A million thousand times no.
As some one else said, every spare dollar I have is going to fund a company that values open source hardware, open source software, right to repair and own.
A company that doesn't purposefully force manufactured obsolescence as a business model, privacy intrusions, lip service to OSS, bullying right to repair in courts, tax evasions doesn't deserve any free work from the skilled people in the community. All of this, just so that they can make more billions when people around the world are suffering just to give their restrictive supply chain their blood, lives and tears.
You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices.
Hardware manufacturers want the Apple cash, so they wait for the Apple contract and when they get that, any other contracts that you might have will get delayed and sidelined with lower quality stuff. Essentially, a monopoly in the supply chain
Also the cognitive dissonance is deafening. The company with industry leading device lifetimes and premium long lasting second hand market value is, er, guilty of built-in obsolescence. How does that work exactly?
I mean Ive got to think you must know both those points are true. The fact that Apple has nothing to do with the vast majority of the PC supply chain, and the fact that Apple devices have industry leading lifetimes and service and support is just overwhelmingly supported by the evidence. I just don't see how you can not know those things. Yet here you are making this argument. I just find it really puzzling. Are you really not aware of these things, or deny that they are true? Are these things we actually need to dig into and discuss?
I'll concede on the repairability point, yes that's a valid argument. I would contend that it's mostly just a tradeoff between compactness and simplicity of design, versus repairability and it's up to customers to choose which they value most, but Apple has sometimes gone too far in unnecessarily obstructing repairability.
Hardware relating Comments on HN has always been fairly low quality to say the least, comparatively speaking to many other subjects. But Apple M1 sort of brings the worst out of it. My current counting right now over 10K comment suggest most have very limited understanding of Hardware tech, little on Hardware business, and quite literally zero on supply chain.
So I would not be suspired If many doesn't know.
I could count people with one hand who have to constantly comment and correcting all the wrong assumption, TSMC capacity limitation, NAND and DRAM price fixing etc etc. And now we have Apple's supply chain monopoly.
The world currently ships approx ~1.2B Smartphone every year, and Apple represent less than 20% of it. And if you include Tablet, PC and Laptop ( Which shares the same supply chain ) Apple is much closer to 10%. The premium Apple pays is not leading edge ( apart from 5nm TSMC ) but very strict quality control and capacity guarantee.
My observation into this issue, is that most software developers and tech workers are so far removed from old model ( non-tech ) of business they have very little understanding of Logistics, Supply Chain, Lead Time, Sales Channel, Distribution and Discovery ( Marketing ). And ironically enough the world best company at doing all of the above is also a tech Company called Apple.
https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/21/apple-locks-its-riva...
> How Apple locks its rivals out of the tablet market with exclusive sourcing deals
Care to explain how we are wrong instead of just claiming we are dumb? I promise that if you educate me (somewhat a bit famous in the "hating on Apple" space) I will help educate others. (Though, FWIW, I do know that a lot of Apple's hardware is semi-custom design, and so if the argument is that I know but find it irrelevant for this comment thread. I am focusing on the belief that Apple makes it hard for others to source parts, which has a lot of history to it.)
Example when the first iPad using NAND launched, Apple secured nearly 60% of the world's total NAND production capacity. That was not a monopoly or exclusive deal. It was out of necessity. Securing a stable supply of critical component is the norm is any industry. It is up to the manufacture to decide whether they should expand their capacity to meet demand ( from others ).
In again NAND example, since the cost of building a new fab and amortisation time is far too long, most would delay any Capex spending until it is absolutely necessary. With high demand and fixed supply, NAND and DRAM price were sky high, and Samsung managed to be the most profitable company for 3 quarters in 2017, only to be overtaken by Apple. The profits then fasten the capacity increase cycle because the risk are now comparatively lower.
Smaller players who do not have the volume, forecast and commitment will always be left at the will of their manufacturing partners. But partners / vendors will always complain these players dont give ( accurate ) forecast. Capacity planning in itself is a profession. And these are common, if not the norm across all Manufacturing industries, from Food, Metal, Raw Mats or even Transport like DHL where they have Data Scientist working on Flight Space ( Their unit of capacity ).
It has been releasing faulty keyboards on it's macbooks for years. They knew. They didn't care. They just continued to release new ones every year with the same faulty keyboard.
Not to mention staingate (which affected me personally).
Those 2700$+ macbooks with ghosting screens. The stupid chip that does a weird sound when you stop your music.
The list just goes on and on.
And this is the stuff on the surface. Go open a macbook and analyze every single component quality...
It’s an Intel machine
They’ve released versions with bad graphics cards, bad batteries.
It takes time to re-design and ship. They replaced numerous “bad keyboard” models for people.
