12 ms·

The progress on all fronts is really impressive, and even the write-up is top notch. The pace at which the team advances is incredible, as it seems Apple suppor

by hbbio 5y ago

The progress on all fronts is really impressive, and even the write-up is top notch. The pace at which the team advances is incredible, as it seems Apple support is minimal... Maybe the core tech users is negligible to Apple, but it shouldn't be: Winning over the power users generally precedes larger adoption and I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead.

wronglebowski 5y ago
I do wonder what Apple will do if this gets any sort of traction. I fear they only allow disabling of secure boot/other OS installs due to fear of regulation. Apple wants you running their OS and in their walled garden.
- favorited 5y ago
  Apple explicitly enabled support for this: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126018068955136/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/13331260180689551...
- dilap 5y ago
  I don't know, when they were on Intel they went out of their way to support dual-booting with Windows. Maybe if 20XX really does become year the "year of desktop on linux" they'll start to get worried? But for now it seems like an easy calculation that it only benefits Apple to allow easy dual-booting to Linux -- it makes their hardware more appealing to the hard-core geek crowd (w/ disproprtionate mind-share and knock-on effects), while still having essentially zero chance of Linux cannibalizing your every-day user market.
- eptcyka 5y ago
  Apple is at no risk of having Linux stealing their users away. Unless someone makes a business of reselling Macbooks with linux being preinstalled and in some magical way that business becomes immensely successful.
  - maratc 5y ago
    In which case this will generate even more demand for Macbooks, which shouldn't be an issue for Apple.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- sys_64738 5y ago
  Nothing. Most Mac users are not buying from Apple to run vendor unsupported OSs. It really doesn't matter to corporate Apple what is going on other than to make sure technical documentation isn't leaked.
peoplefromibiza 5y ago
power users come and go. general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? only people with lots of money to waste.
- saagarjha 5y ago
  There's a new set of Apple silicon Macs that go all the way up to 64 GB of RAM, although you'll pay a premium for it.
  - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
    premium = an arm and a leg. My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds. It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.
    - saagarjha 5y ago
      I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.
      - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
        The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is. I could understand 20% more, but not two times. Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market. They simply will never be mainstream. My answer was to I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead I would! CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
        dagw 5y ago
        The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality. I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.
phoe-krk 5y ago
> and even the write-up is top notch I enjoyed the pun, even more so now that "support" for the hardware notch on the screen is also mentioned in the article.
ericls 5y ago
If it can run linux, it can conquer data center
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  In it's current form I don't think so. It's not optimized for DC/enterprise. It certainly has potential though.
  - herpderperator 5y ago
    https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/12/amazon-ec2-m1-mac-instances-macos/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/12/amazon-ec...
    - monocasa 5y ago
      That's more of a 'if you have everything else in the data center, then you can have this too for consistency's sake' than something to move traditional data center workloads to.
      - r00fus 5y ago
        The better example of ARM entrance to the datacenter is AWS Graviton. Apple could learn from Graviton to make its ARM cores significantly more datacenter friendly. That said, I don't see Apple doing this unless they see it as a significant opportunity.
        monocasa 5y ago
        Apple hasn't seen fit to do that for their own data center parts yet (hence the job postings for qemu-kvm, and the xcode cloud running on x86_64 in a VM). I don't think data center parts are on their radar at all.
        wtallis 5y ago
        For M1 Macs, isn't it everything but the ARM cores that is not datacenter-friendly - the memory capacity, the IO options, the system form factors?
specialist 5y ago
Totally. I'm not the target audience for Asahi as a daily driver. But I've used Linux to repurpose (life extension) my older macs. So this work is fills me with joy and appreciation. Also, the comparison of A14 and M1 (aka "A14X") gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones. There was an iPodLinux project, back in the day. I have no idea what the options are today.
- tambourine_man 5y ago
  >gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones That would involve jailbraking. The nice thing about the M series Macs is that there is an offical way to run alternative OSs, AFAIK. Something that should be required by law after X number of units sold IMO, but that's another conversation altogether.
  - kaba0 5y ago
    To give credit where it is due, I remember one member from the project mentioning that Apple actually did quite stellar work to enable other OSs while still maintaining a secure booting mechanism (for both osx and future third party ones!)
- 2fast4you 5y ago
  Once asahi is stable, I would seriously consider buying a MacBook to use as my daily driver
  - biomcgary 5y ago
    The final element of my decision to buy my first MacBook (after being very anti-Apple for years) was the existence of Asahi.
    - Elora 5y ago
      Are you already using Asahi on it? Would love to hear/read (if you've written it somewhere else) some feedback about your experience as I'm considering this path as well. A dual-boot would be most excellent! Is there a way to run Asahi as a VM as native ARM yet an M1 Macs?

by hbbio 5y ago

wronglebowski 5y ago

I do wonder what Apple will do if this gets any sort of traction. I fear they only allow disabling of secure boot/other OS installs due to fear of regulation. Apple wants you running their OS and in their walled garden.

