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Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.
by whatever1 28d ago
Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.
- alt227 28d agoSo that you have to keep buying Macs every few years of course. If they gave you a way to install linux easily then you could use it far past their intended lifespan and wouldnt keep you locked into the apple ecosystem. They have proved time and time again that Apple hardware running anything but MacOS or iOS is something they will work very hard to stop you doing.
- alsetmusic 28d ago> past their intended lifespan This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
- alt227 28d agoThe hardware is designed to last, the software is designed to force you to buy a new device after 7 years at most.
- dymk 28d agoIs it a "a few years" or 7 years?
- wa2flq 28d agoMy iMac Pro 2017 is an Energizer Bunny. I got almost 10 years from by MacBook Pro.
- deleted 28d ago[deleted]
- Gigachad 27d agoDepends on your expectations. Throwing a perfectly working laptop out after 7 years because apple cut off software support is wasteful to me. It might not be for you.
- dymk 27d agoWhy would you throw it out after 7 years? The software that’s already on it will continue to work just as it always has.
- Gigachad 27d agoMy experience with iPads losing Apple support is every app just shows you an error message saying your app is out of date and can't be used, while the app store won't let you update it because the latest api version doesn't support your device. Unless you are using all FOSS software, most apps want to connect to some server, and that connection breaks rapidly without updates. If you can load Linux on it it's still usable, but Apple OSs degrade rapidly after Apple stops supporting them. Apple is better about keeping devices on the latest OS version, but much worse about support after that period.
- dymk 27d agoiPads are a different device so I really have no idea why you’re bringing those up. Macs work fine even when the stop receiving updates 7 years doesn’t the line.
- MYEUHD 28d ago> past their intended lifespan Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years) https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.html https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht... https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher
- Marsymars 28d agoIt's a bit awkward where newer Intel models with T2 chips don't support OpenCore, so e.g. the 2019 MBA is going to run out of security updates with macOS 14, sooner than a 2008 MBA that OpenCore will update up to macOS 15.
- dymk 28d ago> every few years of course That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.
- alt227 28d ago2 more years and your mac will not install the latest MacOS version, which then means you will no longer be able to update any software on your own computer or install any new software either. If you could install linux or any other OS on it you would be able to use it for decades to come, but instead you will be forced to buy another new shiny Apple box. You will probably argue thats ok because you would have wanted one anyway by that time or some such point, but the fact remains that Apple will force you to upgrade your hardware not very long away by not allowing you to install anything on it.
- dymk 28d agoThat's not how macs work. You don't suddenly lose the ability to run new binaries just because they're not on the latest MacOS version. Using your own conservative estimate, 8 years seems like a fine lifespan for a laptop, far longer than the "few years" you initially said. And in practice, there are plenty of macbooks that have been running even longer.
- edschofield 28d agoThe parent commenter described exactly how Macs work. I have a beautiful 10-core iMac 27” with 72 GB of RAM from 2020 that Apple has now decided to turn into a lemon. macOS Tahoe runs as slow as molasses and no more macOS upgrades will be forthcoming. I downgraded to Sonoma (which cost me hours) and the machine runs well again for now but the App Store has already started refusing to update apps like Pages because macOS is old. Soon I won’t be able to install a single app through the App Store and Linux (T2 Linux in my case, not Asahi) will be the only option to keep using this terrific hardware.
- Gigachad 27d agoIntel macs suddenly will lose the ability to run programs because Apple has dropped the requirement to ship an intel build. And from experience, as soon as Apple stops requiring devs support old hardware, nothing works anymore.
- specialist 27d agoMy family continues to use my old 2009 MacBook Pro. YMMV
- deleted 28d ago[deleted]
- sansah 28d agoThey want control on the walled garden. When was the last time apple did anything for public unless forced by FCC. Now there is no hope since they can simply donate to trump.
- novafunc 28d agoApple made some changes specifically for Asahi Linux to make it more robust. I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.
- bitpush 28d agoSource? It's a welcome thing but very much not like Apple.
- robertoandred 28d agoApple has a long long history of supporting open source.
- cute_boi 28d agocan you please tell us what have they done for open source except LLVM.
- juiceland 28d agoSwift, WebKit, Darwin/XNU, MLX, FoundationDB, Container, Pkl, libdispatch (GCD), CUPS, CareKit, ResearchKit, Kubernetes, Cassandra, Spark, Netty, Solr…
- lokar 28d agoSure, but other then language tools, databases, printing, container orchestration, what have the Roman’s ever done for us?
- IshKebab 28d agoI expect they don't actually care whether or not people run Linux on macs. I mean they used to let you run Windows! Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
- ajross 28d ago> they used to let you run Windows! They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped. Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
- VCFundedGenYer 28d agoMicrosoft is being all kumbaya right now for those exact same reasons - they are hemorrhaging users to Linux and macOS. WSL only exists because of this. In the 90s and 2000s, they considered Linux a cancer, and only kept macOS alive for antitrust reasons.
- bel8 28d ago"Developers developers developers!"