Meanwhile, every plastic Lenovo or Dell needs a new hinge or battery cover every year, and screws fall out.
I’d take physically legit with hard to source issues like ghosted screens since I’m only using it for text and browsing and occasional sound hiccups than a laptop that falls apart after 2 years.
My recent 15” MBP has outlived Dells of the same age at my employer.
80% of the way there is better than 60%
It looks like you speak from your own experience, and so do I.
Enterprise grade laptops from either Lenovo and Dell are known to be very sturdy and well made. Not sure if the materials will be as nice for your fingers as the macbook materials, but for sure they won't fall apart.
I have had thinkpads that would have survived falling from a third floor. I just don't see how a macbook is more reliable than a thinkpad or a precision.
Try throwing a macbook out your window.
"pays the premium on the premium quality stuff" reads very weird to me. Isn't that how generally the world is supposed to work? You pay a premium for premium stuff? If not Apple, somebody is anyways going to do it right...
> You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices.
Hardware is hard. Some Atmel or whatever low brain microcontroller can be had on a board with hand-painted selfmade-etched circuits or shoddy breadboard stuff, at the frequencies these things operate signal integrity doesn't really matter.
But anything with a brain powerful enough to run Linux? Then you're delving into differential signalling at extremely high frequencies - which means you have to precisely account for trace widths, trace thickness and trace length matching simply to ensure that the signal from your CPU arrives at your RAM chip intact. You'll ned an awful lot of awfully precise voltage levels other than 3v3/5v, with equally precise requirements on timing in getting them up. You also won't be able to get away with a two layer board, you'll need three or more layers and a lot of vias - and now, you can't manufacture your own prototypes any more but need to order at a PCB shop which means you either pay through your nose for speedy turnaround and low volume or wait for weeks for pool orders.
And once you have the PCB you'll need to populate and solder it - where you will run into such nasty things as minimum order quantities and the need for a pick-and-place machine if you don't want to go nuts. And if that's not enough, have fun with NDAs and no support for hobbyists by big SoC vendors due to small volumes (I have extensively written about that topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208056).
The best solution if you needs smarts is to look into either adopting a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module if you can get away with its performance, or look into COMexpress if you need serious, up to Intel Xeon scale levels performance - but be warned, designing for that ain't exactly easy either.
And I forgot about another thing too: the supply of people. While everyone and their dog can attend some six weeks coding bootcamp or teach themselves using free and open resources and can then start contributing to open source code, dealing with hardware requires a good education in fundamental physics, good amounts of money for components and tooling (a good soldering iron, air filters, fine-controlled hot air gun, a decent oven, the equipment and the chemicals for etching, a precise micro-drill, ...). Many people don't have that amount of upfront money and skills, and those that do often don't have the amount of free time to help advance open source because, as I wrote, it takes lots of time and money to deal with smart hardware.
Perhaps this was intended to be hyperbolic, but no, you can't become a kernel developer, say, in six weeks. You can learn to dabble in web development in that time, but you'll barely have taken the first step toward being a serious software engineer.
Much skill is needed to make a serious contribution to an open hardware project, but the same is true for many types of software.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b1UdOmxVrw
There is, as yet, no magical piece of software that automatically produces good layouts - not even for simple designs like this where signal integrity is of little concern.
You're talking about people doing FPGA work which is a totally different skillset than making your own PCBs - and even more lacking in people contributing to open-source projects because it is (at least in my opinion) even harder to get a grasp on, and capable FPGA development boards cost a boatload of money.
Apple's mobile devices, laptops, and desktops have some of the best longevity and the best resale values in the market.
What is this whimsical company, and how exactly does it make money?
> You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices.
Apple is not even in contention over the same stuff. Nothing open sourced can fund the development process of a 5nm IC, as the tooling alone would be tens of millions if not more. The total cost of an IC would be in the hundreds of millions (making something of the M1 class is billions).
Open source is lower quality unless there is a commercial sponsor. This is almost universally true for software and hardware. This is because people, naturally, have less resources to invest in something with zero to no financial return.
Concerning the old hardware, it's the most powerful phone which can run latest Linux kernel and the only one recommended by the FSF [3]. Specs is not the whole story in smartphones [4].
[0] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Cellul...
[1] https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-4500mah-battery-upgrade/
[2] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
[3] https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11
[4] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/librem-5-review-the-lin...
https://forums.puri.sm/t/received-my-librem-5-evergreen/1087...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/jzj6s1/i_have_recei...
You own it. You control it. YOU have the power. That's the damn point.
If you want to play an actual game people care about and think there are game companies building those for PureOS you're delusional.
Concerning "game companies", this is a typical problem of new hardware and is quite expected (in the beginning). The difference however is that you do not have to rewrite anything, just recompile for Debian ARM and make it fit the screen. Potentially thousands of games should run well after quick adjustments.
