Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.
Not just single core perf though. Very efficient idle TDP, efficient all core boost, efficient all core TDP, and efficient mid-high performance tier accelerator (GPU, NPU) TDP.
And the benchmarks seem to understate this. That i9-9001THIKK doesn't matter when it thermal throttles a few seconds into a task. Are they testing these laptops inside freezers or something?
The Intel period of MacBooks allowed a more direct comparison. Don't think macOS itself is the differentiator vs Windows.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
A significant portion of the Apple Silicon efficiency gains would have come from shifting away from discrete GPUs. At that time it was very normal for the integrated GPU to be minimal (slow) because people who need it get a discrete GPU. Things are very different now because we push far more onto the GPU now vs. back then, which made Intel and AMD scale them up out of uselessness. Now most people don't really need a discrete GPU because the integrated ones are fast enough to even handle some gaming.
The majority(?) of Intel MacBooks didn't have dGPUs though. That was a higher-end option on the larger models. I also vaguely remember there being a big leap in iGPU performance with Intel Iris around 2013. I had a high-end MBP from work and wished I could perma disable the dGPU, cause I didn't need it and it just made the thing get hot.
But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
Skimming Wikipedia it looked like you get discrete graphics unless you have a MacBook Air or 13-inch MacBook Pro. A higher-end option, yes, but probably the more likely one that people actually had here.
And yes, Intel Iris was a good leap forward for their iGPUs at the time! But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Oh yeah, I was thinking of 2015 and earlier. They used to have "IG" and "DG" models. <a href="https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2015.html" rel="nofollow">https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2015.h... And I never wanted the 2016-2020 ones because of all the issues, so my personal MBP was a 2015 model until like 2024.
> But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Dang, didn't notice until you pointed it out. So it's a really good thing I got the 13".
> But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU
I don't remember exactly what the chip options were back then, but currently Intel enforces that by ensuring that the laptop chip with the larger iGPU doesn't actually have enough PCIe lanes to connect a dGPU.
But you could use an external GPU on any of the up to four Thunderbolt 3 ports. Intel is stingy with PCIe lanes but there's definitely enough. A dGPU doesn't need the full 16 and will do just fine with 8, maybe even 4. Especially the low power ones found in laptops.
Intel Macbooks were really really terrible. Slow OS, noisy fan, bad battery life, awful keyboard, little connectivity.
The current ones are really good, but honestly I'm kind of afraid Apple would build crap like that again, because it's not like you can "just" switch to a competitor.
They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
Same here. Have a Base M1 Air. Will trade that for M7 Base Air maybe if I can drag this one for a while. I can't go back to computers with noisy fans. It seems too last generation since the M1 launched.
I really do not know when I will replace my five year old M1 Pro. I'm not even starting to begin to get to the point where I start thinking about replacing this thing which I'm frankly astonished by.
I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
I'm still astonished at how good this little thing is. The only problem I've had is the realization that 256GB isn't enough for me, but save for that I really have no excuse to upgrade. Can't justify a newer machine when this thing does everything I need!
Even for pretty intense workloads it rarely struggles or slows down. And even with some pretty intense battery degradation (reasonable, to be expected after five years of heavy use) it still runs for more than long enough for me on a single charge, although I really can't go to a coffee shop without a charger if I'm doing development work. All that, and it's dead quiet? I could never go back to the old ways!
I understand the thinking of "I'd like to do local inference on a laptop", but as long as I have a beefier Mac Mini sitting at home that can do all of that for me remotely, why bother?
I can see myself putting Asahi on this thing and giving it to my yet-unborn kids for them to finally drop it down a staircase someday. I've been rough with it and it hasn't broken yet!
I was required to use a Macbook Air in my last job. I hated small things like the window management, the keyboard lack of delete, home, etc keys. There were ways to work around this. Cold aluminium in an aircon office though was no fun, and the keyboard lacked travel.
For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
Are you sure about ESC? I looked at MacBook Air pictures on DDG, and they all had an escape key in the upper left. I've never seen a Mac without one. If you're using it for VI, Ctrl-[ is also ESC (and avoids stretching your fingers).
