Why do you feel sad? Apple Silicon Macs are fairly open hardware, I see it as a win that there are ARM64 machines now that can run Linux and are competitive with x86_64.
If that were remotely true TFA wouldn't be about reverseengineered GPU support on Apple Silicon. Nor would there really be a need for Asahi Linux to be developed in its own silo while it gets Apple Silicon support hammered out.
This isn't really unique to Apple Silicon. The difference here is that most proprietary systems Linux has to work with on PC were reverse engineered many years ago, while AS is being reverse engineered today.
The Asahi Linux developers themselves have praised the openness of Apple Silicon, not because they have access to documentation or source code that we don't, but because it seems Apple has gone out of their way to make sure their platform can securely accommodate third party operating systems even though they have no incentive to. It's surprising in contrast to Microsoft, who has been slowly trying to make booting Linux on PCs that ship with Windows harder and harder.
I definitely think calling Apple Silicon an "open platform" is a bit of a stretch, but it's not the iron clad walled garden people think it is either.
> The difference here is that most proprietary systems Linux has to work with on PC were reverse engineered many years ago
Such as what, though?
Intel and AMD both wrote support for their systems themselves. Nvidia has long offered a proprietary driver for Linux users, and even Intel Macbooks were a shoo-in once the firmware is sorted out. It's been a long time since someone has approached a full-scale reverse engineering project like Asahi, and I think characterizing it as "non-unique" undersells the amount of bespoke work here.
Apple made the right move by continuing to allow third-party OSes, but that's not equivalent to building out support. The work required to bring up a black-box SOC is hugely distinct from using first-party drivers to boot into Linux through UEFI.
Drivers for WiFi, audio, Bluetooth, a heap of I2C devices like keyboards on laptops and temp/fan control, graphics cards, and much much more.
Not a single company “built out support” for all these things. And none of it is covered by some common interface — each must be reverse engineered (or implemented following reference manuals, if they are available). Intel and AMD did not provide support for these, because they can’t — the processor architecture is oblivious of these peripherals.
I think you’re underestimating how much volunteer work has been done to get Linux to be usable on any machine. From your wording, I suspect you may think there are some grand unifying abstractions that, when implemented once, provide compatibility with most machines, and that Intel and AMD did just that. But that would be mistaken.
I'm comparing it more to the state of Linux on PC in the '90s and early '00s, when most vendors didn't care about Linux unless you were buying a server. Getting Linux running on a laptop back then was often a mess of hacky reverse engineered drivers, sometimes with incomplete or missing functionality.
Of course what Asahi Linux has undertaken still feels like a bigger and more impressive task, I'm just saying that this kind of work is not entirely unprecedented. The current Linux ecosystem on Apple Silicon is more comparable to that of the PC Linux ecosystem from 25 years ago than from today.
> ThinkPad also has proprietary undocumented subsystems that are reverse engineered to work on Linux. Such double standards versus Apple.
The differentiator for decades now is intel-based laptops, including thinkpads, have been well-supported by mainline kernels including GPU support. Support that Intel has directly funded development and maintenance of.
Where are the @apple.com commits supporting Apple Silicon in mainline Linux?
Well supported by mainline kernels, thanks to reverse engineering undocumented proprietary Lenovo hardware. ThinkPads contain other components besides the GPU. Apple is not in the business of selling GPUs to other hardware vendors and the fraction of customers demanding Linux support is miniscule. Intel supports Linux as a business decision based on profitability, not open source idealism.
What components? Lenovo sells several ThinkPad models with Linux out of the box. The fingerprint reader is a source of trouble but it's not a Lenovo part.
Over the years I've seen numerous thinkpad tweaks for wifi, sleeping with the lid closed, restarting wifi on lid open, numerous tweaks for the function keys (audio up/down/mute, brightness up/down), clock speed/thermal management, reading battery levels, etc.
Seems like the #1 reason thinkpads are well supported is that they are relatively popular among the people who modify the OS and kernel for compatibility.