> Is their hardware really open source?
The phone is going to get Respects Your Freedom certification by the FSF.
>> Purism published the KiCAD schematics files for the DevKit, which was entirely designed with free software tools. However, Purism has not released the CAD files or the Gerber files for the Librem 5, in order to prevent the creation of clones. CEO Todd Weaver says that Purism needs to recover its development costs before releasing the Gerber files, which they are “thinking about releasing in a time capsule” of “3 years, 5 years, something like that.”
Not to mention the plastic CAD files, tooling, etc.
There's very little you can do with electrical schematics alone. It's probably just enough for someone to claim a product is "open sourced" while keeping it proprietary for all intents and purposes.
Yes, you are right. The reason is the wrong claims written in a convincing tone and (intentionally?) ignoring facts.
For example, here you ignore that this company is providing much more than any other company typically provides (schematics). Purism also promise manufacturing files and have a history of fulfilling their promises (even though sometimes with delays). I have no idea how you can say "resounding no" if you take into account the alternatives.
I mean, Olimex isn't exactly poor. https://www.olimex.com/
This. Apple doesn't even care about Hackintoshes, which are (theoretically) orders of magnitude more threatening to Apple's business model since they (theoretically) cannibalize Mac sales.
> Although about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though," Gates told an audience at the University of Washington. "And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.
I am sure Apple loves that Hackintosh users are in the Apple ecosystem (often developing software for Apple machines), and many will eventually start buying real Apple hardware.
Apple will turn a blind eye to Hackintosh as long as the process stays too difficult to ever cannibalize sales.
"A survey conducted by Forrester Research earlier this month showed that Microsoft has already become the country’s second-biggest cloud services provider, with its Office 365 and Azure platforms."
Looks like the subscription model did the trick.
That's because their numbers are so low that they don't represent a threat, but still contribute to keep users hooked to the Apple ecosystem, which is vital for them; of 10 people with a Hackintosh there may be no real Mac users, but many of them are likely to own an iPhone and use other Apple services; Apple need to keep those customers so they close both eyes on Hackintoshes. Also, since they offer no warranty for non original Apple hardware, it wouldn't impact much their corporate users base, which often are forced to use the real thing.
One side effect of making their own line of CPUs, and a system that as for now, runs only on them, however, could also be seen as a way to kill the Hackintoshes "competition", or it may be just a nice side effect for them. Time will tell.
I suspect a lot of Hackintoshes users do so because they like using macOS day-to-day, but don't see anything appealing in Apple's hardware lineup.
I'm one of them.
I wonder if it occurred to someone at Apple, if it's somewhat an added benefit to them.
With apple silicon, I hope they release a decent 'mac pro' or something that is good enough for me. Prices won't go down obviously, so here's hoping we can at least install third-party ram + storage.
(and this is just one of the pain points I get from Windows 10 every day that I don't get from macOS.)
My biggest pain are how Apple treats everyone, for the last 30 years. It's unbelievably frustrating.
Yes. Especially if you add in how Microsoft Corporation have treated people over the last 30 years too.
Small examples: you can scroll a window without having to click on it to make it active, applications don't refer to files using paths but file ids instead so you can generally move files around a disk while they are open without things breaking.
This works on Windows, and most sane Linux DEs are either default to that or can be configured to do that.
> applications don't refer to files using paths but file ids instead so you can generally move files around a disk while they are open without things breaking.
Do you mean they hold an opening fd of the file, which is also not special at all? Otherwise it is pretty interesting, please elaborate.
The ability to implement file access the way is obviously possible on any OS, but on the Mac it's consistently implemented that way in applications, except for a couple of bad actors. On other OSes it's much more mixed. The same can be said for many other small features. There's a just a lot better consistency overall on macOS.
Exactly. Special notwithstanding, it’s still a nice feature and not something Windows has to my knowledge, at least not common (i.e. “File is in use” errors). On macOS you can e.g. move a file to trash while it’s being used still by some running program.
I believe (if I understand what you mean correctly) that the file system behaviour is also a Linux thing. Deleting a file that is open is completely fine in Linux.
I think UX between the three OSs is almost completely a matter of habit and familiarity these days. I for one can't see how anyone can be productive with the (what I believe is abysmal) window management on a Mac but millions of people like it so I'd probably get used to it if I wanted to.
It's required by POSIX, so all modern UNIX-like systems have this behavior:
When the file's link count becomes 0 and no process has the file open, the space occupied by the file shall be freed and the file shall no longer be accessible. If one or more processes have the file open when the last link is removed, the link shall be removed before unlink() returns, but the removal of the file contents shall be postponed until all references to the file are closed.
https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/functions/u...
