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When I think about it, I don't understand why Apple wouldn't want to help this effort and just provide all the documentation. All the classic reasons ("competi
by jwr 6mo ago
When I think about it, I don't understand why Apple wouldn't want to help this effort and just provide all the documentation.
All the classic reasons ("competitive advantage", "secrets", etc) do not hold water in this day and age.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- u_fucking_dork 6mo agoThe cynical take is that they make a shit ton of money from services and Linux running on a MacBook won’t help them do that.
- c7b 6mo agoThey do also make a lot of money selling hardware, and as things stand today that business happens to make them look like the first tech giant to actually profit from the AI boom (because the hardware they've been developing internally for years happens to be among the best consumer-grade options for self-hosting LLMs). Making their hardware more attractive to tinkerers could be a winning move right now.
- gschier 6mo agoLinux users don't pay for anything anyway
- deaddodo 6mo agoThey pay for the hardware that they run Linux on. Apple's hardware division is very profitable without the "value" adds they run through their ecosystem, and those people never would have bought into the ecosystem whether they used MacOS or not.
- omnimus 6mo agoThis, but also you would be allowing people to learn Linux. Developer with a Mac has to be one of the most common linux defectors. I suspect most people don't realize how doable and comfortable the switch can be.
- kavok 6mo agoIt’s been my experience that developers running Mac already know how to use Linux and actively choose to use Mac. Unless the company is forcing it at least.
- chocochunks 6mo agoYeah, and having the only supported OS be MacOS means they can entice people to upgrade when they want. No continuing on with 8+ year old hardware and a lightweight Linux distro even if it's fine for the intended use case.
- deaddodo 6mo agoThe vast majority of people that buy Macs for the ecosystem aren't going to switch to Linux. That market will remain untouched. Outside of a few gamers who might want to put up with the x86-to-ARM translation layer and (for most A to AAA games) Proton to run some non-Mac games. And even they'll probably still dual-boot. There's a portion of another market: people who want to run Linux and want a powerful laptop who buy x86 Laptops right now. Apple could expend very little relative effort while offering no official support by helping Asahi get that to a first class platform. They won't capture them in the ecosystem (and they never would have) but will still benefit from hardware sales to them. Obviously, if they sold their hardware at a loss and subsidized that with ecosystem capture that would be a non-starter. But from everything we know, the hardware itself is very profitable.
- carlosjobim 6mo agoWhat's cynical about it? Surely you understand what the purpose of a for-profit company is.
- basisword 6mo agoI imagine the real reason is that if they change things they now have an obligation to promptly share technical docs and if they're slow people will whine and bitch online about them. Not worth it. They have zero to gain (and I say this as someone who would love to dual boot Linux on my M4).
- confiq 6mo agoso they don't care about users, they care about themself?
- afavour 6mo agoI think a more accurate statement is that they don’t want to take on the outsized burden relative to the number of users it would actually affect. I’d love to dual boot Linux too but I’m under no delusions about being a very small segment of the Mac population.
- basisword 6mo agoApple's whole thing is hardware + software working together. Endless other options available to Linux users. They'd also need to be prepared for people bringing laptops to stores with hardware problems that aren't running macOS. Again, more burden for Apple for no gain other than winning over a couple of dozen users.
- foltik 6mo agoDo you seriously think someone who installed Asahi is gonna walk into a genius bar and ask for help with it? And often enough that it becomes a burden?? And according to their stats page that sibling linked it’s more like a few tens of thousands of users.
- mrj 6mo agoPlenty are whining now and that doesn't seem to bother them. I mean, this is one of the largest companies in the world. This is the company that once told people they were holding the phone wrong. I can't see them being particularly more bothered by people complaining in a slightly different way.
- ansgri 6mo agoOne of the reasons I can see is it’s much easier to say “we don’t play this game” than get a lot of negative press for selective openness and breaking compatibility of non-public interfaces. Maybe it’s even more important internally, as it enables new kind of internal discussions distracting from priority work.