I don't recall that Lenovo is a particularly big contributor to the linux kernel.
> Well supported by mainline kernels, thanks to reverse engineering undocumented proprietary Lenovo hardware.
Such as? What "proprietary Lenovo hardware" is obfuscating my boot process, I'm really curious now.
> Intel supports Linux as a business decision
Yes. Intel supports Linux because the concept of selling Unix doesn't work. Take it from Apple, who gave up on selling their OS after realizing that people were really only in it for the hardware. If Intel is the begrudging neighbor to Open Source software, then Apple is holding them in a Mexican standoff with their userbase. Somehow, Intel's "business decision" manages to be the more civilized relationship between the two.
Sure it has some undocumented subsystems, but compared to the Macs, it has a much stronger claim to openness. Apple has released virtually no information on the internals of these machines, and they aren't standard PCs like the Lenovos. Calling them 'open' is absurd, it would be hard to imagine a publicly released general-purpose computer that is less open.
> but compared to the Macs, it has a much stronger claim to openness.
False. Lenovo hardware contains a lot of proprietary undocumented parts that required reverse engineering to get working on Linux/BSD. The parts that didn't require reverse engineering (Intel GPU) were not made by Lenovo.
Apple hardware is "open" as far as they don't try to prevent other operating systems to be installed. Apparently they made it reasonably straightforward for the Asahi team.
> False. Lenovo hardware contains a lot of proprietary undocumented parts that required reverse engineering to get working on Linux/BSD. The parts that didn't require reverse engineering (Intel GPU) were not made by Lenovo.
How is it false? Whether the parts were made by Lenovo or not is irrelevant. It may not be 100% open (and this is probably not due to parts that Lenovo themselves created), but it is substantially open, which is far more than can be said about the Macs, which are virtually undocumented system-architecture wise, and who knows what Apple will do in the future to hamstring efforts to use them outside the walled garden.
> Apple hardware is "open" as far as they don't try to prevent other operating systems to be installed. Apparently they made it reasonably straightforward for the Asahi team.
That is not "open", it's just "not openly hostile to reverse engineering...yet".
No it is not. I'm amazed that people just don't get this simple fact. The drivers were reverse engineered. ThinkPad is not an open platform. It contains some Intel and AMD stuff that is open, but you can't give credit to Lenovo for that.
You keep saying that, but you have yet to provide any evidence. What essential drivers were reverse engineered, exactly. As far as I can tell, everything required to boot to a working graphical desktop is well documented.
I'm not giving credit to Lenovo, I'm saying that the platform is mostly open because it is based on mostly open components. In contrast to Apple's devices, where the platform is closed because it is based on undocumented components. You could say the same about pretty much any standard PC, Lenovo is just one of many vendors, I have no idea why they got singled out here.
But they do sell boxes explicitly qualified and supported to run Linux, and they do contribute to the Linux kernel development process.
The fact remains that claiming any of Apple's hardware platforms are remotely open is laughable.
"ThinkPad linux driver reverse engineered" or "lenovo linux driver reverse engineered"
Power management, I2C devices, touchpad, touchscreen, audio, WiFi, bluetooth, etc. Many things besides the GPU. Maybe some of it is open now (Intel parts) but that wasn't always the case.
As another smart person (smoldesu) pointed out here, Lenovo has recently started contributing some updates to the kernel, but the vast majority has been reverse engineered over decades.
The attitude of Linux devs was always to accept that hardware is proprietary/undocumented and get to work on reverse engineering. Then users take it for granted that stuff just works and have no appreciation of the effort that it took to get it working.
> Apple hardware is "open" as far as they don't try to prevent other operating systems to be installed.
1. This is not true for "Apple hardware" as a rule.
2. Removing support for third-party OSes would be a shocking product regression for the Macbook.
3. If Apple's definition of "Open" excludes any transparent documentation or explanation, then they have provided precisely nothing.