For delete, if you mean delete-under instead of delete-before (what the key labelled "delete" does), Fn-Delete is delete-under.
Home/End are either Cmd-Up/Down (doc begin/end) or Opt-Up/Down (line begin/end) (I haven't used a PC in a while, so I can't remember what Home/End do)
On a Mac keyboard, Home is Fn+Left arrow, End is Fn+Right arrow, Page up is Fn+Up arrow and Page down is Fn+Down arrow, and as you said, Delete is Fn+Backspace. The Fn key is at the bottom left of the Mac keyboard, which is diametrically opposed to the top right position of the Backspace key. You need to use your two hands to produce any of these combinations. Also, the arrow keys are half the size of the other keys.
Obviously, this is not a problem for most Mac users. Personally, I've used a MacBook Pro for more than a decade, and I eventually found that so annoying that I bought an external keyboard with full size arrow keys and dedicated Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys.
MacOS is a lovely desktop OS, even now. I stress "desktop" because you can use a proper full-sized keyboard with Home/End, PgUp/PgDn, Ins/Del, etc and they all do exactly what they should. Apple has built in keymaps for PC keyboards for all the localisations so that I get UK English on a PC keyboard, and then I can swap Cmd and Ctrl so Linux keystrokes work as I expect as well.
And a proper external wired mouse, with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel.
It's lovely.
I sold my Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and may their new owners enjoy them. I am happy I never need to touch the damned things again. I have a centimetre of key travel and a big fat mechanical click, and it's lovely.
It's laptops that are the pain. There, you have no choice. When I travel with this MBA I take a Lenovo USB keyboard and a cheapo 3rd party Bluetooth mouse, but I still need to fsck around with hubs and external power adaptors and so on and it's a pain. The all-day battery life sort of makes up for it. Sort of.
Most of that sounds like trivial misconfiguration and printer compatibility problems.
In other words, things that you would have had to touch in Linux too, but because they didn't work at all, here work but until configured, do not work like you'd want them to.
I'm fortunate enough to have WSL so I frankly do everything in bash. I am also in control of the Intune endpoint exceptions for development machines, to make sure they are allowed to run stuff like cargo, but it has the advantage of letting me remove my devices from the Adobe Acrobat group.
It's still hilarious when defender does it's thing and the fan goes mach 1, or when the firmware updater force reboots in the middle of a meeting after you've clicked the 10 minute extend two times.
It is what it is. I'm sure we'd figure out a way to make enterprise IT horrible on any OS.
I was assuming the people complaining about macOS are coming from Linux, cause modern Windows is horrendous. Also don't get what's so bad about macOS unless we're talking about license or compatibility. There are small things for sure, like the green button shouldn't be fullscreen. There are big things it does better.
> Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
You answered that: _Corporate_.
Normal Windows doesn't have all those problems, and most of them sound like they're network, configuration or specific tools related, exactly where corporate setups tend to do things "their own way".
That is the thing, all corporate laptops suck regardless of the OS.
Unless one is lucky to work for small to medium size companies whose organisation hasn't yet grown to such politics and processes, with certifications, IT tickets for admin actions, and so on.
I use an M3 mbp with corporate crap like Windows Defender on it. Two cores are maxed out all day, so if I do anything else intensive it goes up to 80 C and turns on the "vacuum" fan. Still, most of the time it's absolutely quiet (barely audible, and I'm someone who really hates laptop fan noise!), and the machine doesn't get more than lukewarm.
With battery saver mode it even lasts over 6 hours.
> it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off.
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
There is no doubt that it throttles. For the most part I don't notice. I've build a rust SDK around apache arrow which produces Typescript, Python and Go interactions with our datalake. Compiling that is rather slow. It'll take 5-10 minutes on myh corporate pc vs the 15–30 minutes on the air. Whenever I absolutely have to work on it on myh mac I'll usually end up letting Azure DevOps spend it's 30-60 minutes while I do something else.
That was the case with the M1 indeed. Subsequent releases have been allowed to consume more power. My M5 Pro gets too hot to use on my lap when full out compiling or playing games.
To be fair. I can also make my m1 air hot if try playing civilization 7 on it. Compiling doesn't make it hot though, but it's not exactly fast.
