> 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.)

• phire

  today at 1:58 PM

  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.

  • jessienark

    today at 4:44 PM

    [flagged]

• a1o

  today at 12:50 PM

  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

• bigyabai

  today at 4:29 PM

  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.

• today at 5:04 PM

• amelius

  today at 1:08 PM

  [flagged]

  • simonh

    today at 1:55 PM

    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

    • amelius

      today at 2:29 PM

      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.

      • cosmic_cheese

        today at 2:56 PM

        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.

        • jagged-chisel

          today at 3:39 PM

          > … the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs.

          What? Where do you get that?

          • drbawb

            today at 3:59 PM

            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...

            • jagged-chisel

              today at 4:36 PM

              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."

              • simonh

                today at 4:45 PM

                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.

          • boarush

            today at 4:00 PM

            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.

          • fl0id

            today at 3:48 PM

            Because it explicitly has tooling for custom boot objects etc, and stated by asahi developers, maybe also apple people they know.

      • wpm

        today at 3:47 PM

        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.

      • simonh

        today at 2:55 PM

        >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?

        • thewebguyd

          today at 3:30 PM

          > 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).

        • bigyabai

          today at 4:11 PM

          > 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.

          • simonh

            today at 4:40 PM

            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.

            • bigyabai

              today at 5:37 PM

              > 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.

    • throw0101d

      today at 3:28 PM

      > 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?

      • simonh

        today at 3:59 PM

        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.

    • WD-42

      today at 2:58 PM

      > 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.

  • lopis

    today at 1:14 PM

    These efforts will also save a lot of old macbooks from the landfill in the future.

  • rbits

    today at 1:14 PM

    What do you mean? You mean not on Apple hardware? That exists, that's basically every other Linux distro in existence.

    • preisschild

      today at 1:24 PM

      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

      • bzzzt

        today at 1:41 PM

        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.

        • preisschild

          today at 1:58 PM

          You don't have to support "legacy stuff", just make sure a modern linux kernel can boot without apple-specific workarounds

          • smith7018

            today at 2:10 PM

            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?

            • outadoc

              today at 2:24 PM

              > 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.

              • t-3

                today at 2:36 PM

                > 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.

                • wpm

                  today at 5:01 PM

                  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.

      • mschuster91

        today at 2:07 PM

        > 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.

  • smith7018

    today at 1:23 PM

    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.

    • bzzzt

      today at 1:53 PM

      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)

      • dml2135

        today at 2:08 PM

        Still, reuse > recycling

      • coldtea

        today at 3:26 PM

        Recycling the metals is obviously far less useful than being able to still operate them even if Apple stops macOS updates for them!

  • panick21_

    today at 2:46 PM

    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.

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/

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.

• mort96

  today at 11:09 AM

  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

• jasoneckert

  today at 1:41 PM

  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 :-)

  • thewebguyd

    today at 3:39 PM

    And at least Fedora is rock solid these days, which is more than I can say about Ubuntu. Its really a great distro.

• weikju

  today at 11:09 AM

  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/

  • hparadiz

    today at 2:48 PM

    I wish more people on HN learned how to build their own kernel and run it.

    A distro is just window dressing and flavor.

• MYEUHD

  today at 11:15 AM

  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...

• matrss

  today at 2:00 PM

  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.

• tuna74

  today at 4:02 PM

  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.

• leenixx

  today at 11:52 AM

  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.

  • fridder

    today at 6:31 PM

    really is too bad FreeBSD couldn't be an alternative

  • Grombobulous

    today at 12:21 PM

    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.

    • nosioptar

      today at 1:38 PM

      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.

      • dandellion

        today at 3:23 PM

        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.

        • nosioptar

          today at 4:49 PM

          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.

        • debugnik

          today at 4:23 PM

          > 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.

