Nit: I²S has nothing to do with I²C.
(Most I²S chips also have an I²C interface since I²S only carries raw audio data, no sideband like volume control or clock configuration. But that's a separate interface and can also be SPI rather than I²C. In fact, SPI is more closely related to I²S than I²C is.)
The reason why they both follow the same naming scheme is that Philips Semiconductor (now NXP) made both.
This is the weal-and-woe of reverse engineering. It's awesome that these machines now have native Vulkan 1.2 drivers, but it took years to get there. There are still unsolved problems 7 years after Apple Silicon hit shelves, and most newer hardware is broadly unsupported. The lesson here is a reiteration of what Linux users have always said - proprietary drivers suck.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585
For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.
>In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU.
Also these comments are worth considering.
Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use? Wishful thinking if you ask me.
There’s no IP misuse and the ability to boot an arbitrary OS is an intentional part of the design of M-series Macs. The built in lag time of the current situation ensures that macOS will never have its position as the dominant OS for Mac hardware challenged. Further, doing this would stoke the flames of the already red-hot internet Apple haters and unnecessarily burn goodwill. It’d be a loss across the board.
What? Where do you get that?
Apple knows how to build an iPhone: if they wanted to lock down a Mac they would have simply done that. There's something like nine pages detailing the differences. What word describes that other than "intentional" design? The fact that you can sign and boot a third party OS isn't an "accident" if it's documented, and there's no "exploit" because this is functionality the platform supports; anyone can do it with tools already present on the (Apple-signed) recovery OS.
They certainly don't provide great support for people wanting to develop [drivers for] these operating systems, but the platform was very clearly engineered to support booting them.
[1]: https://help.apple.com/pdf/security/en_US/apple-platform-sec...
If they did, I still have macOS, an OS I can easily disable all runtime protections and security on, rig up into a kernel debugger, arbitrarily dump memory of other processes and so on. If Apple takes away our ability to easily boot alternative kernels, the tools are readily available to find...alternative ways around iBoot security, which is not ideal for Apple since iOS iBoot is mostly the same as it is on macOS.
I find it hard to believe that Apple would purposefully shoot themselves in their own feet, unless you also believe that they would lock down the Mac as much as an iPad, ever.
How could they do that? They could cease providing the facilities the project relies on in newer chips, but the existing chips, er, exist. They could stop making chips all together and go back to intel. It's not a useful hypothetical.
>Also, I don't believe Apple has no backdoors and such. They basically made it impossible to be root on your iPhone, so you don't think they have a almighty-super-superuser mode on their laptops that only they can use?
It's possible such a thing exists, of course, it's possible on intel, or AMD, or any ARM chips, or any chip at all. However such a back door, if discovered, would not be accessible only to them. It would have the same problem that all such backdoors have, in that if Apple can exploit it, others can exploit it. Apple very heavily relies on the claim that they have no such back door, and they have relied on this as a legal defence, and frankly it's hard to see how they would benefit from having such a back door. A chunk of their business model and legal liability protection depends on not having such a back door.
>Wishful thinking if you ask me.
If you say so, this is all about relative risk. However what reason might anyone have for thinking that any other platform, such as Intel with it's proprietary supervisor code with remote updatability, is more under the control of the user? There may be platforms that have a better security architecture that's more under the control of the user, but I can't think of any of the major ones that does. Which would you suggest?
And, at least in the case of their private cloud compute, they encourage third party audit of their claims and even provide a virtual research environment running an instance of their PCC on your mac.
The UK explicitly requesting a backdoor to iCloud's advanced data protection forcing Apple to pull the service instead also tells me their claims are legit.
It's certainly possible a backdoor exists in hardware instead, or elsewhere in the stack but given Apple's surprising relative openness for how they implement their privacy products & the research papers they put out I'm inclined to believe them for now. (I say relative because its not open source, which is the only way to be 100% certain, but their research papers are surprisingly in depth).
iBoot? Asahi needs iBoot to boot third-party volumes for Linux to run properly. Apple controls iBoot; if they burn an eFuse and disable third-party volumes in a "Security" update, Asahi cannot fight back.
You cannot boot macOS with an unsigned iBoot firmware, so writing your own bootloader isn't an option. If a fuse is burned, you also cannot downgrade to older firmwares. The entire system is designed to give Apple the ability to disable other OSes in a macOS update if they ever decided to.
Any manufacturer could put an eFuse in any of their hardware and lock it. No hardware can be proven not to have such exploits. That's the first point marcan makes in that post.
This is my point too, though. Do we trust Apple to not burn a hardware fuse if their community one-ups them? They've already done it on iPad and iPhone hardware when users find a boot ROM exploit. All that they'd need to do is push an update for "security" purposes, and then the new boot flow could refuse to boot into unsigned volumes or deny running unsigned bootloaders. There would be no way to downgrade.
