> The defacto industry standard for audio ICs is I²S, an I²C-based bus optimised for audio data.
Nit: I²S has nothing to do with I²C.
(Most I²S chips also have an I²C interface since I²S only carries raw audio data, no sideband like volume control or clock configuration. But that's a separate interface and can also be SPI rather than I²C. In fact, SPI is more closely related to I²S than I²C is.)
I²S is a remarkably simple design. There's no protocol handshakes, it's just raw PCM. I like how it's designed so sender and receiver can use totally different sample bit-depths (in either direction) without any incompatibility.
This project is impressive but I wonder if those efforts would not have been better spent on an open platform that actually respects its users and that is less likely to kill the whole project on a whim. It seems like building a house on someone's else property.
I use MacBook anyway, this project brings open platform to my MacBook, I'm happy with that. I guess many people have the same situation like me. I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.
>I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.
Yes, because being non repairable, being non upgradable, having early thermal throttling due to subar cooling, and having a mediocre keyboard is SO much better than anything else that is out there.
I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts. Whats next, you are going to tell me that your Macbook is great for local LLM usage because 10 tok/sec while your laptop gets too hot to use on your lap and makes your fingers hot is all that anyone needs?
Sure, but I eat all these downsides and more, just for the battery life.
I was a (mostly) happy Asahi Fedora user for a while, but eventually went back to macos (for the battery life). I'm not sure how much better it is, but I actually trust that it will sleep and wake properly when I use its lid.
The prices and ram have been fucked though, long before the latest ram crisis. I have a macbook m1 air, which I bought second hand. I'm looking at maybe upgrading to a second hand m3 or m4 air (with more ram), but honestly the prices are just wrong. Whatever I buy will be too expensive and unable to run decent llm models.
In the very extreme case of not having access to charging for extended periods, I would understand the battery life argument, even though there are laptops you can buy with comparable battery life than are non mac, especially if you run a lightweight linux distro with i3wm that basically means your cpu sits fully idle when not in use (unlike Macs which constantly phone home to Apple)
But with fast charging and basically an outlet most everywhere you would actually use your laptop, that ship has sailed.
> even though there are laptops you can buy with comparable battery life than are non mac, especially if you run a lightweight linux distro with i3wm
I am totally a Linux person, but I have to say: I run Alpine with Sway, and my battery life is nothing compared to a Macbook. It's just another world, it doesn't remotely compare.
I am very much a Linux person, I have been running Linux on my personal computers (and mostly on my work machine) for 20 years. But in the last few years I changed company and had to work on an M-series Macbook, and the battery life is absolutely amazing.
For people who mostly use their browser and a few programs, I understand why they would want to use a Macbook. I mean, I can go for a full weekend without charging it, and I do programming stuff where I compile regularly.
Late intel macs are in fact crimes against thermal design, but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones (except the 14-inch M4 max, that one does throttle.). The keyboard is also no longer e-waste tier. The rest is true, but you may wish to update your talking points.
The Macs all throttle with heavy workload that raises the temps no matter what you do. The efficiency (and battery life) comes from the hardware being configured to do certain things very efficiently, like video decoding.
Compute is compute, Apple didn't circumvent physics. It just managed to take chunks of that compute that represents the most average use case, and make it more efficient, in the same way that ASIC mine bitcoins more efficiently than GPUS
As for keyboard, it still sucks. Impossible to clean without taking the thing apart, so if you get any dirt under the keys, its gonna be there for quite some time.
> but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones
It definitely is. Apple's mistake with the Intel Macs was refusing to throttle the chips before they hit their T junction temp (~95c). This is why a lot of Wintel machines will max out around 70-80c in sustained load while Macs will fly past those temps.
The same behavior is present in both Intel Macs and Apple Silicon chips - you can very nearly boil water on your Macbook if you push the GPU with sustained load like LLM prefill.
I don't get why you're so against Macs. I would invite you to show me a comparable laptop like a Macbook pro, with similar battery life, similar build quality, similar usability and functionality where you don't have to be a sysadmin every 2 days because [insert Linux driver] isn't compatible with [insert hardware].
Like honestly look into it and compare 1 to 1. Your talking points are outdated.
> I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts.
How ironic. There is no “blatant lie” in “their hardwares aren’t comparable to MacBook” if you don’t know what aspects they are comparing, but there are in your comment.
I will clarify, at the same price, the MacBook is good at: display, instant performance and battery life, trackpad, webcam, sound and microphones, build quality.
My workload: web development, video call, running VM.
I basically could not find any laptop comaprable in those aspect AT THE SAME PRICE.
Are you aware that “it’s not comparable to” / “it doesn’t compare to” doesn’t literally mean that it’s strictly impossible to attempt a comparison? It means that the comparison is not favourable.
Many of the problems aren't cracked whatsoever. For instance, Apple Silicon's PSCI power management interface is a mystery. PSCI code exists in other Linux devicetrees, but nobody knows how Apple implements theirs. So for the better half of a decade, Asahi users have relied on a hack to prevent their battery from draining constantly. We still don't have any prospective solutions, to my knowledge.
This is the weal-and-woe of reverse engineering. It's awesome that these machines now have native Vulkan 1.2 drivers, but it took years to get there. There are still unsolved problems 7 years after Apple Silicon hit shelves, and most newer hardware is broadly unsupported. The lesson here is a reiteration of what Linux users have always said - proprietary drivers suck.
Apple's PSCI interface is not a mystery, and there is perfect knowledge on how it is implemented. It isn't. Which is the actual problem, Linux wants PSCI, Apple platforms do not have it.
marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways.
For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.
>In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU.
> For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.
The Oxide Computer folks wrote their own AMD boot loader and have an entire chain of trust and apparently (?) basically got rid of the supervisor code (Ring -2 and -3). They also have custom motherboards with third-party BMCs.
What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project?
Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.
What good would it do Apple to shut down the project?
There’s no IP misuse and the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs. The built in lag time of the current situation ensures that macOS will never have its position as the dominant OS for Mac hardware challenged. Further, doing this would stoke the flames of the already red-hot internet Apple haters and unnecessarily burn goodwill. It’d be a loss across the board.
The Apple Platform Security[1] white paper describes the secure boot process for Apple silicon. The Mac boot process is significantly more configurable than the iOS boot process, and it allows operating in reduced security modes. (Including running locally signed operating systems.)
Apple knows how to build an iPhone: if they wanted to lock down a Mac they would have simply done that. There's something like nine pages detailing the differences. What word describes that other than "intentional" design? The fact that you can sign and boot a third party OS isn't an "accident" if it's documented, and there's no "exploit" because this is functionality the platform supports; anyone can do it with tools already present on the (Apple-signed) recovery OS.
They certainly don't provide great support for people wanting to develop [drivers for] these operating systems, but the platform was very clearly engineered to support booting them.
I guess I'm missing something then. The Asahi blog says "Apple’s boot tooling will only work with what it considers to be a “valid” macOS installation inside an APFS container." Sounds very adversarial to "the ability to boot an arbitrary OS."
It basically just has to look like macOS in some trivial sense, it doesn't have to be macOS, there are no obstacles. The system is designed specifically to enable booting custom compiled kernels and former members of the Apple team have said booting other OSes was intentionally left open. The company just doesn't make any guarantees about that.
Where is it stated in official Apple communications that Apple laptops will always support other OSes like Linux?
There you have it.
If they don't guarantee it, then better not depend on it. Or waste your time on it.
This also holds for members of the Asahi team. Unless they don't mind that a decade or so of their working life goes down the drain in one decision from Apple management or Apple lawyers.
It’s the difference between “there’s no published standards other than the reference implementation for some of the API” and “there’s no published standards and extremely monolithic reference implementation design coupled to proprietary blobs and considerable effort spent on signing/boot chain authentication to prevent third party implementations”. Apple is currently the former.
marcan mentioned in a few of his livestreams that the design seems very much intentional, plus a few of the tweets by Xeno Kovah who worked on the bootloader: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914716454526979.
If they did, I still have macOS, an OS I can easily disable all runtime protections and security on, rig up into a kernel debugger, arbitrarily dump memory of other processes and so on. If Apple takes away our ability to easily boot alternative kernels, the tools are readily available to find...alternative ways around iBoot security, which is not ideal for Apple since iOS iBoot is mostly the same as it is on macOS.
I find it hard to believe that Apple would purposefully shoot themselves in their own feet, unless you also believe that they would lock down the Mac as much as an iPad, ever.
>What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project?
How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical.
>Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use?
It's possible such a thing exists, of course, it's possible on intel, or AMD, or any ARM chips, or any chip at all. However such a back door, if discovered, would not be accessible only to them. It would have the same problem that all such backdoors have, in that if Apple can exploit it, others can exploit it. Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door, and they have relied on this as a legal defence, and frankly it's hard to see how they would benefit from having such a back door. A chunk of their business model and legal liability protection depends on not having such a back door.
>Wishful thinking if you ask me.
If you say so, this is all about relative risk. However what reason might anyone have for thinking that any other platform, such as Intel with it's proprietary supervisor code with remote updatability, is more under the control of the user? There may be platforms that have a better security architecture that's more under the control of the user, but I can't think of any of the major ones that does. Which would you suggest?
> Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door
And, at least in the case of their private cloud compute, they encourage third party audit of their claims and even provide a virtual research environment running an instance of their PCC on your mac.
The UK explicitly requesting a backdoor to iCloud's advanced data protection forcing Apple to pull the service instead also tells me their claims are legit.
It's certainly possible a backdoor exists in hardware instead, or elsewhere in the stack but given Apple's surprising relative openness for how they implement their privacy products & the research papers they put out I'm inclined to believe them for now. (I say relative because its not open source, which is the only way to be 100% certain, but their research papers are surprisingly in depth).
iBoot? Asahi needs iBoot to boot third-party volumes for Linux to run properly. Apple controls iBoot; if they burn an eFuse and disable third-party volumes in a "Security" update, Asahi cannot fight back.
You cannot boot macOS with an unsigned iBoot firmware, so writing your own bootloader isn't an option. If a fuse is burned, you also cannot downgrade to older firmwares. The entire system is designed to give Apple the ability to disable other OSes in a macOS update if they ever decided to.
iBoot firmware exists and is already in our hands.
Any manufacturer could put an eFuse in any of their hardware and lock it. No hardware can be proven not to have such exploits. That's the first point marcan makes in that post.
> Any manufacturer could put an eFuse in any of their hardware and lock it.
This is my point too, though. Do we trust Apple to not burn a hardware fuse if their community one-ups them? They've already done it on iPad and iPhone hardware when users find a boot ROM exploit. All that they'd need to do is push an update for "security" purposes, and then the new boot flow could refuse to boot into unsigned volumes or deny running unsigned bootloaders. There would be no way to downgrade.
