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It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously fl

by sneak 4mo ago

It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.

figmert 4mo ago
Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store. Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.
- boxed 4mo ago
  The ad revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to the app store rent, which is a drop in the bucket compared to hardware sales.
  - eru 4mo ago
    Do you have any sources for hardware sales vs app store revenue?
    - MYEUHD 4mo ago
      https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment iPhone: 50.4% Mac: 8.1% iPad: 6.7% Wearables, home and accessories: 8.6% Services: 26.2% I assume that the majority of service revenue is App store revenue. Other services they provide are iCloud and Apple care
      - dbdr 4mo ago
        That's revenue though. Fixed costs for hardware is probably much higher. If we looked at profits, the percentages would probably look quite different.
      - jurip 4mo ago
        I believe Google's Safari payments are a significant chunk of services revenue too (around $20 billion a year.) Then there's Apple TV and Apple Music, which are not nothing.
    - Angostura 4mo ago
      Let’s not conflate total App Store revenue and Ad revenue.
      - eru 4mo ago
        Yes, but I was willing to grant (even if only for the sake of argument) that ad revenue is probably a lot smaller than the other two in the list.
- cromka 4mo ago
  > Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. And this is related to MacBooks how exactly?
  - drnick1 4mo ago
    Presumably, tightly controlling what software runs on their hardware (by not supporting alternatives like Asahi) enables Apple to surveil their users through the OS and associated services (app store, iCloud, email, location services, etc.)
- 4fterd4rk 4mo ago
  The activities you're proclaiming to be Apple's bread and butter in an effort to conflate them with Google and Meta are actually a rounding error. What is it about Apple that makes people have these crazy ideas?
toxik 4mo ago
Nobody gets promoted for building open-source software at corpos. It is allowed, at best, not condoned. So what manager is going to go for this? Let's dedicate our limited resources to gratuitous goodwill work. Carrer suicide, I expect. Unfortunately.
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- GTP 4mo ago
  How would you fit Red Hat in this picture? I think the situation could be different, if it is about improving some software the company is using for its business. Not that this happens often, but I think the possibility to persuade managment that improving a piece of software crucial for the company's business is there.
  - LtWorf 4mo ago
    You mean the company that rescinds your contract if you exercise the rights granted to you by GPL licenses? What about it?
    - GTP 4mo ago
      They still have people working on FOSS, right? I didn't know about what your saying,but if this is the problem, then what if I gave Canonical as an example?
      - LtWorf 4mo ago
        Isn't canonical the company replacing GNU coreutils with a broken and full of CVE replacement because it doesn't have a copyleft license?
jeroenhd 4mo ago
Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store. They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?
- Mashimo 4mo ago
  > Their big money maker is their app store That said, their AirPods division could be a Fortune 500 on its own.
- mft_ 4mo ago
  AFAIK Apple’s “services” revenue is a little over a quarter of their total; everything else is hardware, dominated by the iPhone. Mac hardware is <10% of total revenue. iPhones are largely locked to their App Store so no risk there. Macs (currently) aren’t locked to the App Store - and I’d guess that Mac App Store usage is middling as a result. Which is to say, I doubt that a marginal Mac App Store revenue hit from a small proportion of users switching to Linux over MacOS is the driver for not supporting Linux development. I’d guess it’s more about an inflexible company culture and maybe not wanting to extend their area of responsibility and risk.
  - jeroenhd 4mo ago
    Revenue wise, the services part is not that large. Profit-wise, though, I don't believe the same is true. Their 30% cut is barely costing them anything compared to manufacturing hardware and physical logistics. I don't think the Mac App Store is going to get to iPhone levels of lock-down soon, but Apple thinks in ecosystems, not just in laptops. If you have an iMac, you probably have an iPhone, and you're probably going to buy an iPad should you ever want a tablet. If they wanted, they could open source all of the drivers necessary to boot an OS as part of their Darwin core, but they choose not to. That actually breaks with their older, more open development style. I guess they just don't see the benefit of being open any longer.
torben-friis 4mo ago
Their amazing laptop hardware pushes you into their ecosystem. Once you're on macOS, might as well get iphone rather than Android and benefit from the synergy, same for airpods or the apple watch. The only reason I'd see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.
