7 ms·

Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS

by nextos 2y ago

Linux power management is pretty good. The problem is that defaults favor desktop and server performance. On a MacBook Air 11, my custom Linux setup and Mac OS had the same battery autonomy, despite Safari being much more energy efficient. The real problem is that, just like the grandparent post pointed out, Apple's software quality has been declining. The Tiger to Snow Leopard epoch was incredible. Apps were simple, skeumorphic, and robust. Right now, the whole system feels a lot less coherent and robustness has declined. IMHO, there are not so many extra features worth adding. They should focus on making all software robust and secure. Robustness should come from better languages that are safe by construction. Apple can afford to invest on this due to their vertical integration.

MichaelZuo 2y ago
What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Because right now it’s clearly so far down, beneath dozens of other priorities, that expecting it to just happen one day seems futile.
- datadrivenangel 2y ago
  It's all their OS software. The Messages app on 18.3 will just... not open the menu to send a photo attachment about ~10% of the time now...
  - tracerbulletx 2y ago
    Ya and it’s something in maybe the top 3 of most used user actions. Really indefensible
  - what 2y ago
    I’m pretty sure the touch target only covers the text label. Tap anywhere other than the text labels and it does nothing but close the menu. Really bizarre.
- nextos 2y ago
  IMHO, Mac OS X contributed decisively towards making Apple cool, which was followed by lots of boutique apps and the success of iOS. Loosing that critical mass of developers, even if it's a tiny userbase, would worry me if I was a top leader of Apple.
  - yyyk 2y ago
    Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.
    - yunwal 2y ago
      And that’s a huge part of the reason why the Vision Pro will never take off.
      - greener_grass 2y ago
        I disagree - if the Vision Pro had some strong use-cases then developers would hold their nose and make apps for it. The platforms that get apps are the ones where businesses see value in delivering for them. Of course businesses prefer it when making apps is easier (read: cheaper) but this is not a primary driver.
        ben_w 2y ago
        I think the potential high-return use-cases for VR and AR are (1) games, (2) telepresence robot control, (3) smart assistants that label (a) people and (b) stuff in front of you. Unfortunately: 1) AVP is about 10x too pricy for games. 2) It's not clear if it can beat even the cheapest headsets for anything important for telepresence (higher resolution isn't always important, but can be sometimes). Irregardless, you need the associated telepresence robot, and despite the obvious name, the closest Apple gets to iRobot is if someone bought a vaccum cleaner because Apple doesn't even have the trademark. 3) (a) is creepy, and modern AI assistants are the SOTA for (b) and yet still only "neat" rather than actually achieving the AR vision since at least Microsoft's Hololens, and because AI assistants are free apps on your phone, they can't justify a €4k headset — someone would need a fantastic proprieraty AI breakthrough to justify it.
- syeare 2y ago
  The actual argument would be people voting with their wallets and moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but this something impossible at least in the USA due to these bullshit "blue bubbles"
  - briandear 2y ago
    How do blue bubbles make any difference?
    - api 2y ago
      For most of the people here they don't. In popular culture and especially among teens and non-technical twenty-somethings there's this absurd "eww green text!" thing. A blue bubble is a status symbol for some reason, even though there's lots of Android phones that cost as much as iPhones.
  - whstl 2y ago
    At this point this is not an argument anymore, it’s just a thought terminating cliche. Expecting users to change their daily habits in order to marginally improve the operating system of a trillion dollar company feels naive and a bit disrespectful to people who actually use these machines for work. Even developers… the vast majority of developers ignored Apple for decades (and Apple was also hostile) and it managed to grow despite that. Might as well ask people to contribute to Gnome or whatever so in the future everyone can go somewhere better. Feels way more feasible.
    - rickdeckard 2y ago
      But the opposite is assuming that Apple has a "responsibility" towards its existing users and has to acknowledge their expectations from them. A sentiment which famously led Steve Jobs to respond that he doesn't understand this, because "people pay us to make that decision for them" and "If people like our products they will buy them; if they don't, they won't" [0] So according to Steve Jobs himself, the only Apple-acknowledged way to disagree with Apple is to NOT buy their products, and by extend into the services-world of today it means STOP USING their products. Now Steve Jobs doesn't officially run this company anymore, but I don't see any indication that this philosophy has changed in any way. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s
- whstl 2y ago
  Apple is addicted to growth. It is as big as it should be, but it acts like an early stage startup always trying to build some new flashy thing to attract the next customer.
  - bolognafairy 2y ago
    Okay, if you are so confident in your convictions, convince enough Apple shareholders of this.
    - whstl 2y ago
      Why should I? That's not my job.
      - tesch1 2y ago
        b- was probably hinting that the confidence of your conviction may be unsupportable?
        whstl 2y ago
        It's also not my job to prove my conviction to aggressive internet people. Regardless: that kind of message doesn't feel like HN-worthy productive discussion.
  - andrepd 2y ago
    It's not Apple, it's capitalism. "Unlimited growth is the ideology of the cancer cell", yet for Apple (or any corporation), it's not good enough to sell 100,000,000 phones. Next year you must sell 105,000,000. And the year after 112,000,000 (not even 110 or your growth is stagnating). So you get rid of removable batteries so customers have to toss their phones away more often, you gimp other feature, you spend more money on advertising than you did actually developing the product (read this bit several times until it sinks in how crazy it is, yet that's how we are with every major phone, every major movie, etc), and so on.
    - 2y ago
- troupo 2y ago
  > What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? That their own products depend on it because they developer their products in Mac. And that the professional people they pretend they cater to depend on Macs, and steadily move away.
- latexr 2y ago