This is basic ARM security architecture stuff, I'm a little shocked that people can't imagine how this type of lockout is possible. There are tons of commodity ARM boards that are effectively bricked and eFused to user-hostile security epochs.
Apple could also support open standards like UEFI/dt/acpi. Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. This would projects such as Asahi a lot easier and more reliable.
> Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel.
In the x86 sphere it isn't that much better either, most ACPI tables are thoroughly broken if Linux announces itself as Linux and not as Windows. In fact, a lot of machines' ACPI tables barely work on Windows.
UEFI or its predecessor ACPI are complicated and support a long list of legacy stuff that has absolutely no value to Apple at all so why should they do the development?
It's like asking Tesla for a fuel tank so it would be easier to install a gasoline engine.
Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware? Should they also ensure Windows and Android can boot on the hardware easily?
> Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware?
To sell more hardware?
Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS. It's not like Apple needs this tiny market, but it wouldn't hurt them either.
Apple still ships a copy of Boot Camp Assistant in macOS Tahoe. It was great to be able to dual boot on Intel Macs and licensing BS aside it would be nice to be able to boot Win11 ARM on an M1.
These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day. That's a valiant effort and they're doing it wonderfully. Regardless, one of the points of Linux is to install it on as much hardware as possible. Do you think people that managed to get it installed on iPods, PS5s, Wiis, Chromebooks, routers, Nintendo Switches, etc. should all stop just because they're doing something unsupported? Most of those cases were met with friction by the original OEM. If anything, Apple has been pretty laissez faire about the whole thing compared to Nintendo and Sony who will ban your console if you hack it.
Those laptops don't need to go to any landfill. They are much too precious to not recycle the metals and other materials and will be taken care of if you return them to the manufacturer. (by law, at least in the EU)
Yeah should they design their own computer chips? And do literally everything need for such a platform. That is literally 10000x the effort. There is no change the same group of people could create such an open solution. Hardware is just much harder in so many ways and no comparable OpenPlatform exists.
They are upstreaming their patches, so upstream Linux will eventually get the necessary drivers.
Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.
This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances.
As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)
There is a bit more to it on ARM I'm afraid. The device trees are complex and it feels to me it takes it out of the realm of 'anyone can and should do it'
Device trees are certainly less portable across hardware, and more difficult to create than just booting a generic kernel on a machine that supports ACPI. However, the device tree is shipped as part of the kernel, and as long as the bootloader correctly loads the DTB and kernel, it's no more difficult to swap out the userspace portion/rootfs than any other Linux system, generally.
There is an effort by the Bananas Team to get standard Debian working on Apple silicon, and they have installation instructions for how to get it running now with an additional unofficial repository: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1#The_Bana...
I haven't actually tried to install it yet, though.
I can’t see that being a bad thing considering that the kernel is mandatory software in the Linux world. You would want to have high standards for what gets added.
You'll never be able to agree on where that line should go. First because there's a cultural component to it. I'm from Spain so I can only talk for myself, but while he uses rude language, nothing I've ever read from him ever seemed particularly offensive. And second because any activity involving a large group of people will need some amount of toxicity if only to prevent other toxic people from derailing it, and since nobody thinks of themselves as the one that is being toxic to the project, there will always be some friction. You might not like fevers either, but they are necessary for a functioning immune system.
Someone who doesnt see a problem with this is probably one of those toxic people who dont realize they're toxic you mentioned. Nobody wants to be treated how Torvalds treated people.
Also, coming from an orchestral background, I'm well aware of situations where the leader needs to be gruff. A gentle conductor will never get the idiot violists playing in tune. (A harsh one won't either, but at least the violists will be too scared to make any noise.) That said, it's still unacceptable for a conductor to cross the line from gruff to personal attacks.
I find the debates about his toxicity to be essentially pointless, especially since he's not in an employer employee relationship with the people he works with.
Nobody has to work with him, and you chose not to. You don't contribute your kernel patches because you don't like the guy. And that's fine, and I even agree with your assessment that he's been abrasive.
On the other hand, it's his project. He does get to be dictator of his own project and the philosophies behind it. This is the beauty of open source: unlike proprietary software where money and power is everything, everyone is free to fork the kernel and stop dealing with him. In the open source world there are a long list of forks that have turned out to be more popular than their original projects.
The other beautiful thing about open source in this arrangement is that the people he's being a jerk to are people he has an employer power dynamic over.
If my boss is a jerk to me, yeah, that really sucks, because if I get fired my family doesn't eat. I'm forced to interact with that person, at least for a time.
Culture that gave world "microagression", "harasment", cancel culture and now numeric "hate". "Not toxic".
> Nobody wants to be treated how Torvalds treated people.
Exactly, nobody wants but so many can't stop until treated.
> Stop this "we can break stuff" crap. Who maintains udev? Regressions are not acceptable. I'm not going to change the kernel because udev broke, f*ck it. Seriously. More projects need to realize that regressions are totally and utterly unacceptable. ... That just encourages those package maintainers to be shit maintainers. ... And stop blaming the kernel for user space breakage!...
I seem to remember reading somewhere that, even at his worst, Linus limited his toxicity to professional-programmer kernel contributors (i.e. people who were employed by linux distros or hardware companies to contribute to Linux). Can anyone else remember/confirm this?
Regardless, to a newbie potential kernel contributor, that high level of toxicity can be intimidating, and the professional-programmers-only aspect is non-obvious, so it's easy to see why this would discourage hobbyists/free-time programmers from contributing.
That is my understanding also. It was mostly for people who were around and should know better. He would never do this to a new contributor. Granted, he almost never sees code from new contributors in review. But what he will do is, if there is something egregious from a new contributor, he lights of the maintainer of the system.
example. I don't remember what all system Greg KH is responsible for, but for the sake of argument, lets say USB. You as a new contributor, try to contribute a patch to the USB subsystem. Turns out it is total garbage. For it to get Linus's attention, it has to have gone through review by Greg KH. Linus will light up Greg and only Greg because Greg has been doing this for 20+ years.
Now, do I feel he sometimes goes over board and unprofessional? Yes. But people keep contributing and the thing keeps chugging along.
Or it may attract talented and responsible people, since it makes it more of an honor if a patch gets through the gauntlet. Especially since the gauntlet is fit for a system that literally affects billions of people in so many ways.
Not very likely. It doesn't work that way. Linus usually don't respond to individual patches and hasn't for over 20 years.
A subsystem maintainer will pick up your patch if it is good, and they will deal with Linus for you. Most subsystems have their own mailing list because you need to visibility.
The process is described pretty well in Documentation/.
Torvalds didn't even come close to toxicity shown by marcan on social media, so your diction is downright dishonest and spreading FUD (conveniently, marcan deleted all the generated drama from socials).
Asahi founder (plus community community) was heavy with drama and loved to attack and brigade anyone that didn't immediately bow down and listen to demands of their team and social media entourage. This isn't how the most important OS in the world should be led and Torvalds was right to call out that toxic behaviour.
I mean, surely there is a more defensive way to communicate his preference, and the word disgusting is a bit unpolite. But still, does this really count as toxic behaviour?
They've actually been focusing on upstreaming for what feels like 2 years now. It's really slowed down progress but it's important for the longevity of the project. They still have so much left to upstream but little by little it's happening
You will probably always need a "fork" because Asahi needs a custom installer and bootloader. It is also probably a good idea to recompile everything for the Apple ARM architecture.
Asahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow.
There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is focused more on m1 and m2 models. Even so, to this day both of them have issues with idle power management and alt-dp implementation, preventing many to switch, by the time they will have been ironed out the value of machines would be significantly diminished.
It is a miracle how much so few can do, but in the end, despite ubiquitous media coverage it looks like team's enthusiasm and passion have dwindled to the point that even m1 air will never be ready.
When the new leadership team took over, they announced that they would prioritize upstreaming the existing work over adding support for newer hardware.
Upstreaming their changes into the kernel took time.
Now the announced that they had started work on the M3 in February and things are progressing well.
> On top of the above, we also have PCIe, WiFi, Bluetooth, NVMe, keyboard, trackpad, and other core SoC block drivers working in Linux for M3 series machines. Most of this work has come by way of Yureka, who has been very busy hacking on both m1n1 and Linux with her M3 series machines for a while now. We still have a ways to go before we can start enabling Asahi Installer support for these machines, but progress is rapid so watch this space!
That sounds more like talented people doing meticulous work than doom.
If they can set a single machine as target every few years and make it work, that would be a lot better than having no alternative.
M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.
M1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch.
Hopefully, they will manage to get it done someday.
That's simply not true. I have been daily driving asahi for 2.5 years or so now on an M2 Max macbook. In it's been one of the most reliable and smooth experiences I have had ever using linux. DP alt made is working fine for me. I'm not sure about battery, I never measured.
I use DP alt mode and also the HDMI port to drive two screens. I use hyprland and runs fine after configuration.
My battery certainly last a few hours. I use it as any other laptop I had before and use it daily on trains. So I cannot at all agree with your POV that it's a desktop. The battery is working without problems.
> The firmware loaded by XNU is not verified by the CM3. It will begin executing from its reset vector when signalled, no matter what is actually there. What if we just… used our own firmware?
Without taking away from the unutterably awesome achievement of writing custom firmware against a proprietary moving target, I worry about this one specifically. While Apple will hopefully continue the practice of not going out of their way to break third-party OSes, it doesn’t seem unlikely that they will introduce hardware signing for firmware blobs or the data they supply at runtime when programming the hardware; that’s a reasonable security concern for Apple to address. I hope this gamble pays off though!
Then how was the Asahi team able to load their own firmware? I was concerned about that process--whatever it is--being something apple might lock down. If it's already likely locked down to Apple's satisfaction, that's good news.
Macs allow the machine owner to install (and boot) a completely unsigned OS on a different partition without having it affect security when you do boot MacOS.
The Mac partitions are encrypted by default and the system partition is signed and read only.
They first mentioned that efforts to add M3 support were starting in February:
> For quite some time, m1n1 has had basic support for the M3 series machines. What has been missing are Devicetrees for each machine, as well as patches to our Linux kernel drivers to support M3-specific hardware quirks and changes from M2. Our intent was always to get to fleshing this out once our existing patchset became more manageable
As someone rocking a M3 Pro, I personally don't expect to be able to try Asahi out until mid/late next year on my MBP, but I am looking forward to it nonetheless!
I really wish Apple would fund a small team to open source some documentation and drivers to help Asahi along. I know they won't, but I can dream. It would be a drop in the bucket for Apple but would cement their hardware as de facto for silicon valley engineers (even more so than today).
Apple's own hypervisor framework is close enough to what you said that i run Fedora and Arch Linux builds via the UTM app, set to use Apple Silicon virtualization (_not_ emulation), which is a wrapper around said framework.
it's excellent, and made me reformat and erase Asahi a couple years ago.
the analogy (even if humorous) isn't exact, since i can have apple silicon's hypervisor running macos and fedora/arm and arch/arm all concurrently, and can have full desktop environments on the linux instances, full-screened to individual macos desktops.
