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> Apple spent significant engineering effort modifying their iOS bootloader to support for third-party OSs—then neglected to tell anyone how to actually make a

> Apple spent significant engineering effort modifying their iOS bootloader to support for third-party OSs—then neglected to tell anyone how to actually make a third-party OS. Whoops! Have fun! This tend to be the usual practice for much of what Apple does, release things with minimal documentation and let others figure out how it works. Maybe it's just a sadist corporation who wants to see how far people are willing to go in order to get stuff working with their own hardware/software? Sometimes it certainly seems that way.

smoldesu 4y ago
It's mostly frustrating that this is still the rhetoric from Apple now that they are the largest company in modern existence. They have the faculties to release their Unix drivers and even provide world-class Linux support while still profiting heavily from their hardware sales. Yet, they don't. Every time they're given an opportunity to err on the side of freedom or choice, they shrug. This is an ongoing problem that has prevented me from daily-driving MacOS since Catalina. Really a stance I wish Apple would revert, even Microsoft does a better job here than Apple.
- tpush 4y ago
  > [...] even Microsoft does a better job here than Apple. How so?
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    For one, they helped build Linux drivers for NTFS. Despite Apple promising to document and open-source APFS, they still have not gotten around to it (which makes interop with Macs really frustrating). There are lots of little things, too - Microsoft packages desktop apps for Linux and made pretty great OSS contributions like the Monaco editor. The list could go on, but this really shouldn't be surprising. Apple doesn't even treat upstream BSD with respect, it's insane to think that they would respect Linux.
    - bch 4y ago
      > Apple doesn't even treat upstream BSD with respect, it's insane to think that they would respect Linux. Meanwhile from Microsoft: * https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/emips/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/emips/ * https://www.netbsd.org/ports/emips/index.html https://www.netbsd.org/ports/emips/index.html
    - my123 4y ago
      For APFS, they did release some docs at: https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-Sys...
    - minusf 4y ago
      yes, microsoft is truly amazing, where is their patent free exfat implementation? that is the only true modern interop fs and they keep it hostage.
      - mixmastamyk 4y ago
        Been in the kernel for long enough to trickle out to recent distributions. Is there something missing?
        minusf 4y ago
        i see i was out of date on this, thanks for the heads up. better late than never.
- 411111111111111 4y ago
  > "it's mostly frustrating that this is still the rhetoric from Apple now that they are the largest company in modern existence." But why should it change? They've become the most profitable for sure, but they became that while ignoring docs etc. Why should they now change, considering it's been unquestionable proven that it doesn't matter for their financial success? PS: i still don't understand how people some people call it largest, doesn't that adjective describe size...? It doesn't have the most employees, it doesn't have the most locations etc. It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion, as that's usually called richest.
  - smoldesu 4y ago
