright stalling web innovation with Safari, the “Sideloading in this case is eliminating choice” newspeak. It's just not something I want to support.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  I'm in a (similar) boat. I'd probably be a lot more interested if Apple gave me more control over the hardware.
  - EricE 5y ago
    What control are you lacking? Are you positive you are lacking control or just espousing a knee jerk opinion? Indeed, a comment in this thread points out that others have reported Apple went out of their way to allow secure access to the hardware on peer with what apple does with macOS - your generic concerns seem utterly without merit.
    - wayneftw 5y ago
      Perhaps you're not sure what kinds of controls you're missing because you haven't often left the Apple bubble? Here are the types of control that I enjoy as a Linux/Windows PC user: - All of my non-Mac PCs have a BIOS interface that lets me control very low level behaviors of my motherboard and CPU. Macs expose just the bare minimum. - Windows, and to a much greater extent Linux both offer vastly more API hooks to customize things that I want about the OS. Apple does things like making NSScreen.visibleRect readonly so that only their Dock program can change it and nobody else. Meanwhile, on Windows/Linux I can programatically do just about anything I choose to, so I can replace the taskbar (and even app window chrome/menus) with something else if I want. - Macs have extremely limited GUI configuration options. You can't even change the color of your mouse pointer from black to white if you wish to! You can't have "themes" that change anything significant. You can only put the Dock left/right/bottom. You can't move the menu bar. For a long, long time you could only resize app windows by the lower right corner until they finally implemented that. It's very often Apple's way or the highway - and there's a reason why that phrase is often associated directed towards Apple; because they just don't offer nearly as much control to users... - Even if you try to customize these things by using third party hacks, there's no guarantee that your hack will continue to work after an update - and that's a loss of control. My Macs have broken many times from updates, way more than any of my real PCs. Even if I do hack Windows to do something that I want, Microsoft bends over backwards to stay compatible. Obviously Linux offers even more control, i.e. you can get right into the source code of almost anything on your desktop. - I can only run macOS on Apple hardware. This is a severe loss of control for users. If Apple decided to stop making Intel machines tomorrow, I'd be screwed. - If I'm running a cloud business, I can't even rent out a cloud Mac for an hour at a time. I have to rent it out for 24 hours at a time. That's a loss of control. I'm sure I missed some things because I wrote this pretty quickly. I thought at some point that I should keep a running list of things that Macs just can't do, but that would be a waste of time - better to just accept things and relegate my Macs for doing iOS/Mac things only. So that's exactly what I did.
rickdeckard 5y ago
It was for sure designed to bring the locked architecture and tight value-chain control from iOS into the macOS space, in a slow transition which doesn't alienate the existing userbase (like the frog in a pot analogy). For example, I don't expect them to address the situation with the Hackintosh market (people running macOS on custom PCs). They will simply fade-out OS-support for Intel CPU's, AMD GPUs and so on at one point, and then basically close the door behind all the M1/Mx users...
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  They never supported Hackintoshes, and you need to remember there was a 20-year period before Intel where hackintoshes weren't possible. Apple is closing something they never supported and that wasn't there for the two decades prior, so I can hardly fault them. For how well-known "hackintoshing" is, remember that the Mac has spent the majority of its existence without this ability.
- pram 5y ago
  The description of Hackintosh as a “market” is pretty amusing
- rickdeckard 5y ago
  To clarify: I didn't mean that they would/should "help" the Hackintosh community. Quite the opposite, when looking into it they don't seem to take a significant effort to shut it down for several years now. It probably also helped them at times, especially when they didn't offer powerful desktop machines and were at risk to have customers transition to another OS. But with the introduction of M1 I suspect that this is the solution for that Hackintosh "grey-market".
burlesona 5y ago
To exactly the same extent as everything Apple does. If they genuinely believe that they can create a custom X that works better than all the other options, and that compatibility with the rest of the world would hold back the user experience, then they go for it and don’t worry about compatibility. Whether you, as a user, agree with their decisions, is a different story. Apple doesn’t care about making products for everyone, so to them if 70% of the market doesn’t like their design but 30% absolutely loves it - and they can make sustainable profits selling to that 30% - then that’s fine. Apple thinks of it’s products like game consoles. We don’t get mad at Sony that PlayStation games don’t run on Windows… we understand that Sony has designed a complete package offering and then we either like it and buy it… or we don’t. And that’s fine. People get confused about Apple’s choices because they make Macs, which are a lot like PCs and partially compatible. But Apple doesn’t see the Mac as part of the PC ecosystem, it sees the Mac and all its products as the distinct, standalone, Apple platform, which is a complete package offering. And Apple expects users to either like that and buy it, or not.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  > Apple doesn’t care about making products for everyone Can you give me a quote from the company or an otherwise official statement that supports this?
  - xuki 5y ago
    https://youtu.be/gnU9Vgt8Hmg?t=9 https://youtu.be/gnU9Vgt8Hmg?t=9
  - least 5y ago
    It doesn't require a statement from Apple for someone to ascribe intent from a company's actions. It's of course just speculation and may not align with what the company officially states or what the intent is internally. It's simply an opinion.
  - macintux 5y ago
    They’ve certainly said on multiple occasions they won’t make cheap computers, which by definition excludes a big percentage of the potential market. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-ceo-tim-cook-expensive-products_n_2670366 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-ceo-tim-cook-expensive-...
api 5y ago
I don't think it matters, since MacOS itself is a compilation target that differs completely from others. If they made the CPU different, that would just make its differences yet another aspect of MacOS as a target. In other words I don't think it would be any more of a special snowflake than it is. If they dropped ARM64 compatibility (in other words stopped making Apple Silicon a superset of ARM64), this would be stupid in that it would make the platform less useful. It would make it impossible to e.g. run ARM64 Linux or Windows in a VM which is a fundamental use case of the machine for developers. I doubt they'd do this.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Why not? As long as Swift and Objective-C development is the same as always, that is their public, not people that should be giving money to Linux or Windows OEMs.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    People write C and C++ for those platforms too. And a lot of programming languages that Apple doesn’t ship compilers for.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      They do, to the extent that they fullfill Apple platforms, like Metal shaders, IO and DriverKit, Network extensions, POSIX, macOS is after all a certified UNIX. I never seen Mac OS X as something to use to target GNU/Linux. The computer I use for GNU/Linux development was bought from Asus, with Ubuntu pre-installed.
      - saagarjha 5y ago
        I write plenty of POSIX code on my Mac. Sometimes I send it to people to run on Linux without once running it on anything but my machine!
        pjmlp 5y ago