It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah probably they want to be free to bork it, but if they released some documentation or patches, they'd be expected to keep them up to date and working at the very least.
>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.
You do realize that Apple is a public company and one can just go look at their financials like their latest 10-Q [0] right? For the most recent 6 month half (ending March 28 2026) I'm seeing $194 billion for product sales and $61 billion for service sales. The gross margins are certainly higher on services, at 77%, but 40% product margins are nothing to sneeze at either, and the disparity in absolute sales means the absolute dollar gross margins are $77 billion for products vs $46 billion for services.
So I don't see how you can assert that their "big money maker is their app store" from those numbers. Hardware matters a lot, and furthermore Apple sells services (like AppleCare+) that are specific to hardware and thus even a Linux user might still be interested in.
And without their hardware, their services would evaporate. There is a much tighter link there than with many companies. So they're on the hook for continued R&D and capex on that no matter what, you can't really separate that out, and in turn it's always going to be useful to have more volume to amortize it with.
I think primarily it comes down to corporate DNA, which is powerful. There are plenty of Mac hardware, software and service markets in pro/business/enterprise Apple has neglected or abandoned over the years, including ones making oodles of money, not out of any 4D chess but just because it doesn't fit them as an organization.
why do people just make stuff up ? apple is a hardware company with supply chain excellence that eclipses most pc manufs giving them entire verticals of control, that joined the services game later on. their services don't even come close to the offerings of other tech giants and they're largely okay with it. the bulk of their revenue has always been and continues to be hardware and the bulk of their r&d war chest funds the development and advancement of hardware.
I think Apple sees the writing on the wall with hardware feature increases and hardware longevity.
Sell a phone that is good for a few years, or get sell a phone and also get monthly 100% margin payments indefinitely? Given that phones are going to be useful for longer and longer periods, the replacement/upgrade cycle is definitely going to slow. They’re running out of compelling reasons you MUST have the new phone, falling back on dumb shit like making it stupid colors so you can wield it like a $1400 status symbol. It already does all of the camera and video stuff any normal person could ever ask for, which was previously the main way of differentiating smartphones.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the internal mandate/goal is equal services profit to hardware profit. It is a LOT cheaper and easier to vibe code new services than to design and build new features into the best phone in the world that has already been aggressively iterated on for two decades. Additionally, new signups are all profit as the marginal cost of additional subscribers is zero. Apple’s future is in subscriptions, that’s clear.
Are they there now? No. Does almost every single product decision they have made in the last 10 years point to this future? Absolutely. This “sign up pretty please” user-hostile bullshit (which now everywhere in all products, or nudged toward by all products) is the most un-Apple thing that I have ever witnessed in my 30+ years spent watching hawk-eyed at every single product, accessory, product variation, and service they have ever released.
I sometimes wonder if Jobs would have reached the same conclusion and pulled the company into the same direction in service of profitmaxxing vs spending the company’s time and resources producing and selling things that are insanely great. Can you name one Apple service that is insanely great? (iMessage’s uptime comes to mind, but that doesn’t directly generate subscriptions, and certainly doesn’t generate a single shred of the unalloyed glee in customers that was the characteristic phenomenon that originally put Apple on the map for decades.)
(Unrelated to this topic, the closest I get to that feeling anymore mostly gets caused by DJI and Anker.)
If there was a Linux Apple App Store, I would buy stuff from it. I already buy from Steam. OSS doesn't have the answer to everything. Boutique software has value that people are willing to pay for.
Linux applications are being sold. In fact, GPL-licensed applications get sold, so it's not even the OSS part that's holding you back. ElementaryOS even has its optionally-paid app store: https://appcenter.elementary.io/ Autodesk and other industrial software providers are quite happy to sell you software, though unfortunately not through a unified app store.
In practice, I expect a paid Linux app store to go down about as well as the Microsoft Store has. Especially now, in the age of vibecoding.
Apple's profit margins on many services are at 76% (according to Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/01/13/apples-de...), over twice that of their hardware sales. Margins are higher on reselling licensed content (their Spotify and Netflix alternatives), but their customer base for those is still rapidly growing according to their 2025 report.
That's not what you said. Their margins on software and hardware are irrelevant to what they, as a company, make most money off on — which was your original claim on which you are wrong and got called out on.
So annoying when people can't just admit they're wrong and instead gaslight people with their changed narrative.
Hardware revenue is 3x the services revenue, even with half the margins it still generates more profit than services. I get that Apple would like to increase service revenue but they are a hardware company at heart and their financial statements show it too
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
That's over 10 years of service. But if it's a Pro, then the latest OS officially supported is Monterey, which received its last update in 2024. So I would consider that very fair of Apple, even impressive.
It is fair if you compare Apple with other manufacturers, but it is still unfair in absolute terms. The hardware still works, and the work they're doing to support other models would let macOS work on that laptop as well, as proven by tools that let you do the upgrade unofficially.
Eh, with prebuilt PCs it’s muddy because the bulk of heavy lifting is done by Microsoft, not the manufacturer. It’s not unusual at all to pull up the firmware/drivers/etc page for a random laptop and find that updates stopped rolling out about 2 years after its introduction to the market, despite Reddit and similar being filled with reports of firmware bugs for that particular model.
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.
Yeah, they pretty much lied about that. It is only in a special Windows ultra-power saving mode that heavily throttles background tasks, forces the screen to be 30% lower brightness, heavily downclocks the CPU (50%+ less performance!), etc; The MacBook has to do no such tricks.
You're not gonna see Frameworks that equal the perf-per-watt of Apple until they release a model with a Snapdragon chip.
Frameworks have one benefit that other laptops don't: there's only a few parts. So for example for your Framework speakers you can find an EasyEffects / Pipewire (+bankstown?) tune profile that makes them sound better than 99% of laptops on the market. It's basically the Raspberry Pi effect.
It is well-documented that Panther Lake is highly power efficient. I wouldn’t personally argue against that.
The days of assuming that Apple has the best chip efficiency are coming to an end, especially if the Windows/Qualcomm platform is a workable choice for your needs (maybe someday Linux support will get better).
Apple still has a lead but it’s small enough that it’s not a good reason to choose an Apple system on its own. The M1 MacBook systems got double the battery life of competitors, now 5 years later, Apple systems are at best getting ~10% better battery life than competitors, and some systems like the XPS 14 have Apple beat entirely.
Obviously getting 20 hours in real world productivity use was never realistic, and it’s not realistic on a MacBook Pro, either. I disagree that framework was “basically lying.” They live-streamed the laptop hitting 20 hours, it doesn’t matter that they changed settings to get there. MacBooks have a brightness slider, too. You aren’t getting anywhere close to 20 hours on a MacBook without turning the screen brightness down.
IIRC the MacBook Air/Pro can’t even make it to 20 hours regardless of settings.
The point is that the new framework 13 Pro laptop isn’t a 5-7 hour battery life experience like the previous models. Instead, you can expect 10+ hours depending on what you’re doing it, so it’s a full work day.
As far as I can tell, Framework’s claimed battery numbers require Windows to achieve, which is more than enough reason for many to not consider the FW 13 Pro as an option. If it can’t run Linux without sacrifice compared to Windows there’s no point.
Standby time is likely also a major issue, unless Intel suddenly reversed course and decided to support proper sleep again.
It’s still going to be a respectable performer in Linux. The whole point of the 20 hour stunt was to show that it’s a major improvement and not a small one. Maybe it would have been better to show a default-settings Linux and Windows for comparison but I can understand why they wanted to hit 20 hours for marketing.
Framework specifically has stated that they worked very hard to improve standby time and claim that it’s dramatically better. Being able to use LPDDR5x LP-CAMM2 modules aids in standby time significantly. We’ll find out soon when the first reviewers get their retail units in, probably within a month or so.
For standby time, my current framework 13 has never bothered me. It’s great that Macs have incredible standby but it’s much less of a dealbreaker than I originally thought it would be. I just have sleep to hibernate set up in Linux.
My system sleeps for 2 hours then hibernates afterward. If I am putting my system down for 2 hours I’m likely done using it for the day anyway.
If you can point out where my goalposts moved I’d be happy to entertain the idea, but I’m not seeing it.
To clarify for you, “moving the goalposts” means that I changed my definitions over time. You’ll notice that in my comments I never changed my definition of what it means to have good battery life. I know sometimes turns of phrase are easy to misuse so I hope that helps you out.
There’s no winner or loser here. We’re just discussing technology. I’d appreciate if you tried to add conversation value rather than just dissing me personally.
Panther Lake is an impressive chip. The only MacBook Pro that can achieve 20+ hours of battery life at all with any setting is the 16” model that comes with the largest battery capacity allowed on a commercial airplane. It’s really not framework’s achievement, it’s the chip that’s so good, and that’s great for consumers because you can find a lot of competition on the market that has the coveted “all day battery life” without compromising on performance.
Panther Lake is impressive for x86, but decidedly middling when stacked up against a field including ARM.
The problem is that x86 can (almost) match ARM battery life but at much worse performance, or match the performance at much worse battery life. That's what the statistics don't show you when they show either max performance or max battery life tests.
I repeat it rather often on this site but it's because they're such impressive numbers: an M1 Ultra gets 70% of the performance of an RTX 3090 at 25% of the power envelope, and it beats out a desktop class Core i9 from that era at 30% of the power envelope.
Nvidia, Intel and AMD would commit murder for those kind of perf per watt numbers.
Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so.
I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?
It’s not about dinging Framework specifically and more about if you want *nix and top tier battery life, MacBooks remain the best option.
My understanding is that the reason why Linux still struggles in this front is that nobody has put in the hardware-specific optimization work to make it happen. There’s also some friction with how the bulk of Linux dev attention is paid to servers rather than portable consumer hardware.
Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion.
I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and companies that explicitly support Linux, even if they aren't at the very top of the spec sheet. This has the best practical chance of convincing big-money companies and Linux kernel experts to actually spend time and money on this. Meanwhile, buying a Macbook and installing Linux on it is fine, I guess, but also invisible to the corporate world.
On this note, the world where buying a Framework or really any other Windows PC meant getting roughly 1/2 the battery life of a MacBook really doesn't exist anymore like it did in 2020, so long as you do your research and buy the right system.
I think there's a lot of assumption among the group of people who have stuck with MacBooks since the M1 days that shopping the competition means compromising with a huge performance/battery life/value gap, but that reality that existed in 2020 is much different than the current situation in 2026.
If you are in the market for a MacBook Air for the kinds of things that most people use MacBook Airs for, the average user won't notice that the battery life or performance on a computer equipped with a Panther Lake or Qualcomm chip is different from a MacBook Air at all.
