I also imagine they will be left behind, for better or for worse as AI-authored software and hardware will satisfy people's needs faster than that developed by humans.
I don't see a way to merge these rapidly moving frontiers if software without radically different distributed software development and distribution networks where AIs collaborate on a global scale. Perhaps the only way to keep playing is to grow a "super cortex", a projection of ourselves into the digital. Like today's agents, but improved, grounded by our knowledge and understanding.
This smells a bit like Skynet. Also, Software Heaven.
I'm not sure how I feel.
And more importantly, documenting Mac hardware takes time. Components like the speaker on a Macbook can be permanently damaged if you don't write the drivers in a specific way. Other features like the Secure Enclave, power management, and TouchID might be unsupportable depending on how Apple designed it.
Asahi's stance isn't particularly crazy, and it probably aligns with how Linus feels about upstreaming code that nobody understands.
It is quite remarkable how far along support has come: https://aurorasilicon.org/devices/
> It is quite remarkable how far along support has come
Is it? All I'm seeing from that page is that they forked Asahi's M1-M4 work, and then failed to bring up M5 and M6. What's remarkable here?
> Please note that installing on an M-series Mac is not directly supported at this time.
And the way they have written that driver is absolute crap, not submimissible at all. They will need to write it from scratch, properly, using a TEE driver, a sensor driver, a userspace plumbing and an fprintd patch. What they did, instead, is they run pretty much everything in-kernel.
So, can't wait for ridiculous exploits that make your fingerprint effectively a backdoor to your OS.
Personally I don't think it's very likely the tables would turn and Asahi became dependent upon their contributions. I foresee a much bleaker future for Omarchy, crashing and burning from some reckless and unnecessarily abrasive whim of DHH. I'm not optimistic about Gravity Linux either, it's a single-dev project and that's prone to failure for many reasons.
Then those distributions will fail.
It's 2026. Any open source project with an anti-AI stance will get its milkshake drunk by a fork that embraces AI. How can people still not see this?
Perhaps the 30+ years of non-LLM generated Linux support for UEFI/ACPI and ARM device tree chips has something to do with it.
The state of the art has changed.
It may shock you to hear that coding was never the bottleneck for emulation or reverse-engineering.
Yes, and LLMs work well for the non-coding parts too. Pointing Claude at Gravity's repos has gotten Linux running well on my M4 Pro mini, with GPU acceleration as of a few days ago. So either I'm a genius or LLMs are pretty good at this, and I'm not a genius.
I have no particular love for Asahi, but they've made 10x more progress than the vibe coded alternatives.
I keep repeating myself, but make an effort to check the "state of the art" of the crap they added to their kernel tree.
The primary message we get out of the AI ecosystem is "MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER".
First off, that's not really what plenty of projects are about. You might like your favourite Linux distribution or desktop environment because it represents less, as a curated vision-- an AI "workalike" could offer ten thousand new features per week, but break the earned trust that a single clear vision provided.
Second, beyond a certain point, speed burns through the human components of a software project. There are only so many reviews that can be done, whether the source is AI or enthusiastic humans. Quality eventually suffers, contributors burn out, and the project dies.
If you point a well-funded slop cannon at an unfunded open-source project, they're not going to say "let's find 20 new reviewers to keep up with the firehose of commits!" They either have to circle their wagons and get finicky about what they allow, throw up their hands about quality, or rely on the machine itself, the dreamworld where they build enough test suites and harnesses to somehow keep Microsoft Paint from having zero-days.
Given those choices, I feel like I'd be happier to see "we circled the wagons". This doesn't necessarily mean "no AI" but it means keeping the project at a manageable scale, and right now, the way to handle that is to push away AI contributions without a bulletproof background behind them.
Going even further, it's high time we saw a "slow software" movement to counter the "move fast and break things" and its new cousin "move even faster and let the bot break things for you". I want smaller programs written by happier people under less psychic and economic assault.
> "MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER".
You people, if you had any clue about the code quality standards and cared about security, YOU would see this other way.
I have personally vetted their code for TouchID and some other aspects, including USB-C/Thunderbolt.
I absolutely cannot wait to hear your apologist brown-nosing when you start getting targeted with exploits.
b) being left behind is a good thing if your counterparts are headed in the wrong direction. I think projects which lean into LLMs are going to find they have a hot mess a year or two from now, whereas projects that eschewed them will be in a good place.
Because the "slop era" of AI-generated code is over. It ended in September. AI-generated code is now better than what the vast majority of practicing software engineers can produce. And AIs can more thoroughly test and verify the code too, both with programmatically automated unit and integration tests and with "manual" testing by the LLM itself.
If you are not letting LLMs write the code, then your code is not up to professional standard. This is the new reality now.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/
Also tried LordOS very quick, very easy to install, looks and feels like macOS, but Debian distro underneath.
I also tried GhostBSD. It's easy enough to work with, but it does not have any packages for "spice-vdagent," which I needed to resize the screen size and clipboard copy/paste support between host and guest devices when using Virt Manager :(
> It’s just not true that most Mac users use Macs because the hardware is better designed. They’re Mac users because of the Mac OS. What the original cloning program showed was that many of Apple’s customers were Mac fans, not Apple fans.
https://daringfireball.net/2006/04/asinine_and_or_risky_idea...
I had several Mac laptops over the decade that followed, but ultimately ended up back on a Windows 11 workstation with heavy WSL usage and a NUC and Thinkpad X1 both running Ubuntu in supporting roles.
So almost by accident, my time as a Mac user overlapped perfectly with the Intel era.