Probably to the same level of everything else they do - "We are doing what we want, so get on board if you are interested" If that leads to lock-in, it's a happy accident.

madia_leva 5y ago
Accident, yeah
burlesona 5y ago
I think many will interpret this as sarcasm, but it’s actually spot-on. If you watch Apple’s history, they’re strongly opinionated and they always do what they believe is best for users, regardless of what developers or critics think. This usually works out well. I think the one big conflict is that Apple is also very diligent about it’s profit margins, and while this usually doesn’t conflict with “what’s best for the user,” where Apple gets in trouble is when it does. One prominent example: there’s really no reason to think that the 5GB of free iCloud storage is sufficient anymore. Maintaining cloud storage isn’t free, so I understand why they don’t want to offer more than a “free trial” so to speak, but I would guess this hurts a lot of users who have a degraded user experience on their phone because they don’t have enough storage for iCloud backups, for example. It would make more sense to me if they would offer something like “system backups don’t count against your storage cap” and then include two years of iCloud 50GB with the purchase of the phone. That conflicts with the profit margins, though, so the 5GB teaser stays around.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  I think it's part of an onboarding strategy, because remember that the next tier is $1/mo., or $12 a year. Peanuts. It could easily be rolled into the purchase price of the device for a year or two. Apple TV+ which come with a year free with purchasing an iPhone would be $60 a year, or 5 years of iCloud 50GB. However, by charging peanuts, you got the user into a subscription, which is the important bit. A person in a subscription who jumped the hurdle of not paying vs paying a little is much more likely to upgrade later. It also plays into a Steve Jobs strategy, for better or worse. Many people don't hear about this, but Steve Jobs had a view that people don't value things that are free. He made the Cafe at Apple HQ subsidized but require payment, not that Apple couldn't afford it, but because he knew people wouldn't respect free food. This view of Apple's, that people don't value things they didn't pay for, seems to permeate many of their business decisions.
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    > This view of Apple's, that people don't value things they didn't pay for, seems to permeate many of their business decisions. This would explain why their users are so quick to defend the 30% cut, with sunken cost taken into account.
  - burlesona 5y ago
    Yes, I think you’re exactly right. Overall it’s a good business strategy. I just personally think that in this case, it’s an example of “what’s best for profit margins” conflicting with “the best user experience for most users,” and the awkward place they’ve landed today is how they’ve split that difference.
smoldesu 5y ago
Can anyone else name an industry where this would be allowed? Imagine if John Deere decided to switch all of their tractors to a proprietary gasoline formula, and said "We're doing what we want, so get on board if you're interested". They would be sued before the sun went down.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Except here's the twist: Imagine if John Deere made their tractors from day one with the proprietary gasoline formula. And that people liked their tractors from day one and grew them into the behemoth they are today despite the formula. That's more like what the current situation is.
- macintux 5y ago
  A better analogy would be if Deere required a new fuel formulation that all the industry players had access to but no one else had sufficient clout/“courage” to use.
- defaultname 5y ago
  Do Apple devices use special Apple Electricity? No? Then your analogy is nonsensical, as analogies always are.
- rdsnsca 5y ago
  John Deer tractors are locked down... just go talk to a real farmer and see what he says.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  John Deere unfortunately does do this. To the court's credit, at least they keep losing right to repair lawsuits. To law enforcement's discredit, they don't change the behavior and suffer no punishment.