  > What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Unrelenting bad press. People talking about nothing else but the decline of their software quality. We can already see that with the recent debacle which caused executive shuffling at the top of the company.
  - rollcat 2y ago
    That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for the latest generation of their hardware. "Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.
    - whompyjaw 2y ago
      What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.
      - rollcat 2y ago
        Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out. It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless. TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
        ethbr1 2y ago
        The decreasing effectiveness of machine-local search is just developers fucking up integrations and indexing. This is a solved problem since ~1970 -- they're just not spending enough time on it.
- butlike 2y ago
  Probably nothing as it seems the major push is to get iPad OS and macOS in parity (and I assume to retire macOS completely)
- jajuuka 2y ago
  I think the best argument is to remind Apple that they aren't selling the OS anymore, so they don't need a new version every year. And that macOS features is not what is pushing Mac sales. People aren't buying the M series machines because of the new macOS version, they are buying it because of the hardware. The M series chips are impressive and provide some great benefits that you can't get elsewhere. And that hardware needs to be coupled with solid software to hook and keep people on this computer. So they can take more time to create more compelling upgrades and sand off more edges. I think they need to desync all their OS's and focus on providing better releases. There really is no benefit to spending the day updating your Mac, phone, tablet, appletv, and HomePod. Especially when there are no good reasons to update. I feel like Apple became far to addicting to habit and routine that it's become more important to keep that than deliver product. Apple Intelligence is a good example of that.
travisgriggs 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...
- api 2y ago
  The iron law of bureaucracy happens because humans have a finite amount of time to spend doing things. Those dedicated to bureaucratic politics spend their time doing that, so they excel at that, while those dedicated to doing the work have no time for bureaucratic politics. It's related to why companies with great marketing and fund raising but mediocre or off-the-shelf technology often win over companies with deeper and better tech that's really innovative. Innovation and polishing takes work that subtracts from the time available for fund raising and marketing.
  - gzer0 2y ago
    Great insight—thanks for sharing. It strikes me that bureaucracy is inherently self-perpetuating- once established, it rewards compliance over creativity, steadily shifting the culture until innovation becomes the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps the real challenge isn't balancing innovation and marketing—it's creating a culture that genuinely rewards bold ideas and meaningful risk-taking.
    - hiatus 2y ago
      It seems most organizations naturally become more risk-averse as they age and grow since the business becomes more well-defined over time and there is more to lose from risky ventures. The culture has to reward meaningful risk-taking even when that risk-taking results in a loss, which can cause issues when people see the guy who lost a bunch of money getting a bonus for trying (not to mention the perverse incentives it may create).
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      > [Bureaucracy] rewards compliance over creativity Imho, this is the wrong takeaway from parent's point. Bureaucracy rewards many things that are actual work and take time. (Networking, politicking, min/max'ing OKRs) Creativity and innovation are rarely part of the list, because by definition they're less tangible and riskier. A couple effective methods I've seen to fight the overall trend are (a) instill a culture where people succeed but processes fail (if a risky bet fails then the process goes under the spotlight, not the person) and (b) tie rewards to results that are less min/maxable (10x vs +5%).
NavinF 2y ago
> Linux power management is pretty good > defaults favor desktop and server performance Desktops are in S3 half the day consuming ~0 power. During use, electricity costs are so much lower than hardware costs that approximately nobody cares about or even measures the former. Servers have background tasks running at idle priority all day so the power consumption is effectively constant. Laptop and phone are the only platforms where the concept of "Linux power management" makes any sense.
- rollcat 2y ago
  My Mac mini (M1) sips ~6W idle and is completely inaudible. It acts as a desktop whenever I need it to, and as a server 24/7. I only power up my NAS (WoL) for daily backups. The rest of the homelab is for fun and experiments, but mostly gone. "Idle" x86-64 SOHO servers still eat ~30W with carefully selected parts and when correctly tuned, >60W if you just put together random junk. "Cloud" works because of economies of scale. If there's a future where people own their stuff, minimising power draw is a key step.
  - PhilipRoman 2y ago
    The low power draw is definitely not exclusive to Macs, a similar x86 mini PC with Linux will also draw around 5W idle.
    - rollcat 2y ago
      Does the mini PC go from zero to eleven though? Can I play BG3, Factorio, or Minecraft on the same hardware? Can I saturate a TB3 port? Transcode video? Run an LLM or text2img? Any of that while remaining responsive, having a video call? If I already need a powerful machine for a desktop, why would I need a second one just so it can stay up 24/7 to run Miniflux or Syncthing? Less is more.
      - hedora 2y ago
        Yes; for about $1000. Eg: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-ser9-ai-9-hx-370 https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-ser9-ai-9-hx-370 I have the ser-8 model, and can confirm everything works under Linux. This one has an 80 TOPS AI thing, since you asked about llms.
franzkappa 2y ago
> Robustness should come from better languages that are safe by construction. Nahh, robustness comes from the time you can spend refining the product not from some magic property of a language. That can help but just a bit. There was no Swift in Snow Leopard. Nor there is not much Rust in Linux (often none) and even less (none) in one of the most stable OS available, FreeBSD. They should just release a new version when the product is ready and not when the marketing says to release it.
- andrekandre 2y ago
  > They should just release a new version when the product is ready and not when the marketing says to release it. bingo, the yearly wwdc-turned-marketing-extravaganza cycle has kind of ruined for apple i think

