Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community? So much wasted effort when they can just share a pdf.
> when they can just share a pdf.<p>I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.<p>The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.<p>I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.<p>Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.<p>Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into account.
> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.<p>Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
In the beginning, Bootcamp had a real job.<p>It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.<p>Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.<p>If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.
> not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.<p>The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful
Apple's hypervisor.framework lets other OS instances run very very fast with the UTM app (open source on github, but i use the prebuilt version from the App Store). In my case i've used arm native linuxes (arch with various compositors, kde, gnome, fedora) all on M2, M2 Max, M5 and the experience is indistinguishable from native. MacOS is running too. I think hardcore graphics folks might want direct accelerator access, or there'd be curiously little reason for Asahi (other than that it's awesome work).<p>I use UTM in emulation mode, NOT Qemu simulation mode, which is wasteful.<p>just my $0.02.
What is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around.
I'd recommend reading up on it, and perhaps trying it, because it's very useful.<p>For folks lamenting that the (awesome) Asahi efforts are challenged by reverse engineering of changes from M2 to M3, and so on, those changes vanish into the abstraction, but their benefits do not. That's why i switched from Asahi a couple years ago to UTM in apple silicon hypervisor mode.<p><a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor</a>
<a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines">https://apps.apple.com/us/app/utm-virtual-machines</a>
It serves the exact same purpose that WSL does in Windows.<p>You can run any flavor of Linux you like in a virtual machine, while booted into the native OS.
The purpose is to be able to run a decent Linux setup while also having MacOS for things. Not everyone is stuck on the anti-Apple train; some of us put software on all the platforms and thus using the hypervisor for this use case is quite comfortable. Disclaimer: personal experience - I too use UTM for highly productive things..
This misses the point entirely. What happens when apple inevitably discontinues support for this hardware.
i have no idea how you think apple silicon will discontinue support for itself.<p>the hypervisor framework documentation, that i linked above, is pretty clear; the linux builds for arm run extremely fast on apple silicon because hypervisor framework gives them hardware access, in some subsystems directly (memory mapping for example), in other systems through a shim (graphics hardware).
The same thing that has previously happened with discontinued Intel Macs or PC hardware that is no longer supported by Windows.<p>You can still boot Linux natively on it.
I don't think you understand what Asahi Linux is.<p>This isn't about running VMs.
They want control on the walled garden. When was the last time apple did anything for public unless forced by FCC. Now there is no hope since they can simply donate to trump.
Apple made some changes specifically for Asahi Linux to make it more robust.<p>I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.
Would you happen to have a link to this? I would like to learn about this but unfortunately treehouse.systems doesn't seem to be very well indexed by search engines, and Mastodon's search is failing me.
Discussed here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578</a>
Source? It's a welcome thing but very much not like Apple.
The FCC? I guess you mean their wifi chips or cellular modems or something? I can’t see the FCC having jurisdiction over anything else that Apple does. Maybe you meant the FTC?
> They want control on the walled garden.<p>It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.<p>Even the Asahi team has been much more appreciative of Apple leaving this open.
Aside from the "they have no incentive" answer, I imagine it's not so easy even if they wanted to. I suspect most of it won't be solely Apple's IP to share in the first place.
It wouldn’t even be a problem for Apple to support Linux. Linux’s desktop market share has never been a threat to Apple at all. I hope Ternus, being the engineer he is, opens this up.
The sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs<p>> <a href="https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engineer-linux-driver-and-kernel-developer-32654023/#:~:text=Software%20Engineer%2D%20Linux%20Driver%20and%20Kernel%20Developer,software%20bringup%20on%20pre%20and%20post%2Dsilicon%20platforms%2D" rel="nofollow">https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...</a>
I don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO?
So that you have to keep buying Macs every few years of course. If they gave you a way to install linux easily then you could use it far past their intended lifespan and wouldnt keep you locked into the apple ecosystem. They have proved time and time again that Apple hardware running anything but MacOS or iOS is something they will work very hard to stop you doing.
> past their intended lifespan<p>Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years)<p><a href="https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.html" rel="nofollow">https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...</a><p><a href="https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher</a>
It's a bit awkward where newer Intel models with T2 chips don't support OpenCore, so e.g. the 2019 MBA is going to run out of security updates with macOS 14, sooner than a 2008 MBA that OpenCore will update up to macOS 15.
> past their intended lifespan<p>This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.
Because that's not their business model. How is that not obvious?
Legal reasons. Their lawyers say "no".
Why would they?
I expect they don't <i>actually</i> care whether or not people run Linux on macs. I mean they used to let you run Windows!<p>Probably the real reason is just that it's extra work - both in terms of producing the docs, and in dealing with complaints when they change things. From their point of view it's extra work with no benefit to them.
Yep, I suspect the goal is to reduce support footprint/burden to the absolute minimum possible, which is also why they don't maintain their legacy virtualization/translation layers indefinitely (Classic mode, Rosetta 1 (PPC → x86), Rosetta 2 (x86 → ARM)). The benefit is being able to make major changes, refactors, etc with relatively little delay and encumbrance.<p>This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.<p>If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.
> they used to let you run Windows!<p>They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.<p>Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.
Microsoft is being all kumbaya right now for those exact same reasons - they are hemorrhaging users to Linux and macOS. WSL only exists because of this.<p>In the 90s and 2000s, they considered Linux a cancer, and only kept macOS alive for antitrust reasons.
Community... is what you have with family, neighbors and such. Being a user of a mass produced thing is not a community.<p>But to answer your question: Why would they? Apple hasn't asked anybody to put Linux on their machines. They deliver them with a fully functional OS already and there are thousands of other computer models you can purchase instead of a Mac.
> Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community?<p>Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.<p>I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.<p>If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.
Apple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.<p>Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.<p>I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.
I'm in the same boat.<p>Hell, I was given a bunch of old iphones recently, all of which are newer and better hardware than my phone. I wiped them and donated them to charity.
> It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.<p>Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market.<p>Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy.<p>[1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.
How does providing the specs to run Linux on a MacBook open them them up to competition from junky used eBay laptops?