Another item added to the list of why I'm not buying one of these.

I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are. It's not really your computer, you're just renting. Apple has decided that they know what you want and need better than you.

It's really kind of tragic that so much incredible research and engineering work goes into creating new hardware like this only for it to be locked into one particular company with very tight constraints on target audience, income bracket, and technical limitations. Think how incredible it would be if everyone could use this new silicon.

It is, in fact, already used by everyone, because it's an evolution of the chipset in basically every smartphone in the world with widely divergent target audiences, income brackets, and technical limitations.

I don't know that that's a fair comparison. Just because it's an ARMv8 chip doesn't mean it's directly comparable to what's in smartphones. (I assume you aren't comparing it to Apple made chips for iPhone specifically, since then it wouldn't be true that it's in "basically every smartphone in the world".)

In particular, this is the first 5nm chip to be widely available, and by most accounts on performance it competes with top of the line hardware at a small fraction of the power use. Most existing ARM chips are designed for the very-low-power market, e.g. in phones, not to be used in a high performance laptop.

If there's a Dell or Thinkpad laptop with an ARM chip that's comparable, by all means, let me know.

AFAIK you are correct. Apple has completely redesigned their own ARM chip. It has the same instruction set (or a superset of the instruction set) as what runs in a cellphone, but the design is completely different from say, Qualcomm chips.

Just because it is locked down, why is that the same as "renting"? Those are two very different concepts.

Because you are not the ultimate decider of what to do with the machine. If you owned it, you could do anything outside of harm.

The whole concept of the machine is to be bought and optimized for running macOS.

I guess, but the "whole concept of the machine" that I'm typing this on was to run Windows... 7 (I think?); that's a completely artificial limitation, as shown by running Ubuntu on it years after the hardware went out of support.

I'm not sure what the problem is, then. You have a device that does what you (or the GP) want, which is to install any operating system, tinker, etc.

Is the worry that Apple and its practices will dominate the industry to the point that you literally will not be able to turn on your current machine and use it?

> Is the worry that Apple and its practices will dominate the industry to the point that you literally will not be able to turn on your current machine and use it?

I know you're joking, but I actually kind of am...

Apple has a tremendous amount of industry influence, just see removal of the headphone jack.

macOS deprecates support for Macs that are 5-7 years old with every release. I put Linux on them when new macOS releases no longer support them, and they're perfectly good machines afterwards.

When macOS deprecates support for these ARM Macs in 5-7 years, Linux isn't an option for them unless Apple puts in a lot of work to support a mainline Linux kernel on their hardware. Apple has said they won't support running other operating systems on these ARM Macs unless they're virtualized.

>When macOS deprecates support for these ARM Macs in 5-7 years, Linux isn't an option for them unless Apple puts in a lot of work to support a mainline Linux kernel on their hardware.

Why would Apple need to "put a lot of work in"? Apple doesn't support Linux on 86 either. Third parties did the Mac Linux ports for 86, and will do them for the ARM Macs.

The only thing Apple needs to do is to not lock the ARM Macs from booting another OS, which is very easy to do -- Apple doesn't need to invest lots of work to run Linux on ARM Macs, just needs not to prevent it.

> Why would Apple need to "put a lot of work in"? Apple doesn't support Linux on 86 either. Third parties did the Mac Linux ports for 86, and will do them for the ARM Macs.

Because ARM SoCs are fundamentally different than 32-bit and 64-bit x86 machines. The prime difference is the lack of an enumerable bus that even some ARM servers have, but are missing in ARM SoCs.

I bought an x86 Mac when they were first released and I was able to boot an Ubuntu live CD when I got it. No work was needed to get a mainline kernel running on a x86 Mac, but work was needed to support things like Apple's SMC and cameras etc.

> The only thing Apple needs to do is to not lock the ARM Macs from booting another OS, which is very easy to do -- Apple doesn't need to invest lots of work to run Linux on ARM Macs, just needs not to prevent it.

This is not true. Given the lack of an enumerable bus, someone will need to either fork the kernel and hardcode addresses for hardware, or someone will need documents to build out the DeviceTree. If hardware doesn't conform to existing standards, which nearly every ARM SoC follows their own, someone will need to do further work port the kernel to the machine. All the special deviations from standards that Apple baked into their hardware either needs to be documented accurately, or Apple needs to put the work in to get mainline Linux running on their SoCs.

This is a general problem in the ARM SoC and Linux space, and is not unique to Apple's SoCs. There are millions of ARM SoCs that are either stuck on old kernel forks because vendors never put the work in to get mainline Linux to support their SoCs, or they will never run Linux at all, ever. I don't even think all of the Raspberry Pi models have mainline support yet, and those that do only have it because of the work put in by the RPi Foundation, which has access to some vendor documentation, but I don't believe all.

To get an idea of the scope of the problem concerning Linux support on ARM SoCs, check out this presentation[1].

[1] https://elinux.org/images/a/ad/Arm-soc-checklist.pdf

Right, the point is that it didn't use to be that way exclusively and now it is, so the new machines are more restrictive than previous Macs, which also ran macOS.

In fact macOS itself is more restrictive nowdays than it used to be.

Apple could optimize their hardware and software without making the machine locked down. Those are somewhat orthogonal issues.

But renting implies you are continuing to pay money and will some day need to return it.

There's a direct parallel you can draw between software licensing and leasing.

But we’re not talking about software leases.

No, not necessarily. Renting just implies you're not the owner and need to follow someone's rules, (that of the actual owner), in order to make use of the rented item.