This is basic ARM security architecture stuff, I'm a little shocked that people can't imagine how this type of lockout is possible. There are tons of commodity ARM boards that are effectively bricked and eFused to user-hostile security epochs.
The Oxide Computer folks wrote their own AMD boot loader and have an entire chain of trust and apparently (?) basically got rid of the supervisor code (Ring -2 and -3). They also have custom motherboards with third-party BMCs.
Could something similar be done on Intel?
However if that phone home feature is read only, it could always just re-root itself.
When was the last time they looked at the schematics for one of the Apple machines? Oh, wait.
And I'm not even talking about drivers
To sell more hardware?
Obviously I get your point, but there's a bunch of customers who would like good ARM hardware but can't accomplish their work with macOS. It's not like Apple needs this tiny market, but it wouldn't hurt them either.
Citation needed.
In the x86 sphere it isn't that much better either, most ACPI tables are thoroughly broken if Linux announces itself as Linux and not as Windows. In fact, a lot of machines' ACPI tables barely work on Windows.
They first mentioned that efforts to add M3 support were starting in February:
> For quite some time, m1n1 has had basic support for the M3 series machines. What has been missing are Devicetrees for each machine, as well as patches to our Linux kernel drivers to support M3-specific hardware quirks and changes from M2. Our intent was always to get to fleshing this out once our existing patchset became more manageable
I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.
Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.
Or, if you find Ubuntu acceptable, there's Ubuntu Asahi: https://ubuntuasahi.org/
EDIT: After some googling I found this wiki article: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)
They’re working hard on upstreaming everything exactly so it’s easier for any distribution to be ported.
A distro is just window dressing and flavor.
https://voidlinux.org/download/#arm%20platforms
It's a regular package of linux in the distro: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/tree/master/srcp...
I haven't actually tried to install it yet, though.
Torvalds often crosses that line into outright toxicity. I've written a few kernel patches that I never tried to upstream for that reason.
https://github.com/corollari/linusrants/blob/master/table.md
Someone who doesnt see a problem with this is probably one of those toxic people who dont realize they're toxic you mentioned. Nobody wants to be treated how Torvalds treated people.
Also, coming from an orchestral background, I'm well aware of situations where the leader needs to be gruff. A gentle conductor will never get the idiot violists playing in tune. (A harsh one won't either, but at least the violists will be too scared to make any noise.) That said, it's still unacceptable for a conductor to cross the line from gruff to personal attacks.
You may have missed the "retroactively aborted" one.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495
To be fair, he's got much more self-control now.
There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is focused more on m1 and m2 models. Even so, to this day both of them have issues with idle power management and alt-dp implementation, preventing many to switch, by the time they will have been ironed out the value of machines would be significantly diminished.
It is a miracle how much so few can do, but in the end, despite ubiquitous media coverage it looks like team's enthusiasm and passion have dwindled to the point that even m1 air will never be ready.
M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.
Hopefully, they will manage to get it done someday.
Will it ultimately be manually loading a build into specific hardware each time, or is there a level of automation that can be done here?
It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.
They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?
iPhones are largely locked to their App Store so no risk there. Macs (currently) aren’t locked to the App Store - and I’d guess that Mac App Store usage is middling as a result.
Which is to say, I doubt that a marginal Mac App Store revenue hit from a small proportion of users switching to Linux over MacOS is the driver for not supporting Linux development. I’d guess it’s more about an inflexible company culture and maybe not wanting to extend their area of responsibility and risk.
I don't think the Mac App Store is going to get to iPhone levels of lock-down soon, but Apple thinks in ecosystems, not just in laptops. If you have an iMac, you probably have an iPhone, and you're probably going to buy an iPad should you ever want a tablet.
If they wanted, they could open source all of the drivers necessary to boot an OS as part of their Darwin core, but they choose not to. That actually breaks with their older, more open development style. I guess they just don't see the benefit of being open any longer.
That's just your made up opinion, completely not supported by their financials.
That said, their AirPods division could be a Fortune 500 on its own.
You do realize that Apple is a public company and one can just go look at their financials like their latest 10-Q [0] right? For the most recent 6 month half (ending March 28 2026) I'm seeing $194 billion for product sales and $61 billion for service sales. The gross margins are certainly higher on services, at 77%, but 40% product margins are nothing to sneeze at either, and the disparity in absolute sales means the absolute dollar gross margins are $77 billion for products vs $46 billion for services.
So I don't see how you can assert that their "big money maker is their app store" from those numbers. Hardware matters a lot, and furthermore Apple sells services (like AppleCare+) that are specific to hardware and thus even a Linux user might still be interested in.