That is my exact take - new Mac Book Pro M5. Love the battery, like the hardware quality, don't care at all for the rest of it. MacOS is annoying.
Apple is one of the biggest companies on earth. If every single person on earth who wanted to use Desktop Linux were to buy the most expensive Apple sells to do that, the revenue would not be material relative to Apple's existing size. Please exit your bubble.
Who said anything about desktops? The ARM datacenter is being taken over by Nvidia's Grace and Vera CPU products. If Apple supported OpenBSD, Linux or Solaris, they could destroy Nvidia in CPU performance and kick Graviton and Ampere to the curb forever. But instead they've left the low hanging fruit as another trillion dollar market for Nvidia to eat up.
they deliberately do not want to enter the server market. it is literally an entirely different thing than what they're doing right now. they can't do any of their vertical integration there, there's no moat for them.
like Tim Cook said (quoting Steve I believe) - it's about knowing how to say no 1000 times so that you can say yes to the right thing once, and then put your all into that
They have the resources to be able to do what Jobs described as “hobby projects” (he was referring to the Apple TV which definitely is the best streaming interface for video available, albeit one which is on the expensive side). They did kill their car project after spending a decade on it (and reportedly having thousands of people working on it).
The Server market is enormous with a much higher average selling price. It would make perfect sense for Apple to make servers if it meant more revenue and profit than they could make not doing it. There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.
They tried it with various open systems that allowed licensed powerpc clones of their systems and they ended it because it reduced their profits as people bought the clones instead of mac hardware. I don't see them redoing that anytime soon.
That still doesn’t overcome the issue that they are selling every single one they can already. They have no need for additional chip sales.
All the capacity at all the fabs is booked up for years. They can’t make more if they want to.
So any hypothetical sales of OEM style guts would only cut into the number of Macs they can sell to existing customers. And there’s no way they would ever do that.
Servers need a lot of RAM. Apple can either make 42 iPhones with 12GB or one server with 512GB RAM.
42 people with iPhone will buy airpods, some subscriptions and apps. They also be vendor locked into Apple ecosystem and almost guaranteed to bring more iPhone sale in 3 years.
Apple must be dumb to canibalize their own market.
If Apple cared about the server market, they would have added syncookies into their TCP stack. Seems like they should have done it during the time of Xserve... it would have been somewhat straightforward to pull it in from upstream BSD back then. But they still haven't (last I checked).
Apple doesn't have the business to business support organization to make this kind of thing work either.
Libdispatch is a burden to use for a server because of its book keeping overhead, and their history with kqueue makes it hard to convince someone to use it.
epoll isn’t very fast, kqueue is indeed much faster as a primitive.
MacOS’s implementation is an order of magnitude or more slower than (say) FreeBSD though, so its not a valid comparison that the syscall simply exists.
Another example of a syscall performing differently would be gettimeofday() in OpenBSD vs linux, its an extremely cheap operation in Linux but quite costly in OpenBSD despite being identical at the kernel boundary.
Sure, they can, but they've done servers several times in their past and I think it's reasonable to guess that results will be similar. Sure, they have a very nice CPU, but they don't have a good reputation for enterprise support and that's more important to selling servers than having the best cpus. If their cpus were 10x as good as the competition, maybe, but they're not, especially in a server context where power and cooling are abundant.
The rumors are that it’s for internal use. It’s already known that they have custom M2 or M3 servers that they don’t sell to the public. Source: multiple episodes of the Accidental Tech Podcast that discuss articles about this.
Apple tried to address the server market 20 years ago during the PowerPC days (and later Intel). Their Xserves were really well
designed machines and worked well. And yes, they also ran Linux (Yellowdog, IIRC).
It failed.
But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.
We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.
Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.
But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.
A lot of Apple's advantages come from tightly-linked memory and compute in a fully integrated design. I somewhat doubt that advantage can fully translate to servers, where features like hot-swappable memory are standard. Maybe they should skip mid-scale and head straight to mainframes?
Hot-swappable memory is probably much more common in mainframes than mainstream servers. A typical x86 server still requires you to power it off before replacing DIMMs. Meanwhile, NVIDIA and AMD have both recently done some rather Apple-like server processors that solder CPU, GPU, and RAM to the same package/module.