rvz 4mo ago
> It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. Why should they when they have macOS already? > Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate. How many people who buy Apple silicon laptops do it to run Linux on it? less than 10,000 or 20,000 people? You should not expect Apple to care about what Linux users want. The closest you are getting from them is being able to boot a custom OS or kernel. Everything else from the drivers to the secure enclave they do not care.
- drdexebtjl 4mo ago
  No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux. But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Macbook hardware completely outclasses even the high end options.
  - rvz 4mo ago
    > No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux. Almost no-one bought Intel Macs for dual-booting Linux either (Unless you are Linus Torvalds and a tiny amount of people who use Linux on Intel Macs). > But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them. The entire point of Intel Macs was for running Windows on a Mac which that cohort is just as tiny as the Linux on Intel Mac customers. Dual booting is generally reserved for those who are highly technical, so I would not expect Apple to care about either customer anyway. So that was tested already and Apple still did not care. So of course they also do not care about Linux users who have Apple Silicon Macs either.
    - drdexebtjl 4mo ago
      Windows on the Mac requires cooperation from Microsoft and Apple, and benefits Apple’s competition. It was always a strategy to get Windows users to switch sides, not to sell hardware. Linux on the Mac requires only Apple’s initiative, and does not benefit their competitors. > Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them. Why does the Linux laptop market care about running Windows? > Dual booting I’m not talking about dual booting at all. Before Apple Silicon, if you wanted to buy a laptop to run Linux, the Intel Macbooks have always been a top-tier recommendation. The market isn’t large, but it’s a soft power they’re giving up. Walk into a big tech’s office and you’ll no longer see only Macbooks, and it’s not because they have to run Windows.
mhh__ 4mo ago
I read somewhere that Apple even uses Linux kernels to bring up new hardware but I don't know if it's actually/still true.
GTP 4mo ago
My father purchased a new MacBook just in time to avoid the recent price increase. It wasn't because his old one didn't work anymore; it was because Apple wouldn't support it on more recent macOS versions, and some applications he runs daily (like Teams) don't work anymore on the latest supported macOS for that MacBook. Apple is an hardware company, and forcing you to upgrade your hardware gives them revenue. Admittedly, his MacBook lasted longer than many other laptops would have. But, if it wasn't for the outdated OS, he would have been happy to keep using it because the hardware was still fine for office use.
- armchairhacker 4mo ago
  FYI there’s software that can upgrade old Macs to officially unsupported OSs: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
  - GTP 4mo ago
    He found out about one of those, but wasn't comfortable using it anyway.
- carlosjobim 4mo ago
  But in this case it was Microsoft who forced him to upgrade, wasn't it?
  - GTP 4mo ago
    Depends on the point of view, as it is Apple not supporting that MacBook anymore, and Microsoft could have a point in not supporting macOS versions that Apple doesn't want to support anymore. You could even argue that he forced the update on himself, since the web version still worked. The point remains that somehow without upgrading the hardware some software he uses everyday doesn't work anymore.
    - carlosjobim 4mo ago
      I would put it squarely on Microsoft in this case. They decided to make their software not function anymore. Why not let older Teams clients still function and communicate with the newer? Apple still pushes updates and security updates to OS versions which are not the latest. So I don't see how they can be blamed much here.
VeejayRampay 4mo ago
see homebrew, they could have made this an official thing but no, they prefer to let people work do their work for them and sleep on their mattress of cash despicable business practices really
- SG- 4mo ago
  actually long ago before homebrew there was MacPorts which Apple actually was part of.
- brewmarche 4mo ago
  IIRC Apple actually helped with MacPorts in the beginning
  - VeejayRampay 4mo ago
    but have they integrated homebrew, have they made it a first class citizen, have they provided money or something? the answer is "maybe to some small extent, but not really"
    - brewmarche 4mo ago
      MacPorts is still around and is a perfectly viable package manager, I prefer it over homebrew
leenixx 4mo ago