    > But why should it change? Because I'm not buying Macbooks anymore. In fact, over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen people develop on a dedicated Linux box or Linux VM. Apple's appeal is shrinking to developers, and it has been on a steady decline for the past 10 years. For all of MacOS' POSIX certification, it hasn't stopped people from trying to implement Linux just so they can run privacy-respecting software and benign GPU libraries that Apple refuses to officially support. Their plan here isn't working. It might placate the 80% of users who don't care about this stuff, but the technical sentiment towards Apple's technologies is waning. I'm frustrated with WebKit, I'm frustrated with Swift, and everyone is frustrated with their 30% tax. Something has to give, and it's probably going to be Apple's facade of benevolence. > It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion. All businesses are constrained by a set of limiting factors. The most important factor will always be capital, since you can trade it for any one of the lesser factors. Apple uses their 200 billion USD cash reserve to buy goodwill in the form of advertising, first-in-line tickets to TSMC and the finest lobbyists in the nation. They have every protection that lesser companies do not, which is why their valuation supersedes any other publicly or privately traded organization. I'll stop calling them the biggest company when business stops revolving around money.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      > Because I'm not buying Macbooks anymore. You're not but many people still are [0]. Many people started to see Apple's developer experience wane in previous years, true, but their Apple Silicon changed that. Their price/performance/battery life ratio is simply unbeatable for devs and anecdotally many people I know bought AS Macs where before they would've bought or used a Windows or Linux computer, including me. There are some things I will agree with you on though, such as their 30% tax, as a mobile developer myself. [0] 2021 Mac shipments grew twice as fast as overall PC shipments - https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/12/2021-mac-shipments-growth/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/12/2021-mac-shipments-growth/
nemothekid 4y ago
I think we are ascribing too much to this as some corporate apple policy when the reality is closer to a single engineer or engineering lead believes the hardware would be open, but Apple is not going to spend any resources behind that. So you have engineering teams with hacker ethos building "open" hardware, but Apple the company doesn't really give a shit and is not going to spend money on documentation for a feature the company doesn't care about.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I take your point, but I have to imagine Tim Cook (or someone just under him) signed off on opening the bootloader. It's not like the executive team doesn't know about it. Allowing an engineer to answer questions for half an hour a week would be practically a rounding error in terms of resources, and certainly less of a commitment than rewriting iBoot policy, which they already did.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    We're not really privy to how it got through (I could imagine some engineer/manager somewhere arguing that allowing it open would change some obscure tax/import filing somewhere).
  - kaba0 4y ago
    I’m fairly sure that it is not as easy from a legal standpoint. Apple does manufacture some of their own components, but they still have plenty of third-party ones, where the usual licensing applies - so the same reason why it’s hard to run third-party OS on android phones.
titzer 4y ago
They certainly have a penchant for randomly crapping on people that don't do things the Officially Supported Way(TM). For example, one rev of MacOS changed the ABI for the gettimeofday() kernel system call. That broke Golang (and Virgil). Apple didn't care. They want you go through libc for some reason. Uh, no, don't break userspace.
- 0x0 4y ago
  Microsoft also changes the kernel syscalls between releases. It's not unusual for operating systems to specify ABI at the libc level, in fact I believe Linux is the odd one out to specify ABI at the syscall level. https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/ https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/
  - titzer 4y ago
    I know. Solaris has/had a stable ABI.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  Apple has been crystal clear since 1999 that syscalls are not ABI on Darwin. Linus chose to draw that line differently, which is fine; Linux is a different environment.