> There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.
The issue is that the current Apple way of designing hardware doesn't really work for servers. An individual 1U server can easily cost $50,000 or more. Soldering everything together so that if a single memory chip goes bad you have to replace the entire machine instead of that one stick is going to make customers unhappy. Likewise, they expect to be able to add storage or network ports, and expect the software to have enough openness that the new systems will work with their existing enterprise SAN or what have you.
Obviously Apple could make open server hardware, but then people might start wondering why they can't make open laptop hardware.
They could use sockets for the memory. Easily justifiable because there is much more available space in a server than their other products. Just look at how bare the Apple Silicon Mac Pro mainboard looks.
The problem was never space. They solder the RAM even in the laptops that have 8GB and the same memory bandwidth as ordinary PC laptops with modular RAM, and DIMMs take up less space on the board because the memory chips can then be attached double-sided to a DIMM that only needs as much space on the board as it takes for an edge connector.
The primary advantage of soldering compared to DIMMs is that the traces can be slightly shorter without routing them through an edge connector, but if you need that then you can use CAMM.
They solder the memory because then you can't upgrade it. Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD, for which there is no even plausible other justification.
The main reason is definitely just overcharging people for upgrades but size also includes thickness. SOCAMM would add at least the thickness of an extra PCB. I don't really agree with Apple's obsession to make their devices as thin as possible (they're thin enough!) but it would be a valid concern for them.
> Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD
Worse, they have a proprietary module that they use in the Mac Mini. Couldn't have just used M.2.
Oh, I’m sure they exist. There’s Christian versions of any genre you can think of. That’s partly why I ended up adding in the 8-track part, to make it more ridiculous.
Maybe I should have made it Mongolian gangster rap.
Nuvia started because a few Apple engineers wanted to make server CPUs and sell them. Apple management didn’t want to do it so they left and started their own company. They were acquired by Qualcomm.
There are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
Pretty much soon. Nuvia's design has been incorporated into 8 Elite and X Elite/Plus series. It was generational leaps ahead of 8 Gen 3, where 8 Elite is already close to Apple M1.
I'm looking for a cheap 8 Elite phone to root it and run a special kernel module that let me run LXC containers and run arbitrary Linux ARM64 program. And run a couple of services on it, maybe I can port Kubernetes whatsoever
> here are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
At the very least they ought to consider doing a macOS-based server chip. Given how many providers are racking Mac Minis these days. It's mostly for CI testing for code deployed to Apple platforms, so it very much supports their business.
Define big. They're one of the biggest companies in history. You're saying that if they appealed to 1% of the market that already uses Macs... what? And then they have to support these users?
They got Steve Jobs, so it was probably the right decision, but I will wish they'd bought Be instead. It was super fast, instead of the (still!) super slow Nextstep.
I wonder how macOS would've turned out then. For me, the Smalltalk-ness of Objective-C is one of the things that makes it feel so much different than the likes of Windows and Linux. So much of the UX falls naturally out of it that I doubt we'd have ended up anywhere similar otherwise. What could Be have been like?
That's true, and Interface Builder is quite a step up from what I had seen GUIs do before.
Mind you that this (me dabbling around with it) was 2004, with most other GUIs still in stone age, and I think it was developed back in the Nextstep days.
You would have had a C++ userspace, and POSIX would likely not be as relevant as it is today.
Note that BeOS wasn't POSIX compatible, that came with Haiku rewrite.
However without UNIX/POSIX to sell Apple to those frustrated Linux users looking for shinny UNIX laptops, and the management skills from Steve Jobs (vs Gassé), probably Apple would be no more instead.
Haiku has archived what BeOS programming looked like,
Looks very Windowsish... which makes me even more grateful for Objective-C! Not to mention that C++ is far more difficult to mix with other languages, too.
It's funny how it was the macOS that everyone wanted to run on non-Apple hardware, starting with the Sony Vaio rumour, ending with the Hackintosh.
I don't think many people were consistently using a Hackintosh as a daily driver, but that was also a time when OS X seemed less buggy than today.
