By its very nature Homebrew is going to hit every edge case that can possibly exist during this transition process. It also has a huge number of indirect dependancies, also driven by its nature as a package manager. Meaning a huge amount of work across many projects is needed to get Homebrew “working” for everyone.

We’re at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs. If important thing X doesn’t work right, and it’s important to your workflow, then buy an Intel Mac.

Otherwise have patience and wait for people work through the issues. Besides in a years time Apple are undoubtedly going to release the M2, M3 etc with a whole slew of “pro” devices better suited for developers.

As to why Adobe gets a helping hand. Simple, Adobe’s customers almost certainly make up a bigger portion of Apple’s revenue than developers. Plus normal people understand what photoshop is, and understand how important it is to work on these new Mac. The general public hasn’t even heard of Homebrew, never mind understands how impressive it would be to get such software working on day 0.

I'm not paying the Homebrew developers anything so I've got no right to expect anything or criticise whatever they choose to do with their time and their project.

But if they did want compatibility it's not true that they're 'at the start of Apples two year transition to ARM CPUs' - you have been able to access development machines for many months. I got one and I don't maintain anything nearly as important as Homebrew.

The reason Apple do developer previews, betas, and early access to hardware is so that you can have day-one support, if you want it.

I don't think you needed M1 - I think A12Z was fine and widely available for many months.

So no, I don't think "you can have day-one support, if you want it" is accurate at all.

Do we have any actual numbers on that? I feel like developers (and power-users generally) have internalized this notion that we're a rounding error compared to the general public (perhaps a holdover from the old days, when regular folks didn't use the internet or computers at all). But in 2020, software development is a massive portion of the economy, and Macs seem to be disproportionately popular with startups and developers.

A little lazy googling puts the graphic design industry at $12.7 billion, and the software development industry at $388.98 billion.

I hope this next year shows Apple helping out pivotal projects like Homebrew. If they expect their own developers to be using their own hardware, then they will certainly have to make it work.

I was only a student when they switched to Intel, so I wasn't aware of any issues facing developers back then. I'm guessing they'll follow the same playbook, though.

Because an important segment of Apple's customers--developers--rely on Homebrew for critical functionality.

Of course it's difficult to move an entire ecosystem to a new architecture, and Apple may have made the right move here. But it's not very hard to understand why people who stand to gain so much from the new architecture, but can't use it yet because the ecosystem isn't there yet, are a little annoyed.

Plenty of us develop just fine without it.

> Otherwise have patience and wait for people work through the issues. Besides in a years time Apple are undoubtedly going to release the M2, M3 etc with a whole slew of “pro” devices better suited for developers.

There's also, arguably, a pretty pronounced bleeding-edge trend over the past 12-18 months or so, across a number of device categories: foldables everywhere, new game consoles, multiple open-spec Linux phones, M1 Macs, etc.

And if you're not itching to early adopt, the timing for all of these is actually kind of great. Because parallel to this, there are multiple ecosystem-level changes hitting over the next several months that should translate to big usability jumps for any of the ones that get a next version. (Though probably not the consoles, since those tend to run longer lifecycles by design.)

Of particular note: by the time the M2 or M3 has ironed out the macOS ARM ecosystem, you can also reasonably expect high-end devices as a category to have 6GHz WiFi and a modern spec for Bluetooth audio.

Sure, but making it easy for developers to use your platform is good because then it's easier to develop big fancy things like Photoshop.

I got a dev unit (mac mini). It had beta 2 on it. We started the porting effort and had questions. Forums were the only place they said answers could be had. Never got any answers.

When beta 10 was released, it just wouldn't install. We tried for a week then saw a post on the forums that gave a hint about Mac-to-Mac reset of the firmware and general machine state. We had to upgrade another machine to Catalina to use it (inconvenient, but not a killer).

When 11.0.1 came out it wouldn't install and now the machine is a brick. We ordered a production mini with the M1 and it will be here in late December. While we sit with the brick and can't do any porting.

At every step we hit brick walls and had zero help from Apple. It was beyond frustrating.

And, because I want 16GB that's an automatic wait.

You can get only the standard configs without waiting, which do not include any 16 GB RAM model.

People have been consistently rewarding them for this direction by buying more of their stuff and relying on open source projects to fill in the gaps without really acknowledging the obvious problem that Apple has made it increasingly unattractive to use their hardware to do anything other than Apple stuff.

To me it matters most that I be able to do things that I want easily on the platform I choose - in that sense PC hardware with Linux is the best choice I have, with Windows coming in 2nd due to how much Microsoft has done to make their OS attractive for wide variety of use cases that are not necessarily to Microsoft's direct benefit.