    • gjvc

      today at 12:26 PM

      "Disgusting" Linux sched_ext Source Code Restructured Following Complaint By Linus Torvalds - Phoronix https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Sched-Ext-Restructured

• realusername

  today at 11:36 AM

  Upstreaming something like this is a monumental task, even small changes can take ages. It will take a while.

  • smith7018

    today at 1:29 PM

    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

• tensegrist

  today at 11:45 AM

  i've been using nixos on an m2 air for a year now, the kernel is enough

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.

• torben-friis

  today at 2:29 PM

  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.

  • shvarr

    today at 3:36 PM

    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.

    • rowanG077

      today at 5:24 PM

      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.

    • cromka

      today at 3:57 PM

      [dead]

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).

It is exciting that they are working on AVD driver.

• brcmthrowaway

  today at 4:00 PM

  if i use ffmpeg or VLC on a M1+ Mac, does it use AVD?

  • rowanG077

    today at 5:33 PM

    not on asahi, no clue about macos.

I wonder how much LLMs have been leveraged to help Asahi lately, there’s extremely powerful for reverse-engineering. Have they written about it?

• johnwalkr

  today at 5:11 PM

  They forbid their use.

  https://asahilinux.org/docs/project/policies/slop/

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?

• viraptor

  today at 11:52 AM

  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.

• today at 11:52 AM

Is the github sponsors link a 404 for everyone else?

• zamadatix

  today at 1:22 PM

  Not for me, perhaps fixed in the last hour already.

God bless the asahi team

• today at 11:16 AM

• sneak

  today at 10:34 AM

  [flagged]

  • today at 10:48 AM

• humanfromearth9

  today at 10:34 AM

  [flagged]

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.

• jeroenhd

  today at 11:15 AM

  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?

  • mft_

    today at 11:39 AM

    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.

    • jeroenhd

      today at 1:13 PM

      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.

    • LtWorf

      today at 1:17 PM

      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.

  • trueno

    today at 5:39 PM

    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.

  • cromka

    today at 4:19 PM

    > Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware.

    That's just your made up opinion, completely not supported by their financials.

  • Mashimo

    today at 11:23 AM

    > Their big money maker is their app store

    That said, their AirPods division could be a Fortune 500 on its own.

  • xoa

    today at 1:15 PM

    >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.

    ----

    0: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000320193/37f5e9c...

  • today at 11:49 AM

  • mmcnl

    today at 1:10 PM

    This is just plain wrong. Apple generates most revenue and profits with hardware and it's not even close.

    • jeroenhd

      today at 1:18 PM

      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...).

      • cromka

        today at 4:20 PM

        > 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.

      • mmcnl

        today at 1:34 PM

        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

      • scarlehoff

        today at 1:36 PM

        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...

  • speed_spread

    today at 12:50 PM

    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.

    • jeroenhd

      today at 1:12 PM

      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.

    • Koshkin

      today at 5:26 PM

      > 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.

    • tuna74

      today at 4:03 PM

      flathub.org ?

• figmert

  today at 10:58 AM

  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.

  • 4fterd4rk

    today at 5:14 PM

    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?

  • cromka

    today at 4:22 PM

    > 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?

    • drnick1

      today at 5:33 PM

      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.)

  • boxed

    today at 11:01 AM

    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.

    • eru

      today at 11:07 AM

      Do you have any sources for hardware sales vs app store revenue?

      • MYEUHD

        today at 11:21 AM

        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

        • dbdr

          today at 11:34 AM

          That's revenue though. Fixed costs for hardware is probably much higher. If we looked at profits, the percentages would probably look quite different.

        • jurip

          today at 1:58 PM

          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.

      • Angostura

        today at 11:41 AM

        Let’s not conflate total App Store revenue and Ad revenue.

        • eru

          today at 11:54 AM

          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.

• Grombobulous

  today at 12:29 PM

  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.

  • jorvi

    today at 1:38 PM

    > 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.

    • Grombobulous

      today at 2:45 PM

      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.

      • cosmic_cheese

        today at 3:04 PM

        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.

