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.
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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