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Apple's entire business model heavily depends on vertical integration. They use their software to attract customers to their hardware, and viceversa. Users runn
by imiric 4y ago
Apple's entire business model heavily depends on vertical integration. They use their software to attract customers to their hardware, and viceversa. Users running alternative OSs on their hardware doesn't tie them into their software ecosystem.
That, and they don't give a crap about the open source community, unless it directly benefits them. They have zero incentive to help a group of hackers run Linux on their hardware that will only benefit a niche of a niche of users. Allocating any of their engineers' time to this project would ultimately result in a negative ROI.
TBH I'm surprised Asahi Linux hasn't received a C&D notice yet. Apple hasn't been this tolerant of hackintosh projects before, so at least they're turning a blind eye to this.
Why anyone would want to spend their free time working in such a hostile environment is beyond me, but hats off to the Asahi team for the dedication. The patience and talent required must be extraordinary.
- minusf 4y agoi'm not saying this can't be true, but why leave the boot loader open then?
- colonwqbang 4y agoThis is exactly the opposite of hackintosh. A hackintosh is "pirated" Apple software running on non-Apple hardware. These are people who have bought genuine Apple hardware - putting money in Apple's pocket. Then they want to write some custom software for their computer. I don't see how this threatens Apple in any way. The intersection between general Apple users and those who want to run "a remix of Arch Linux ARM" on their $1000 hardware has to be pretty small anyway. Actually it could open up a new market for Apple. I for one am quite impressed by Apple hardware, but have minimal interest in running their software. If Asahi becomes stable enough, I would seriously consider buying Apple. Your second point is a good one, however.
- imiric 4y agoTrue, doing this doesn't threaten them, and it could result in a negligible amount of devices sold for this purpose, but I wouldn't be surprised if they saw this as equivalent to jailbreaking, and thus as some kind of breach of the ToS you implicitly agree on purchase. Though Apple hasn't historically prosecuted individuals for such things, so this likely won't happen. But it's even less likely they'll officially support, advertise, or even recognize this project in any way.
- Wowfunhappy 4y agoIt would be the equivalent of Jailbreaking if Apple explicitly built checkm8 into the iPhone.
- nicoburns 4y ago> I wouldn't be surprised if they saw this as equivalent to jailbreaking The difference is that jailbreaking compromises the security of iOS. Whereas some clever apple engineer has setup the M1 MacBooks such that each OS is completely isolated from each other (enforced by dis encryption and the Secure Enclave). The only thing a rogue linux install could do is delete macOS entirely. But there would be little incentive to do so. Installing malware or stealing data is completely blocked.