Comment by Teever
5 days ago
I wish the EU would regulate this kind of stuff.
A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought, be it a smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or server.
A company the size of Apple should also be required to release proper documentation that enables the porting of operating systems to these kinds of devices.
The reverse engineering work that the Asahi team did is remarkable but so much of it is ultimately busy work that didn't need to be done if we regulated the consumer electronics market appropriately.
If you believe this, the fight should be against PlayStation and Xbox.
They’re 100% commodity hardware and fully locked down from any user freedom. Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple with all their might instead of gaming consoles.
Because gaming consoles are for a very specific purpose (and sold as such – the ruling against Sony for blocking Linux on the PS3 only happened because they advertised Linux compatibility) and Macs are general purpose computers
No Universal Machine inside any consumer product should "be for a very specific purpose," where it is locked down to prevent the consumer-owner from making software or firmware modifications to it. This goes for pacemakers, automobiles, microwave ovens, MRI machines, and even Intel IME or the little microcontroller on your NVME drive. If I were elected Benevolent Dictator For Life of the United States, I would immediately withdraw us from WIPO, strike down the DMCA, and implement a 100%+ sales tax on all "finished products" for sale which had even just one such Universal Machine in it locked down as described, AND mandate a minimum of 25 years full warranty and support on such products with forced 100% buy-back for failure to support or patch or open. We must relegate today's form of 'proprietary' to a rental/lease-only model and quit calling it 'ownership'.
We must demand hardware which strongly adheres to the GNU/FSF ethos or it must be rejected society-wide (or made too expensive for the average normie to afford, effectively killing its market). Universal Machines are to free humanity, not limit or enslave us! THIS is why I don't buy Apple and hold my nose buying x86 (Qubes OS) and Google Pixels (GrapheneOS); if I could afford Raptor Engineering's TALOS II, I would own only that!
And PS3 had Linux support because of EU taxes :)
Game consoles had a higher import tax than "computers" -> allow linux, save money.
IIRC they did a similar thing with the PS2 with some janky-ass BASIC interpreter being available.
Macs are special purpose hardware for running macOS. A PC you build from custom components in your office is a general purpose machine. The gaming console example by oc is quite apt.
Macs are specialized in running macOS and its app ecosystem and integrating with other Apple devices. Apple don't advertise Linux compatibility.
6 replies →
> Weirdly everyone focuses on Apple
Lifetime Xboxes sold: ~200 Million
Lifetime iPhones sold: 3 Billion
Why is it weird?
Well, currently 6 Billion active Android phones exist. Not lifetime total: current active. So there's that.
1 reply →
They are actually not commodity hardware. The PlayStation and Xbox CPU/GPU is custom built for the console. Try finding a CPU that can use GDDR RAM!
Why would I need to "find a CPU"? It's there inside the console.
I should be able to put in a Linux DVD or memory stick and install Linux on it.
Or at the _very_ least an alternative app store.
Wouldn't that be the same argument for Apple hardware?
1 reply →
What fundamentally makes a box which has a web browser, allows for third party app installs, and can drive them by connecting to a 4k monitor in addition to a keyboard and mouse different than a PC - other than the vendor setting policy such that their store only allows game and media streaming apps?
There was a brief period of time where you could buy your car like this. You'd purchase a rolling chassis from one manufacturer, and commission a coachbuilder to put a body on top. Many premium brands such as Bugatti, Rolls-Royce and Jaguar (Swallow) started in this fashion.
Today, outside of a few niche areas such as motorsport and commercial uses such as buses and coaches, nobody buys a vehicle this way. If you walked into your local Ford or Toyota and asked for a rolling chassis they would look at you as if you were insane, and rightly so. Integrating the development of the chassis and body into a single unit (both philosophically and literally [0]) has given us cars which are lighter, faster, more efficient, more featureful and safer by every measure.
We had our coachbuilding period in personal computing and it's all but over[1]. Nobody asks for the hardware and operating system to be sold separately for their washing machine, their TV, their microwave oven, PlayStation or Tesla EV. And yet for some reason some still cling to the idea that tablets and smartphones are personal computers rather than recognising them for the appliances they are.
