Wow. The effort here is amazing—sad Apple won’t provide for more assistance. If it wasn’t for this project, OpenBSD on Apple silicon (thank you kettenis@!) likely wouldn’t exist.
Apple spent significant engineering effort modifying their iOS bootloader to support third-party OSs—then neglected to tell anyone how to actually make a third-party OS. Whoops! Have fun!
And to be clear, this is absolutely preferable to Apple selling fully locked-down Macs. And, I realize that macOS will always be Apple's first priority, and that writing documentation takes effort.
But would it really kill Apple to connect Marcan to an engineer, who could allocate 30 minutes a week to answering questions? Is there some sort of legal liability involved? Security concerns? Brand safety?
The Asahi team is comprised of people who clearly enjoy reverse-engineering, and if everyone is having fun (and creating an awesome Linux port in the process), perhaps that's all that matters. But I still find Apple's choices confusing.
This tend to be the usual practice for much of what Apple does, release things with minimal documentation and let others figure out how it works.
Maybe it's just a sadist corporation who wants to see how far people are willing to go in order to get stuff working with their own hardware/software? Sometimes it certainly seems that way.
This is an ongoing problem that has prevented me from daily-driving MacOS since Catalina. Really a stance I wish Apple would revert, even Microsoft does a better job here than Apple.
How so?
Meanwhile from Microsoft:
that is the only true modern interop fs and they keep it hostage.
But why should it change? They've become the most profitable for sure, but they became that while ignoring docs etc. Why should they now change, considering it's been unquestionable proven that it doesn't matter for their financial success?
PS: i still don't understand how people some people call it largest, doesn't that adjective describe size...? It doesn't have the most employees, it doesn't have the most locations etc. It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion, as that's usually called richest.
Because I'm not buying Macbooks anymore. In fact, over the past 5 years I've increasingly seen people develop on a dedicated Linux box or Linux VM. Apple's appeal is shrinking to developers, and it has been on a steady decline for the past 10 years. For all of MacOS' POSIX certification, it hasn't stopped people from trying to implement Linux just so they can run privacy-respecting software and benign GPU libraries that Apple refuses to officially support.
Their plan here isn't working. It might placate the 80% of users who don't care about this stuff, but the technical sentiment towards Apple's technologies is waning. I'm frustrated with WebKit, I'm frustrated with Swift, and everyone is frustrated with their 30% tax. Something has to give, and it's probably going to be Apple's facade of benevolence.
> It definitely has the largest pile of money, but that's still a very unfitting description for that, at least in my opinion.
All businesses are constrained by a set of limiting factors. The most important factor will always be capital, since you can trade it for any one of the lesser factors. Apple uses their 200 billion USD cash reserve to buy goodwill in the form of advertising, first-in-line tickets to TSMC and the finest lobbyists in the nation. They have every protection that lesser companies do not, which is why their valuation supersedes any other publicly or privately traded organization.
I'll stop calling them the biggest company when business stops revolving around money.
You're not but many people still are [0]. Many people started to see Apple's developer experience wane in previous years, true, but their Apple Silicon changed that. Their price/performance/battery life ratio is simply unbeatable for devs and anecdotally many people I know bought AS Macs where before they would've bought or used a Windows or Linux computer, including me.
There are some things I will agree with you on though, such as their 30% tax, as a mobile developer myself.
[0] 2021 Mac shipments grew twice as fast as overall PC shipments - https://9to5mac.com/2022/01/12/2021-mac-shipments-growth/
Apple Silicon only reverses their hardware quality (which was truly awful 2015-2018). Their software quality has still been in rapid decline since Mojave, and it's developer experience out-of-the-box is still marred with coreutils older than dinosaurs and increased restrictions around running software. I know a lot of developers that are happy with Apple Silicon, but I know exactly 0 developers that don't complain MacOS.
I used to use tools like Codemagic which ran macOS in the cloud for deploying mobile apps, so buying a MacBook wasn't necessarily a blocker for me.
Codemagic, from my understanding just does code-signing and deployment. I don't know how you did it, but a Mac would still be necessary for access to Xcode libraries, Objective-C, and iOS simulators.
Honestly speaking, Apples main success vector has always been it's marketing. It's never been benevolent, and if you ever thought it was... I'm afraid you've only witnessed first hand how effective they are at their job.
> I'll stop calling them the biggest company when business stops revolving around money.
I admit that I'm not a native speaker, but that's exactly the reason why that adjective confuses me so much.
Bigger/largest directly translates over but nobody would consider bigger to be better in a financial context. Profitability is the thing that's interesting, and to a lesser extend how rich is is.
Calling it biggest/largest doesn't (to me) say anything particularly interesting about it
So you have engineering teams with hacker ethos building "open" hardware, but Apple the company doesn't really give a shit and is not going to spend money on documentation for a feature the company doesn't care about.
Allowing an engineer to answer questions for half an hour a week would be practically a rounding error in terms of resources, and certainly less of a commitment than rewriting iBoot policy, which they already did.
They've just decided they don't want to be in the business of supporting Linux on Apple hardware.
Short of fully supporting Linux, the "Whoops! Have fun!" part would happen somewhere, no matter where the line was drawn.
Of course they could do more. But you and I shouldn't really expect to be able to tell Apple how to spend their money.
I don't, I just think Apple chose to draw the line in a perplexing location. I'd love to know what they were thinking.