smoldesu 4y ago

It's mostly frustrating that this is still the rhetoric from Apple now that they are the largest company in modern existence. They have the faculties to release their Unix drivers and even provide world-class Linux support while still profiting heavily from their hardware sales. Yet, they don't. Every time they're given an opportunity to err on the side of freedom or choice, they shrug. This is an ongoing problem that has prevented me from daily-driving MacOS since Catalina. Really a stance I wish Apple would revert, even Microsoft does a better job here than Apple.

tpush 4y ago
> [...] even Microsoft does a better job here than Apple. How so?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  For one, they helped build Linux drivers for NTFS. Despite Apple promising to document and open-source APFS, they still have not gotten around to it (which makes interop with Macs really frustrating). There are lots of little things, too - Microsoft packages desktop apps for Linux and made pretty great OSS contributions like the Monaco editor. The list could go on, but this really shouldn't be surprising. Apple doesn't even treat upstream BSD with respect, it's insane to think that they would respect Linux.
  - bch 4y ago
    > Apple doesn't even treat upstream BSD with respect, it's insane to think that they would respect Linux. Meanwhile from Microsoft: * https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/emips/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/emips/ * https://www.netbsd.org/ports/emips/index.html https://www.netbsd.org/ports/emips/index.html
  - my123 4y ago
    For APFS, they did release some docs at: https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-System-Reference.pdf https://developer.apple.com/support/downloads/Apple-File-Sys...
  - minusf 4y ago
    yes, microsoft is truly amazing, where is their patent free exfat implementation? that is the only true modern interop fs and they keep it hostage.
    - mixmastamyk 4y ago
      Been in the kernel for long enough to trickle out to recent distributions. Is there something missing?
      - minusf 4y ago
        i see i was out of date on this, thanks for the heads up. better late than never.
411111111111111 4y ago
> "it's mostly frustrating that this is still the rhetoric from Apple now that they are the largest company in modern existence." But why should it change? They've become the most profitable for sure, but they became that while ignoring docs etc. Why should they now change, considering it's been unquestionable proven that it doesn't matter for their financial success? PS: i still don't understand how people some people call it largest, doesn't that adjective describe size...? It doesn't have the most employees, it doesn't have the most locations etc. It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion, as that's usually called richest.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  > But why should it change? Because I'm not buying Macbooks anymore. In fact, over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen people develop on a dedicated Linux box or Linux VM. Apple's appeal is shrinking to developers, and it has been on a steady decline for the past 10 years. For all of MacOS' POSIX certification, it hasn't stopped people from trying to implement Linux just so they can run privacy-respecting software and benign GPU libraries that Apple refuses to officially support. Their plan here isn't working. It might placate the 80% of users who don't care about this stuff, but the technical sentiment towards Apple's technologies is waning. I'm frustrated with WebKit, I'm frustrated with Swift, and everyone is frustrated with their 30% tax. Something has to give, and it's probably going to be Apple's facade of benevolence. > It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion. All businesses are constrained by a set of limiting factors. The most important factor will always be capital, since you can trade it for any one of the lesser factors. Apple uses their 200 billion USD cash reserve to buy goodwill in the form of advertising, first-in-line tickets to TSMC and the finest lobbyists in the nation. They have every protection that lesser companies do not, which is why their valuation supersedes any other publicly or privately traded organization. I'll stop calling them the biggest company when business stops revolving around money.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    > Because I'm not buying Macbooks anymore. You're not but many people still are [0]. Many people started to see Apple's developer experience wane in previous years, true, but their Apple Silicon changed that. Their price/performance/battery life ratio is simply unbeatable for devs and anecdotally many people I know bought AS Macs where before they would've bought or used a Windows or Linux computer, including me. There are some things I will agree with you on though, such as their 30% tax, as a mobile developer myself. [0] 2021 Mac shipments grew twice as fast as overall PC shipments - https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/12/2021-mac-shipments-growth/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/12/2021-mac-shipments-growth/

nemothekid 4y ago

I think we are ascribing too much to this as some corporate apple policy when the reality is closer to a single engineer or engineering lead believes the hardware would be open, but Apple is not going to spend any resources behind that. So you have engineering teams with hacker ethos building "open" hardware, but Apple the company doesn't really give a shit and is not going to spend money on documentation for a feature the company doesn't care about.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I take your point, but I have to imagine Tim Cook (or someone just under him) signed off on opening the bootloader. It's not like the executive team doesn't know about it. Allowing an engineer to answer questions for half an hour a week would be practically a rounding error in terms of resources, and certainly less of a commitment than rewriting iBoot policy, which they already did.
- bombcar 4y ago
  We're not really privy to how it got through (I could imagine some engineer/manager somewhere arguing that allowing it open would change some obscure tax/import filing somewhere).
- kaba0 4y ago
  I’m fairly sure that it is not as easy from a legal standpoint. Apple does manufacture some of their own components, but they still have plenty of third-party ones, where the usual licensing applies - so the same reason why it’s hard to run third-party OS on android phones.

titzer 4y ago

They certainly have a penchant for randomly crapping on people that don't do things the Officially Supported Way(TM). For example, one rev of MacOS changed the ABI for the gettimeofday() kernel system call. That broke Golang (and Virgil). Apple didn't care. They want you go through libc for some reason. Uh, no, don't break userspace.

0x0 4y ago
Microsoft also changes the kernel syscalls between releases. It's not unusual for operating systems to specify ABI at the libc level, in fact I believe Linux is the odd one out to specify ABI at the syscall level. https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/ https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/
- titzer 4y ago
  I know. Solaris has/had a stable ABI.
KerrAvon 4y ago
Apple has been crystal clear since 1999 that syscalls are not ABI on Darwin. Linus chose to draw that line differently, which is fine; Linux is a different environment.