by nextos 2y ago

MichaelZuo 2y ago

What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Because right now it’s clearly so far down, beneath dozens of other priorities, that expecting it to just happen one day seems futile.

datadrivenangel 2y ago
It's all their OS software. The Messages app on 18.3 will just... not open the menu to send a photo attachment about ~10% of the time now...
- tracerbulletx 2y ago
  Ya and it’s something in maybe the top 3 of most used user actions. Really indefensible
- what 2y ago
  I’m pretty sure the touch target only covers the text label. Tap anywhere other than the text labels and it does nothing but close the menu. Really bizarre.
nextos 2y ago
IMHO, Mac OS X contributed decisively towards making Apple cool, which was followed by lots of boutique apps and the success of iOS. Loosing that critical mass of developers, even if it's a tiny userbase, would worry me if I was a top leader of Apple.
- yyyk 2y ago
  Apple has had a contemptuous attitude towards developers since.. the App Store? when the iPhone was out? The last two decades? They don't seem to care about this.
  - yunwal 2y ago
    And that’s a huge part of the reason why the Vision Pro will never take off.
    - greener_grass 2y ago
      I disagree - if the Vision Pro had some strong use-cases then developers would hold their nose and make apps for it. The platforms that get apps are the ones where businesses see value in delivering for them. Of course businesses prefer it when making apps is easier (read: cheaper) but this is not a primary driver.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        I think the potential high-return use-cases for VR and AR are (1) games, (2) telepresence robot control, (3) smart assistants that label (a) people and (b) stuff in front of you. Unfortunately: 1) AVP is about 10x too pricy for games. 2) It's not clear if it can beat even the cheapest headsets for anything important for telepresence (higher resolution isn't always important, but can be sometimes). Irregardless, you need the associated telepresence robot, and despite the obvious name, the closest Apple gets to iRobot is if someone bought a vaccum cleaner because Apple doesn't even have the trademark. 3) (a) is creepy, and modern AI assistants are the SOTA for (b) and yet still only "neat" rather than actually achieving the AR vision since at least Microsoft's Hololens, and because AI assistants are free apps on your phone, they can't justify a €4k headset — someone would need a fantastic proprieraty AI breakthrough to justify it.
syeare 2y ago
The actual argument would be people voting with their wallets and moving away from the Apple ecosystem, but this something impossible at least in the USA due to these bullshit "blue bubbles"
- briandear 2y ago
  How do blue bubbles make any difference?
  - api 2y ago
    For most of the people here they don't. In popular culture and especially among teens and non-technical twenty-somethings there's this absurd "eww green text!" thing. A blue bubble is a status symbol for some reason, even though there's lots of Android phones that cost as much as iPhones.
- whstl 2y ago
  At this point this is not an argument anymore, it’s just a thought terminating cliche. Expecting users to change their daily habits in order to marginally improve the operating system of a trillion dollar company feels naive and a bit disrespectful to people who actually use these machines for work. Even developers… the vast majority of developers ignored Apple for decades (and Apple was also hostile) and it managed to grow despite that. Might as well ask people to contribute to Gnome or whatever so in the future everyone can go somewhere better. Feels way more feasible.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    But the opposite is assuming that Apple has a "responsibility" towards its existing users and has to acknowledge their expectations from them. A sentiment which famously led Steve Jobs to respond that he doesn't understand this, because "people pay us to make that decision for them" and "If people like our products they will buy them; if they don't, they won't" [0] So according to Steve Jobs himself, the only Apple-acknowledged way to disagree with Apple is to NOT buy their products, and by extend into the services-world of today it means STOP USING their products. Now Steve Jobs doesn't officially run this company anymore, but I don't see any indication that this philosophy has changed in any way. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=772s
