Comment by benoau
6 days ago
Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software, which is arguably what is important about the hardware.
PPC software is gone, 32 bit apps are gone, x86 apps are next, virtualizing or emulating platforms on iOS devices seems to be eternally damned, and what that looks like on Mac after Rosetta 2's quasi-retirement could only be inferior.
In an alternative universe you could connect an eGPU to a Mac or iPad and simply enjoy being the best platform for practically all software that ever existed. Run anything but the most intensive games directly on an AVP or iPad or MacBook Air or even an iPhone.
> Not only that they go out of their way to obstruct running software.
Apple delivered EFI 32 bit(ppc, 32) firmware updates to their 64 bit mac pro range, make booting/installing alternative operating systems much more difficult only shortly after the new intel range came out.
I had a few of these running Linux at the time and made the mistake of booting one into OSX to see if an update would fix an networking corner case, not an easy roll back.
You may wish to prefix your statement with "apple software".
As I recall, the PPC machines (like the Power Mac G5) never had EFI of any kind, and the early Intel Macs (including the Mac Pro) all had 32-but EFI even after the processors went 64-bit. I don't recall any of those Macs ever being switched from 32-bit EFI to 64-bit (U)EFI with a firmware update, or vice versa. It was a bit of a pain point because Linux was not initially ready to run a 64-bit kernel on top of 32-bit EFI, but that got resolved on the Linux side and I don't recall anything about Apple's firmware updates making that harder.
I must be mixing up my details, but I did think it was one of the first gen cheese graters.
I did have it booting Linux before upstream officially supported it. I remember using patches from infradead
You may very well be correct, Maybe it wasn't EFI, however they absolutely did ship an update that broke my existing installs, until upstream linux shipped an update, so your memory aligns more than mine does.