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by izacus18 hours ago |
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upvoteby GeekyBear17 hours ago|
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In the beginning, Bootcamp had a real job.

It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.

Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.

If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.

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upvoteby izacus15 hours ago|
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And Linux support on M Macs would also have a "real job", what is your point exactly?

I find it so bizarre that some of you here are defending a megacorporation that could have easily afforded to provide drivers for Linux Kernel like their competitors do.

You're clapping for free volunteers to spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering Thunderbolt controllers when companies like Intel outright contribute them.

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upvoteby lokar15 hours ago|
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The reverse of that argument is why are you applauding Intel for doing something they had to do well in order to get any sales?
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upvoteby GeekyBear14 hours ago|
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I'm pretty sure Intel is providing Xenon CPUs for free when they are used in Linux servers, so they have no financial interest in providing first party Linux drivers.

Sure, they relied on community Linux drivers in the past, but that didn't have anything to do with money.

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upvoteby izacus14 hours ago|
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There is no "applause" in my post - please learn to read before you take up your bigcorp defender shield and think for a second why you're fighting against your own benefit.
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upvoteby lokar14 hours ago|
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Wft?
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upvoteby biorach18 hours ago|
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> not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.

The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful

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upvoteby bel818 hours ago|
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Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple is laughable at best. Even more so when Apple used to release such docs in the past when it was much less financially capable.

They just don't care.

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upvoteby smith701817 hours ago|
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Bootcamp on Intel Macs was a different story because Apple's hardware was mostly an assortment of other vendors' hardware (with some custom components and set up). That means they could bundle drivers for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvell, Synaptics, etc plus a couple of their own (the camera, the touchpad, the mouse, etc) and call it a day. Since the hardware was x86-64 it mostly just worked. That's an immensely different world from their custom hardware. They would need to write Linux drivers for all of their networking chips, each of their processors, their GPUs, work around Linux/Windows' 16KB memory page issues, their neural engines, the SEP, their DCP, the interrupt controller, IOMMU, their custom storage drivers, etc. You're vastly underselling or misunderstanding the size of the situation.

They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.

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upvoteby Danox8 hours ago|
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Darwin is out there and you too can license Arm and design something from the ground up if you have the ability and the will…

It’s all there and it’s been 25-26 years no one has bothered maybe that’s Apple is still the only vertical computer company left from the 1980s.

At one time there were many choices in hardware and OS software combined with that hardware that era is basically gone because no one wants to take the bull by the horns and do anything they want someone else to give it to them free.

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upvoteby biorach17 hours ago|
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> Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple

That's not what they said. Please don't misrepresent

> is laughabe

And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.

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upvoteby Dylan1680715 hours ago|
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The implication of saying it's a "huge effort" is that the effort is too much. You're nitpicking at this point and the flat refusal is just as much a problem as tossing out "laughable" in a sentence focused on calling Apple bad.
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upvoteby izacus14 hours ago|
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> And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.

Nothing about that statement is disparaging - just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't make it insulting.

Calling out nonsense is important, especially on this website.

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upvoteby dwaite12 hours ago|
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Apple until a few years ago had killed off all first party monitors because they thought that business line was a distraction.

The challenge isn't finding an engineer. It is picking what project doesn't get done in its place.

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