Are these chips exactly the same price/performance ratio of an M5? Maybe not. But, if it's close enough, it's close enough.
There are ones with decent to good battery life. There are none with awesome battery life and abso-fucking-lutely none for super-awesome battery life.
That was one thing I never realized I needed until I had it. Having my laptop basically be optional to charge 99% of the time I use it changed my life. I can take it out with 20% left having not charged it in a week and still get a workday out of it. wtaf
Killer battery life is a defining feature of a laptop in my opinion, unless we’re talking hulking desktop replacement workstation laptops or something. Aside from physical attributes, nothing modulates portability like battery life does.
The user of a laptop with top tier battery life isn’t tethered to the wall, doesn’t need to care about availability of power outlets, and in many circumstances doesn’t even need to carry a charging cable and brick (or if they do, they can get by on trickle-charging with a tiny 15w phone brick overnight). This kind of laptop is in its own class of ultraportability.
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.
I personally think the 13 Pro is the one that’s truly competitive, the 16” is a very different story and not something I recommend specifically.
Someone looking that machine who wants strong GPU performance, I’d probably send over to a Zephyrus G16 or something like that, and give up the modularity.
SSD and RAM speed specs aren’t really something that impacts the user experience unless you’re doing local LLM work.
What does impact the user experience, for example, is having access to hundreds of thousands of PC games by not being platform locked. Or maybe your user experience is impacted by having upgradable storage.
This obviously depends on individual needs, and I’m certainly not saying either system is bad. But I am saying that the Apple “experience” is often assumed to be the best when it does have some downsides.
Even the fact that there’s no charge port on the right side of the MacBook Air/Neo is a user experience downside (of course, not every PC laptop has that feature, but you can find them in the same price category as the Air).
I sold my MacBook Pro because I needed 2TB and couldn’t afford it from Apple. Being stuck with 512GB when 2TB drives cost under $200 at the time was stifling.
I’m mainly looking at the 16” mbp because of the beautiful screen and the refined hardware. For the work I use the laptop on my lap for (or in the evening at the kitchen table) to compare products, research holidays etc, I notice that 13” is too small to comfortably hold two browsers next to each other plus room for notes.
Then sometimes when I’m on the go I like to play a game or two, but nothing seriously requiring graphics power
SSD speed and RAM speed start mattering when memory pressure is high. And when doing stuff with video and photo editing.
The storage price is indeed steep and now the RAM price as well. I wish I hit the buy button when I had the chance before the price increase.
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.
I would recommend something like a Zephyrus G16 to someone who is interested in a 16” laptop with powerful graphics and a MacBook Pro-like footprint.
It’s easy to diss Apple alternatives and call them unrefined and all that, but to the right person, there are downsides to a Mac.
For example, the current MacBook Pro models with higher end chips prioritize quietness over heat and get very hot to the touch under heavy workloads.
Unless you are in music production, a little fan noise never hurt anyone, and the idea that windows laptops sound like hair dryers when doing basic tasks like browsing the web is very outdated.
Apple is revered for refinement and quality yet they get some basic ergonomics wrong like the sharp edges near your wrist and the notch blocking the menu bar.
Never thought I'd think about switching from Apple. M1 was handsdown the best buy ever and I was sure my next laptop would be an Apple as well. But looking at framework, this looks really nice. Apple-ish but without some of the drawbacks (also, while windows stinks, not really a MacOS fanboy tbh). Makes me kinda regret I was lazy and locked myself in using Apple passwords app.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
> 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.
> The entire point of Intel Macs was for running Windows on a Mac
That wasn't the point for Apple. After pointing out that PowerPC hadn't hit 3GHz (as he had promised two years prior) and that there was no PowerBook G5, Steve Jobs clearly explained the rationale for intel Macs:
> As we look ahead, we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you, and we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map.
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.
I don't think they would. What market would that exactly be targeting? Devs, who are overwhelmingly just provided macbooks via their employer? They'll still run macOS because IT requires them to.
Linux Gamers? The arm story for proton still needs work (hopefully the steam frame will help). Nvidia+Microsoft are working on it with that new surface ultra, but verdicts out on whether that will boot Linux or not as its specifically a Microsoft partnership.
General non-dev, non-gaming, non-creative users? I don't think they'd buy a mac specifically for Linux either. That market is much better served by Framework, System76, Tuxedo, Lenovo (thinkpads), etc.
And Apple certainly isn't going to win over any FOSS purists either.
I think the intersection of "I want macbook pro hardware" and "I must run Linux natively on it for my workflow" is a lot smaller than you think.
Outside of the US, macOS is not that popular. Where I grew up, no school had Macs on their computer labs, but they did have Linux. You could have lived your entire life near computers and never been in contact with macOS. I had. The first time I saw macOS was in college in a digital media lab.
I like macOS, but I do prefer Linux.
I can't ask for a Framework, System76 or Tuxedo laptop at work because they don't sell them directly and locally (within my country). They don't want to risk importing these machines, sending them back if they're broken, and not having a local replacement. But since the iPod, Apple has had a meaningful global presence, so of course, I can ask for a Macbook.
For a while we could pick Intel Macbooks and install Linux, and maybe I live in a tiny bubble, but many people I know did just that.
That’s not a sales tactic. Apple supports their old hardware with updates longer than anyone in the industry. The recent ones have been due to the architecture transition, maintaining BC with amd64 has significant costs.
This is what I assumed as well, but online I found people who were able to update a ~2015 MacBook Pro to a version of macOS more recent than the latest supported one, and it still worked.
Both are true. Apple's official qualification, continuous integration, bug fixing, backporting, etc. takes more effort than a hobbyist getting things to (mostly) work. But the main issue for Apple is focus: Apple wants its product development organization to focus on the next new thing, not on the past.
I'm mostly OK with Apple's 7-10 years of support, but I also have older Macs that still work fine and that I wish were safe to connect to the internet while running macOS - without relying on various hacks or workarounds.
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.
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
It's a shame (in practice, although I get the philosophical idea).
I think the lawsuit chances are very low because FAANG right now depend way too much on LLM being legal, so they would not want to shoot themselves in the foot.
> The defacto industry standard for audio ICs is I²S, an I²C-based bus optimised for audio data.
Nit: I²S has nothing to do with I²C.
(Most I²S chips also have an I²C interface since I²S only carries raw audio data, no sideband like volume control or clock configuration. But that's a separate interface and can also be SPI rather than I²C. In fact, SPI is more closely related to I²S than I²C is.)
Yeah, it's much closer to SPI.
The reason why they both follow the same naming scheme is that Philips Semiconductor (now NXP) made both.
[flagged]
I²S is a remarkably simple design. There's no protocol handshakes, it's just raw PCM. I like how it's designed so sender and receiver can use totally different sample bit-depths (in either direction) without any incompatibility.
https://web.archive.org/web/20070102004400/http://www.nxp.co...
Thanks for this comment, it lead me to look into I2S and I learned something new!
I’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems
This project is impressive but I wonder if those efforts would not have been better spent on an open platform that actually respects its users and that is less likely to kill the whole project on a whim. It seems like building a house on someone's else property.
I use MacBook anyway, this project brings open platform to my MacBook, I'm happy with that. I guess many people have the same situation like me. I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.
>I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.
Yes, because being non repairable, being non upgradable, having early thermal throttling due to subar cooling, and having a mediocre keyboard is SO much better than anything else that is out there.
I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts. Whats next, you are going to tell me that your Macbook is great for local LLM usage because 10 tok/sec while your laptop gets too hot to use on your lap and makes your fingers hot is all that anyone needs?
Sure, but I eat all these downsides and more, just for the battery life.
I was a (mostly) happy Asahi Fedora user for a while, but eventually went back to macos (for the battery life). I'm not sure how much better it is, but I actually trust that it will sleep and wake properly when I use its lid.
The prices and ram have been fucked though, long before the latest ram crisis. I have a macbook m1 air, which I bought second hand. I'm looking at maybe upgrading to a second hand m3 or m4 air (with more ram), but honestly the prices are just wrong. Whatever I buy will be too expensive and unable to run decent llm models.
In the very extreme case of not having access to charging for extended periods, I would understand the battery life argument, even though there are laptops you can buy with comparable battery life than are non mac, especially if you run a lightweight linux distro with i3wm that basically means your cpu sits fully idle when not in use (unlike Macs which constantly phone home to Apple)
But with fast charging and basically an outlet most everywhere you would actually use your laptop, that ship has sailed.
> even though there are laptops you can buy with comparable battery life than are non mac, especially if you run a lightweight linux distro with i3wm
I am totally a Linux person, but I have to say: I run Alpine with Sway, and my battery life is nothing compared to a Macbook. It's just another world, it doesn't remotely compare.
I am very much a Linux person, I have been running Linux on my personal computers (and mostly on my work machine) for 20 years. But in the last few years I changed company and had to work on an M-series Macbook, and the battery life is absolutely amazing.
For people who mostly use their browser and a few programs, I understand why they would want to use a Macbook. I mean, I can go for a full weekend without charging it, and I do programming stuff where I compile regularly.
Late intel macs are in fact crimes against thermal design, but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones (except the 14-inch M4 max, that one does throttle.). The keyboard is also no longer e-waste tier. The rest is true, but you may wish to update your talking points.
The Macs all throttle with heavy workload that raises the temps no matter what you do. The efficiency (and battery life) comes from the hardware being configured to do certain things very efficiently, like video decoding.
Compute is compute, Apple didn't circumvent physics. It just managed to take chunks of that compute that represents the most average use case, and make it more efficient, in the same way that ASIC mine bitcoins more efficiently than GPUS
As for keyboard, it still sucks. Impossible to clean without taking the thing apart, so if you get any dirt under the keys, its gonna be there for quite some time.
Isn't thermal throttling an issue for all laptops, really any computer?
Also the keyboards have improved a lot since the original butterfly design.
> but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones
It definitely is. Apple's mistake with the Intel Macs was refusing to throttle the chips before they hit their T junction temp (~95c). This is why a lot of Wintel machines will max out around 70-80c in sustained load while Macs will fly past those temps.
The same behavior is present in both Intel Macs and Apple Silicon chips - you can very nearly boil water on your Macbook if you push the GPU with sustained load like LLM prefill.
I don't get why you're so against Macs. I would invite you to show me a comparable laptop like a Macbook pro, with similar battery life, similar build quality, similar usability and functionality where you don't have to be a sysadmin every 2 days because [insert Linux driver] isn't compatible with [insert hardware].
Like honestly look into it and compare 1 to 1. Your talking points are outdated.
> I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts.
How ironic. There is no “blatant lie” in “their hardwares aren’t comparable to MacBook” if you don’t know what aspects they are comparing, but there are in your comment.
I will clarify, at the same price, the MacBook is good at: display, instant performance and battery life, trackpad, webcam, sound and microphones, build quality.
My workload: web development, video call, running VM.