whstl 2y ago
Apple is addicted to growth. It is as big as it should be, but it acts like an early stage startup always trying to build some new flashy thing to attract the next customer.
- bolognafairy 2y ago
  Okay, if you are so confident in your convictions, convince enough Apple shareholders of this.
  - whstl 2y ago
    Why should I? That's not my job.
    - tesch1 2y ago
      b- was probably hinting that the confidence of your conviction may be unsupportable?
      - whstl 2y ago
        It's also not my job to prove my conviction to aggressive internet people. Regardless: that kind of message doesn't feel like HN-worthy productive discussion.
- andrepd 2y ago
  It's not Apple, it's capitalism. "Unlimited growth is the ideology of the cancer cell", yet for Apple (or any corporation), it's not good enough to sell 100,000,000 phones. Next year you must sell 105,000,000. And the year after 112,000,000 (not even 110 or your growth is stagnating). So you get rid of removable batteries so customers have to toss their phones away more often, you gimp other feature, you spend more money on advertising than you did actually developing the product (read this bit several times until it sinks in how crazy it is, yet that's how we are with every major phone, every major movie, etc), and so on.
  - 2y ago
troupo 2y ago
> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? That their own products depend on it because they developer their products in Mac. And that the professional people they pretend they cater to depend on Macs, and steadily move away.
latexr 2y ago
> What’s the actual argument that will credibly convince the top leaders of Apple, to push fixing MacOS up the list of priorities? Unrelenting bad press. People talking about nothing else but the decline of their software quality. We can already see that with the recent debacle which caused executive shuffling at the top of the company.
- rollcat 2y ago
  That shuffling was caused by Apple utterly failing to deliver a major feature, that was a key selling point for the latest generation of their hardware. "Bad press" for their declining software quality is like people complaining there's no iPhone mini/SE anymore. Apple just doesn't give a fuck. They've joined the rest of the flock at chasing fads and quarterly bottom lines.
  - whompyjaw 2y ago
    What was the major feature? The complete uselessness of “AI” on macOS? I updated and enabled all the AI features and I would ask Siri from my M1 and it failed every time. Would just continuously try with its annoying ping sound and never work. Blew my mind that they let this out.
    - rollcat 2y ago
      Yeah I was talking about the "AI". It's such an utter failure that even Gruber has been calling it out. It was already the same story with AirPower (the wireless charging mat). They've pre-announced it, even tried to upsell it by advertising it on the AirPods packaging. It just turned out physics is ruthless. TBH I've been increasingly sceptical about voice assistants in the "pre-AI" era. I sold my HomePods and unsubscribed from Apple Music because Siri couldn't even find things in my library.
      - ethbr1 2y ago
        The decreasing effectiveness of machine-local search is just developers fucking up integrations and indexing. This is a solved problem since ~1970 -- they're just not spending enough time on it.
butlike 2y ago
Probably nothing as it seems the major push is to get iPad OS and macOS in parity (and I assume to retire macOS completely)
jajuuka 2y ago
I think the best argument is to remind Apple that they aren't selling the OS anymore, so they don't need a new version every year. And that macOS features is not what is pushing Mac sales. People aren't buying the M series machines because of the new macOS version, they are buying it because of the hardware. The M series chips are impressive and provide some great benefits that you can't get elsewhere. And that hardware needs to be coupled with solid software to hook and keep people on this computer. So they can take more time to create more compelling upgrades and sand off more edges. I think they need to desync all their OS's and focus on providing better releases. There really is no benefit to spending the day updating your Mac, phone, tablet, appletv, and HomePod. Especially when there are no good reasons to update. I feel like Apple became far to addicting to habit and routine that it's become more important to keep that than deliver product. Apple Intelligence is a good example of that.