I think the interesting part is being missed here, the behavior is that the file is being identified to apps by a uniquie identifier which is not the path, so referrering apps still find it after it's been moved, even when they didn't have it open already. More like using the inode as the identifier maybe? This is a behavior that goes all the way back through the pre-OSX macs. It was part of some sort of philosophy for Macs though I forget its name.
- You can have (..)nix like terminal in half of the screen and Office, Photoshop, and most of the shiny SW ("except games") running flawlessly in the other half without some kind of VM
- The battery of this very nice machines that it comes attached to may last a day
- Customization is a bit more restricted than its (..)nix cousins so most of the time it runs flawlessly even if you don't know what you're doing
- It connects very well with the other device that a lot of people carry in their pockets
- There are not a lot of combinations of HW + MacOs that you can run so online support tends to be very good
Try as I might, I have never found any laptop that is even half as sturdily built as a macbook. Yes apple plays dirty tricks that prevent inexpensive repair, but TBH, no one else produces a product that physically lasts long enough to be worth repairing by the time the board level components gives out.
I'm sure Apple denies any faulty hardware as they did with their keyboards.
That said, I am using one of those Macbook Pros for work, and the overall build is still very impressive. I would expect this machine to last longer physically than any of the non-mac laptops I have ever used.
I like Linux, but it’s no where near as polished as Mac OS. Wasn’t 20 years ago. Isn’t now.
Hell, I’m thinking I should just reinstall windows and use WSL2.
"...in my opinion."
None of those require macOS.
Add to that a lack of expandability, customizability, (user) repairability and (hardware) compatibility.
Life is just a lot less miserable without having to deal with Apple hardware. PC components seem to be very reliable when you spend just middle-range prices and you can easily buy and swap out components when something does go wrong.
I generally go many months without having to reboot my Hackintosh, and I can't ever remember having a kernel panic after initial setup. Both of those things were not true with Apple hardware.
You can see services revenue is up to 14 billion compared to iPhone's 26 billion.
> If the services aren’t generating that margin, the hardware is making it up.
I really don't like that way of looking at profits.
Going by that standard, if you sell a thousand dollar device with $260 in margin and no software, everything is great.
But then if you add on $600 in software to increase your margin to $330, that's bad somehow?
Imagine thinking macOS is threatened by Linux. Guys like this will never understand the appeal of the Apple ecosystem, it is beyond their comprehension. There are some good reasons to run Linux, but shouldn't you at least be capable of seeing why Apple makes the kind of money they do, beyond the "well those customers must obviously be stupid and less enlightened than myself, a true warrior of the Free Software tribe"? Why are people like this.
Sort of.
For most MacBook users, a chromebook will be more sensible choice.
And iphones sell because fashion.
iOS is locked down, and Mac app Store is also a candy shop. Because there are stupid people to spend money on shit mobile games, apple makes quite a lot of money.
And they do lot of deceitful marketing. Apple software is getting shit year by year.
Most people buy apple because "brand", and get accustomed to it and don't like slightest change.
- First, having good hardware support even on x86_64, a known platform with vendor support, can be problematic.
Even on a standard laptop where Linux works just fine, it's still a struggle for the community to get all the peripherals working after a new laptop has been released. Usually new computers can take a year or two before everything is sorted out. For example, on my Lenovo tablet, it took a whole year before every driver has stabilized, yet the integrated audio still didn't work (even when two company employees were actively supporting it on Linux), and I had to take an USB soundcard on-the-go, a really frustrating experience. Eventually I found the problem in the source code, fixed it, and submitted it to LKML - happy end. But it's not the only problem I had, and not everyone is lucky to have an easy problem - the more non-standard the platform is, the more problematic it is, just ask Microsoft Surface Book users for confirmation.
- Second, power management is already a somewhat unsolvable problem on x86_64, again, it's a known platform, and often with vendor support.
It's increasingly difficult to do power saving in modern laptops with highly integrated SoC - a single component can prevent the entire system from entering a deeper power saving state. In the old days, CPU and graphics were basically everything, but nowadays there can be an endless number of traps - a SATA driver or an audio driver can be the culprit. And even when developers have gone through the trouble of supporting power saving in a device driver based on the existing documentation, it's often plagued with mysterious bugs that baffles everyone (the Window driver often includes nonstandard workarounds that is difficult to be discovered without familiarity with the hardware and systematic testing). And not to mention that many subsystems are poorly documented that prevents the implementation of power management. On many machines, it's already safe to say that nobody knows how power management really works, and nobody knows how to fix it.
- Third, reverse engineering the GPU driver is hard, GPU driver is still a disaster on Nvidia x86_64 and ARM SoCs.