spacedcowboy 5y ago

The Apple ABI was burnt into physical hardware while ARM was still finalizing some of the 64-bit details, which is why there are minor differences. X18 is very specifically called out as “for the platform: do not use”, though, so things like GNU MP [1] moaning that Apple hasn’t specified how they use x18, and them using it anyway are just ridiculous. ‘While we added support for Apple's new Arm based computers, our support has a problem. The problem is that Apple reserves CPU register x18, but GMP's mpn/arm64 assembly code uses that register. While GMP runs fine in our tests, we expect things to go awry in some execution situation. (Apple has not been kind enough to specify how they use x18. Therefore, we don't know what the consequences of using x18 might be.)’ [1] https://gmplib.org/ https://gmplib.org/

chrisseaton 5y ago
Are they not able to stop using the register? Why keep touching a rail that you've been told might be electrified?
- vetinari 5y ago
  Their code is older than M1. That rail, when supplied by other vendors, was not live.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    Yeah I get that... but that doesn't meet the current ABI so change it.
    - zorgmonkey 5y ago
      It is already fixed https://gmplib.org/repo/gmp/rev/5f32dbc41afc https://gmplib.org/repo/gmp/rev/5f32dbc41afc
  - stephencanon 5y ago
    But younger than Apple’s arm64 ABI, and younger than ARM’s ABI docs which reserve it for platform use. Any software intended to target multiple platforms should never have been using it.

adevx 5y ago

I'm in the market for a new laptop, but can't get myself to buy an Apple laptop despite some nice innovation on the CPU front. The lock-in, the dragging their feed and outright stalling web innovation with Safari, the “Sideloading in this case is eliminating choice” newspeak. It's just not something I want to support.

smoldesu 5y ago
I'm in a (similar) boat. I'd probably be a lot more interested if Apple gave me more control over the hardware.
- EricE 5y ago
  What control are you lacking? Are you positive you are lacking control or just espousing a knee jerk opinion? Indeed, a comment in this thread points out that others have reported Apple went out of their way to allow secure access to the hardware on peer with what apple does with macOS - your generic concerns seem utterly without merit.
  - wayneftw 5y ago
    Perhaps you're not sure what kinds of controls you're missing because you haven't often left the Apple bubble? Here are the types of control that I enjoy as a Linux/Windows PC user: - All of my non-Mac PCs have a BIOS interface that lets me control very low level behaviors of my motherboard and CPU. Macs expose just the bare minimum. - Windows, and to a much greater extent Linux both offer vastly more API hooks to customize things that I want about the OS. Apple does things like making NSScreen.visibleRect readonly so that only their Dock program can change it and nobody else. Meanwhile, on Windows/Linux I can programatically do just about anything I choose to, so I can replace the taskbar (and even app window chrome/menus) with something else if I want. - Macs have extremely limited GUI configuration options. You can't even change the color of your mouse pointer from black to white if you wish to! You can't have "themes" that change anything significant. You can only put the Dock left/right/bottom. You can't move the menu bar. For a long, long time you could only resize app windows by the lower right corner until they finally implemented that. It's very often Apple's way or the highway - and there's a reason why that phrase is often associated directed towards Apple; because they just don't offer nearly as much control to users... - Even if you try to customize these things by using third party hacks, there's no guarantee that your hack will continue to work after an update - and that's a loss of control. My Macs have broken many times from updates, way more than any of my real PCs. Even if I do hack Windows to do something that I want, Microsoft bends over backwards to stay compatible. Obviously Linux offers even more control, i.e. you can get right into the source code of almost anything on your desktop. - I can only run macOS on Apple hardware. This is a severe loss of control for users. If Apple decided to stop making Intel machines tomorrow, I'd be screwed. - If I'm running a cloud business, I can't even rent out a cloud Mac for an hour at a time. I have to rent it out for 24 hours at a time. That's a loss of control. I'm sure I missed some things because I wrote this pretty quickly. I thought at some point that I should keep a running list of things that Macs just can't do, but that would be a waste of time - better to just accept things and relegate my Macs for doing iOS/Mac things only. So that's exactly what I did.