'Purchasing' a Kindle book or video on Amazon is also renting for example and yet it does not mean you have to continue paying and yet you don't own the copy as Amazon's going to decide how you're allowed to consume it and if they're going to let you keep it[1][2].

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Kindle#Criticism

2 - https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/amazon-argues-user...

I don’t think purchasing a computer is the same thing as buying a movie from Amazon. The computer is always gonna be yours, and you can do whatever you want with it, even if Apple has made it very difficult to do so. But there are lots of objects in my house that would fall under that category as well, but I consider myself as their owner.

I prefer for the class of device the Air fits into (travel, work laptop) to have a nicely curated nix machine with working drivers out of the box. Apple has continued to improve on this by making this product class faster, more battery efficient, and* cheaper.

There is a massive marketplace for tinkering on computers, from Arduinos to multi-GPU ML rigs. Trying to optimize for both classes of things seems like a foolish endeavor, especially when Linux users represent such a small fraction of the desktop market.

I hear this all the time from people "drivers working out of the box", but I've been running Linux machines for a decade now, and I've run into very few issues comparatively speaking. My work makes me use a MacBook for work, and it has a lot of significant bugs that are not getting fixed. The trick with Linux is to use a popular distribution. The one thing I will fully concede is that Linux laptops have poor battery life.

>I feel kind of grossed out, as a developer (and tinkerer) by how locked down Mac products are

That's part of the value proposition (leave it or take it).

Hopefully it's not just secret apple sauce that makes these powerhouses, and other chip makers make arm based processors soon enough giving us the choice we deseeve. (given gravitons similar performance bump this is likely the case)

It doesn't make a huge amount of sense to buy a Mac if you're not going to use Mac OS as your daily driver. A lot of the benefits (e.g. battery life, touchpad quality) are dependent on software as well as hardware, and are greatly diminished on Windows or Linux.

I've never been that impressed with the Mac Mini's battery life or touchpad :-)

Actually I had a Mac mini with the touchpad and the damn thing disconnected three times a day. All my input devices have wires now and the stick out of the right places.

Touché. But seriously, most people who want to run Linux on Mac want to do it because they like Apple's laptop hardware. If you want a compact Linux desktop then a NUC should probably serve you just as well. Or at least, this was the case while Apple was still using Intel chips. If Apple Silicon lives up to expectations then I suppose there could finally be a compelling reason for running Linux on a Mac desktop.

To be clear, I'm not saying that there couldn't possibly be any good reason for wanting to run Linux on a Mac desktop. But desktops are already a niche product for Apple, and people who want to run Linux on Mac desktops are arguably a tiny niche within a niche.

Mac Mini doesn't raise those issues.

libinput's touchpad support is pretty great recently. working on an xps 17, and the touchpad is - no joke - just like the touchpad on my previous MBP.

You can speculate but we will never know for certain.

I realize Federighi's reply seems to rule out Linux, but the context of the question seemed to be with respect to Boot Camp and Windows. My take is that Apple doesn't want to continue to invest in Boot Camp, especially since Microsoft apparently isn't willing to license ARM Windows for this use case.

It's not clear to me that the new Macs won't allow booting Linux if the Linux community can figure out how to do it. The number of folks booting Linux on Mac via Boot Camp has to be really tiny.

> It's not clear to me that the new Macs won't allow booting Linux if the Linux community can figure out how to do it.

Mainline Linux support requires a lot of work from vendors. Check out the ARM SoC Linux market for an abundance of examples of this problem. Many of the devices will be forever stuck an old kernel fork and will never run a mainline kernel.

Getting drivers to work will be hard without Apple's help or blessing. And there are a lot of drivers.

For comparison you can check the progress of Linux on iPhones (which is actually a thing!)

Yeah, agreed, but my take isn't that Apple is going out of their way to prevent it, just that they have no interest in spending any resources on it. Some conjecture here about what will be possible:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/running-linux-on-apple-...

Proprietary original GPU must be a problem.

But you can disable Secure Boot and boot whatever OS you want, so unless there's some other hardware gotcha it's not like someone couldn't get Linux running if they wanted to put the time in (which is a big if, considering there's no UEFI-ish helper like on the Windows ARM devices).

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/macos-recovery-a-ma...

There are quite literally millions of ARM devices out there that will never have Linux support, and millions more are being produced each year.

When it comes to ARM SoCs, Linux requires vendor support to get it running. If you want mainline kernel support, that requires even more work that many vendors just aren't providing.

A locked bootloader is just one issue to overcome for Linux support. A lot of the real issues come down to the lack of an enumerable bus on ARM SoCs, along with a lack of drivers.

Without vendor support from Apple to support Linux, these devices will be like the millions of iPhones and iPads that don't run Linux and will never run Linux.

Most ARM SoCs that are sold explicitly as mini Linux computers also have this problem. Many of them are stuck on old kernel forks, because vendors didn't give the proper support their SoCs needed to run a mainline Linux kernel.

tl;dr: For Linux to be a viable option on Apple's SoCs, Apple needs to put in a lot of work to explicitly support Linux. Without that vendor support, you will never be able to download a Linux ISO and install it like you can on an x86 Mac.

Millions of iPhones and iPads that don’t do what now? https://projectsandcastle.org/

There's a gulf between getting a kernel fork to run on an ARM SoC and getting mainline Linux support for it.

This researcher has said it may be possible with PongoOS and kernel signing https://mobile.twitter.com/never_released/status/13273981029... https://mobile.twitter.com/never_released/status/13273946342...

You’re misunderstanding that quote. Apple has never claimed they won’t support booting something else (in fact, there are ways to enable this by removing signature checks); they were just explaining how their demo works.

Challenge accepted :)