Indeed, buy the idea was you could have built a much more powerful system for much less money for hackintosh back then. I'd rather now use their hardware as it's cheaper than anything else comparable, but run it on Linux.
There are those of us that also remember when they were at the verge of being nothing, and even turned to Linux as possible rescue alternative (mkLinux).
> How many people really care about linux on a mac?
Me and most developers I know IRL would switch to Apple hardware (for laptops, not everything obviously) if Apple just cared one iota about Linux users, as the hardware is simply so good, and the software/OS so trash. But, we're also all professionals who can't be bothered about having to hack in our own support for a OS, at least anymore. So we end up staying with our Carbon X1s, workstations, desktops and Thinkpads.
Of course they will not because they don't want to be a commodity seller, they want to sell a complete product of premium quality and premium price and that works mighty well for them.
However I am afraid I bought a macOS Air with M1 and recently a Neo for my daughter, because, while they are excellent computers, their closed ecosystem hardware goes directly against free software projects like Linux and others as well.
Microsoft has always been much criticised but, for its own interest, it promoted from the '90 a general purpose ecosystem of hardware where free software thrived. It just got a little bad later for the GPUs where proprietary, undocumented hardware becomes the norm and Direct3D the only viable abstraction layer to use them, making it Windows only. It was this ecosystem that made free software thrive, including Linux, GCC, Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk and a lot of wonderful project that empowered people and make computer better to use.
I think we must be aware that free software needs general purpose, well documented hardware to thrive and I think we - the power users, developers, etc - we should choose responsibly what hardware we purchase to choose those that are favorable to free software. We should be also aware that in some cases this means getting a machine with lower performances or that costs a little more but there is a trade-off to be done.
Some people may say: who cares about free software, we just want the best product that works and proprietary, closed, stuff is fine. However, when we think that we are forgetting that we enjoy today a free software ecosystem that was made possible from the open hardware ecosystem of 20 - 30 years ago. We need to remember that when companies are unchallenged they inevitably begin to produce shitty products and make the user's life miserable as long as they can. This can as long as to stifle progress and significantly diminish the usefulness of a computer system.
So, no, apple will not make open hardware but we, the developers and power users, may consider to not buy their computers when they use proprietary, undocumented hardware that is hostile to free software.
Microsoft has never promoted general purpose hardware. From paying OEMs to install Windows on all computers no matter what the customer wants, to locked down proprietary drivers, to ACPI tables that only worked because Windows knew about their specific bugs, to getting Secure Boot force-enabled on all hardware from a certain era...
The reason I buy it is because it’s a vertical. I know the hardware and software work together. The trackpad on my 11 year old MacBook Pro is better than the one on my 1 year old work laptop, and it’s a mix of the software and hardware clearly
> Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware.
Why should it matter how big Apple is (to Apple itself, or anyone else)? How does being that, or aiming to be that, motivate people to work at Apple? Versus, say, making the 'best' product they can, or making the 'most useful' product for people/customers?
Given how "big" Apple is already, it seems that not aiming to be big got them pretty good results (using their current motivations), and IMHO it's pretty questionable that they would have reached the same place in 'bigness' if bigness had been their goal.
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I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
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But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
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But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
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And yes, Intel Iris was a good leap forward for their iGPUs at the time! But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
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> But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Dang, didn't notice until you pointed it out. So it's a really good thing I got the 13".
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I don't remember exactly what the chip options were back then, but currently Intel enforces that by ensuring that the laptop chip with the larger iGPU doesn't actually have enough PCIe lanes to connect a dGPU.
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The current ones are really good, but honestly I'm kind of afraid Apple would build crap like that again, because it's not like you can "just" switch to a competitor.
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I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
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I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
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Even for pretty intense workloads it rarely struggles or slows down. And even with some pretty intense battery degradation (reasonable, to be expected after five years of heavy use) it still runs for more than long enough for me on a single charge, although I really can't go to a coffee shop without a charger if I'm doing development work. All that, and it's dead quiet? I could never go back to the old ways!
I understand the thinking of "I'd like to do local inference on a laptop", but as long as I have a beefier Mac Mini sitting at home that can do all of that for me remotely, why bother?