Why do you think that Apple doesn’t have developers internally that develops Linux for their own chips? They obviously have a ton of people developing with linux and even asahi, else they wouldn’t been able to make adjustments in their uefi to shape the support of 3rd party OSes exactly how they wanted. As apple no longer develop their own servers (OS), they even run some internal ”production” system on Linux, on their own hardware.
carlosjobim 4mo ago
Are you really baffled as you say? Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups. Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value. And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.
Grombobulous 4mo ago
Food for thought: Apple’s services make more revenue than Macs and iPads combined, and they do so at a higher profit margin. There’s your answer. I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable. Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system. CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback. And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding. But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that. I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you. There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.
- spockz 4mo ago
  I checked a 16” framework last week comparing to the 24/48GiB MBP. The ssd is significantly faster, the RAM is almost twice as fast, the CPU has more cores. The only benefit is having a dedicated gpu. At more or less the same price. Admittedly, the screen ratio is better with the framework. But prefer the matte screen of the MacBook.
  - mmcnl 4mo ago
    The battery life stinks, the build quality is subpar and the fan runs all the time. If you don't care about anything that makes the MacBook Pro a premium device, then sure you can be overpriced consumer-grade slop that has a slight edge in specs (except CPU). But it's a miserable trade-off.
bri3d 4mo ago
It’s less a question of people and more one of "Why doesn't a hardware company want to give away their IP design documentation?"
WD-42 4mo ago
Or they could just make their schematics available and save 99% of the reverse engineering the Asahi team has to do. 1000s of hours of work for what is just sitting in a drawer in Cupertino. But they won’t.
- musicale 3mo ago
  The schematics tell you how things are wired together, which is maybe useful if you are building compatible hardware. The ASIC specifications tell you how to operate and program the chips, which is what device drivers need. Better for Linux would be for Apple to provide open source drivers. (Linux would also benefit if NVIDIA provided open source drivers, for example.)
troyvit 4mo ago
They've been like this long before they were a digital services company. 25 years ago Yellow Dog Linux (another RPM based distro) had the same challenges working with PowerPC. The scientific community was clamoring for an open platform to use their native Linux software with the PowerPC, YDL filled that niche, and Apple watched their struggles supporting Linux on their platform with detached amusement.
- markus_zhang 4mo ago
  Kinda think Asahi is not going to fair too much better in this fight. It’s an interesting exercise but most people won’t buy a Mac to use Linux. The only reason I’d buy an overpriced piece of hardware is because it can run Linux very well. But apparently people like me is negligible.
  - macintux 4mo ago
    I think it'll have more of an impact with used hardware buyers. I wouldn't buy an M5 for Linux, but repurposing a cheap M1 in a few years? Absolutely.
    - troyvit 4mo ago
      Yeah I think I agree. The big difference I see is in the chip. The PowerPC arguably had its benefits (vectorization) which made it super attractive for bioinformatics, etc., and a lot of that software was Linux-based. People could either buy a super-computer or a G4 (or a cluster of G4s) and get the work they needed done for a fraction of the cost. MacOS (and OSX) were behind on a lot of this stuff compared to Linux then. Today from what I see the M3-M5 chips are a big leap forward compared to their competitors, and it just happened to hit at the same time LLMs became popular. I imagine there are some similar, specialized needs with the M[1-5] chips that might benefit from Linux but with OSX's stronger BSD underpinnings it's a different world.
w10-1 4mo ago
Apple open-sourced their container tooling and they also support Linux in their Virtualization framework. Anyone can run any compatible Linux now in a VM, with bare-metal speed but limited to virtio devices. To me it's baffling that more people don't run Linux this way.
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  > To me it's baffling that more people don't run Linux this way. Why? People have been using Orbstack, Lima and Docker long before Apple shipped first-party container tooling. The virtualization support was never ever a problem. For actual dedicated server usage, macOS itself is the problem. You want to be running Proxmox on baremetal, nobody wants to administer headless macOS machines by-hand.
- pacifika 3mo ago
  Mainly I’m concerned about shortcut conflicts such as command q
izacus 4mo ago
THey do pay a few thousand FTEs - the OS they built for the hardware is named macOS and fits their specifications.