For packages such as GCC, that of course will take a lot of time. For Java, there are other supported runtimes like Azul Zulu, but Homebrew just wants OpenJDK and not much else.

Besides being used internally as mentioned, making the Alpha Geeks (to use Tim O'Reilly's phrase) happy would be prudent for their continued success. If the Alpha Geeks aren't using your product, they will not recommended it to their friends when asked for computer advise, and it will not be installed in relatives' home where the Alpha Geeks tend to do tech support.

The Alpha Geeks was how Apple probably got more popular that PCs in the first place, and they may now have a lot/enough inertial to keep moving forward, but Microsoft and PCs used to be the 800-pound (400 kg) gorilla, and they're less so now.

There's a lot of Unix-y stuff being used in academy, research, and HPC: plenty of folks there would be just as willing to switch to a PC with Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS (which run the world's HPC clusters) if macOS gets in the way of their workflow if Homebrew or Macports don't work.

At which point in time was that?

From the statistics I could google in a few seconds, for the last 20 years, MacOS was always hovering around 10-15% of the worldwide desktop PC market share with Windows at around 75-85% and linux/BSD the rest of the scraps.

Absolutely. I'd say Linux is the default for science and ML!

If Microsoft is less successful in the home market now, it is because Windows is seen by many consumers as too techy, and too difficult.

You may say that's not true. But just look at their actions and not their marketing speak.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25188225

There is essentially no regression, and Apple is donating hardware to enable Homebrew to do the work to extract more performance from the new chips.

What ‘more’ do you think they should do?

This is classic of the all or nothing attitude that anti-Apple and anti-Mac people have. Unless Apple does some Herculean task that shows they're worthy, they're shit.

That makes the process much more complex.

They haven’t impacted homebrew users negatively at all.

You do have to specify Terminal to launch using Rosetta however.

I am holding off purchasing multiple ARM Macs until homebrew works properly. We need them for our development and ops work, and now these uber-cool Macs are out, buying old Intel ones has become a no-no too, so we don't buy any desktops/laptops at all!

If you read this and work at Apple, you can show this message to your bosses and I hope that it could entice the company to sponsor Homebrew with hardware + engineer time to help the project go forward. I am pretty sure than homebrew generates 100s of millions of sales for Macs (100k computers sold instead of Linux laptops if homebrew did not exist seems reasonable).

As you can read further down the thread, the Homebrew team was granted test units during the summer and had M1 Macs donated to them once they shipped.

This is what I love about HN: the actual people behind the stories comment here.

How is it acceptable that Apple donates just now? Even more so when Apple themselves use Homebrew. tags:#apple

edit: I don't mind the foreseen responseless downvotes. This is more of a personal note on yet another reason to stay away from APPL after having problems with iPhone 6 CPU throtling and MacBook Pro keyboard fiasco.

Homebrew isn't a cross-platform thing. It's written by MacOS users for MacOS users. (Although I guess it now also supports Linux.) The project didn't need anything from Apple as long as Apple was using generally-available hardware.

Once Apple announced new hardware, they donated hardware to avoid the brew devs needing to buy new hardware. I'm not sure why anyone would expect anything before then.

The least I would expect from a tax evading megacorp like Apple was to support the development of a tool that's so widespread and important to developers on macs. That would be the smart thing to do.

The fact that homebrew is specific to macs only adds insult to injury because that's even more reason to support such a tool and strengthen their ecosystem.

Throwing a bone so late in the game with no extra support other than a few beta machines worth a single week of one developer's income is laughable.

I shouldn't be surprided by Apple's stinginess. Last time they got hacked by a one-of-a-kind security research team which found dozens of vulnerabilities, the team was paid within 6 digits what could easily sell for 7 ou perhaps 8 digits to state actors. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24718078

Could any global corporation pay more in taxes? Absolutely.

But paying $35 billion in taxes and being the world's largest tax payer is not nothing [1].

[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-apple...

Well here are some non-biased results from Google's first page for your education:

- Apple Avoided $40 Billion in Taxes. Now It Wants a Gold Star https://fortune.com/2018/01/18/apple-bonuses-money-us-350-bi...

- Silicon Valley giants accused of avoiding over $100 billion in taxes over the last decade. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/silicon-valley-giants-accuse...

It's amazing how far Apple supporters will go to defend Apple stealing their own money.

It could be that people are reacting less in defense of Apple and more to your obvious passionate hatred of the company.

