4 ms·

Everything Apple does they do because it makes sense for them. They are neither trying to help nor hinder third-party OSes. They just don't care. The NVMe desi

Everything Apple does they do because it makes sense for them. They are neither trying to help nor hinder third-party OSes. They just don't care. The NVMe design makes sense in the context of their common ASC architecture and how their SoC works. Various quirks are due to things like supporting their storage encryption. Even for things which we can't quite explain, I have no trouble believing that it made sense for them for whatever reason.

lucb1e 5y ago
> it makes sense for them. They are neither trying to help nor hinder third-party OSes. They just don't care. That sounds eerily similar to a paperclip maximizer (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer). I suppose we all know what Apple is maximizing, but I never drew this parallel before.
- wwweston 5y ago
  See also: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre...
kelnos 5y ago
Thanks for the even-handed reply, which I imagine is much easier to have after diving into all this stuff first-hand (I assume you're the same 'marcan' who wrote the progress report). As much as many of us want to attribute positive or negative reasons or motivations to things companies do -- especially secretive companies like Apple -- it's a nice reminder that most decisions are made without malice, because they make the most sense based on the requirements at hand. Having control over the entire hardware and software ecosystem means that there's no reason to follow standards to the letter when those standards get in your way and make things harder, more expensive, or even just not possible. Anyhow, just wanted to finish by saying all of this work is truly impressive. Obviously there's still a lot to be done to support everything to the same level as, say, a Dell XPS machine, but the progress made so far is pretty amazing, and even though I have no plans to buy an M1 Mac any time soon, I'm always excited to read these updates.
- oneplane 5y ago
  It's also the cost of those decisions would have quite the impact on the investment in R&D which is already bonkers as it is. A lot of people try to attribute some human aspect to a large multinational (as they are mostly just sociopaths controlled by shareholders in a sense), but technology-wise it's often just "it made sense for us at our scale". Same with the weird USB-C PD controllers that are 'almost normal' but then specialised for Apple; it's not that they want to make it hard to repair, use custom software with or patent it and screw with other companies.. it just makes sense to change that part instead of changing another part. At scale, that is a choice you have, but also a choice you must make in such an implementation. This is of course not exclusive to Apple, a lot of the really high quantity mass produced electronics contain slightly modified versions of existing parts because that turns out to be cheaper/more reliable/better fit-to-spec than modifying the rest of the design around an existing part. This is one of the baffling things about calculators or toy electronics (for light and sound effects) in the same vein; modifying an ancient chip with very crude software on a single-sided extra thin older style PCB material with no silk screen and only partial solder mask with a die-on-PCB with wire bonding and epoxy blob... all to make the assembly 3 cents instead of 4 cents, and reduce the lack of connections to make that 3 cent assembly have less possibilities of defects and causing less of a multi-thousand-cent service process to be activated (swap in a store, callcenter, website, email etc). Every time you get one less customer to call about a crappy firetruck where the lights stopped flashing in a 3 cent assembly is a huge win. This is of course an extreme example, more complicated hardware and software extrapolates quite extremely from there. Oddly enough, some of those practises are implemented at a much less impactful scale in HP and Dell desktops where they might have one large non-standard PCB hosting all the normal PC components but also all the DC-DC converters, front I/O and on-board WiFi. It makes almost no sense at all to do that, but the reduced number of connectors apparently makes the products cheaper to support, last longer and since people don't upgrade them anyway they are often just 'used up' and thrown away. That last part is bad of course but something that a design-for-manufacture department is unlikely to care about or mitigate using a trade-in or recycling program (which often just ends up meaning: ship the trash to china or Africa and let them deal with it). The amount of details and their impact at this scale is astounding. Add custom silicon and you're almost in a new dimension.
- 5y ago
joshstrange 5y ago
> Everything Apple does they do because it makes sense for them. They are neither trying to help nor hinder third-party OSes. They just don't care. That's my read on this as well. They designed it so it would work well with their other hardware/software and this is what they landed on. I seriously doubt they paid even a second of thought to other OSs running on their hardware. Some people will call that "user-hostile" but it's much closer to apathy IMHO and as a macOS and Apple hardware user I'm fine with that. It's cool that Linux can/will run on the M1 but I'll never be doing that myself. It reminds me of that scene in Mad Men "I don't think about you at all" [0] but Apple's feeling isn't even as sinister or hostile as the comment made by Don. [0] https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k?t=40 https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k?t=40
p2t2p 5y ago
> They just don't care. Exactly this. I can easily imagine somewhere in some OS slack channel in Apple: hardware dev: hey dear @channel we're breaking NVME spec in couple places and we're kinda running out of time to fix it, would be so kind to address it in you drivers if it's not too hard? os guy: yeah, no worries those seem trivial, we can easily adjust. hardware guy: cool, thanks a bunch.
karmakaze 5y ago
Perhaps that's their stance on competing software, but certainly not competing hardware. I recall an internal memo that had to do with intentionally being poorly compatible with other brands in implementing standards so that it could be written off as programming error.
webmobdev 5y ago
> They are neither trying to help nor hinder third-party OSes. That's naive. It is absolutely part of their design goals to plan for obsolescence and to prevent third party OSes to run perfectly on their device. The move to soldering SSDs and RAM on laptops and desktops is designed to prevent users from extending the life of the device. Mac Mini's experience a delay of 2-3 minutes to even start booting alternate OS to frustrate the users. The T2 chips even prevent booting a lot of other OSes. There are umpteen examples like these. And that's all ok when you consider the business goals of Apple. But please don't pretend that it's all an "accident" or Apple doesn't care if a user wants to break free from the stranglehold of the Apple ecosystem.