I can see myself putting Asahi on this thing and giving it to my yet-unborn kids for them to finally drop it down a staircase someday. I've been rough with it and it hasn't broken yet!
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For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
prewett · · focus · HN ↗
For delete, if you mean delete-under instead of delete-before (what the key labelled "delete" does), Fn-Delete is delete-under.
Home/End are either Cmd-Up/Down (doc begin/end) or Opt-Up/Down (line begin/end) (I haven't used a PC in a while, so I can't remember what Home/End do)
loicd · · focus · HN ↗
Obviously, this is not a problem for most Mac users. Personally, I've used a MacBook Pro for more than a decade, and I eventually found that so annoying that I bought an external keyboard with full size arrow keys and dedicated Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys.
lproven · · focus · HN ↗
And a proper external wired mouse, with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel.
It's lovely.
I sold my Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and may their new owners enjoy them. I am happy I never need to touch the damned things again. I have a centimetre of key travel and a big fat mechanical click, and it's lovely.
It's laptops that are the pain. There, you have no choice. When I travel with this MBA I take a Lenovo USB keyboard and a cheapo 3rd party Bluetooth mouse, but I still need to fsck around with hubs and external power adaptors and so on and it's a pain. The all-day battery life sort of makes up for it. Sort of.
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
literalAardvark · · focus · HN ↗
In other words, things that you would have had to touch in Linux too, but because they didn't work at all, here work but until configured, do not work like you'd want them to.
Quothling · · focus · HN ↗
It's still hilarious when defender does it's thing and the fan goes mach 1, or when the firmware updater force reboots in the middle of a meeting after you've clicked the 10 minute extend two times.
It is what it is. I'm sure we'd figure out a way to make enterprise IT horrible on any OS.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
That looks like a corporation problem.
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
reichstein · · focus · HN ↗
You answered that: _Corporate_.
Normal Windows doesn't have all those problems, and most of them sound like they're network, configuration or specific tools related, exactly where corporate setups tend to do things "their own way".
whatever1 · · focus · HN ↗
I think eventually they pushed a spyware update that improved a bit the situation but not by a lot.
Meanwhile my personal M1 Pro had truly full day battery life.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Unless one is lucky to work for small to medium size companies whose organisation hasn't yet grown to such politics and processes, with certifications, IT tickets for admin actions, and so on.
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
With battery saver mode it even lasts over 6 hours.
II2II · · focus · HN ↗
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
Quothling · · focus · HN ↗
spockz · · focus · HN ↗
Quothling · · focus · HN ↗
abrookewood · · focus · HN ↗
chrisweekly · · focus · HN ↗
nightfly · · focus · HN ↗
Select2 · · focus · HN ↗
Select13 · · focus · HN ↗
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bigyabai · · focus · HN ↗
r_lee · · focus · HN ↗
like Tim Cook said (quoting Steve I believe) - it's about knowing how to say no 1000 times so that you can say yes to the right thing once, and then put your all into that
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
Readerium · · focus · HN ↗
dhosek · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
dhosek · · focus · HN ↗
SyneRyder · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2002/05/14Apple-Introduces-Xserve-1U-Rack-Mount-Server/" rel="nofollow">https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2002/05/14Apple-Introduces-Xs...
This is something they've tried, and later decided based on that experience that they do not want to be in the server business.
"Xserve is the result of listening to our customers," said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO.
raincom · · focus · HN ↗
GeekyBear · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
They only want to sell the whole package. You might as well ask the Catholic Church to start a rap music 8-track only record club. Same probability.
The hardware is a means to an end, and nothing else to them.
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UltraSane · · focus · HN ↗
bombcar · · focus · HN ↗
internet2000 · · focus · HN ↗
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UltraSane · · focus · HN ↗
fragmede · · focus · HN ↗
boredatoms · · focus · HN ↗
If they just did motherboards with cpu/ram/pcie and let other OEMs build complete systems the story would be very different
scheme271 · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
All the capacity at all the fabs is booked up for years. They can’t make more if they want to.
So any hypothetical sales of OEM style guts would only cut into the number of Macs they can sell to existing customers. And there’s no way they would ever do that.
adgjlsfhk1 · · focus · HN ↗
Higher margins?