I basically could not find any laptop comaprable in those aspect AT THE SAME PRICE.
The hardware isn't identical to a Mac, but that's because of copyright.
You can absolutely compare various chips and laptops to a Mac and end up with a fair comparison.
Are you aware that “it’s not comparable to” / “it doesn’t compare to” doesn’t literally mean that it’s strictly impossible to attempt a comparison? It means that the comparison is not favourable.
I'm very aware of that. I own multiple Macs, and even though I like the hardware I can't bring myself to daily drive any of them.
Comparisons are very subjective, you've got to look at the big picture and not the solipsistic one if you're going to call other people blatant liars.
Ah, right, we agree then. That’s the point I was making.
Lets not play the dumb games please. Its obvious that the poster mean that Apple hardware is better than the rest, which is simply not true.
It absolutely can be true depending on what you value. Let’s indeed not play dumb.
Almost no hardware is open anyway. Plus all of the hard problems have been solved on typical pc hardware.
Many of the problems aren't cracked whatsoever. For instance, Apple Silicon's PSCI power management interface is a mystery. PSCI code exists in other Linux devicetrees, but nobody knows how Apple implements theirs. So for the better half of a decade, Asahi users have relied on a hack to prevent their battery from draining constantly. We still don't have any prospective solutions, to my knowledge.
This is the weal-and-woe of reverse engineering. It's awesome that these machines now have native Vulkan 1.2 drivers, but it took years to get there. There are still unsolved problems 7 years after Apple Silicon hit shelves, and most newer hardware is broadly unsupported. The lesson here is a reiteration of what Linux users have always said - proprietary drivers suck.
Apple's PSCI interface is not a mystery, and there is perfect knowledge on how it is implemented. It isn't. Which is the actual problem, Linux wants PSCI, Apple platforms do not have it.
Case in point. Devicetree drivers make this much harder than ACPI (say what you will about ACPI) and there's no documentation that fills the gap.
Is this something like Fable can help with?
This is something that documentation would help with. Fable doesn't know anything that human engineers don't.
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marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585
For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.
>In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU.
Also these comments are worth considering.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377
> For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.
The Oxide Computer folks wrote their own AMD boot loader and have an entire chain of trust and apparently (?) basically got rid of the supervisor code (Ring -2 and -3). They also have custom motherboards with third-party BMCs.
Could something similar be done on Intel?
> Could something similar be done on Intel?
Yes: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%253Asite+phoronix.com+'Dasharo'
I suppose it's possible, after all if the thing can phone home and update itself, that could be spoofed so it updates itself with your code.
However if that phone home feature is read only, it could always just re-root itself.
What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project?
Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.
What good would it do Apple to shut down the project?
There’s no IP misuse and the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs. The built in lag time of the current situation ensures that macOS will never have its position as the dominant OS for Mac hardware challenged. Further, doing this would stoke the flames of the already red-hot internet Apple haters and unnecessarily burn goodwill. It’d be a loss across the board.
> … the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs.
What? Where do you get that?
The Apple Platform Security[1] white paper describes the secure boot process for Apple silicon. The Mac boot process is significantly more configurable than the iOS boot process, and it allows operating in reduced security modes. (Including running locally signed operating systems.)
Apple knows how to build an iPhone: if they wanted to lock down a Mac they would have simply done that. There's something like nine pages detailing the differences. What word describes that other than "intentional" design? The fact that you can sign and boot a third party OS isn't an "accident" if it's documented, and there's no "exploit" because this is functionality the platform supports; anyone can do it with tools already present on the (Apple-signed) recovery OS.
They certainly don't provide great support for people wanting to develop [drivers for] these operating systems, but the platform was very clearly engineered to support booting them.
[1]: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...
I guess I'm missing something then. The Asahi blog says "Apple’s boot tooling will only work with what it considers to be a “valid” macOS installation inside an APFS container." Sounds very adversarial to "the ability to boot an arbitrary OS."
It basically just has to look like macOS in some trivial sense, it doesn't have to be macOS, there are no obstacles. The system is designed specifically to enable booting custom compiled kernels and former members of the Apple team have said booting other OSes was intentionally left open. The company just doesn't make any guarantees about that.
Where is it stated in official Apple communications that Apple laptops will always support other OSes like Linux?
There you have it.
If they don't guarantee it, then better not depend on it. Or waste your time on it.
This also holds for members of the Asahi team. Unless they don't mind that a decade or so of their working life goes down the drain in one decision from Apple management or Apple lawyers.
That is irrelevant for the laptops Asahi currently support or are working on supporting.
It’s the difference between “there’s no published standards other than the reference implementation for some of the API” and “there’s no published standards and extremely monolithic reference implementation design coupled to proprietary blobs and considerable effort spent on signing/boot chain authentication to prevent third party implementations”. Apple is currently the former.
Because it explicitly has tooling for custom boot objects etc, and stated by asahi developers, maybe also apple people they know.
marcan mentioned in a few of his livestreams that the design seems very much intentional, plus a few of the tweets by Xeno Kovah who worked on the bootloader: https://x.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914716454526979.
Why would Apple do that?
If they did, I still have macOS, an OS I can easily disable all runtime protections and security on, rig up into a kernel debugger, arbitrarily dump memory of other processes and so on. If Apple takes away our ability to easily boot alternative kernels, the tools are readily available to find...alternative ways around iBoot security, which is not ideal for Apple since iOS iBoot is mostly the same as it is on macOS.
I find it hard to believe that Apple would purposefully shoot themselves in their own feet, unless you also believe that they would lock down the Mac as much as an iPad, ever.
Kernel debugging on Apple silicon largely does not work in any useful way
>What good does that bring if Apple shuts down the project?
How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical.
>Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use?
It's possible such a thing exists, of course, it's possible on intel, or AMD, or any ARM chips, or any chip at all. However such a back door, if discovered, would not be accessible only to them. It would have the same problem that all such backdoors have, in that if Apple can exploit it, others can exploit it. Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door, and they have relied on this as a legal defence, and frankly it's hard to see how they would benefit from having such a back door. A chunk of their business model and legal liability protection depends on not having such a back door.
>Wishful thinking if you ask me.
If you say so, this is all about relative risk. However what reason might anyone have for thinking that any other platform, such as Intel with it's proprietary supervisor code with remote updatability, is more under the control of the user? There may be platforms that have a better security architecture that's more under the control of the user, but I can't think of any of the major ones that does. Which would you suggest?
> Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door
And, at least in the case of their private cloud compute, they encourage third party audit of their claims and even provide a virtual research environment running an instance of their PCC on your mac.
The UK explicitly requesting a backdoor to iCloud's advanced data protection forcing Apple to pull the service instead also tells me their claims are legit.
It's certainly possible a backdoor exists in hardware instead, or elsewhere in the stack but given Apple's surprising relative openness for how they implement their privacy products & the research papers they put out I'm inclined to believe them for now. (I say relative because its not open source, which is the only way to be 100% certain, but their research papers are surprisingly in depth).
> How could they do that?
iBoot? Asahi needs iBoot to boot third-party volumes for Linux to run properly. Apple controls iBoot; if they burn an eFuse and disable third-party volumes in a "Security" update, Asahi cannot fight back.
You cannot boot macOS with an unsigned iBoot firmware, so writing your own bootloader isn't an option. If a fuse is burned, you also cannot downgrade to older firmwares. The entire system is designed to give Apple the ability to disable other OSes in a macOS update if they ever decided to.
iBoot firmware exists and is already in our hands.
Any manufacturer could put an eFuse in any of their hardware and lock it. No hardware can be proven not to have such exploits. That's the first point marcan makes in that post.
> Any manufacturer could put an eFuse in any of their hardware and lock it.
This is my point too, though. Do we trust Apple to not burn a hardware fuse if their community one-ups them? They've already done it on iPad and iPhone hardware when users find a boot ROM exploit. All that they'd need to do is push an update for "security" purposes, and then the new boot flow could refuse to boot into unsigned volumes or deny running unsigned bootloaders. There would be no way to downgrade.
This is basic ARM security architecture stuff, I'm a little shocked that people can't imagine how this type of lockout is possible. There are tons of commodity ARM boards that are effectively bricked and eFused to user-hostile security epochs.
> last time I looked at the schematics for one of those
When was the last time they looked at the schematics for one of the Apple machines? Oh, wait.
These efforts will also save a lot of old macbooks from the landfill in the future.
What do you mean? You mean not on Apple hardware? That exists, that's basically every other Linux distro in existence.
Apple could also support open standards like UEFI/dt/acpi. Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. This would projects such as Asahi a lot easier and more reliable.
And I'm not even talking about drivers
> Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel.
In the x86 sphere it isn't that much better either, most ACPI tables are thoroughly broken if Linux announces itself as Linux and not as Windows. In fact, a lot of machines' ACPI tables barely work on Windows.
UEFI or its predecessor ACPI are complicated and support a long list of legacy stuff that has absolutely no value to Apple at all so why should they do the development? It's like asking Tesla for a fuel tank so it would be easier to install a gasoline engine.
You don't have to support "legacy stuff", just make sure a modern linux kernel can boot without apple-specific workarounds
Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware? Should they also ensure Windows and Android can boot on the hardware easily?
> Why should Apple care if a modern Linux kernel boots without workarounds on their hardware?
To sell more hardware?
Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS. It's not like Apple needs this tiny market, but it wouldn't hurt them either.
> Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS.
Citation needed.
Apple still ships a copy of Boot Camp Assistant in macOS Tahoe. It was great to be able to dual boot on Intel Macs and licensing BS aside it would be nice to be able to boot Win11 ARM on an M1.
These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day. That's a valiant effort and they're doing it wonderfully. Regardless, one of the points of Linux is to install it on as much hardware as possible. Do you think people that managed to get it installed on iPods, PS5s, Wiis, Chromebooks, routers, Nintendo Switches, etc. should all stop just because they're doing something unsupported? Most of those cases were met with friction by the original OEM. If anything, Apple has been pretty laissez faire about the whole thing compared to Nintendo and Sony who will ban your console if you hack it.
Those laptops don't need to go to any landfill. They are much too precious to not recycle the metals and other materials and will be taken care of if you return them to the manufacturer. (by law, at least in the EU)
Still, reuse > recycling
Recycling the metals is obviously far less useful than being able to still operate them even if Apple stops macOS updates for them!
Yeah should they design their own computer chips? And do literally everything need for such a platform. That is literally 10000x the effort. There is no change the same group of people could create such an open solution. Hardware is just much harder in so many ways and no comparable OpenPlatform exists.
Will this forever exist as a Fedora "remix". Or will we find the support in upstream so I can one day run Debian-based distro?
I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.
They are upstreaming their patches, so upstream Linux will eventually get the necessary drivers.
Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.
Or, if you find Ubuntu acceptable, there's Ubuntu Asahi: https://ubuntuasahi.org/
EDIT: After some googling I found this wiki article: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances.