travisgriggs 2y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_iron_law_of_bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Pournelle's_ir...

api 2y ago
The iron law of bureaucracy happens because humans have a finite amount of time to spend doing things. Those dedicated to bureaucratic politics spend their time doing that, so they excel at that, while those dedicated to doing the work have no time for bureaucratic politics. It's related to why companies with great marketing and fund raising but mediocre or off-the-shelf technology often win over companies with deeper and better tech that's really innovative. Innovation and polishing takes work that subtracts from the time available for fund raising and marketing.
- gzer0 2y ago
  Great insight—thanks for sharing. It strikes me that bureaucracy is inherently self-perpetuating- once established, it rewards compliance over creativity, steadily shifting the culture until innovation becomes the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps the real challenge isn't balancing innovation and marketing—it's creating a culture that genuinely rewards bold ideas and meaningful risk-taking.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    It seems most organizations naturally become more risk-averse as they age and grow since the business becomes more well-defined over time and there is more to lose from risky ventures. The culture has to reward meaningful risk-taking even when that risk-taking results in a loss, which can cause issues when people see the guy who lost a bunch of money getting a bonus for trying (not to mention the perverse incentives it may create).
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    > [Bureaucracy] rewards compliance over creativity Imho, this is the wrong takeaway from parent's point. Bureaucracy rewards many things that are actual work and take time. (Networking, politicking, min/max'ing OKRs) Creativity and innovation are rarely part of the list, because by definition they're less tangible and riskier. A couple effective methods I've seen to fight the overall trend are (a) instill a culture where people succeed but processes fail (if a risky bet fails then the process goes under the spotlight, not the person) and (b) tie rewards to results that are less min/maxable (10x vs +5%).

NavinF 2y ago

> Linux power management is pretty good > defaults favor desktop and server performance Desktops are in S3 half the day consuming ~0 power. During use, electricity costs are so much lower than hardware costs that approximately nobody cares about or even measures the former. Servers have background tasks running at idle priority all day so the power consumption is effectively constant. Laptop and phone are the only platforms where the concept of "Linux power management" makes any sense.

rollcat 2y ago
My Mac mini (M1) sips ~6W idle and is completely inaudible. It acts as a desktop whenever I need it to, and as a server 24/7. I only power up my NAS (WoL) for daily backups. The rest of the homelab is for fun and experiments, but mostly gone. "Idle" x86-64 SOHO servers still eat ~30W with carefully selected parts and when correctly tuned, >60W if you just put together random junk. "Cloud" works because of economies of scale. If there's a future where people own their stuff, minimising power draw is a key step.
- PhilipRoman 2y ago
  The low power draw is definitely not exclusive to Macs, a similar x86 mini PC with Linux will also draw around 5W idle.
  - rollcat 2y ago
    Does the mini PC go from zero to eleven though? Can I play BG3, Factorio, or Minecraft on the same hardware? Can I saturate a TB3 port? Transcode video? Run an LLM or text2img? Any of that while remaining responsive, having a video call? If I already need a powerful machine for a desktop, why would I need a second one just so it can stay up 24/7 to run Miniflux or Syncthing? Less is more.
    - hedora 2y ago
      Yes; for about $1000. Eg: https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-ser9-ai-9-hx-370 https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-ser9-ai-9-hx-370 I have the ser-8 model, and can confirm everything works under Linux. This one has an 80 TOPS AI thing, since you asked about llms.

franzkappa 2y ago

> Robustness should come from better languages that are safe by construction. Nahh, robustness comes from the time you can spend refining the product not from some magic property of a language. That can help but just a bit. There was no Swift in Snow Leopard. Nor there is not much Rust in Linux (often none) and even less (none) in one of the most stable OS available, FreeBSD. They should just release a new version when the product is ready and not when the marketing says to release it.

andrekandre 2y ago
> They should just release a new version when the product is ready and not when the marketing says to release it. bingo, the yearly wwdc-turned-marketing-extravaganza cycle has kind of ruined for apple i think