by sneak 4mo ago

figmert 4mo ago

Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store. Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.

boxed 4mo ago
The ad revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to the app store rent, which is a drop in the bucket compared to hardware sales.
- eru 4mo ago
  Do you have any sources for hardware sales vs app store revenue?
  - MYEUHD 4mo ago
    https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment iPhone: 50.4% Mac: 8.1% iPad: 6.7% Wearables, home and accessories: 8.6% Services: 26.2% I assume that the majority of service revenue is App store revenue. Other services they provide are iCloud and Apple care
    - dbdr 4mo ago
      That's revenue though. Fixed costs for hardware is probably much higher. If we looked at profits, the percentages would probably look quite different.
    - jurip 4mo ago
      I believe Google's Safari payments are a significant chunk of services revenue too (around $20 billion a year.) Then there's Apple TV and Apple Music, which are not nothing.
  - Angostura 4mo ago
    Let’s not conflate total App Store revenue and Ad revenue.
    - eru 4mo ago
      Yes, but I was willing to grant (even if only for the sake of argument) that ad revenue is probably a lot smaller than the other two in the list.
cromka 4mo ago
> Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. And this is related to MacBooks how exactly?
- drnick1 4mo ago
  Presumably, tightly controlling what software runs on their hardware (by not supporting alternatives like Asahi) enables Apple to surveil their users through the OS and associated services (app store, iCloud, email, location services, etc.)
4fterd4rk 4mo ago
The activities you're proclaiming to be Apple's bread and butter in an effort to conflate them with Google and Meta are actually a rounding error. What is it about Apple that makes people have these crazy ideas?

toxik 4mo ago

Nobody gets promoted for building open-source software at corpos. It is allowed, at best, not condoned. So what manager is going to go for this? Let's dedicate our limited resources to gratuitous goodwill work. Carrer suicide, I expect. Unfortunately.

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
GTP 4mo ago
How would you fit Red Hat in this picture? I think the situation could be different, if it is about improving some software the company is using for its business. Not that this happens often, but I think the possibility to persuade managment that improving a piece of software crucial for the company's business is there.
- LtWorf 4mo ago
  You mean the company that rescinds your contract if you exercise the rights granted to you by GPL licenses? What about it?
  - GTP 4mo ago
    They still have people working on FOSS, right? I didn't know about what your saying,but if this is the problem, then what if I gave Canonical as an example?
    - LtWorf 4mo ago
      Isn't canonical the company replacing GNU coreutils with a broken and full of CVE replacement because it doesn't have a copyleft license?

jeroenhd 4mo ago

Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store. They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?

Mashimo 4mo ago
> Their big money maker is their app store That said, their AirPods division could be a Fortune 500 on its own.
mft_ 4mo ago
AFAIK Apple’s “services” revenue is a little over a quarter of their total; everything else is hardware, dominated by the iPhone. Mac hardware is <10% of total revenue. iPhones are largely locked to their App Store so no risk there. Macs (currently) aren’t locked to the App Store - and I’d guess that Mac App Store usage is middling as a result. Which is to say, I doubt that a marginal Mac App Store revenue hit from a small proportion of users switching to Linux over MacOS is the driver for not supporting Linux development. I’d guess it’s more about an inflexible company culture and maybe not wanting to extend their area of responsibility and risk.
- jeroenhd 4mo ago
  Revenue wise, the services part is not that large. Profit-wise, though, I don't believe the same is true. Their 30% cut is barely costing them anything compared to manufacturing hardware and physical logistics. I don't think the Mac App Store is going to get to iPhone levels of lock-down soon, but Apple thinks in ecosystems, not just in laptops. If you have an iMac, you probably have an iPhone, and you're probably going to buy an iPad should you ever want a tablet. If they wanted, they could open source all of the drivers necessary to boot an OS as part of their Darwin core, but they choose not to. That actually breaks with their older, more open development style. I guess they just don't see the benefit of being open any longer.

torben-friis 4mo ago

Their amazing laptop hardware pushes you into their ecosystem. Once you're on macOS, might as well get iphone rather than Android and benefit from the synergy, same for airpods or the apple watch. The only reason I'd see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.