As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)
And at least Fedora is rock solid these days, which is more than I can say about Ubuntu. Its really a great distro.
It is, but I have been suspicious of redhat since IBM bought them and feel the rugpull could come at any old time.
You can still run Arch, and Ubuntu Asahi also exists. (1)
They’re working hard on upstreaming everything exactly so it’s easier for any distribution to be ported.
1- https://ubuntuasahi.org/
I wish more people on HN learned how to build their own kernel and run it.
A distro is just window dressing and flavor.
There is a bit more to it on ARM I'm afraid. The device trees are complex and it feels to me it takes it out of the realm of 'anyone can and should do it'
Device trees are certainly less portable across hardware, and more difficult to create than just booting a generic kernel on a machine that supports ACPI. However, the device tree is shipped as part of the kernel, and as long as the bootloader correctly loads the DTB and kernel, it's no more difficult to swap out the userspace portion/rootfs than any other Linux system, generally.
There is an effort by the Bananas Team to get standard Debian working on Apple silicon, and they have installation instructions for how to get it running now with an additional unofficial repository: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1#The_Bana...
I haven't actually tried to install it yet, though.
linux-asahi is available in Void Linux:
https://voidlinux.org/download/#arm%20platforms
It's a regular package of linux in the distro: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/tree/master/srcp...
The founder of asahi linux famously quit due to how hard it was to upstream patches. It’s not easy to deal with linus’ project.
I can’t see that being a bad thing considering that the kernel is mandatory software in the Linux world. You would want to have high standards for what gets added.
You should have high standards.
Torvalds often crosses that line into outright toxicity. I've written a few kernel patches that I never tried to upstream for that reason.
You'll never be able to agree on where that line should go. First because there's a cultural component to it. I'm from Spain so I can only talk for myself, but while he uses rude language, nothing I've ever read from him ever seemed particularly offensive. And second because any activity involving a large group of people will need some amount of toxicity if only to prevent other toxic people from derailing it, and since nobody thinks of themselves as the one that is being toxic to the project, there will always be some friction. You might not like fevers either, but they are necessary for a functioning immune system.
What a ridiculous comment. Here's a small sample of Torvalds being an ass.
https://github.com/corollari/linusrants/blob/master/table.md
Someone who doesnt see a problem with this is probably one of those toxic people who dont realize they're toxic you mentioned. Nobody wants to be treated how Torvalds treated people.
Also, coming from an orchestral background, I'm well aware of situations where the leader needs to be gruff. A gentle conductor will never get the idiot violists playing in tune. (A harsh one won't either, but at least the violists will be too scared to make any noise.) That said, it's still unacceptable for a conductor to cross the line from gruff to personal attacks.
I find the debates about his toxicity to be essentially pointless, especially since he's not in an employer employee relationship with the people he works with.
Nobody has to work with him, and you chose not to. You don't contribute your kernel patches because you don't like the guy. And that's fine, and I even agree with your assessment that he's been abrasive.
On the other hand, it's his project. He does get to be dictator of his own project and the philosophies behind it. This is the beauty of open source: unlike proprietary software where money and power is everything, everyone is free to fork the kernel and stop dealing with him. In the open source world there are a long list of forks that have turned out to be more popular than their original projects.
The other beautiful thing about open source in this arrangement is that the people he's being a jerk to are people he has an employer power dynamic over.
If my boss is a jerk to me, yeah, that really sucks, because if I get fired my family doesn't eat. I'm forced to interact with that person, at least for a time.
I had a typo, “the people he’s being a jerk to aren’t peope he has an employee power dynamic over”
> What a ridiculous comment
I wonder if starting a comment by despising the parent is just being gruff or it leans on personal attack...
Culture that gave world "microagression", "harasment", cancel culture and now numeric "hate". "Not toxic".
> Nobody wants to be treated how Torvalds treated people.
Exactly, nobody wants but so many can't stop until treated.
> Stop this "we can break stuff" crap. Who maintains udev? Regressions are not acceptable. I'm not going to change the kernel because udev broke, f*ck it. Seriously. More projects need to realize that regressions are totally and utterly unacceptable. ... That just encourages those package maintainers to be shit maintainers. ... And stop blaming the kernel for user space breakage!...
Hate 0.832673044602
For common sense.
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> nothing I've ever read from him ever seemed particularly offensive
You may have missed the "retroactively aborted" one.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495
To be fair, he's got much more self-control now.
That post is so exaggerated that it is funny.
That implementation is also hilariously bad:
> read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte
The irony of censoring "f*ck" while saying something like that.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that, even at his worst, Linus limited his toxicity to professional-programmer kernel contributors (i.e. people who were employed by linux distros or hardware companies to contribute to Linux). Can anyone else remember/confirm this?
Regardless, to a newbie potential kernel contributor, that high level of toxicity can be intimidating, and the professional-programmers-only aspect is non-obvious, so it's easy to see why this would discourage hobbyists/free-time programmers from contributing.
That is my understanding also. It was mostly for people who were around and should know better. He would never do this to a new contributor. Granted, he almost never sees code from new contributors in review. But what he will do is, if there is something egregious from a new contributor, he lights of the maintainer of the system.
example. I don't remember what all system Greg KH is responsible for, but for the sake of argument, lets say USB. You as a new contributor, try to contribute a patch to the USB subsystem. Turns out it is total garbage. For it to get Linus's attention, it has to have gone through review by Greg KH. Linus will light up Greg and only Greg because Greg has been doing this for 20+ years.
Now, do I feel he sometimes goes over board and unprofessional? Yes. But people keep contributing and the thing keeps chugging along.
Or it may attract talented and responsible people, since it makes it more of an honor if a patch gets through the gauntlet. Especially since the gauntlet is fit for a system that literally affects billions of people in so many ways.
Not very likely. It doesn't work that way. Linus usually don't respond to individual patches and hasn't for over 20 years.
A subsystem maintainer will pick up your patch if it is good, and they will deal with Linus for you. Most subsystems have their own mailing list because you need to visibility.
The process is described pretty well in Documentation/.
Torvalds didn't even come close to toxicity shown by marcan on social media, so your diction is downright dishonest and spreading FUD (conveniently, marcan deleted all the generated drama from socials).
Asahi founder (plus community community) was heavy with drama and loved to attack and brigade anyone that didn't immediately bow down and listen to demands of their team and social media entourage. This isn't how the most important OS in the world should be led and Torvalds was right to call out that toxic behaviour.
Re-read my comment dude. I didnt say a fucking thing about Marcan. I simply said I won't contribute to the kernel due to Torvalds' behavior.
Let's read the rest of the thread please :)
You're the one that replied to me in a bad faith manner, asshole.
"Disgusting" Linux sched_ext Source Code Restructured Following Complaint By Linus Torvalds - Phoronix https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Sched-Ext-Restructured
I mean, surely there is a more defensive way to communicate his preference, and the word disgusting is a bit unpolite. But still, does this really count as toxic behaviour?
really is too bad FreeBSD couldn't be an alternative
Upstreaming something like this is a monumental task, even small changes can take ages. It will take a while.
They've actually been focusing on upstreaming for what feels like 2 years now. It's really slowed down progress but it's important for the longevity of the project. They still have so much left to upstream but little by little it's happening
i've been using nixos on an m2 air for a year now, the kernel is enough
You will probably always need a "fork" because Asahi needs a custom installer and bootloader. It is also probably a good idea to recompile everything for the Apple ARM architecture.
Asahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow.
There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is focused more on m1 and m2 models. Even so, to this day both of them have issues with idle power management and alt-dp implementation, preventing many to switch, by the time they will have been ironed out the value of machines would be significantly diminished.
It is a miracle how much so few can do, but in the end, despite ubiquitous media coverage it looks like team's enthusiasm and passion have dwindled to the point that even m1 air will never be ready.
> pace of development is doomed to be too slow
When the new leadership team took over, they announced that they would prioritize upstreaming the existing work over adding support for newer hardware.
Upstreaming their changes into the kernel took time.
Now the announced that they had started work on the M3 in February and things are progressing well.
> On top of the above, we also have PCIe, WiFi, Bluetooth, NVMe, keyboard, trackpad, and other core SoC block drivers working in Linux for M3 series machines. Most of this work has come by way of Yureka, who has been very busy hacking on both m1n1 and Linux with her M3 series machines for a while now. We still have a ways to go before we can start enabling Asahi Installer support for these machines, but progress is rapid so watch this space!
That sounds more like talented people doing meticulous work than doom.
If they can set a single machine as target every few years and make it work, that would be a lot better than having no alternative.
M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.
M1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch.
Hopefully, they will manage to get it done someday.
That's simply not true. I have been daily driving asahi for 2.5 years or so now on an M2 Max macbook. In it's been one of the most reliable and smooth experiences I have had ever using linux. DP alt made is working fine for me. I'm not sure about battery, I never measured.
If we overlook battery life and DP alt mode being funky, crucial for laptop use, it becomes essentially a desktop tethered to the desk.
Do you actually use dp alt mode and not HDMI for external displays? What DE/WM are you using your mac with?
I use DP alt mode and also the HDMI port to drive two screens. I use hyprland and runs fine after configuration.
My battery certainly last a few hours. I use it as any other laptop I had before and use it daily on trains. So I cannot at all agree with your POV that it's a desktop. The battery is working without problems.
Do you know how M2 support compares to M1? Trying to figure out if M1 is the better choice for a used macbook to run Asahi on.
It's essentially the same. Afaik there is no feature the M1 has on asahi that is still missing on M2.
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> The firmware loaded by XNU is not verified by the CM3. It will begin executing from its reset vector when signalled, no matter what is actually there. What if we just… used our own firmware?
Without taking away from the unutterably awesome achievement of writing custom firmware against a proprietary moving target, I worry about this one specifically. While Apple will hopefully continue the practice of not going out of their way to break third-party OSes, it doesn’t seem unlikely that they will introduce hardware signing for firmware blobs or the data they supply at runtime when programming the hardware; that’s a reasonable security concern for Apple to address. I hope this gamble pays off though!
The firmware blobs (and the system files) for MacOS live on a read only partition that is digitally signed.
Then how was the Asahi team able to load their own firmware? I was concerned about that process--whatever it is--being something apple might lock down. If it's already likely locked down to Apple's satisfaction, that's good news.
Macs allow the machine owner to install (and boot) a completely unsigned OS on a different partition without having it affect security when you do boot MacOS.
The Mac partitions are encrypted by default and the system partition is signed and read only.
It's nice to see M3 support progressing well.