lucb1e 5y ago

> it makes sense for them. They are neither trying to help nor hinder third-party OSes. They just don't care. That sounds eerily similar to a paperclip maximizer (https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer). I suppose we all know what Apple is maximizing, but I never drew this parallel before.

wwweston 5y ago
See also: https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html https://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre...

kelnos 5y ago

Thanks for the even-handed reply, which I imagine is much easier to have after diving into all this stuff first-hand (I assume you're the same 'marcan' who wrote the progress report). As much as many of us want to attribute positive or negative reasons or motivations to things companies do -- especially secretive companies like Apple -- it's a nice reminder that most decisions are made without malice, because they make the most sense based on the requirements at hand. Having control over the entire hardware and software ecosystem means that there's no reason to follow standards to the letter when those standards get in your way and make things harder, more expensive, or even just not possible. Anyhow, just wanted to finish by saying all of this work is truly impressive. Obviously there's still a lot to be done to support everything to the same level as, say, a Dell XPS machine, but the progress made so far is pretty amazing, and even though I have no plans to buy an M1 Mac any time soon, I'm always excited to read these updates.

oneplane 5y ago
It's also the cost of those decisions would have quite the impact on the investment in R&D which is already bonkers as it is. A lot of people try to attribute some human aspect to a large multinational (as they are mostly just sociopaths controlled by shareholders in a sense), but technology-wise it's often just "it made sense for us at our scale". Same with the weird USB-C PD controllers that are 'almost normal' but then specialised for Apple; it's not that they want to make it hard to repair, use custom software with or patent it and screw with other companies.. it just makes sense to change that part instead of changing another part. At scale, that is a choice you have, but also a choice you must make in such an implementation. This is of course not exclusive to Apple, a lot of the really high quantity mass produced electronics contain slightly modified versions of existing parts because that turns out to be cheaper/more reliable/better fit-to-spec than modifying the rest of the design around an existing part. This is one of the baffling things about calculators or toy electronics (for light and sound effects) in the same vein; modifying an ancient chip with very crude software on a single-sided extra thin older style PCB material with no silk screen and only partial solder mask with a die-on-PCB with wire bonding and epoxy blob... all to make the assembly 3 cents instead of 4 cents, and reduce the lack of connections to make that 3 cent assembly have less possibilities of defects and causing less of a multi-thousand-cent service process to be activated (swap in a store, callcenter, website, email etc). Every time you get one less customer to call about a crappy firetruck where the lights stopped flashing in a 3 cent assembly is a huge win. This is of course an extreme example, more complicated hardware and software extrapolates quite extremely from there. Oddly enough, some of those practises are implemented at a much less impactful scale in HP and Dell desktops where they might have one large non-standard PCB hosting all the normal PC components but also all the DC-DC converters, front I/O and on-board WiFi. It makes almost no sense at all to do that, but the reduced number of connectors apparently makes the products cheaper to support, last longer and since people don't upgrade them anyway they are often just 'used up' and thrown away. That last part is bad of course but something that a design-for-manufacture department is unlikely to care about or mitigate using a trade-in or recycling program (which often just ends up meaning: ship the trash to china or Africa and let them deal with it). The amount of details and their impact at this scale is astounding. Add custom silicon and you're almost in a new dimension.
5y ago

joshstrange 5y ago

> Everything Apple does they do because it makes sense for them. They are neither trying to help nor hinder third-party OSes. They just don't care. That's my read on this as well. They designed it so it would work well with their other hardware/software and this is what they landed on. I seriously doubt they paid even a second of thought to other OSs running on their hardware. Some people will call that "user-hostile" but it's much closer to apathy IMHO and as a macOS and Apple hardware user I'm fine with that. It's cool that Linux can/will run on the M1 but I'll never be doing that myself. It reminds me of that scene in Mad Men "I don't think about you at all" [0] but Apple's feeling isn't even as sinister or hostile as the comment made by Don. [0] https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k?t=40 https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k?t=40

p2t2p 5y ago

> They just don't care. Exactly this. I can easily imagine somewhere in some OS slack channel in Apple: hardware dev: hey dear @channel we're breaking NVME spec in couple places and we're kinda running out of time to fix it, would be so kind to address it in you drivers if it's not too hard? os guy: yeah, no worries those seem trivial, we can easily adjust. hardware guy: cool, thanks a bunch.

karmakaze 5y ago

Perhaps that's their stance on competing software, but certainly not competing hardware. I recall an internal memo that had to do with intentionally being poorly compatible with other brands in implementing standards so that it could be written off as programming error.

webmobdev 5y ago

> They are neither trying to help nor hinder third-party OSes. That's naive. It is absolutely part of their design goals to plan for obsolescence and to prevent third party OSes to run perfectly on their device. The move to soldering SSDs and RAM on laptops and desktops is designed to prevent users from extending the life of the device. Mac Mini's experience a delay of 2-3 minutes to even start booting alternate OS to frustrate the users. The T2 chips even prevent booting a lot of other OSes. There are umpteen examples like these. And that's all ok when you consider the business goals of Apple. But please don't pretend that it's all an "accident" or Apple doesn't care if a user wants to break free from the stranglehold of the Apple ecosystem.