SXX · · focus · HN ↗
42 people with iPhone will buy airpods, some subscriptions and apps. They also be vendor locked into Apple ecosystem and almost guaranteed to bring more iPhone sale in 3 years.
Apple must be dumb to canibalize their own market.
Wowfunhappy · · focus · HN ↗
Now they have Apple Silicon.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
I think most people here never seen the inside of sliding pizza boxes on server racks, really seeing them.
toast0 · · focus · HN ↗
Apple doesn't have the business to business support organization to make this kind of thing work either.
Asmod4n · · focus · HN ↗
Libdispatch is a burden to use for a server because of its book keeping overhead, and their history with kqueue makes it hard to convince someone to use it.
Pesthuf · · focus · HN ↗
There’s no io_uring, but in practice, almost all servers run epoll anyway, don’t they?
dijit · · focus · HN ↗
MacOS’s implementation is an order of magnitude or more slower than (say) FreeBSD though, so its not a valid comparison that the syscall simply exists.
Another example of a syscall performing differently would be gettimeofday() in OpenBSD vs linux, its an extremely cheap operation in Linux but quite costly in OpenBSD despite being identical at the kernel boundary.
Asmod4n · · focus · HN ↗
UltraSane · · focus · HN ↗
toast0 · · focus · HN ↗
podocarp · · focus · HN ↗
alsetmusic · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
A mega-AI workstation could.
But server? Nah.
mbreese · · focus · HN ↗
It failed.
But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.
We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.
Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.
But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.
UltraSane · · focus · HN ↗
SXX · · focus · HN ↗
MacOS is not a server OS either and actually maturing M* support in Linux will take years. And for inference Nvidia is years ahead of Apple.
So best Apple can hope for is some niche market.
t-3 · · focus · HN ↗
wtallis · · focus · HN ↗
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AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
The issue is that the current Apple way of designing hardware doesn't really work for servers. An individual 1U server can easily cost $50,000 or more. Soldering everything together so that if a single memory chip goes bad you have to replace the entire machine instead of that one stick is going to make customers unhappy. Likewise, they expect to be able to add storage or network ports, and expect the software to have enough openness that the new systems will work with their existing enterprise SAN or what have you.
Obviously Apple could make open server hardware, but then people might start wondering why they can't make open laptop hardware.
Rohansi · · focus · HN ↗
AnthonyMouse · · focus · HN ↗
The primary advantage of soldering compared to DIMMs is that the traces can be slightly shorter without routing them through an edge connector, but if you need that then you can use CAMM.
They solder the memory because then you can't upgrade it. Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD, for which there is no even plausible other justification.
Rohansi · · focus · HN ↗
> Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD
Worse, they have a proprietary module that they use in the Mac Mini. Couldn't have just used M.2.
internet2000 · · focus · HN ↗
balder1991 · · focus · HN ↗
willy_k · · focus · HN ↗
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe I should have made it Mongolian gangster rap.
Groxx · · focus · HN ↗
robin_reala · · focus · HN ↗
FlowingRiver · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
MBCook · · focus · HN ↗
Or is this just “punch buggy” for Wikipedia references.
voakbasda · · focus · HN ↗
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
aurareturn · · focus · HN ↗
There are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
<a href="https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/16/apple-may-return-to-server-market/" rel="nofollow">https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/16/apple-may-return-to-ser...
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Cause neither Apple is bringing back OS X Server, nor Qualcom is that great on server space, other than now maybe with their Modular acquisition.
aurareturn · · focus · HN ↗
They are releasing a server cpu soon I believe. It’s called Dragonfly C1000.
stevefan1999 · · focus · HN ↗
I'm looking for a cheap 8 Elite phone to root it and run a special kernel module that let me run LXC containers and run arbitrary Linux ARM64 program. And run a couple of services on it, maybe I can port Kubernetes whatsoever
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
aurareturn · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
aurareturn · · focus · HN ↗
No one is saying they're proven.
nicoburns · · focus · HN ↗
At the very least they ought to consider doing a macOS-based server chip. Given how many providers are racking Mac Minis these days. It's mostly for CI testing for code deployed to Apple platforms, so it very much supports their business.
lproven · · focus · HN ↗
aurareturn · · focus · HN ↗
mahboi · · focus · HN ↗
mvkel · · focus · HN ↗
whatever1 · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
LoganDark · · focus · HN ↗
hobo123 · · focus · HN ↗
Mind you that this (me dabbling around with it) was 2004, with most other GUIs still in stone age, and I think it was developed back in the Nextstep days.