They first mentioned that efforts to add M3 support were starting in February:
> For quite some time, m1n1 has had basic support for the M3 series machines. What has been missing are Devicetrees for each machine, as well as patches to our Linux kernel drivers to support M3-specific hardware quirks and changes from M2. Our intent was always to get to fleshing this out once our existing patchset became more manageable
https://asahilinux.org/2026/02/progress-report-6-19/
As someone rocking a M3 Pro, I personally don't expect to be able to try Asahi out until mid/late next year on my MBP, but I am looking forward to it nonetheless!
It is exciting that they are working on AVD driver.
if i use ffmpeg or VLC on a M1+ Mac, does it use AVD?
It can if it calls into VideoToolbox
not on asahi, no clue about macos.
I really wish Apple would fund a small team to open source some documentation and drivers to help Asahi along. I know they won't, but I can dream. It would be a drop in the bucket for Apple but would cement their hardware as de facto for silicon valley engineers (even more so than today).
Apple's own hypervisor framework is close enough to what you said that i run Fedora and Arch Linux builds via the UTM app, set to use Apple Silicon virtualization (_not_ emulation), which is a wrapper around said framework.
it's excellent, and made me reformat and erase Asahi a couple years ago.
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
https://docs.getutm.app/installation/macos/
So osx is just a bootloader for Fedora?
the analogy (even if humorous) isn't exact, since i can have apple silicon's hypervisor running macos and fedora/arm and arch/arm all concurrently, and can have full desktop environments on the linux instances, full-screened to individual macos desktops.
They do, what Apple does release is referenced often in discussions.
https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blob/f6217f89...
https://lore.kernel.org/asahi/c13d95d0-911f-48f6-b4ca-8a5e9a...
God bless the asahi team
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I wonder what the dev/CI process looks like on this.
Will it ultimately be manually loading a build into specific hardware each time, or is there a level of automation that can be done here?
m1n1 does a lot of fun stuff here: https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/tethered-boot/
It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Yeah probably they want to be free to bork it, but if they released some documentation or patches, they'd be expected to keep them up to date and working at the very least.
>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.
You do realize that Apple is a public company and one can just go look at their financials like their latest 10-Q [0] right? For the most recent 6 month half (ending March 28 2026) I'm seeing $194 billion for product sales and $61 billion for service sales. The gross margins are certainly higher on services, at 77%, but 40% product margins are nothing to sneeze at either, and the disparity in absolute sales means the absolute dollar gross margins are $77 billion for products vs $46 billion for services.
So I don't see how you can assert that their "big money maker is their app store" from those numbers. Hardware matters a lot, and furthermore Apple sells services (like AppleCare+) that are specific to hardware and thus even a Linux user might still be interested in.
And without their hardware, their services would evaporate. There is a much tighter link there than with many companies. So they're on the hook for continued R&D and capex on that no matter what, you can't really separate that out, and in turn it's always going to be useful to have more volume to amortize it with.
I think primarily it comes down to corporate DNA, which is powerful. There are plenty of Mac hardware, software and service markets in pro/business/enterprise Apple has neglected or abandoned over the years, including ones making oodles of money, not out of any 4D chess but just because it doesn't fit them as an organization.
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0: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000320193/37f5e9c...
> Their big money maker is their app store
That said, their AirPods division could be a Fortune 500 on its own.
why do people just make stuff up ? apple is a hardware company with supply chain excellence that eclipses most pc manufs giving them entire verticals of control, that joined the services game later on. their services don't even come close to the offerings of other tech giants and they're largely okay with it. the bulk of their revenue has always been and continues to be hardware and the bulk of their r&d war chest funds the development and advancement of hardware.
> Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware.
That's just your made up opinion, completely not supported by their financials.
I think Apple sees the writing on the wall with hardware feature increases and hardware longevity.
Sell a phone that is good for a few years, or get sell a phone and also get monthly 100% margin payments indefinitely? Given that phones are going to be useful for longer and longer periods, the replacement/upgrade cycle is definitely going to slow. They’re running out of compelling reasons you MUST have the new phone, falling back on dumb shit like making it stupid colors so you can wield it like a $1400 status symbol. It already does all of the camera and video stuff any normal person could ever ask for, which was previously the main way of differentiating smartphones.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the internal mandate/goal is equal services profit to hardware profit. It is a LOT cheaper and easier to vibe code new services than to design and build new features into the best phone in the world that has already been aggressively iterated on for two decades. Additionally, new signups are all profit as the marginal cost of additional subscribers is zero. Apple’s future is in subscriptions, that’s clear.
Are they there now? No. Does almost every single product decision they have made in the last 10 years point to this future? Absolutely. This “sign up pretty please” user-hostile bullshit (which now everywhere in all products, or nudged toward by all products) is the most un-Apple thing that I have ever witnessed in my 30+ years spent watching hawk-eyed at every single product, accessory, product variation, and service they have ever released.
I sometimes wonder if Jobs would have reached the same conclusion and pulled the company into the same direction in service of profitmaxxing vs spending the company’s time and resources producing and selling things that are insanely great. Can you name one Apple service that is insanely great? (iMessage’s uptime comes to mind, but that doesn’t directly generate subscriptions, and certainly doesn’t generate a single shred of the unalloyed glee in customers that was the characteristic phenomenon that originally put Apple on the map for decades.)
(Unrelated to this topic, the closest I get to that feeling anymore mostly gets caused by DJI and Anker.)
If there was a Linux Apple App Store, I would buy stuff from it. I already buy from Steam. OSS doesn't have the answer to everything. Boutique software has value that people are willing to pay for.
Linux applications are being sold. In fact, GPL-licensed applications get sold, so it's not even the OSS part that's holding you back. ElementaryOS even has its optionally-paid app store: https://appcenter.elementary.io/ Autodesk and other industrial software providers are quite happy to sell you software, though unfortunately not through a unified app store.
In practice, I expect a paid Linux app store to go down about as well as the Microsoft Store has. Especially now, in the age of vibecoding.
> If there was a Linux Apple App Store, I would buy stuff from it.
I believe you.
> I already buy from Steam.
I believe this even more.
flathub.org ?
This is just plain wrong. Apple generates most revenue and profits with hardware and it's not even close.
Apple's profit margins on many services are at 76% (according to Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/01/13/apples-de...), over twice that of their hardware sales. Margins are higher on reselling licensed content (their Spotify and Netflix alternatives), but their customer base for those is still rapidly growing according to their 2025 report.
Tim Cook said it himself: Apple is not a hardware company (https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hard...).
> Apple's profit margins on many services are at 76% (according to Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/01/13/apples-de...), over twice that of their hardware sales.
That's not what you said. Their margins on software and hardware are irrelevant to what they, as a company, make most money off on — which was your original claim on which you are wrong and got called out on.
So annoying when people can't just admit they're wrong and instead gaslight people with their changed narrative.
Hardware revenue is 3x the services revenue, even with half the margins it still generates more profit than services. I get that Apple would like to increase service revenue but they are a hardware company at heart and their financial statements show it too
If you read the last link you'll see he just means Apple could slash its hardware margins (if needed) and still make tons of money.
As we saw recently, they decided they are, after all, a hardware company, since they decided not to slash their margins...
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.
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.
Do you have any sources for hardware sales vs app store revenue?
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
That's revenue though. Fixed costs for hardware is probably much higher. If we looked at profits, the percentages would probably look quite different.
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.
Let’s not conflate total App Store revenue and Ad revenue.
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.
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?
> 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?
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.)
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.
FYI there’s software that can upgrade old Macs to officially unsupported OSs: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
He found out about one of those, but wasn't comfortable using it anyway.
But in this case it was Microsoft who forced him to upgrade, wasn't it?
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.
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.
I'm not sure he's still receiving security updates, as the MacBook in question is from ~2015. But, if this is the case, then you would have a point.
That's over 10 years of service. But if it's a Pro, then the latest OS officially supported is Monterey, which received its last update in 2024. So I would consider that very fair of Apple, even impressive.
It is fair if you compare Apple with other manufacturers, but it is still unfair in absolute terms. The hardware still works, and the work they're doing to support other models would let macOS work on that laptop as well, as proven by tools that let you do the upgrade unofficially.
Eh, with prebuilt PCs it’s muddy because the bulk of heavy lifting is done by Microsoft, not the manufacturer. It’s not unusual at all to pull up the firmware/drivers/etc page for a random laptop and find that updates stopped rolling out about 2 years after its introduction to the market, despite Reddit and similar being filled with reports of firmware bugs for that particular model.
Fair point, but I think the lack of those updates impacts the average consumer much less than lack of OS updates.
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.
> Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.
Yeah, they pretty much lied about that. It is only in a special Windows ultra-power saving mode that heavily throttles background tasks, forces the screen to be 30% lower brightness, heavily downclocks the CPU (50%+ less performance!), etc; The MacBook has to do no such tricks.
You're not gonna see Frameworks that equal the perf-per-watt of Apple until they release a model with a Snapdragon chip.
Frameworks have one benefit that other laptops don't: there's only a few parts. So for example for your Framework speakers you can find an EasyEffects / Pipewire (+bankstown?) tune profile that makes them sound better than 99% of laptops on the market. It's basically the Raspberry Pi effect.
It is well-documented that Panther Lake is highly power efficient. I wouldn’t personally argue against that.
The days of assuming that Apple has the best chip efficiency are coming to an end, especially if the Windows/Qualcomm platform is a workable choice for your needs (maybe someday Linux support will get better).
Apple still has a lead but it’s small enough that it’s not a good reason to choose an Apple system on its own. The M1 MacBook systems got double the battery life of competitors, now 5 years later, Apple systems are at best getting ~10% better battery life than competitors, and some systems like the XPS 14 have Apple beat entirely.
Obviously getting 20 hours in real world productivity use was never realistic, and it’s not realistic on a MacBook Pro, either. I disagree that framework was “basically lying.” They live-streamed the laptop hitting 20 hours, it doesn’t matter that they changed settings to get there. MacBooks have a brightness slider, too. You aren’t getting anywhere close to 20 hours on a MacBook without turning the screen brightness down.
IIRC the MacBook Air/Pro can’t even make it to 20 hours regardless of settings.
The point is that the new framework 13 Pro laptop isn’t a 5-7 hour battery life experience like the previous models. Instead, you can expect 10+ hours depending on what you’re doing it, so it’s a full work day.
As far as I can tell, Framework’s claimed battery numbers require Windows to achieve, which is more than enough reason for many to not consider the FW 13 Pro as an option. If it can’t run Linux without sacrifice compared to Windows there’s no point.
Standby time is likely also a major issue, unless Intel suddenly reversed course and decided to support proper sleep again.
It’s still going to be a respectable performer in Linux. The whole point of the 20 hour stunt was to show that it’s a major improvement and not a small one. Maybe it would have been better to show a default-settings Linux and Windows for comparison but I can understand why they wanted to hit 20 hours for marketing.
Framework specifically has stated that they worked very hard to improve standby time and claim that it’s dramatically better. Being able to use LPDDR5x LP-CAMM2 modules aids in standby time significantly. We’ll find out soon when the first reviewers get their retail units in, probably within a month or so.