rickdeckard 5y ago

It was for sure designed to bring the locked architecture and tight value-chain control from iOS into the macOS space, in a slow transition which doesn't alienate the existing userbase (like the frog in a pot analogy). For example, I don't expect them to address the situation with the Hackintosh market (people running macOS on custom PCs). They will simply fade-out OS-support for Intel CPU's, AMD GPUs and so on at one point, and then basically close the door behind all the M1/Mx users...

gjsman-1000 5y ago
They never supported Hackintoshes, and you need to remember there was a 20-year period before Intel where hackintoshes weren't possible. Apple is closing something they never supported and that wasn't there for the two decades prior, so I can hardly fault them. For how well-known "hackintoshing" is, remember that the Mac has spent the majority of its existence without this ability.
pram 5y ago
The description of Hackintosh as a “market” is pretty amusing
rickdeckard 5y ago
To clarify: I didn't mean that they would/should "help" the Hackintosh community. Quite the opposite, when looking into it they don't seem to take a significant effort to shut it down for several years now. It probably also helped them at times, especially when they didn't offer powerful desktop machines and were at risk to have customers transition to another OS. But with the introduction of M1 I suspect that this is the solution for that Hackintosh "grey-market".

burlesona 5y ago

To exactly the same extent as everything Apple does. If they genuinely believe that they can create a custom X that works better than all the other options, and that compatibility with the rest of the world would hold back the user experience, then they go for it and don’t worry about compatibility. Whether you, as a user, agree with their decisions, is a different story. Apple doesn’t care about making products for everyone, so to them if 70% of the market doesn’t like their design but 30% absolutely loves it - and they can make sustainable profits selling to that 30% - then that’s fine. Apple thinks of it’s products like game consoles. We don’t get mad at Sony that PlayStation games don’t run on Windows… we understand that Sony has designed a complete package offering and then we either like it and buy it… or we don’t. And that’s fine. People get confused about Apple’s choices because they make Macs, which are a lot like PCs and partially compatible. But Apple doesn’t see the Mac as part of the PC ecosystem, it sees the Mac and all its products as the distinct, standalone, Apple platform, which is a complete package offering. And Apple expects users to either like that and buy it, or not.

smoldesu 5y ago
> Apple doesn’t care about making products for everyone Can you give me a quote from the company or an otherwise official statement that supports this?
- xuki 5y ago
  https://youtu.be/gnU9Vgt8Hmg?t=9 https://youtu.be/gnU9Vgt8Hmg?t=9
- least 5y ago
  It doesn't require a statement from Apple for someone to ascribe intent from a company's actions. It's of course just speculation and may not align with what the company officially states or what the intent is internally. It's simply an opinion.
- macintux 5y ago
  They’ve certainly said on multiple occasions they won’t make cheap computers, which by definition excludes a big percentage of the potential market. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-ceo-tim-cook-expensive-products_n_2670366 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/apple-ceo-tim-cook-expensive-...

api 5y ago

I don't think it matters, since MacOS itself is a compilation target that differs completely from others. If they made the CPU different, that would just make its differences yet another aspect of MacOS as a target. In other words I don't think it would be any more of a special snowflake than it is. If they dropped ARM64 compatibility (in other words stopped making Apple Silicon a superset of ARM64), this would be stupid in that it would make the platform less useful. It would make it impossible to e.g. run ARM64 Linux or Windows in a VM which is a fundamental use case of the machine for developers. I doubt they'd do this.

pjmlp 5y ago
Why not? As long as Swift and Objective-C development is the same as always, that is their public, not people that should be giving money to Linux or Windows OEMs.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  People write C and C++ for those platforms too. And a lot of programming languages that Apple doesn’t ship compilers for.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    They do, to the extent that they fullfill Apple platforms, like Metal shaders, IO and DriverKit, Network extensions, POSIX, macOS is after all a certified UNIX. I never seen Mac OS X as something to use to target GNU/Linux. The computer I use for GNU/Linux development was bought from Asus, with Ubuntu pre-installed.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      I write plenty of POSIX code on my Mac. Sometimes I send it to people to run on Linux without once running it on anything but my machine!
      - pjmlp 5y ago