- cosmic_cheese 28d agoYep, I suspect the goal is to reduce support footprint/burden to the absolute minimum possible, which is also why they don't maintain their legacy virtualization/translation layers indefinitely (Classic mode, Rosetta 1 (PPC → x86), Rosetta 2 (x86 → ARM)). The benefit is being able to make major changes, refactors, etc with relatively little delay and encumbrance. This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations. If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
- ajross 28d ago> Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff. I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not. If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
- smashed 28d agoApple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware. Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either. I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
- ajross 28d ago> It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware. Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market. Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy. [1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.
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- meerita 28d agoIt wouldn’t even be a problem for Apple to support Linux. Linux’s desktop market share has never been a threat to Apple at all. I hope Ternus, being the engineer he is, opens this up.
- kylec 28d agoI don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO?
- meerita 28d agoMy phone autocorrected Ternus to Torvalds, what a catch!
- alsetmusic 28d ago> My phone autocorrected Termus to Torvalds, what a catch! Kinda funny and definitely a word suggestion that will be locked in future code.
- kylec 28d agoAlso it's "Ternus" with an "n"
- ChocolateGod 28d agoThe sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs > https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engineer-linux-driver-and-kernel-developer-32654023/#:~:text=Software%20Engineer%2D%20Linux%20Driver%20and%20Kernel%20Developer,software%20bringup%20on%20pre%20and%20post%2Dsilicon%20platforms%2D https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...
- amazingamazing 28d agoWhy would they?
- SoftTalker 28d agoWhen Intel-based Macs debuted they touted their support for dual-booting Windows (Bootcamp). Apple makes money selling hardware.
- amazingamazing 28d agoYeah, they abandoned that, though.
- jjtheblunt 28d agoApple's hypervisor.framework lets other OS instances run very very fast with the UTM app (open source on github, but i use the prebuilt version from the App Store). In my case i've used arm native linuxes (arch with various compositors, kde, gnome, fedora) all on M2, M2 Max, M5 and the experience is indistinguishable from native. MacOS is running too. I think hardcore graphics folks might want direct accelerator access, or there'd be curiously little reason for Asahi (other than that it's awesome work). I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful. just my $0.02.
- smashed 28d agoWhat is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around.
- jjtheblunt 28d agoI'd recommend reading up on it, and perhaps trying it, because it's very useful. For folks lamenting that the (awesome) Asahi efforts are challenged by reverse engineering of changes from M2 to M3, and so on, those changes vanish into the abstraction, but their benefits do not. That's why i switched from Asahi a couple years ago to UTM in apple silicon hypervisor mode. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines
- trompetenaccoun 27d agoThe point is some people who want to run Linux mostly do not want MacOS. You suggest to "just run MacOS" (the thing they want to avoid) and virtualize Linux. That defeats the entire purpose, then you could just as well skip the VM and run Mac apps. Yes, there are a few specialized applications people might need Linux for but that's mostly not why they install an entirely different OS. For the occasional obscure programm that doesn't exist in the Apple ecosystem VMs are a good option, absolutely. Everything you do in the VM still runs on Mac though and you depend on Apple for security, privacy and trust in general.
- Retr0id 28d agoAside from the "they have no incentive" answer, I imagine it's not so easy even if they wanted to. I suspect most of it won't be solely Apple's IP to share in the first place.
- deleted 27d ago[deleted]
- Aurornis 28d ago> when they can just share a pdf. I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer. The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption. I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
- izacus 28d ago> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open. Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
- biorach 28d ago> not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here. The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful
- bel8 28d agoRegardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple is laughable at best. Even more so when Apple used to release such docs in the past when it was much less financially capable. They just don't care.
- carlosjobim 28d agoCommunity... is what you have with family, neighbors and such. Being a user of a mass produced thing is not a community. But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
- amelius 28d agoLegal reasons. Lawyers say "no".
- BloodyIron 28d agoBecause that's not their business model. How is that not obvious?
- varispeed 28d agoCompetition could use it as well. Why make it easy.
- deleted 28d ago[deleted]
- apatheticonion 27d agoI'd imagine it's for IP protection. There's a lot of documentation required to write drivers for hardware; for the GPU, they'd need to share the instruction set of the GPU along with the specifications of the controller. Lots of weird things like power management too. If shared, that's probably enough to create copycat hardware or at least an emulator. Personally, I just want to run Linux on my latest MacBook Pro on day 1 with full hardware acceleration. If it was supported, MacOS would be on the device for as long as it took to install Linux. I think the only way that would happen is if the EU extended "the right to repair" to include software, compelling companies to release documentation sufficient to produce drivers with. I'm sure Apple would maliciously comply, like provide the ISA but not power management specs - but that would still cut the work required by the Asahi team by 80%.
- Danox 27d agoYou can get a team together and do the work… Nothing worth doing is free.
- apatheticonion 27d agoI'd love to. Want to join?
- Danox 27d agoDarwin is open source has been for 25-26 years is it too much hard work? https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin https://github.com/PureDarwin/PureDarwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://www.puredarwin.org/ https://www.puredarwin.org/