In the past decade, it's well known that Nvidia had done a successful job to destroy Nouveau, the free and open source driver for Nvidia graphics, by simply not providing documentation and tech support. It took years of reverse engineering to get basic 3D rendering, and another few years for reclocking support. And the introduction of signed firmware for hardware initialization and control essentially rendered Nouveau unusable on the last few generations. The problem is GPU is not limited to complex hardware like Nvidia graphics, even the graphics on relatively simple ARM SoCs have this problem, documentation is nonexistent and reverse engineering is slow. The Mali GPU commonly found on ARM single board computers is still having problem on performance, stability and hardware support.
Even on an extremely popular platform, with known documentation (after requests from the community) and strong community support - the Raspberry Pi, it still takes 3 years or so before the 3D graphics driver, VC4, is developed into a usable state.
---
Porting Linux to Apple Silicon is a challenge that requires developers to accomplish a similar task, but under the conditions of (1) to a brand new platform, (2) with unknown, new and non-standard peripherals, including the GPU, (3) without adequate documentation. It's easy to make the kernel boot, but making it usable is the sum of all nightmares.
You'll find none of the peripherals works, and the community reverse engineering efforts will take years before getting basic functionality, and even then, the battery will only last for 2 hours and will forever be broken. Graphics acceleration will be nonexistent or just borderline usable. And only Apple knows the technical details, nobody can fix it.
Unless the circumstances change and indicate otherwise, I think the Apple Silicon port will be a serious waste of community time, talents, and resources. It's better to spend time on a platform where vendor support and documentation exists...
However, the conclusion assumes that a serious competitor of Apple Silicon will eventually emerge and more supportive to the community, but it won't necessarily happen. I'm somewhat afraid that biting the bullet and reverse engineering the Apple Silicon could be the only way to have a high-performance Linux desktop on ARM - I hope not.
First they ignore you
Then they laugh at you
Yet.
However, considering Apple's behavior around iPhones and iPads, I don't expect those hopes to come to much fruition.
The integratedness of Apple's offerings depend on the control they have on both software and hardware. I think it's the integratedness that sells Apple's product.
Agreed. But the point I argues was that Apple does not care because they sell hardware either way. I think they care a lot their hardware is used to runt their software, as this is a big reason to sell more hardware.
NT is very much legacy code in maintenance mode, switching to something that's more modern that's also the base for Android makes a lot of sense.
Nowadays, especially on iOS, it seems like the software is the focus. I'd argue that's a mistake that will sooner rather than later bite Apple in the ass. Hopefully the switch to M1 is a sign that Apple realizes this and wants to move back toward making top-notch hardware instead of coasting on App Store rent-seeking and planned obsolescence.
They also make hardware that to take advantage of the new software features need to become obsolete
Linux extends the life of any hardware it runs on
This new hardware is awesome!
I could care less overall though.
Frankly, open computing can be done fast enough to not be a worry. I will stick with all that and see where this new path leads.
And my mind is open. Who knows? Maybe it all ends up in a good place.
I am quite happy to run FOSS on the many devices that will do that reasonably for the foreseeable future.
How will the GPU driver support arrive unless Apple opens up the specs to it? Either these open it up like AMD and the community writes a driver, or they keep it closed and people try to reverse engineer something that is a poor second best (hello Nouveau).
What do you realistically think will happen?
It's just not worth it.
When is driver support coming?
When will audio on Mac's work on Linux?
When will the touchbar drivers be made available?
Apple doesn't give a shit about Linux, but they also don't make it easy to use their hardware.
And to answer the question posed, no, I would never give this company money.
There are options to buy from & support manufacturers who actively help this process. Why would I put my money towards making apples hardware more attractive, when their stance is at best "we don't care but we might change things any second and break this simply because we don't care."
[1] OK, I do. I have a T-42 with an unknown supervisor password. :( I installed OpenBSD on it ages ago, but locked myself out.
AMD is traditionally better for desktop GPU support but either is fine.
Particular hardware doesn't really matter these days, just check the manufacturer website / reviews. Level1 techs on YouTube cover Linux support well for various mobos.
No, I don't. On the Mac platform, Apple has consistently elected to give users ultimate control. They could have a change of heart some day, but so could Intel, Microsoft, or any other vendor.
I agree that the situation sucks for us, but on the other side - you can give a piece of Apple hardware to a literal child and won't have to deal with either getting it running in the first place (as with anything Linux based) or a persistent rootkit or other malware (which is more common and easy than not on Windows).
Being easily open for power users, hard to exploit for malware and hard for incompetent people to mess up, unfortunately, is a Hard Thing.
It's honestly not hard to disable any security settings that are getting in the way. I run whatever software I like on my Mac, no problems.