And without their hardware, their services would evaporate. There is a much tighter link there than with many companies. So they're on the hook for continued R&D and capex on that no matter what, you can't really separate that out, and in turn it's always going to be useful to have more volume to amortize it with.
I think primarily it comes down to corporate DNA, which is powerful. There are plenty of Mac hardware, software and service markets in pro/business/enterprise Apple has neglected or abandoned over the years, including ones making oodles of money, not out of any 4D chess but just because it doesn't fit them as an organization.
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0: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000320193/37f5e9c...
Tim Cook said it himself: Apple is not a hardware company (https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hard...).
That's not what you said. Their margins on software and hardware are irrelevant to what they, as a company, make most money off on — which was your original claim on which you are wrong and got called out on.
So annoying when people can't just admit they're wrong and instead gaslight people with their changed narrative.
As we saw recently, they decided they are, after all, a hardware company, since they decided not to slash their margins...
In practice, I expect a paid Linux app store to go down about as well as the Microsoft Store has. Especially now, in the age of vibecoding.
I believe you.
> I already buy from Steam.
I believe this even more.
Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.
And this is related to MacBooks how exactly?
iPhone: 50.4%
Mac: 8.1%
iPad: 6.7%
Wearables, home and accessories: 8.6%
Services: 26.2%
I assume that the majority of service revenue is App store revenue.
Other services they provide are iCloud and Apple care
I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable.
Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system.
CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.
And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding.
But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that.
I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you.
There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.
Yeah, they pretty much lied about that. It is only in a special Windows ultra-power saving mode that heavily throttles background tasks, forces the screen to be 30% lower brightness, heavily downclocks the CPU (50%+ less performance!), etc; The MacBook has to do no such tricks.
You're not gonna see Frameworks that equal the perf-per-watt of Apple until they release a model with a Snapdragon chip.
Frameworks have one benefit that other laptops don't: there's only a few parts. So for example for your Framework speakers you can find an EasyEffects / Pipewire (+bankstown?) tune profile that makes them sound better than 99% of laptops on the market. It's basically the Raspberry Pi effect.
The days of assuming that Apple has the best chip efficiency are coming to an end, especially if the Windows/Qualcomm platform is a workable choice for your needs (maybe someday Linux support will get better).
Apple still has a lead but it’s small enough that it’s not a good reason to choose an Apple system on its own. The M1 MacBook systems got double the battery life of competitors, now 5 years later, Apple systems are at best getting ~10% better battery life than competitors, and some systems like the XPS 14 have Apple beat entirely.
Obviously getting 20 hours in real world productivity use was never realistic, and it’s not realistic on a MacBook Pro, either. I disagree that framework was “basically lying.” They live-streamed the laptop hitting 20 hours, it doesn’t matter that they changed settings to get there. MacBooks have a brightness slider, too. You aren’t getting anywhere close to 20 hours on a MacBook without turning the screen brightness down.
IIRC the MacBook Air/Pro can’t even make it to 20 hours regardless of settings.
The point is that the new framework 13 Pro laptop isn’t a 5-7 hour battery life experience like the previous models. Instead, you can expect 10+ hours depending on what you’re doing it, so it’s a full work day.
Standby time is likely also a major issue, unless Intel suddenly reversed course and decided to support proper sleep again.
I'm not sure it's fair to ding Framework specifically for not being able to make Linux battery life as good as Windows. Is that actually something they could reasonably fix?
My understanding is that the reason why Linux still struggles in this front is that nobody has put in the hardware-specific optimization work to make it happen. There’s also some friction with how the bulk of Linux dev attention is paid to servers rather than portable consumer hardware.
Framework specifically has stated that they worked very hard to improve standby time and claim that it’s dramatically better. Being able to use LPDDR5x LP-CAMM2 modules aids in standby time significantly. We’ll find out soon when the first reviewers get their retail units in, probably within a month or so.
For standby time, my current framework 13 has never bothered me. It’s great that Macs have incredible standby but it’s much less of a dealbreaker than I originally thought it would be. I just have sleep to hibernate set up in Linux.
My system sleeps for 2 hours then hibernates afterward. If I am putting my system down for 2 hours I’m likely done using it for the day anyway.
Just take the L, dude.
Admittedly, the screen ratio is better with the framework. But prefer the matte screen of the MacBook.
Someone looking that machine who wants strong GPU performance, I’d probably send over to a Zephyrus G16 or something like that, and give up the modularity.
SSD and RAM speed specs aren’t really something that impacts the user experience unless you’re doing local LLM work.
What does impact the user experience, for example, is having access to hundreds of thousands of PC games by not being platform locked. Or maybe your user experience is impacted by having upgradable storage.