You contradict yourself by praising Apple for keeping standard features while deriding Lenovo for doing the same thing. All of this ignores the Linux certification Lenovo offers on their products, their Linux support contracts and even the freely-provided firmware updates through fwupd (something Apple will never provide). Regardless of whether you characterize "open"-ness as non-hostility or constructive support, Lenovo is still the more open company by a country mile. And Lenovo doesn't even do that much to-boot.
>You contradict yourself by praising Apple for keeping standard features while deriding Lenovo for doing the same thing.
Putting words in my mouth. I never praised Apple and I never derided Lenovo. I am simply stating the facts. I am trying to explain that both companies have the same approach. Neither of them are open source idealists. Lenovo is not more open than Apple. Apple is not more open than Lenovo. I am pointing out the double standards and hypocrisy in this thread. I have owned many Lenovo and Apple products and I'm not a fanboy of any company.
> 1. This is not true for "Apple hardware" as a rule.
It is true for their laptops and desktops. iPhone/iPad are not relevant to this discussion.
Lenovo is doing what Apple doesn't, and publishing their contributions as GPL code. In this particular arena, they are provably more open in the sense that they make official Linux contributions and Apple does not.
I too have owned hardware from either company, and have plenty to complain about for both. One thing I cannot deride is the quality of first-party Linux support for my Lenovo hardware. It's not perfect and they're an ill-fit successor to IBM, but they make marked FOSS contributions that other companies would refuse. Because these changes are made freely available with an Open license, I think it's fully fair to say that Lenovo is shipping more Open systems than Apple is. Like I said in my other post, they don't even have to do much to cement themselves in that position either, just offer a few of their own patches.
> It is true for the current hardware. [sic]
> It is true for their laptops and desktops. iPhone/iPad are not relevant to this discussion.
Ah, there's the caveat. We can agree to disagree, frankly I'm more interested to see where the legislation takes this.
I am neither an Apple lover or an Apple hater. I think Apple produces extremely well polished products thanks to their vertical integration and have innovated in hardware pushing the frontier, especially with the ARM suites. However, they also have a fairly closed ecosystem in which they are trying to overprice things when they can abusing their dominant position. I would feel sad to contribute to its success but I also selfishly really need the best tool available.
Apple's computers are actually quite competitive when comparing price-to-performance. Beyond that, they have great build quality, battery life, components, and support which all adds up to being a great package for their cost. Seriously, this whole "Apple is too expensive" talking point died long ago. When the MacBook Air first came out, it was $1,800 ($2,500 adjusted for inflation) with a slow Intel C2D proc. Now you can get an M1 MacBook Air for $1k or an M2 for $1,200.
I'd argue price/performance is where they are the weakest. Especially when you want more than the bare minimum ram or ssd. An Apple replacement for my current notebook would cost over $5k and I spent a fraction of that.
Battery life is really the core differentiator at the moment.
Did you take into account the different RAM architecture? Sure you can get bigger RAM, but that’s not nearly the same as what the M series offers (and it shows on benchmarks) - you might be better off with a 16GB MacBook, than a 32GB other laptop. Oh, and it’s not like this form factor/higher quality displays, etc would be cheap by other manufacturers.
It's on-die, but it's not really any faster. The latency and bandwidth are pretty OK by today's standards. I suspect it's on-die because M1/M2 grew out of mobile CPUs. You might be referring to fast SSDs, but that's mainly true only for Pro versions. People who need >32 GB RAM usually know why they need it, you cannot really be running simulations out of your SSD swap. I'm not saying it's a proper use-case for a MacBook, I'm just saying that this guy might have some special requirements that do not align well with Apple laptops price-wise.
Bandwidth on the macs is pretty good. M2 = 100GB/sec peak, M2 pro = 200GB/sec peak, M2 Max = 400GB/sec peak.
A $3k lenovo thinkpad p16 uses DDR4-4800 or 76.8GB/sec peak. That also ignores the arm relaxes memory model, which means you get (on average) a greater fraction of peak bandwidth when running something memory intensive.