People have been talking about how Apple were going to lock down Mac OS "real soon now" for at least a decade. There's no real indication that it's ever going to happen.
I remember the days of very little Apple compatible software on the shelf at retailers, and no games. I was probably one of the first students to use a MacBook with OSX for CSCI 101 because many classes required Windows. That was lack of freedom. The App Store has more software than any other distribution channel at any point in my life.
Edit: I also love freedom from malware, which I understand is probably a temporary situation. But it’s been a good run so far.
Apple does not, but the GPL does.
Edit: I ask because I’m curious to learn and because many systems run apps that are GPL without the whole system being GPL. For example, I love using GIMP on Windows.
> You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein.
This conflicts with the App Store's Terms of Service, particularly it's "Usage Rules". https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store...
This is of course different from merely running GPL software on a proprietary OS. In fact, iOS ships with GPL software on board.
Not sure this Stack Overflow is current/correct, but it appears other FOSS licenses might be compatible with iOS App Store terms. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/459833/which-open-source...
If you write entirely your own code, and include only more freely licensed dependencies, you can release your own code under the GPL and still distribute it on the App Store.
Eric Raymond explained why: use value. Open systems can be exploited easily and the people who use them get high use value because of all that.
Incentives to port and build on known open systems are stronger, barriers to access lower.
Result: more FOSS on said system
We're talking about Apple, right? The company that made an entire software platform called Bootcamp, specifically to enable a competitor's OS to run on their hardware? A company who custom-developed drivers specifically to be compatible with a competitor's OS on their own hardware? You're talking about that Apple? The one who said they would be open to allowing Windows to run on M1 if Microsoft developed a compatible version of Windows?
I just want to make sure we're talking about the same company, because you seem to think we're talking about a company who runs in the face of competition, where the Apple I know confronts it head-on and goes out of their way to be compatible with the competitors.
We are talking about that Apple which sued a recycling vendor in Canada because they recycled devices instead of trashing them.
We are talking about that Apple which bribed judges in the US to deny its endusers the right to repair.
We are talking about that Apple which removed even the audio port of a device to prevent its competition to breakout of the locked hardware with their "upgrades" like better cameras, or even payment systems that wont be supported by Apple.
We are talking about that Apple which even changed their goddamn shell from the BSD fork because they didnt want to "open source" (Apple thinks this is zip file dumping) their own bash, which was the only reason bash was outdated for decades.
Yes, we are talking about that Apple.
Once anything is a competition, it will be extinguished by Apple. They only care about profits, and nothing else.
Care to expand on that?
> We are talking about that Apple which sued a recycling vendor in Canada because they recycled devices instead of trashing them.
That's incorrect. They sued the company because they were supposed to take the devices apart and recycle/recover the parts. Not resell them as manufacturer refurbished.
> We are talking about that Apple which bribed judges in the US to deny its endusers the right to repair.
Again, please expand on that.
> We are talking about that Apple which removed even the audio port of a device to prevent its competition to breakout of the locked hardware with their "upgrades" like better cameras, or even payment systems that wont be supported by Apple.
Arguably, for the 2 things you have mentioned, the Lightening port would be much better suited. They took out the headphone jack because wires are a pain in the ass and the state of the art for wireless headsets is good enough for the majority.
> We are talking about that Apple which even changed their goddamn shell from the BSD fork because they didnt want to "open source" (Apple thinks this is zip file dumping) their own bash, which was the only reason bash was outdated for decades.
So brief history of the defaults shells in macOS. First 3 releases it was tcsh (BSD - inherited from NeXTStep), then for a while, it was the GPLv2 version of bash (last version to be released under GPLv2 was 3.2), more recently they moved to zsh (MIT). The critical part to get here is licensing. The GPLv3, like it or not, is a controversial license. Apple have an issue with GPLv3, so they avoid software that uses it. Frankly, when bash transitioned to GPLv3 is when Apple should've made the change, but that is a different discussion.
While they ended up on the market as refurbished, (not necessarily manufacturer refurbished) the devices were sold to refurbishers, who would have treated them as any other device they received for refurbishing.
The lock feature is implemented via iCloud and the "Find My Mac" page, which is able to remotely shut the soft fuses via BIOS/EFI, and in return physically bricks the hardware. Anybody that has control over your iCloud account (e.g. a malicious third party) can potentially do this. See [1], this happened to a lot of companies (customers) that had problems with malicious third-parties getting access to their network.
> That's incorrect. They sued the company because they were supposed to take the devices apart and recycle/recover the parts. Not resell them as manufacturer refurbished.
How come that they could only prove that by having more than 18% of devices that were sent to be trashed with active GPS antennas, and active remote iCloud software tracking? [2] Also, recycle is defined as re-cycling, not re-abandoning. The definition of recycling among the population seems to be a different perception than yours.