        • Grombobulous

          today at 3:08 PM

          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.

          • Klonoar

            today at 5:20 PM

            In three comments you’ve moved the goalpost on the 20-hours-of-battery comment multiple times.

            Just take the L, dude.

        • ufmace

          today at 5:09 PM

          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?

          • cosmic_cheese

            today at 5:40 PM

            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.

  • spockz

    today at 1:02 PM

    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.

    • Grombobulous

      today at 2:54 PM

      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.

      • spockz

        today at 3:18 PM

        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.

        • Grombobulous

          today at 3:33 PM

          [dead]

    • mmcnl

      today at 1:13 PM

      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.

      • Grombobulous

        today at 3:03 PM

        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.

  • urbsgpw

    today at 1:04 PM

    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.

    • 4fterd4rk

      today at 5:16 PM

      For what it's worth, the Apple password implementation on Windows is actually pretty good. No love for Linux, though.

    • watermelon0

      today at 1:36 PM

      FYI Apple Passwords supports exporting of items including Passkeys, which can be then imported in e.g. Bitwarden.

      • Grombobulous

        today at 3:16 PM

        TIL about exporting Passkeys, that’s a great tip.

• GTP

  today at 11:46 AM

  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.

  • armchairhacker

    today at 11:59 AM

    FYI there’s software that can upgrade old Macs to officially unsupported OSs: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/

    • GTP

      today at 12:13 PM

      He found out about one of those, but wasn't comfortable using it anyway.

  • carlosjobim

    today at 12:06 PM

    But in this case it was Microsoft who forced him to upgrade, wasn't it?

    • GTP

      today at 12:12 PM

      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.

      • carlosjobim

        today at 12:33 PM

        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.

        • GTP

          today at 12:44 PM

          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.

          • carlosjobim

            today at 12:51 PM

            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.

            • GTP

              today at 1:03 PM

              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.

              • cosmic_cheese

                today at 2:45 PM

                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.

                • GTP

                  today at 3:05 PM

                  Fair point, but I think the lack of those updates impacts the average consumer much less than lack of OS updates.

• troyvit

  today at 2:36 PM

  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.

  • markus_zhang

    today at 3:13 PM

    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.

    • macintux

      today at 3:18 PM

      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.

      • troyvit

        today at 4:11 PM

        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.

• w10-1

  today at 4:33 PM

  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.

  • bigyabai

    today at 4:40 PM

    > 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.

• mhh__

  today at 11:41 AM

  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.

• torben-friis

  today at 11:30 AM

  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.

• WD-42

  today at 1:33 PM

  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.

• leenixx

  today at 11:59 AM

  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.

• bri3d

  today at 1:37 PM

  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?"

• carlosjobim

  today at 12:01 PM

  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.

• toxik

  today at 11:13 AM

  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.

  • GTP

    today at 12:31 PM

    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.

    • LtWorf

      today at 1:50 PM

      You mean the company that rescinds your contract if you exercise the rights granted to you by GPL licenses? What about it?

      • GTP

        today at 3:02 PM

        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?

        • LtWorf

          today at 4:39 PM

          Isn't canonical the company replacing GNU coreutils with a broken and full of CVE replacement because it doesn't have a copyleft license?

  • today at 11:55 AM

• rvz

  today at 11:34 AM

  > 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.

  • drdexebtjl

    today at 11:48 AM

    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.

    • thewebguyd

      today at 4:06 PM

      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.

    • rvz

      today at 1:50 PM

      > 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.

      • drdexebtjl

        today at 4:19 PM

        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.

  • GTP

    today at 12:34 PM

    > 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

• VeejayRampay

  today at 11:59 AM

  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

  • brewmarche

    today at 12:26 PM

    IIRC Apple actually helped with MacPorts in the beginning

  • SG-

    today at 12:24 PM

    actually long ago before homebrew there was MacPorts which Apple actually was part of.

[dead]