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
As were Hypercard, Smalltalk and Lisp environments.
Interface Builder was originally a Lisp application, before being acquired by NeXT.
<a href="https://vimeo.com/62618532" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/62618532
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Note that BeOS wasn't POSIX compatible, that came with Haiku rewrite.
However without UNIX/POSIX to sell Apple to those frustrated Linux users looking for shinny UNIX laptops, and the management skills from Steve Jobs (vs Gassé), probably Apple would be no more instead.
Haiku has archived what BeOS programming looked like,
<a href="https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/programming_the_be_operating_system.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/programming_the_be_oper...
LoganDark · · focus · HN ↗
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pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
Also we already have the PC clones with WinIntel for the alternative experience.
Support Linux OEMs if you care.
cromka · · focus · HN ↗
Now it's the other way round.
userbinator · · focus · HN ↗
cromka · · focus · HN ↗
beAbU · · focus · HN ↗
Just a few short years ago apple was the most valuable company period.
How big do you want them to become?
Also, how much bigger will open harware really make them? How many people really care about linux on a mac?
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
That NeXT acquisition turned out great.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
pjmlp · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment" rel="nofollow">https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment
If macOS wasn't required for app development, it would be even smaller pie slice.
embedding-shape · · focus · HN ↗
Me and most developers I know IRL would switch to Apple hardware (for laptops, not everything obviously) if Apple just cared one iota about Linux users, as the hardware is simply so good, and the software/OS so trash. But, we're also all professionals who can't be bothered about having to hack in our own support for a OS, at least anymore. So we end up staying with our Carbon X1s, workstations, desktops and Thinkpads.
steve1977 · · focus · HN ↗
frankohn · · focus · HN ↗
However I am afraid I bought a macOS Air with M1 and recently a Neo for my daughter, because, while they are excellent computers, their closed ecosystem hardware goes directly against free software projects like Linux and others as well.
Microsoft has always been much criticised but, for its own interest, it promoted from the '90 a general purpose ecosystem of hardware where free software thrived. It just got a little bad later for the GPUs where proprietary, undocumented hardware becomes the norm and Direct3D the only viable abstraction layer to use them, making it Windows only. It was this ecosystem that made free software thrive, including Linux, GCC, Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk and a lot of wonderful project that empowered people and make computer better to use.
I think we must be aware that free software needs general purpose, well documented hardware to thrive and I think we - the power users, developers, etc - we should choose responsibly what hardware we purchase to choose those that are favorable to free software. We should be also aware that in some cases this means getting a machine with lower performances or that costs a little more but there is a trade-off to be done.
Some people may say: who cares about free software, we just want the best product that works and proprietary, closed, stuff is fine. However, when we think that we are forgetting that we enjoy today a free software ecosystem that was made possible from the open hardware ecosystem of 20 - 30 years ago. We need to remember that when companies are unchallenged they inevitably begin to produce shitty products and make the user's life miserable as long as they can. This can as long as to stifle progress and significantly diminish the usefulness of a computer system.
So, no, apple will not make open hardware but we, the developers and power users, may consider to not buy their computers when they use proprietary, undocumented hardware that is hostile to free software.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
maccard · · focus · HN ↗
throw0101a · · focus · HN ↗
Why should it matter how big Apple is (to Apple itself, or anyone else)? How does being that, or aiming to be that, motivate people to work at Apple? Versus, say, making the 'best' product they can, or making the 'most useful' product for people/customers?
Given how "big" Apple is already, it seems that not aiming to be big got them pretty good results (using their current motivations), and IMHO it's pretty questionable that they would have reached the same place in 'bigness' if bigness had been their goal.
bethekidyouwant · · focus · HN ↗
ant6n · · focus · HN ↗
We’re in the windows Vista days of Apple.