Do you honestly think Apple would've dropped the lawsuit if the devices would've been repaired and given away for free? Also kind of related: The lawsuit that happened in Norway, where Rossmann was called as a witness [4]
> They took out the headphone jack because wires are a pain in the ass and the state of the art for wireless headsets is good enough for the majority.
Literally a couple months after PayPal and other payment providers were banned by removing the headphone jack in the 8th gen iPhone, Apple Pay was introduced. You're making it sound like 2 or 3 tiny low-voltage wires are harder to implement than a Bluetooth antenna wiring... c'mon, really?
> (history of default shells in macOS)
You're making it sound as if bash was only inside macOS for a short time. bash, for the sake of argument, has been in use since macOS 10.2 which was released in 2002 [3], whereas 10.0 was a public beta and 10.1 was released the same year in 2001. The argument of a tcsh being in use for 9 months, and bash being in use for over 19 years is quite the opposite way around than you seem to perceive it.
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[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987
[2] https://www.theverge.com/apple/2020/10/4/21499422/apple-sues...
[3] https://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-102.html
[4] https://repair.eu/de/news/apple-crushes-one-man-repair-shop/
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Again, my arguments were to counteract the argument that "Apple is acting in good faith for the people", because I do not think that anything innovative can happen on a crippled platform.
Apple actively shuts down innovation, every time it could be seen as an alternative to their own product, which they will release only once market adaption has been done by pioneers. This was happening a lot of times with hardware, and a lot of times with software.
I personally would choose repairability over anything, always, because I've learned my lessons the hard way with financial burdens.
So a security feature? Hardly Apple acting maliciously, is it. Regarding iCloud being compromised, this is inarguably down to lack security policy on the part of business or the end user. iCloud now enforces 2fa by default as a result, largely because (and I'm speaking from experience here) most businesses can't be trusted to do this themselves.
> How come that they could only prove that by having more than 18% of devices that were sent to be trashed with active GPS antennas, and active remote iCloud software tracking? [2] Also, recycle is defined as re-cycling, not re-abandoning. The definition of recycling among the population seems to be a different perception than yours.
Had Apple sold the lots to the company, you'd be right, but that's not what happened. Apple paid the company to destroy, recover and recycle. The company acted in bad faith and against the terms of the contract they had with Apple. With regards to you claim that Apple tracked active devices - when a business has any kind of electronic equipment destroyed, they are required, by law, to record certain information about the devices like serial numbers, etc. Unsurprisingly, some of the devices turned up at Apple stores for repair. The article that you linked to has the following from Apple: “Products sent for recycling are no longer adequate to sell to consumers and if they are rebuilt with counterfeit parts they could cause serious safety issues, including electrical or battery defects...”. Devices that can and meet the requisant standards to be refurbished and resold are.
> Literally a couple months after PayPal and other payment providers were banned by removing the headphone jack in the 8th gen iPhone, Apple Pay was introduced. You're making it sound like 2 or 3 tiny low-voltage wires are harder to implement than a Bluetooth antenna wiring... c'mon, really?
This is noting more than a conspiracy theory! Do you really believe that they removed the headphone jack to fuck with Paypal? This is utterly ridiculous. I'm not, by the way, suggesting that wires are are a pain in the ass from an engineering perspective, rather a user perspective.
> You're making it sound as if bash was only inside macOS for a short time. bash, for the sake of argument, has been in use since macOS 10.2 which was released in 2002 [3], whereas 10.0 was a public beta and 10.1 was released the same year in 2001. The argument of a tcsh being in use for 9 months, and bash being in use for over 19 years is quite the opposite way around than you seem to perceive it.
Your link shows that bash was included with 10.2 (it was included with 10.0/10.1 and NeXTStep too), not the default. tsch was still the default until OS X 10.3 (bash-2.05a-release) - not 9 months, 2.5 years. bash 4.0 was formally released in 2009, with a change to GPLv3. Apple had updated bash to 3.2 and stuck with that as it was licensed in a way that was acceptable to them for distribution. I know this to be the case because I actually used these OS's on a daily basis. As I said originally, Apple should have switched to a different shell at this point. The wornderfull thing about UNIX shells is that the user can change the default and use what they want, including updating the pre installed one, so suggesting this as Apple being user hostile is well wide of the mark.
> Again, my arguments were to counteract the argument that "Apple is acting in good faith for the people", because I do not think that anything innovative can happen on a crippled platform.
That's your opinion, and a perfectly fine and valid one to have, but...
> Apple actively shuts down innovation, every time it could be seen as an alternative to their own product, which they will release only once market adaption has been done by pioneers. This was happening a lot of times with hardware, and a lot of times with software.