- kevin_thibedeau 6mo agoThey are operating under a patchwork of NDAs. It would take some effort to determine what they can disclose.
- mmcnl 6mo agoI was trying to come up with a response but you're right. It would be easy for Apple and Apple would get so much goodwill from the community in return.
- gjsman-1000 6mo agoThey get more public goodwill from a single ad. The chronically online Linux-using engineer community is too small to matter.
- huflungdung 6mo ago[dead]
- bjelkeman-again 6mo agoDevelopers build many of the applications that make the platform desirable. Steve Ballmer at least seem to get that part. ;)
- internet2000 6mo agoThe developers for their platforms. Which, crucially, Linux developers are not.
- walterbell 6mo agoApple Macbooks support virtualization of Linux on MacOS.
- bigyabai 6mo agoThat's a low bar. Microsoft does too, with a much better hypervisor.
- walterbell 6mo agoYes, Linux developers are officially supported by both Apple and Microsoft, with Microsoft developers being a major contributor to upstream Linux and WSL2 having grown into a capable Linux development environment.
- gjsman-1000 6mo ago> I don't understand We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand. The list here though is long: priorities, accuracy concerns, blurring the line on official support, IP restrictions with third parties (even Apple uses plenty of licensed cores), etc.
- sys_64738 6mo agoI don't see it that way. It's just the GP poster saying that they don't get it. Usually that means the GP poster isn't experienced enough to understand the rationality. So I generally assume the GP poster is simply naive.
- nothrabannosir 6mo ago> > I don't understand > We really need to retire this phrase, it’s become a humblebrag way of calling the other party delusional without even trying to understand. My dear friend I thought I was alone on this hill. It brings a tear to my eye, to learn I will not die alone.
- aurareturn 6mo agoLittle to no monetary benefit, hardware changes now need to be documented for Linux, loudest and most critical users but smallest volume.
- joelthelion 6mo agoAnd risk of loss of control on the software ecosystem.
- freedomben 6mo agoThis is the big one IMHO. Apple is all about control of the stack, top to bottom. Any sort of "help" with linux on macos would be threatening to that control. Apple "helped" even more than I would have expected by not locking alt OSes out of the bootloader. Probably for less than altruistic reasons, but they did do it.
- Barbing 6mo agoloss of control, fewer services sales w/o their built-in upsells etc… tragedies Go team Asahi!
- mhh__ 6mo agoI don't know if that's true. Linux users are curious and will try more stuff but people mistake that they file bug reports (and usually detailed ones...) with complaining more. Apple's MO is that it's their baby. End of. They don't do open. Their compiler is closed source, and so on.
- cromka 6mo ago> Little to no monetary benefit A 1-3% of the market out of the 5% that Linux already is, is little to no monetary benefit?
- aurareturn 6mo agoApple has many easier ways to win 1-3% of 5%.
- internet2000 6mo ago> Focus is about saying no to 100 good ideas so you can pursue one great idea. Important context to understand why.
- robmccoll 6mo agoIf they think macOS is one great idea, that's a terrible misjudgment.
- u_fucking_dork 6mo agoAnd yet it’s incredibly popular and successful. Windows is also ass, and the year of the Linux desktop is perpetually a few years away.
- robmccoll 6mo agoBeing the least bad doesn't make something good. macOS is the least bad choice for the majority of people that just want a machine to mostly browse the Internet, look at their photos, do some light productivity work, and participate in their ecosystem. It also arguably hosts has the best software options for creative work (although that's reaping the fruits of seeds planted long ago - not sure there's much about macOS that makes it inherently better for those tasks these days). For development, its advantage is the hardware it's running on. To achieve any level of customization or to define my own workflow that isn't what Apple wants me to do or to work across multiple systems, I have to fight macOS rather than work with it. Linux on the other hand does what I tell it to do.
- u_fucking_dork 6mo agoLinux as a desktop OS for the vast overwhelming majority of people is a far inferior option. It just is, and always has been. Even for developers, MacOS doesn't prevent you from getting your job done and getting paid, while using arguably the best laptop hardware. Shit just works and stays out of your way. If all MacOS has going for it is better hardware, someone would have stepped up and shipped a better linux laptop ages ago. God knows I'm not going back to a flimsy creaking chassis, shit screen, and horrible battery life just so my Docker container doesn't have to run in a VM.
