Comment by maverwa

2 months ago

if you are in the business of buying parts, assembling them, and selling the assembly under your brand (as tuxedo and others like them are), then Apple is a indeed not an option. Their chips might be the best, but you still can only get them in Apple devices, in the specs Apple provides and with no official support for any OS beside macOS / iOS.

That's true. What I wanted to point out is the fact that the most tightly integrated and arguably the most locked down platform on the market is more open than a platform designed to be adapted by others and sold by many.

I don't expect any daily-driveable alternative operating systems on Apple systems since it's a continuously moving target, yet Apple doesn't have a such heavy-handed approach. They just do their thing and do not hinder things actively like NVIDIA and Qualcomm.

  • This comparison makes no sense. It's desktops/laptops vs phones. In either case Apple is the worst offender. You cannot even use Nvidia/AMD/Intel DGPUs with AS Macs, or install other OSes on iPhone.

    • > You cannot even use Nvidia/AMD/Intel DGPUs with AS Macs

      afaik you technically can, except that m1/m2 force pcie bars to be mapped as device memory (forbids unaligned r/w), so most gpu software (and drivers) that just issue memcpys to vram and expect the fabric to behave sanely will sigbus. it's possible to work around this, and some people indeed have with amdgpu, but it'd absolutely destroy performance to fix in the general case

      so it doesn't really have anything to do with apple themselves blocking it but rather a niche implementation detail of the AS platform that's essentially an erratum

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