Travelling far to a "genius store" to show a stuttering iPhone only to be told that the battery is still not broken enough for warranty despite the phone having to slow down to protect the underprovisioned underplaned battery is like being called a clown and a liar.

And diminishing tax evasion denounced by multiple unbiased entities to "people can't reason with Large numbers" is a disservice to those who could use those billions in health care.

Nothing like the original Intel transition program, I'm willing to bet they're going to give credit instead of hardware for the exchange this time around too. It's an entirely different company now.

Apple doesn't NEED to subsidize or keep developers happy anymore. They've already won us and the marketshare. SE, vertical integration, leapfrog CPU and battery life.. They don't have any competitor, so why waste money investing in the ecosystem? We're going to build for them anyway.

I agree there's been a big shift in focus. I'm seriously unhappy about the Amazon/Google level of ad-down-throat-ramming I have to put up with on my Apple TV. But I don't think they're throwing the towel in on hardware and software innovation.

People are under no obligation to upgrade immediately to big sur. I'm holding out on Catalina for a few months with older hardware. M1 is a big change and I'm not surprised it will initially break a few things.

Also the point of having third party app ecosystem is that the first party doesn't have to maintain them and yet still receive some benefit from them.

It's unfortunate they don't have a package manager. They could do better than apt if they put resources behind it.

They could donate something, but why should they? It’s community project not run by Apple. We, users, who actively use it to make professional work, should be responsible for supporting community projects like that. :)

Apple should have a vested interest in developers on their platform and thus ports of popular F/OSS; but obviously, developers, graphic artists, music and other content producers aren't as significant a customer group relative to consumers as they used to be. I wonder how the decline of the Mac platform for professional work hits Apple's baseline assuming the historical draw of content creators to the platform also brought consumers and has been used by Apple in advertising, but I guess Apple knows better and simply makes so much more money with iDevices.

The first patches for Apple silicon came from Apple engineers, FWIW.

Lets not forget that pretty much everything that's part of the Darwin layer (a.k.a. Unix) is already running natively on M1 Macs, including Ruby, Python, Perl, Vim, Emacs, etc. Straight from Apple.

I wonder how the decline of the Mac platform for professional work hits Apple's baseline assuming…

Apple's Mac revenue hit an all-time high just last quarter and that was before M1 Macs shipped. Yes, a product line that's about to be 37 years old in January 2021 hit $9 billion in revenue during a global pandemic [1] and jumped 39% [2]. I doubt there's a decline in professional usage of the Mac; even if there were, entry level M1 Macs that outperform professional Intel-based machines from Apple and others will address that.

but I guess Apple knows better and simply makes so much more money with iDevices.

The iPhone is brings in the most money but the Mac ($9 billion) made more than the iPad ($6.7 billion) and the Apple Watch + HomePod ($7.8 billion).

[1]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/10/apple-reports-fourth-...

[2]: https://fortune.com/2010/05/17/u-s-mac-sales-up-39-in-april/

And, don’t forget about MacPorts, which is more “core Apple philosophy” than Homebrew.

The Mac App Store is for app delivery, similar, but not exactly a replacement.

A package management system must take care of versions, dependencies, such as, this version of MySQL needs OpenSSL version X, Readline Y, etc. Make sure it doesn't mess with Python's OpenSSL/readline decencies which are both different from the ones used by the OS, and so on.

If they are, they're not doing a very good job; Adobe stuff is reportedly kind of buggy even under Rosetta, and historically Adobe has been very, very slow with the x86_64 transition, the Intel transition, the MacOS 10 transition, and so on.

Semantically this is not the case because they've "released", sure, but I don't think there's anything meaningful you can do until you scale out like this.

They are against right to repair, want to have their own walled garden for both mobile and desktop, so why would they help with this?

Apple has lost its way.

They should not only be helping with this, but SHIPPING more stuff like this themselves.

And "pro" has lost its meaning. It is now for "youtubers who want nice stuff" and don't mind someone else controlling their experience, as opposed to engineers and scientists and creative people who are actually creating the future.

Apple is sending you a message on your value to them as a customer by the fact that they didn't bother :-)

Have you tried WSL2 lately? You can get way more powerful systems with a Linux environment and soon to arrive GPU pass through.

Anyway it’s not about value if customers or anything, they’re just jackasses. Apple could afford to fix 10,000 different concerns simultaneously, and many companies do achieve that level of support, at least proportionate to the resources others have. There isn’t some strategy here.

Finally decided on dual booting Pop!_OS and couldn't have been any happier. It's as close to MacOS as I can get in a desktop system. Due to Proton, I can now play games now too!