- saadn92 6mo agoThe real answer is probably simpler than anyone here is making it. Apple hardware margins are healthy enough that selling macbooks to linux users is pure profit, so no services lock-in needed. However, the moment they officially acknowledge Linux support, then it becomes a support surface. Every kernel panic becomes a genius bar visit. Every driver bug becomes a tweet at @AppleSupport. It's the value of plausible deniability. The Asahi team being unofficial is actually the best possible outcome for Apple in that they get hardware sales to Linux enthusiasts without any support burden.
- mrj 6mo agoThey don't have to support it, just document the system or release their own kernel code. They don't even have to mention Linux.
- internet2000 6mo agoThat’s called support. We count that as support.
- cromka 6mo agoJesus, no, that's not called support.
- wtallis 6mo agoAs used by commercial hardware and software vendors, "support" can mean anything from "we'll come fix it for you when it breaks, or your money back" to merely "theoretically, it should work, and we won't get in the way of you trying". Likewise, "unsupported" can mean anything from "don't complain to us if it doesn't work" to "we're going to spend significant engineering effort to prevent it from working". A stance of "here's some hardware documentation, implement the drivers yourself" definitely falls within that spectrum of "support", and is the kind of "support" for Linux that some hardware vendors have in the past been lauded for, eg. when AMD started documenting their GPUs. That level of "support" from Apple for running Linux bare-metal on Apple Silicon would be an improvement from the status quo, and in practice would probably be sufficient to get good drivers written and upstreamed in short order, given how much interest there is in running Linux on these devices.
- gorgoiler 6mo agoIt feels very close to “right to repair”. The coffee grinder you bought came as a single package but it has burrs, gears, machine screws, a motor, etc. If one of those components fails, we should be able to replace it ourselves and as such they should be documented. The laptop has various pieces of hardware in it and corresponding drivers in macOS to make them tick. Did we buy the hardware and the drivers as an inseparable package, or should we be provided with the manual to make one component work when the other breaks, be that either third party trackpads or third party (Linux) drivers. Apple might argue that drivers, unlike gears or motors, will never wear down and fail. They won’t need repairing so you don’t get to know how they work. Does right to repair only apply to products that could ever need repairing? Does it also extend to knowing how your purchased product is built so that you could repair it? Maybe we’ll see a test case some day when a cosmic ray blows out /System/Trackpad.kext and a litigant applies to a court for the documentation to repair their laptop — to write their own driver! (Or vice versa: a manufacturer of coffee grinders arguing in court that they are exempt from right-to-repair because they repair their machines for free at their Genius Espresso Bar.)
- sounds 6mo agoThis is an interesting thought exercise. I immediately thought of the counter argument that Apple's driver quality is worse, especially for laptops nearing end of life (for the sake of argument assume this were true). Could I then submit a warranty claim and demand Apple replace my aging laptop with their latest model?
- nxpnsv 6mo agoHmmm, both my grinder and espresso machine are quite reparable with parts you can order from the manufacturer. Very much unlike my iphone…
- apatheticonion 6mo agoI think there is a strong case that "the right to repair" includes software. If that doesn't mean drivers must be open source, it should at least mean hardware is documented such that a driver can be written from it. But the US still doesn't have the right to repair hardware, haha. I hope the EU is listening. They won't get far with their sovereign software push if hardware cannot be used. Even on the Android side, you can't write an alternative to Android because all of the hardware has locked bootloaders and hidden drivers. Good luck reverse engineering the hardware/drivers on a Samsung Galaxy - let alone an iPhone or MacBook.
- benoau 6mo agoI think the biggest value Apple gets from Asahi is they can point EU regulators at it as proof the Mac isn't a closed platform that should be a designated DMA gatekeeper. They don't need Asahi to be complete, they just need it to exist.