rvz 4mo ago

> It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. Why should they when they have macOS already? > Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate. How many people who buy Apple silicon laptops do it to run Linux on it? less than 10,000 or 20,000 people? You should not expect Apple to care about what Linux users want. The closest you are getting from them is being able to boot a custom OS or kernel. Everything else from the drivers to the secure enclave they do not care.

drdexebtjl 4mo ago
No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux. But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Macbook hardware completely outclasses even the high end options.
- rvz 4mo ago
  > No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux. Almost no-one bought Intel Macs for dual-booting Linux either (Unless you are Linus Torvalds and a tiny amount of people who use Linux on Intel Macs). > But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them. The entire point of Intel Macs was for running Windows on a Mac which that cohort is just as tiny as the Linux on Intel Mac customers. Dual booting is generally reserved for those who are highly technical, so I would not expect Apple to care about either customer anyway. So that was tested already and Apple still did not care. So of course they also do not care about Linux users who have Apple Silicon Macs either.
  - drdexebtjl 4mo ago
    Windows on the Mac requires cooperation from Microsoft and Apple, and benefits Apple’s competition. It was always a strategy to get Windows users to switch sides, not to sell hardware. Linux on the Mac requires only Apple’s initiative, and does not benefit their competitors. > Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them. Why does the Linux laptop market care about running Windows? > Dual booting I’m not talking about dual booting at all. Before Apple Silicon, if you wanted to buy a laptop to run Linux, the Intel Macbooks have always been a top-tier recommendation. The market isn’t large, but it’s a soft power they’re giving up. Walk into a big tech’s office and you’ll no longer see only Macbooks, and it’s not because they have to run Windows.

mhh__ 4mo ago

I read somewhere that Apple even uses Linux kernels to bring up new hardware but I don't know if it's actually/still true.

GTP 4mo ago

My father purchased a new MacBook just in time to avoid the recent price increase. It wasn't because his old one didn't work anymore; it was because Apple wouldn't support it on more recent macOS versions, and some applications he runs daily (like Teams) don't work anymore on the latest supported macOS for that MacBook. Apple is an hardware company, and forcing you to upgrade your hardware gives them revenue. Admittedly, his MacBook lasted longer than many other laptops would have. But, if it wasn't for the outdated OS, he would have been happy to keep using it because the hardware was still fine for office use.

armchairhacker 4mo ago
FYI there’s software that can upgrade old Macs to officially unsupported OSs: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/ https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
- GTP 4mo ago
  He found out about one of those, but wasn't comfortable using it anyway.
carlosjobim 4mo ago
But in this case it was Microsoft who forced him to upgrade, wasn't it?
- GTP 4mo ago
  Depends on the point of view, as it is Apple not supporting that MacBook anymore, and Microsoft could have a point in not supporting macOS versions that Apple doesn't want to support anymore. You could even argue that he forced the update on himself, since the web version still worked. The point remains that somehow without upgrading the hardware some software he uses everyday doesn't work anymore.
  - carlosjobim 4mo ago
    I would put it squarely on Microsoft in this case. They decided to make their software not function anymore. Why not let older Teams clients still function and communicate with the newer? Apple still pushes updates and security updates to OS versions which are not the latest. So I don't see how they can be blamed much here.

VeejayRampay 4mo ago

see homebrew, they could have made this an official thing but no, they prefer to let people work do their work for them and sleep on their mattress of cash despicable business practices really

SG- 4mo ago
actually long ago before homebrew there was MacPorts which Apple actually was part of.
brewmarche 4mo ago
IIRC Apple actually helped with MacPorts in the beginning
- VeejayRampay 4mo ago
  but have they integrated homebrew, have they made it a first class citizen, have they provided money or something? the answer is "maybe to some small extent, but not really"
  - brewmarche 4mo ago
    MacPorts is still around and is a perfectly viable package manager, I prefer it over homebrew

leenixx 4mo ago

Why do you think that Apple doesn’t have developers internally that develops Linux for their own chips? They obviously have a ton of people developing with linux and even asahi, else they wouldn’t been able to make adjustments in their uefi to shape the support of 3rd party OSes exactly how they wanted. As apple no longer develop their own servers (OS), they even run some internal ”production” system on Linux, on their own hardware.

carlosjobim 4mo ago

Are you really baffled as you say? Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups. Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value. And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.

