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Comment by c0deR3D | Hacker News Reader

When would Apple silicons made natively support for OSes such as Linux? Apple seemlingly reluctant to release detailed technical reference manual for M-series SoCs, which makes running Linux natively on Apple silicon challenging.

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Probably never. We don't have official Linux support for the iPhone or iPad, I would't hold out hope for Apple to change their tune.

That makes sense to me though. If you don’t run iOS, you don’t have App Store and that means a loss of revenue.

Right. Same goes for MacOS and all of it's convenient software services. Apple might stand to sell more units with a more friendlier stance towards Linux, but unless it sells more Apple One subscriptions or increases hardware margins on the Mac, I doubt Cook would consider it.

If you sit around expecting selflessness from Apple you will waste an enormous amount of time, trust me.

If you don't run macOS, you don't have Apple iCloud Drive, Music, Fitness, Arcade, TV+ and News and that means a loss of revenue.

As I replied in else where here, I do not run any Apple Services on my Mac hardware. I do on my iDevices though, but that's a different topic. Again, I could be the edge case

> I do not run any Apple Services on my Mac hardware

Not even OCSP?

I have no idea what that is, so ???

But if you're being pedantic, I meant Apple SaaS requiring monthly payments or any other form of using something from Apple where I give them money outside the purchase of their hardware.

If you're talking background services as part of macOS, then you're being intentionally obtuse to the point and you know it

You lose out on revenue from people who require OS freedom though

All seven of them. I kid, I have a lot of sympathy for that position, but as a practical matter running Linux VMs on an M4 works great, you even get GPU acceleration.

https://asahilinux.org/

That’s what’s weird to me too. It’s not like they would lose sales of macOS as it is given away with the hardware. So if someone wants to buy Apple hardware to run Linux, it does not have a negative affect to AAPL

Except the linux users won't be buying Apple software, from the app store or elsewhere. They won't subscribe to iCloud.

I have Mac hardware and and have spent $0 through the Mac App Store. I do not use iCloud on it either. I do on iDevices though. I must be an edge case though.

Same here.

All of us on HN are basically edge cases. The main target market of Macs is super dependent on Apple service subscriptions.

Maybe that's why they ship with insultingly-small SSDs by default, so that as people's photo libraries, Desktop and Documents folders fill up, Apple can "fix your problem" for you by selling you the iCloud/Apple One plan to offload most of the stuff to only live in iCloud.

Either they spend the $400 up front to get 2 notches up on the SSD upgrade, to match what a reasonable device would come with, or they spend that $400 $10 a month for the 40 month likely lifetime of the computer. Apple wins either way.

Of course this is the reason. And this is why Apple has become so bad for the tech enthusiasts, no matter how good the OS/software can be, you have to pay a tax that is way too big because you already have the competence that should allow you to bypass it.

It's like learning about growing vegetables in your garden but then having to pay the seeds for it much more because you actually know how to produce value with them.

The philosophy at Apple has changed from premium tools for professional to luxury device for normies that makes them pay for their incompetence.

While I don't think Apple wants to change course from its services-oriented profit model, surely someone within Apple has run the calculations for a server-oriented M3/M4 device. They're not far behind server CPUs in terms of performance while running a lot cooler AND having accelerated amd64 support, which Ampere lacks.

Whatever the profit margin on an iMac Studio is these days, surely improving non-consumer options becomes profitable at some point if you start selling them by the thousands to data centers.

Those buying the hardware to run Linux also aren’t writing software for macOS to help make the platform more attractive.

There are a large number of macOS users that are not app software devs. There's a large base of creative users that couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag, yet spend lots of money on Mac hardware.

This forum looses track of the world outside this echo chamber

I’m among them, even if creative works aren’t my bread and butter (I’m a dev with a bit of an artistic bent).

That said, attracting creative users also adds value to the platform by creating demand for creative software for macOS, which keeps existing packages for macOS maintained and brings new ones on board every so often.

I'm a mix of both, however, my dev time does not create macOS or iDevice apps. My dev is still focused on creative/media workflows, while I still get work for photo/video. I don't even use Xcode any further than running the CLI command to install the necessary tools to have CLI be useful.

You also lose out on developers. The more macOS users, the more attractive it is to develop for. Supporting Linux would be a loss for the macOS ecosystem, and we all know what that leads to.

> So if someone wants to buy Apple hardware to run Linux, it does not have a negative affect to AAPL

It does. Support costs. How do you prove it's a hardware failure or software? What should they do? Say it "unofficially" supports Linux? People would still try to get support. Eventually they'd have to test it themselves etc.

Apple has already been in this spot. With the TrashCan MacPro, there was an issue with DaVinci Resolve under OS X at the time where the GPU was cause render issues. If you then rebooted into Windows with BootCamp using the exact same hardware and open up the exact same Resolve project with the exact same footage, the render errors disappeared. Apple blamed Resolve. DaVinci blamed GPU drivers. GPU blamed Apple.

> Apple has already been in this spot.

Has been. This is importance. Past tense. Maybe that's the point - they gave up on it acknowledging the extra costs / issues.

We used to have bootcamp though.

There you go using logical arguments in an emotional illogical debate.

But then they'd have to open up their internal documentation of their silicon, which could possibly be a legal disaster (patents).

Is it not an option to run Darwin? What would Linux offer that that would not?

Darwin is a terrible server operating system. Even getting a process to run at server boot reliably is a nightmare.

I don't think Darwin has been directly distributed in bootable binary format for many years now. And, as far as I know, it has never been made available in that format for Apple silicon.

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