That is something asahi has vowed to never enable.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
It might have worked out better if Apple had forbidden Linux on Apple Silicon instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
> instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
Huh? Apple does not control Asahi and never did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
Note, keeping competitors barely operational inside a walled garden is classic Apple policy. No other company has the goodwill inertia to pull off such stunts. =3
MacOS isn't sold anymore, it's a free download for all supported Macs - meaning Apple is not "selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product", regardless of which product you think is being tied to the other (hardware or software).
I can see where you're coming from, but Apple wouldn't necessarily be in trouble due to the wording of the law. Maybe in some countries where the spirit of a law matters more than the specific wording, but we're quoting US legal definitions here, and my mental model of the US legal system has the phrasing mattering more than the intention
See also Windows and Internet Explorer.
Ford isn't getting sued either for only selling cars with Ford motors inside.
A lot of things on cars are welded or otherwise very difficult for the customer to modify, and I don't think any court would have a big problem with that.
More to the point, the EU have already slapped them with two separate $500m fines having repeatedly found that Apple used iOS and the App Store to break antitrust laws.
The US have a similar case hinging on all sorts of things ranging from green text message bubbles to heavily restricting access to the NFC API and affording to itself the privilege of host-card emulation via Apple Wallet.
A market is the set of goods or services that are fungible substitutes for one another. If Ford and Chevy use the same kind of battery as each other but Honda and Toyota sedans use a different kind then "battery for Ford or Chevy" is a market and "battery for Honda or Toyota" is a different market. If they each require different kinds of battery then "battery for Ford" is a separate market from "battery for Chevy", but even within those markets there can be multiple competitors, i.e. Ford isn't the only company that makes batteries compatible with Ford vehicles.
Whereas if Ford vehicles use a different kind of battery than other vehicles and there is only one company who makes that kind of battery, "battery for Ford vehicles" would be a market in which that supplier has a monopoly, regardless of whether the one supplier is Ford or someone else.
Which one of these looks like what Apple is doing?
> Ford isn't getting sued either for only selling cars with Ford motors inside.
Ford isn't only selling cars with Ford motors inside. They offer them that way, and it's a popular purchase option, but they'll also sell anyone essentially any part of the car by itself. They also don't prohibit you from taking the engine out of your Ford and putting it in a Chevy or vice versa.
Because with that logic, every company in the world is a monopoly because every company in the world has their own niche and their own products which are different from others.
> Ford isn't only selling cars with Ford motors inside.
Ford would never sell you a car with an engine in it which isn't from them.
> They also don't prohibit you from taking the engine out of your Ford and putting it in a Chevy or vice versa.
Apple doesn't prohibit you either from ripping out the motherboard from the chassis of whatever device and putting your own stuff in there. People change batteries etc.
There are numerous companies that make bleach or wheat or ceramic bowls. Their products are completely fungible with their competitors. None of them has a monopoly on any of that.
Whereas the ones that have no viable substitutes for a particular use... have a monopoly. That's what a monopoly is. It's when you can't get something from anyone else.
That's not the same thing as having a vendor-specific part. It's pretty common that the brake pads for a particular vehicle won't fit on a car from any other make. However, that doesn't mean the OEM is the only one who makes that part. You can get Ford-specific brake pads from Duralast or Powerstop or others in addition to getting them from Ford.
> Ford would never sell you a car with an engine in it which isn't from them.
Ford has sold millions of cars with engines in them from Mazda and others.
> Apple doesn't prohibit you either from ripping out the motherboard from the chassis of whatever device and putting your own stuff in there. People change batteries etc.
They expressly prohibit you from running macOS or iOS on anyone else's hardware, and likewise prevent you from running any other OS on an iPhone.
I much prefer ARM over x64 and Linux/BSD over the alternative but it's a wasteland of patches and technical debt out there.
Disable tpm0 check at boot for reducing the boot from 50 seconds to 5 seconds...
Maybe we can argue that they’re still the best, but it’s not 2x better, it’s more like 10-20% better.
For example, Panther Lake beats M5 battery life, GPU, and multicore performance.
What you’re saying is true, but if your workflow involves graphics at all, Apple’s Max chips are subpar compared to getting a laptop with an Nvidia discrete GPU (e.g., 2026 ASUS Zephyrus G16).
Marques’ Framework 13 Pro review was much more of a layperson’s review with a focus on overall user experience.
See, this is the problem, Mac enthusiasts refuse to do research, even when people point them in the right direction.
They run other things, too. There's no valid technical reason it can't or shouldn't, and Apple deserves the scrutiny if they won't bring macOS up to parity with Linux. macOS is genuinely terrible, and 100% of the reason why Macs are a minority of the PC market share.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
I'm sorry that you're absorbed in your fantasy, but it's not my job to accommodate it.
They run other things, too
What other things outside of containers or iPad apps?
You're part of a minority.
> What other things outside of containers or iPad apps?
Linux with fully native Vulkan drivers, for one.
Apple eventually stops OEM support for Macs, which means that support via an alternative operating system is a foremost imperative.
Sorry not sorry, I don't understand the sentiment, If you willingly spend $ on a Mac and then are salty that it doesn't cook rice, that's Apple's failing? Why Apple Watches don't run Wear OS? Why don't Android watches run Watch OS? Why doesn't my BEV run on corn?
If you think that laptops deserve to become e-waste when the OEM says so, then your opinion can be safely discarded.
So can yours? It's only opinions, my guy. I still have my 2015 MPB Retina. The battery is busted, one speaker gave out. Still works though. Runs Proxmox. But, it's 11 years old and it's done its fair share of tours of duty. I got my $ worth.