Grombobulous 4mo ago

Food for thought: Apple’s services make more revenue than Macs and iPads combined, and they do so at a higher profit margin. There’s your answer. I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable. Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system. CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback. And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding. But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that. I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you. There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.

spockz 4mo ago
I checked a 16” framework last week comparing to the 24/48GiB MBP. The ssd is significantly faster, the RAM is almost twice as fast, the CPU has more cores. The only benefit is having a dedicated gpu. At more or less the same price. Admittedly, the screen ratio is better with the framework. But prefer the matte screen of the MacBook.
- mmcnl 4mo ago
  The battery life stinks, the build quality is subpar and the fan runs all the time. If you don't care about anything that makes the MacBook Pro a premium device, then sure you can be overpriced consumer-grade slop that has a slight edge in specs (except CPU). But it's a miserable trade-off.

bri3d 4mo ago

It’s less a question of people and more one of "Why doesn't a hardware company want to give away their IP design documentation?"

WD-42 4mo ago

Or they could just make their schematics available and save 99% of the reverse engineering the Asahi team has to do. 1000s of hours of work for what is just sitting in a drawer in Cupertino. But they won’t.

musicale 3mo ago
The schematics tell you how things are wired together, which is maybe useful if you are building compatible hardware. The ASIC specifications tell you how to operate and program the chips, which is what device drivers need. Better for Linux would be for Apple to provide open source drivers. (Linux would also benefit if NVIDIA provided open source drivers, for example.)

troyvit 4mo ago

They've been like this long before they were a digital services company. 25 years ago Yellow Dog Linux (another RPM based distro) had the same challenges working with PowerPC. The scientific community was clamoring for an open platform to use their native Linux software with the PowerPC, YDL filled that niche, and Apple watched their struggles supporting Linux on their platform with detached amusement.

markus_zhang 4mo ago
Kinda think Asahi is not going to fair too much better in this fight. It’s an interesting exercise but most people won’t buy a Mac to use Linux. The only reason I’d buy an overpriced piece of hardware is because it can run Linux very well. But apparently people like me is negligible.
- macintux 4mo ago
  I think it'll have more of an impact with used hardware buyers. I wouldn't buy an M5 for Linux, but repurposing a cheap M1 in a few years? Absolutely.
  - troyvit 4mo ago
    Yeah I think I agree. The big difference I see is in the chip. The PowerPC arguably had its benefits (vectorization) which made it super attractive for bioinformatics, etc., and a lot of that software was Linux-based. People could either buy a super-computer or a G4 (or a cluster of G4s) and get the work they needed done for a fraction of the cost. MacOS (and OSX) were behind on a lot of this stuff compared to Linux then. Today from what I see the M3-M5 chips are a big leap forward compared to their competitors, and it just happened to hit at the same time LLMs became popular. I imagine there are some similar, specialized needs with the M[1-5] chips that might benefit from Linux but with OSX's stronger BSD underpinnings it's a different world.

w10-1 4mo ago

Apple open-sourced their container tooling and they also support Linux in their Virtualization framework. Anyone can run any compatible Linux now in a VM, with bare-metal speed but limited to virtio devices. To me it's baffling that more people don't run Linux this way.

bigyabai 4mo ago
> To me it's baffling that more people don't run Linux this way. Why? People have been using Orbstack, Lima and Docker long before Apple shipped first-party container tooling. The virtualization support was never ever a problem. For actual dedicated server usage, macOS itself is the problem. You want to be running Proxmox on baremetal, nobody wants to administer headless macOS machines by-hand.
pacifika 3mo ago
Mainly I’m concerned about shortcut conflicts such as command q

izacus 4mo ago

THey do pay a few thousand FTEs - the OS they built for the hardware is named macOS and fits their specifications.