This obviously depends on individual needs, and I’m certainly not saying either system is bad. But I am saying that the Apple “experience” is often assumed to be the best when it does have some downsides.
Even the fact that there’s no charge port on the right side of the MacBook Air/Neo is a user experience downside (of course, not every PC laptop has that feature, but you can find them in the same price category as the Air).
I sold my MacBook Pro because I needed 2TB and couldn’t afford it from Apple. Being stuck with 512GB when 2TB drives cost under $200 at the time was stifling.
Then sometimes when I’m on the go I like to play a game or two, but nothing seriously requiring graphics power
SSD speed and RAM speed start mattering when memory pressure is high. And when doing stuff with video and photo editing.
The storage price is indeed steep and now the RAM price as well. I wish I hit the buy button when I had the chance before the price increase.
It’s easy to diss Apple alternatives and call them unrefined and all that, but to the right person, there are downsides to a Mac.
For example, the current MacBook Pro models with higher end chips prioritize quietness over heat and get very hot to the touch under heavy workloads.
Unless you are in music production, a little fan noise never hurt anyone, and the idea that windows laptops sound like hair dryers when doing basic tasks like browsing the web is very outdated.
Apple is revered for refinement and quality yet they get some basic ergonomics wrong like the sharp edges near your wrist and the notch blocking the menu bar.
Apple still pushes updates and security updates to OS versions which are not the latest. So I don't see how they can be blamed much here.
The big difference I see is in the chip. The PowerPC arguably had its benefits (vectorization) which made it super attractive for bioinformatics, etc., and a lot of that software was Linux-based. People could either buy a super-computer or a G4 (or a cluster of G4s) and get the work they needed done for a fraction of the cost. MacOS (and OSX) were behind on a lot of this stuff compared to Linux then.
Today from what I see the M3-M5 chips are a big leap forward compared to their competitors, and it just happened to hit at the same time LLMs became popular. I imagine there are some similar, specialized needs with the M[1-5] chips that might benefit from Linux but with OSX's stronger BSD underpinnings it's a different world.
Why? People have been using Orbstack, Lima and Docker long before Apple shipped first-party container tooling. The virtualization support was never ever a problem.
For actual dedicated server usage, macOS itself is the problem. You want to be running Proxmox on baremetal, nobody wants to administer headless macOS machines by-hand.
The only reason I'd see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.
1000s of hours of work for what is just sitting in a drawer in Cupertino. But they won’t.
They obviously have a ton of people developing with linux and even asahi, else they wouldn’t been able to make adjustments in their uefi to shape the support of 3rd party OSes exactly how they wanted.
As apple no longer develop their own servers (OS), they even run some internal ”production” system on Linux, on their own hardware.
Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups.
Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value.
And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.
Why should they when they have macOS already?
> Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
How many people who buy Apple silicon laptops do it to run Linux on it? less than 10,000 or 20,000 people?
You should not expect Apple to care about what Linux users want. The closest you are getting from them is being able to boot a custom OS or kernel.
Everything else from the drivers to the secure enclave they do not care.
But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Macbook hardware completely outclasses even the high end options.
Linux Gamers? The arm story for proton still needs work (hopefully the steam frame will help). Nvidia+Microsoft are working on it with that new surface ultra, but verdicts out on whether that will boot Linux or not as its specifically a Microsoft partnership.
General non-dev, non-gaming, non-creative users? I don't think they'd buy a mac specifically for Linux either. That market is much better served by Framework, System76, Tuxedo, Lenovo (thinkpads), etc.
And Apple certainly isn't going to win over any FOSS purists either.
I think the intersection of "I want macbook pro hardware" and "I must run Linux natively on it for my workflow" is a lot smaller than you think.
Almost no-one bought Intel Macs for dual-booting Linux either (Unless you are Linus Torvalds and a tiny amount of people who use Linux on Intel Macs).
> But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops.
Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them.
The entire point of Intel Macs was for running Windows on a Mac which that cohort is just as tiny as the Linux on Intel Mac customers.
Dual booting is generally reserved for those who are highly technical, so I would not expect Apple to care about either customer anyway. So that was tested already and Apple still did not care.
So of course they also do not care about Linux users who have Apple Silicon Macs either.
Linux on the Mac requires only Apple’s initiative, and does not benefit their competitors.
> Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them.
Why does the Linux laptop market care about running Windows?
> Dual booting
I’m not talking about dual booting at all. Before Apple Silicon, if you wanted to buy a laptop to run Linux, the Intel Macbooks have always been a top-tier recommendation.
The market isn’t large, but it’s a soft power they’re giving up. Walk into a big tech’s office and you’ll no longer see only Macbooks, and it’s not because they have to run Windows.
Because Apple cuts support for old MacBooks eventually, even if the hardware still works perfectly. See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745199
despicable business practices really