For standby time, my current framework 13 has never bothered me. It’s great that Macs have incredible standby but it’s much less of a dealbreaker than I originally thought it would be. I just have sleep to hibernate set up in Linux.
My system sleeps for 2 hours then hibernates afterward. If I am putting my system down for 2 hours I’m likely done using it for the day anyway.
In three comments you’ve moved the goalpost on the 20-hours-of-battery comment multiple times.
Just take the L, dude.
If you can point out where my goalposts moved I’d be happy to entertain the idea, but I’m not seeing it.
To clarify for you, “moving the goalposts” means that I changed my definitions over time. You’ll notice that in my comments I never changed my definition of what it means to have good battery life. I know sometimes turns of phrase are easy to misuse so I hope that helps you out.
There’s no winner or loser here. We’re just discussing technology. I’d appreciate if you tried to add conversation value rather than just dissing me personally.
Panther Lake is an impressive chip. The only MacBook Pro that can achieve 20+ hours of battery life at all with any setting is the 16” model that comes with the largest battery capacity allowed on a commercial airplane. It’s really not framework’s achievement, it’s the chip that’s so good, and that’s great for consumers because you can find a lot of competition on the market that has the coveted “all day battery life” without compromising on performance.
Panther Lake is impressive for x86, but decidedly middling when stacked up against a field including ARM.
The problem is that x86 can (almost) match ARM battery life but at much worse performance, or match the performance at much worse battery life. That's what the statistics don't show you when they show either max performance or max battery life tests.
I repeat it rather often on this site but it's because they're such impressive numbers: an M1 Ultra gets 70% of the performance of an RTX 3090 at 25% of the power envelope, and it beats out a desktop class Core i9 from that era at 30% of the power envelope.
Nvidia, Intel and AMD would commit murder for those kind of perf per watt numbers.
Is there a laptop with super-awesome battery life on Linux? I'll buy one if so.
I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?
It’s not about dinging Framework specifically and more about if you want *nix and top tier battery life, MacBooks remain the best option.
My understanding is that the reason why Linux still struggles in this front is that nobody has put in the hardware-specific optimization work to make it happen. There’s also some friction with how the bulk of Linux dev attention is paid to servers rather than portable consumer hardware.
Along those lines, IMO these "spec wars" are not that important. I get that some people want the best bang for their buck, but pretty much everything has more than enough speed and battery life for most practical uses in my opinion.
I am probably not competent to improve linux battery life myself (or at least I certainly don't have the time to get into that). But I can choose to spend my money on hardware and companies that explicitly support Linux, even if they aren't at the very top of the spec sheet. This has the best practical chance of convincing big-money companies and Linux kernel experts to actually spend time and money on this. Meanwhile, buying a Macbook and installing Linux on it is fine, I guess, but also invisible to the corporate world.
On this note, the world where buying a Framework or really any other Windows PC meant getting roughly 1/2 the battery life of a MacBook really doesn't exist anymore like it did in 2020, so long as you do your research and buy the right system.
I think there's a lot of assumption among the group of people who have stuck with MacBooks since the M1 days that shopping the competition means compromising with a huge performance/battery life/value gap, but that reality that existed in 2020 is much different than the current situation in 2026.
If you are in the market for a MacBook Air for the kinds of things that most people use MacBook Airs for, the average user won't notice that the battery life or performance on a computer equipped with a Panther Lake or Qualcomm chip is different from a MacBook Air at all.
Are these chips exactly the same price/performance ratio of an M5? Maybe not. But, if it's close enough, it's close enough.
There are ones with decent to good battery life. There are none with awesome battery life and abso-fucking-lutely none for super-awesome battery life.
That was one thing I never realized I needed until I had it. Having my laptop basically be optional to charge 99% of the time I use it changed my life. I can take it out with 20% left having not charged it in a week and still get a workday out of it. wtaf
Killer battery life is a defining feature of a laptop in my opinion, unless we’re talking hulking desktop replacement workstation laptops or something. Aside from physical attributes, nothing modulates portability like battery life does.
The user of a laptop with top tier battery life isn’t tethered to the wall, doesn’t need to care about availability of power outlets, and in many circumstances doesn’t even need to carry a charging cable and brick (or if they do, they can get by on trickle-charging with a tiny 15w phone brick overnight). This kind of laptop is in its own class of ultraportability.
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.
I personally think the 13 Pro is the one that’s truly competitive, the 16” is a very different story and not something I recommend specifically.
Someone looking that machine who wants strong GPU performance, I’d probably send over to a Zephyrus G16 or something like that, and give up the modularity.
SSD and RAM speed specs aren’t really something that impacts the user experience unless you’re doing local LLM work.
What does impact the user experience, for example, is having access to hundreds of thousands of PC games by not being platform locked. Or maybe your user experience is impacted by having upgradable storage.
This obviously depends on individual needs, and I’m certainly not saying either system is bad. But I am saying that the Apple “experience” is often assumed to be the best when it does have some downsides.
Even the fact that there’s no charge port on the right side of the MacBook Air/Neo is a user experience downside (of course, not every PC laptop has that feature, but you can find them in the same price category as the Air).
I sold my MacBook Pro because I needed 2TB and couldn’t afford it from Apple. Being stuck with 512GB when 2TB drives cost under $200 at the time was stifling.
I’m mainly looking at the 16” mbp because of the beautiful screen and the refined hardware. For the work I use the laptop on my lap for (or in the evening at the kitchen table) to compare products, research holidays etc, I notice that 13” is too small to comfortably hold two browsers next to each other plus room for notes.
Then sometimes when I’m on the go I like to play a game or two, but nothing seriously requiring graphics power
SSD speed and RAM speed start mattering when memory pressure is high. And when doing stuff with video and photo editing.
The storage price is indeed steep and now the RAM price as well. I wish I hit the buy button when I had the chance before the price increase.
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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.
I would recommend something like a Zephyrus G16 to someone who is interested in a 16” laptop with powerful graphics and a MacBook Pro-like footprint.
It’s easy to diss Apple alternatives and call them unrefined and all that, but to the right person, there are downsides to a Mac.
For example, the current MacBook Pro models with higher end chips prioritize quietness over heat and get very hot to the touch under heavy workloads.
Unless you are in music production, a little fan noise never hurt anyone, and the idea that windows laptops sound like hair dryers when doing basic tasks like browsing the web is very outdated.
Apple is revered for refinement and quality yet they get some basic ergonomics wrong like the sharp edges near your wrist and the notch blocking the menu bar.
Never thought I'd think about switching from Apple. M1 was handsdown the best buy ever and I was sure my next laptop would be an Apple as well. But looking at framework, this looks really nice. Apple-ish but without some of the drawbacks (also, while windows stinks, not really a MacOS fanboy tbh). Makes me kinda regret I was lazy and locked myself in using Apple passwords app.
For what it's worth, the Apple password implementation on Windows is actually pretty good. No love for Linux, though.
FYI Apple Passwords supports exporting of items including Passkeys, which can be then imported in e.g. Bitwarden.
TIL about exporting Passkeys, that’s a great tip.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Mainly I’m concerned about shortcut conflicts such as command q
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You mean the company that rescinds your contract if you exercise the rights granted to you by GPL licenses? What about it?
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?
Isn't canonical the company replacing GNU coreutils with a broken and full of CVE replacement because it doesn't have a copyleft license?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> The entire point of Intel Macs was for running Windows on a Mac
That wasn't the point for Apple. After pointing out that PowerPC hadn't hit 3GHz (as he had promised two years prior) and that there was no PowerBook G5, Steve Jobs clearly explained the rationale for intel Macs:
> As we look ahead, we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you, and we don't know how to build them with the future PowerPC road map.
https://allaboutstevejobs.com/videos/keynotes/wwdc_2005
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.
I don't think they would. What market would that exactly be targeting? Devs, who are overwhelmingly just provided macbooks via their employer? They'll still run macOS because IT requires them to.
Linux Gamers? The arm story for proton still needs work (hopefully the steam frame will help). Nvidia+Microsoft are working on it with that new surface ultra, but verdicts out on whether that will boot Linux or not as its specifically a Microsoft partnership.
General non-dev, non-gaming, non-creative users? I don't think they'd buy a mac specifically for Linux either. That market is much better served by Framework, System76, Tuxedo, Lenovo (thinkpads), etc.
And Apple certainly isn't going to win over any FOSS purists either.
I think the intersection of "I want macbook pro hardware" and "I must run Linux natively on it for my workflow" is a lot smaller than you think.
Developers, of course.
Outside of the US, macOS is not that popular. Where I grew up, no school had Macs on their computer labs, but they did have Linux. You could have lived your entire life near computers and never been in contact with macOS. I had. The first time I saw macOS was in college in a digital media lab.
I like macOS, but I do prefer Linux.
I can't ask for a Framework, System76 or Tuxedo laptop at work because they don't sell them directly and locally (within my country). They don't want to risk importing these machines, sending them back if they're broken, and not having a local replacement. But since the iPod, Apple has had a meaningful global presence, so of course, I can ask for a Macbook.
For a while we could pick Intel Macbooks and install Linux, and maybe I live in a tiny bubble, but many people I know did just that.
> Why should they when they have macOS already?
Because Apple cuts support for old MacBooks eventually, even if the hardware still works perfectly. See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745199
That’s not a sales tactic. Apple supports their old hardware with updates longer than anyone in the industry. The recent ones have been due to the architecture transition, maintaining BC with amd64 has significant costs.
This is what I assumed as well, but online I found people who were able to update a ~2015 MacBook Pro to a version of macOS more recent than the latest supported one, and it still worked.
Both are true. Apple's official qualification, continuous integration, bug fixing, backporting, etc. takes more effort than a hobbyist getting things to (mostly) work. But the main issue for Apple is focus: Apple wants its product development organization to focus on the next new thing, not on the past.
I'm mostly OK with Apple's 7-10 years of support, but I also have older Macs that still work fine and that I wish were safe to connect to the internet while running macOS - without relying on various hacks or workarounds.
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.
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.)
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?"
THey do pay a few thousand FTEs - the OS they built for the hardware is named macOS and fits their specifications.
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.
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
IIRC Apple actually helped with MacPorts in the beginning
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"
MacPorts is still around and is a perfectly viable package manager, I prefer it over homebrew
actually long ago before homebrew there was MacPorts which Apple actually was part of.
Is the github sponsors link a 404 for everyone else?
Not for me, perhaps fixed in the last hour already.
I wonder how much LLMs have been leveraged to help Asahi lately, there’s extremely powerful for reverse-engineering. Have they written about it?
They forbid their use.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/
It's a shame (in practice, although I get the philosophical idea).
I think the lawsuit chances are very low because FAANG right now depend way too much on LLM being legal, so they would not want to shoot themselves in the foot.
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