...is simply not accurate in the way you are framing it.
> I personally would choose repairability over anything, always, because I've learned my lessons the hard way with financial burdens.
That's fine. Others wouldn't. I'd suggest convenience is top of the list for the majority of people that use Apple products. It's the same argument that goes against the customisation camp.
...
Say more...?
If they see a similar use for Linux support, they'll do the same. If they think it will hurt them in some way, they won't.
But I think it's fair to at least consider the "undermine" possibility considering that on iPhones they've consistently blocked attempts to jailbreak or open that platform in the way an alternate OS does on their Macs. We've already seen incremental moves to make MacOS app distribution more centrally controlled. So I honestly don't know where Apple believes their long-term interested to be on the topic of facilitating, or at least not actively blocking Linux.
I agree and said... pretty much the same thing. I just don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell Apple will see Linux as a threat.
> But I think it's fair to at least consider the "undermine" possibility considering that on iPhones they've consistently blocked attempts to jailbreak or open that platform in the way an alternate OS does on their Macs. We've already seen incremental moves to make MacOS app distribution more centrally controlled. So I honestly don't know where Apple believes their long-term interested to be on the topic of facilitating, or at least not actively blocking Linux.
Nope. Not likely, unless the mechanism for getting Linux on the M-series is software exploits of the macOS platform. They don’t do anything to undermine booting entirely other OSes on their hardware, even iDevices. But they do patch up their own stack.
It's just business: Apple won't intentionally remove features that makes their hardware more attractive. It's where they make most of their money.
Second while Gatekeeper has been around for 8+ years, the default of contacting an Apple server on every program launch was new (or so I thought) with Big Sur. It's a step towards that direction. People could not launch apps when this server was down.
It only became noticeable because there was an oversight in the "fail-fast" algorithm. If Apple was available, it was assumed it would be fast, and it wasn't when there was an iCloud outage.
Federighi quote: “We have the core technologies for them to do that, to run their ARM version of Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications. But that’s a decision Microsoft has to make, to bring to license that technology for users to run on these Macs. But the Macs are certainly very capable of it.”
To be completely clear, this quote may have only been referring to virtualized operation, but given a change in the WinARM solution licensing model, Apple might support booting as they did on x86 Macs.
Let's rephrase that: The company that made a generic X86 computer and intentionally created a non-standard way to boot operating systems on their run-of-the-mill X86 hardware, so that other X86-compatible operating-systems running on the same hardware would have issues and make OSX look better by comparison.
Yeah, that company. I don't expect them to do jack shit for compatibility.
How generous of them. And will they provide microsoft with the specs needed to do so?
I already pay for closed source Intel and AMD, I wouldn't mind being able to use M1s, but, I just don't like Apple laptop hardware.
This is an idealism vs. pragmatism debate. Ideally, we’d have a solid hardware stack for Linux. Pragmatically, we have top-of-the-line metal for which there will or will not be Linux. I know which one I would fight for if I still believed in consumer-grade Linux.
I am just as in favor of fully open source hardware, software, the whole stack (heck, I'm a huge RISC-V nut), but I won't stick my head under the sand and pretend that I'd rather have a 10x slower, but FOS, machine.
I applaud Purism and other companies that strive to make a fully open source full stack, but I won't always have the financial freedom to purchase products that are either slower or less ergonomic than a closed alternative. It's sad, but it's pragmatism.
That would be these guys then: https://www.sifive.com/boards/hifive-unmatched
https://mntre.com/media/reform_md/2020-05-08-the-much-more-p...
Edit: and here I was, thinking a smiley would clarify things. For the record, I'm of course not arguing against supporting sifive. I just think that in the context of this thread, what MNT are doing is much more directly comparable to porting Linux to M1
> a 10 times slower but open platform
I don’t think you or Apple or anyone else has to worry about that
I use a 1 inch thick Thinkpad that's almost a decade old because it runs Libreboot. There is an alternative, but you need to be in the mindset where freedom is more important than hardware.
You could drive across country right now without a cell phone, just buy a Rand McNally road atlas. That's all you need.
You won't... because it would require you to pay attention to signs and exits, instead of having Google Maps do all that for you.
Serious question. Freedom / open computing
, or
Spiffy hardware.
Pick one. This is where we are right now.
I choose to believe this is not a typo.
I'd rather help funding the port to a 10 times slower but open platform, rather to a technically superior but proprietary close one whose owner would make it incompatible two seconds after they would smell competition from Linux in any of their core business fields. No thanks, I'll send my small quid to whomever appears to be really in favor of openness, no strings attached, which is neither the case with Apple as it is not with Google or Microsoft.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/09/05/how-app...