So apple does 1.3x, 2.6x, or 5.2x better. On a desktop you can get another 2x with the M1 Extreme. Seems quite a bit better than "Pretty ok", it's a big part of why the apple's get great GPU performance compared to Intel/AMD laptops with an iGPU and run at a small fraction of the power of the dGPUs used in laptops.
> An Apple replacement for my current notebook would cost over $5k and I spent a fraction of that.
What if you price out a replacement with the full RAM and SSD capacity you want from the OEM rather than as an aftermarket upgrade? I think the problem usually is not so much "Apple over-charges for upgrades" as it is "all OEMs over-charge for upgrades", with a side of "Apple uses non-upgradable storage".
> What if you price out a replacement with the full RAM and SSD capacity you want from the OEM rather than as an aftermarket upgrade?
Moot point. Of course if you tie your hands behind your back your options will be limited. The point, for the parent, is that they aren't limited by insane markup pricing.
It's important to correctly identify the underlying problem and whatever tradeoffs are involved. It's unproductive to bitch specifically about Apple's expensive storage and memory upgrades when it's actually an industry norm. It might be more fruitful to discuss why OEMs in general are able to get away with such steep upgrade pricing, and it's definitely more interesting and appropriate for HN to debate the pros and cons of Apple's soldered memory and storage.
It’s also important to realize that no one was “bitching” in this thread. It was claimed that the price price wasn’t all that bad, to which someone raised a counterpoint.
The reality is that, if you need a lot of RAM and SSD space, it’s going to cost you a lot more than buying a laptop and replacing the RAM and SSD yourself.
If someone said that the price of SSD and RAM in, say, a System76 laptop was outrageous and that’s why they won’t buy one, that would be a bit silly since they can upgrade those themselves.
What you can’t do is perform a RAM or SSD upgrade on a MacBook. So it’s a reasonable issue to have with their pricing.
To throw one more datapoint in: for my own development, I have to closely manage (closing and reopening stuff constantly, paying the cognitive overhead of context switching as I go) just to keep RAM use between 32gb-64gb — use never managed to go below the former, and the latter is the total my laptop can support. I’m usually sitting around 90%-95% utilization. So 64gb is an absolute minimum for what I can reasonably get away with (and I’d be much more productive if my laptop had the same 128gb my desktop has).
Some people just need as much RAM and storage they can get their hands on, and that quickly makes the MacBook a really expensive option. No bitching (really, no sentiment at all), just facts and reasoning.
meanwhile new 4000 series laptops are routinely costing more than MacBook pros, apple is winning the price/performance category in every style of laptop, as much as you may not like it.
Not wanting to start an anti-apple thread but I meant dominant position in their closed garden. Is that an abuse or not, I'll let the litigators decide.
As another person who loves free software, I'm a little sad that after so much progress has been made in other areas, when it finally looks like x86's dominance of the desktop and laptop CPU markets is starting to slip, the most attractive contender for a non-x86 Linux laptop is any proprietary platform, Apple or otherwise.
And I do have a distaste for putting money in Apple's pockets for various personal reasons, from the huge pile of cache they're sitting on to the way they repeatedly updated my long-dead iPod's firmware just to break its compatibility with open-source tools for syncing music to it way back in the day to the upstream-hostile forming of WebKit from KHTML to their utterly cynical use of 'open-source' as a marketing ploy when they launched OS X. So if I do get an Apple Silicon Mac, it will have to be used even though I wouldn't otherwise want it to be.
Because most other hardware vendors suck, too, there are still things Apple could do, short of becoming some kind of open hardware company, that would make me reconsider that general sense of hostility I've gotten from them over the years, which I acknowledged in this other comment on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35233479
I just wish my interest in the Apple Silicon option could be wholehearted enthusiasm, instead of something complicated by my relationship to a company whose ethos screams that my values are unimportant on a bunch of different levels.