Perhaps it was "targeted" for some internal skunkworks project to get Windows running on ARM Macs? Linux/BSD obviously got there first (at least in the open) and Microsoft is under a Qualcomm only contract for now
Microsoft can't directly request that Apple allow booting their OS, or work with them directly. But "leaving a spare key under the doormat" is a bit more innocent looking
That being said, ARM hardware is nowhere close to being cross-vendor interoperable[0] and going from Qualcomm to Apple Silicon would require a significant reverse-engineering effort on Microsoft's part. The "spare key under the doormat" is running Windows on ARM in a VM under macOS.
[0] Hell, most vendors don't even bother with generational interoperability. Each chip is it's own island. Apple Silicon is a very unique exception.
For Apple's hardware, the documentation exists. It's comprehensive. It's just not being released. (This is not the case for software.)
Source: Apple employee.
But this attitude is common in the hardware industry. This particular situation is a bit unusual because most of the time, Linux drivers either are developed with no support from the hardware vendor (something which wouldn't have been possible here due to secure boot) or are developed by the hardware vendor itself. But in the second case, it's common for no documentation to be released along with the driver, leaving independent parties to glean what they can from register names and other definitions in the source code. Or if documentation is released, it only covers the parts that drivers are supposed to access, excluding what would be needed to, say, write a custom firmware to replace the included blob.
That, and they don't give a crap about the open source community, unless it directly benefits them. They have zero incentive to help a group of hackers run Linux on their hardware that will only benefit a niche of a niche of users. Allocating any of their engineers' time to this project would ultimately result in a negative ROI.
TBH I'm surprised Asahi Linux hasn't received a C&D notice yet. Apple hasn't been this tolerant of hackintosh projects before, so at least they're turning a blind eye to this.
Why anyone would want to spend their free time working in such a hostile environment is beyond me, but hats off to the Asahi team for the dedication. The patience and talent required must be extraordinary.
These are people who have bought genuine Apple hardware - putting money in Apple's pocket. Then they want to write some custom software for their computer.
I don't see how this threatens Apple in any way. The intersection between general Apple users and those who want to run "a remix of Arch Linux ARM" on their $1000 hardware has to be pretty small anyway.
Actually it could open up a new market for Apple. I for one am quite impressed by Apple hardware, but have minimal interest in running their software. If Asahi becomes stable enough, I would seriously consider buying Apple.
Your second point is a good one, however.
Though Apple hasn't historically prosecuted individuals for such things, so this likely won't happen.
But it's even less likely they'll officially support, advertise, or even recognize this project in any way.
The difference is that jailbreaking compromises the security of iOS. Whereas some clever apple engineer has setup the M1 MacBooks such that each OS is completely isolated from each other (enforced by dis encryption and the Secure Enclave). The only thing a rogue linux install could do is delete macOS entirely. But there would be little incentive to do so. Installing malware or stealing data is completely blocked.
I would say, definitely. Apple does use third-party components as well, with presumably closed firmware/drivers.
Yes, iPhones and iPad's don't allow it and Microsoft doesn't allow it on it's ARM based OS. (enforced secureboot; detailed slightly here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ARM/SurfaceRT#Secure_Boot )
There was no expectation on my side that they would support it.
So, again, it was not looking positive.
Even with the T2 chip, it was possible to turn off Secure Boot 100% so you could boot whatever operating system you wanted.
Just as a disclaimer, I'm no Apple fanboy, I stopped using their software/OS even before I got rid of my last MacBook, and since 2018 or something haven't been using the hardware neither and only use a Mac for testing various software I develop. So I don't normally defend anything they are doing.
But right should be right; they have never previously tried to stop people from running whatever OS they want on their computer hardware so guessing they suddenly would start, feels like a pretty far-out guess.
It's a falsehood to say it was allowed.
It was possible but very much not how you seem to imply.
The reason I said it was a "worrisome trend" is because with the switch to M1: Apple would need to intentionally leave in a back-door if people had a chance of booting alternative operating systems.
Since they had not shown any interest in supporting alternative operating systems (outside of Bootcamp, which we knew was going away too) then it could be reasonably assumed that they would do no extra work to allow alternative operating systems at all.
Since it was extra work, and since they had not shown any care before.
I’m not sure if you’re deliberately missing the point either.
The point was that the trend seemed to be locked down devices more and more, not that it was impossible before; just that it was getting more and more difficult- and that it was already difficult on arm platforms.
This is exactly what is happening with Asahi linux. The ARM bootloader to install Linux, but they aren't helping the Asahi linux developers write a GPU driver. They are not locking the platform down, they are simply saying you can do what you want, but don't expect any help from us.
"What's a computer?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S5BLs51yDQ
I really don't know what to call iOS devices other than computers. Unless one of your requirements for "computer" is "ability to boot third party OSs"; I don't entirely disagree with that but it's a bit circulatory in this context.
So I was a bit surprised the following week when one of them showed up with an iPad! But, it had that attachable keyboard and trackpad Apple sells, and it really did work fine in the web-based environments we use.
Broadly speaking, I agree that most people think of Macs as computers and iPads as iPads, but I don't think that distinction is meaningful. Macs and iPads are marketed for most of the same things, and Apple has even begun touting how they have the same chips inside!
Any questions?
I am missing why we think they are not doing so continuously, perhaps behind the scenes
Spiritually it's your device but their ego