favorited 5y ago
Apple explicitly enabled support for this: https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/1333126018068955136/photo/1 https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/13331260180689551...
dilap 5y ago
I don't know, when they were on Intel they went out of their way to support dual-booting with Windows. Maybe if 20XX really does become year the "year of desktop on linux" they'll start to get worried? But for now it seems like an easy calculation that it only benefits Apple to allow easy dual-booting to Linux -- it makes their hardware more appealing to the hard-core geek crowd (w/ disproprtionate mind-share and knock-on effects), while still having essentially zero chance of Linux cannibalizing your every-day user market.
eptcyka 5y ago
Apple is at no risk of having Linux stealing their users away. Unless someone makes a business of reselling Macbooks with linux being preinstalled and in some magical way that business becomes immensely successful.
- maratc 5y ago
  In which case this will generate even more demand for Macbooks, which shouldn't be an issue for Apple.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
sys_64738 5y ago
Nothing. Most Mac users are not buying from Apple to run vendor unsupported OSs. It really doesn't matter to corporate Apple what is going on other than to make sure technical documentation isn't leaked.

peoplefromibiza 5y ago

power users come and go. general population don't need macs, a $ 200 smartphone is more than enough for the majority who would spend 1.500 euros (in Europe) for a laptop that has a limit of 16gb of RAM? only people with lots of money to waste.

saagarjha 5y ago
There's a new set of Apple silicon Macs that go all the way up to 64 GB of RAM, although you'll pay a premium for it.
- peoplefromibiza 5y ago
  premium = an arm and a leg. My 7 years old Lenovo laptop mounts 64gb of RAM and 2 1TB ssds. It costed less than a Mac M1 Pro 7 years later.
  - saagarjha 5y ago
    I suspect that your workload that uses 64 GB of RAM and 2 1 TB SSDs could benefit from an extremely fast processor.
    - peoplefromibiza 5y ago
      The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. The price of an M1 Pro it's not justified by a slightly faster CPU, no matter how low the power usage is. I could understand 20% more, but not two times. Also: most of my workflows wouldn't work natively on ARM Macs. That doesn't mean Apple doesn't have a great product with a big market. They simply will never be mainstream. My answer was to I wouldn't be surprised if Macs continue to gain market share in the years to come with their CPU lead I would! CPU alone doesn't sell notebooks to non-tech people on a budget
      - dagw 5y ago
        The point is that I can find the performance I need for half the price. But only sacrificing something else, like screen, battery life and/or build quality. I bought a M1 Pro, not primarily because of its performance, but because it was the cheapest way to get the performance I wanted without sacrificing battery life or build quality in a hardware/software package I could trust to Just Work out of the box.

phoe-krk 5y ago

> and even the write-up is top notch I enjoyed the pun, even more so now that "support" for the hardware notch on the screen is also mentioned in the article.

ericls 5y ago

If it can run linux, it can conquer data center

stjohnswarts 5y ago
In it's current form I don't think so. It's not optimized for DC/enterprise. It certainly has potential though.
- herpderperator 5y ago
  https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/12/amazon-ec2-m1-mac-instances-macos/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2021/12/amazon-ec...
  - monocasa 5y ago
    That's more of a 'if you have everything else in the data center, then you can have this too for consistency's sake' than something to move traditional data center workloads to.
    - r00fus 5y ago
      The better example of ARM entrance to the datacenter is AWS Graviton. Apple could learn from Graviton to make its ARM cores significantly more datacenter friendly. That said, I don't see Apple doing this unless they see it as a significant opportunity.
      - monocasa 5y ago
        Apple hasn't seen fit to do that for their own data center parts yet (hence the job postings for qemu-kvm, and the xcode cloud running on x86_64 in a VM). I don't think data center parts are on their radar at all.
      - wtallis 5y ago
        For M1 Macs, isn't it everything but the ARM cores that is not datacenter-friendly - the memory capacity, the IO options, the system form factors?

specialist 5y ago

Totally. I'm not the target audience for Asahi as a daily driver. But I've used Linux to repurpose (life extension) my older macs. So this work is fills me with joy and appreciation. Also, the comparison of A14 and M1 (aka "A14X") gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones. There was an iPodLinux project, back in the day. I have no idea what the options are today.

tambourine_man 5y ago
>gives me hope that I can eventually repurpose my old iPads and iPhones That would involve jailbraking. The nice thing about the M series Macs is that there is an offical way to run alternative OSs, AFAIK. Something that should be required by law after X number of units sold IMO, but that's another conversation altogether.
- kaba0 5y ago
  To give credit where it is due, I remember one member from the project mentioning that Apple actually did quite stellar work to enable other OSs while still maintaining a secure booting mechanism (for both osx and future third party ones!)
2fast4you 5y ago
Once asahi is stable, I would seriously consider buying a MacBook to use as my daily driver
- biomcgary 5y ago
  The final element of my decision to buy my first MacBook (after being very anti-Apple for years) was the existence of Asahi.
  - Elora 5y ago
    Are you already using Asahi on it? Would love to hear/read (if you've written it somewhere else) some feedback about your experience as I'm considering this path as well. A dual-boot would be most excellent! Is there a way to run Asahi as a VM as native ARM yet an M1 Macs?