As Steve Jobs allegedly said, design is not how something looks, design is how something works. How a feature works on a highly evolved device like an iPhone is a function of tightly coupled and carefully designed hardware and software.
Having this design process take place in different teams inside different companies, selling in different commercial models would not lead to a better outcome, it would be worse, much worse. The staggering commercial success of both iPhone and iPad is all the proof you need.
If hobbyists want to hobby, more power to them! But it's not something any government needs to regulate into existence.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_frame#Unibody
[1] Servers/Linux are the commercial vehicles in this analogy
I don't think it's unreasonable for a device manufacturer to tightly couple it to the software they design to run on it.
No one said otherwise. Apple tightly coupling macOS is not mutually exclusive with Apple publishing specs for allowing to support other OS on that hardware.
That might be reasonable for a general purpose computer if we were talking about something like a Parallel Inference Machine running KL1 software on a KL0 kernel. But I think conflating Apple's products with that level of foundational engineering is highly disingenuous. They're not exactly trundling into the dark woods of exotic hardware and reinventing the bridge between human and computer. It's an ARM computer running a Unix clone. Apple's engineers aren't mapping every codepath and counting every micro-op, Darwin contains extensive amounts of third-party code.
Hardware and software have to interface at some point. When the people designing the hardware work at the company designing the software it's not unreasonable for them to come to some shared understanding of that interface which may not be standard, portable, or even publicly documented, and certainly not one that is stable.
This isn't incompatible with allowing users to install their own software. There just isn't an obligation on the original designers to make sure that software works. That onus is on the designers of that software.
1 reply →
No Universal Machine, as a component or the whole product, which prevents owner modification through DMCA-styled digital locking mechanisms, must be allowed to be sold on the open market. Such contravenes the rights of ordinary citizens. It is disgusting to me that we have allowed this state of affairs through our collective and individual inaction. America's founding fathers (terrorists by today's definitions) tarred and feathered for much less!
> A consumer shouldn't be restricted from installing their own OS on a device that they bought
That is not what the industry, that pays lobby money, wants. They want to be able to control what the user runs and extract profits.
The EU is not some kind of god that will make others do your bidding if you pray enough to them. You've been misguided into following a false religion.
For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things. Buy the products that suit your needs and wants, and companies have incentive to make them. And if no company wants to provide a feature or function that you know a huge portion of people will want, then you have a golden opportunity to start a business providing this.
> For every niche thing you wish that Apple or other third parties do only for your own enjoyment, there are hundreds of millions of other people who want different niche things.
We're talking Apple publishing specs for their hardware. That's not some "niche, particular, random" feature each persons asks for. We're all asking the same thing. Same thing that IBM did and what made the PC and IT industry as we know it.
> You've been misguided into following a false religion.
You're being misguided by your patronizing attitude.
> We're all asking the same thing.
I don't believe it. Ask a random number of people or a random number of Apple customers, and less than a fraction of a percent will say that the option to install Linux on their MacBook is what they most want from Apple.
More people will probably ask for a handle, or LED flashlight, or how about built-in invoicing software? Should the EU (praised be their names) force Apple to give these customers what they want? Why would their wants be any less important than yours?
>I wish the EU would regulate this kind of stuff.
Regulate what exactly? Bugs? That's what this was...
Hardware documentation.
This wasn't a hardware issue
1 reply →
Dude, you're talking about beta software. Get a fucking grip.
Honestly this shouldn't be limited to traditional computing devices. Why do I need some hacker to reverse engineer my robot vacuum and then fully disassemble it just to install custom firmware to it? Should be a basic requirement of right to repair so all this smart crap doesn't wind up in a landfill when a company goes out of business or decides to arbitrarily drop support for it.
The EU is probably going to want tight control over users like any other government body. Bring your own software runs counter to that.
I can see the argument when it comes to locked-down mobile devices, but macOS is a general-purpose operating system with no restrictions on software sources that can't be easily disabled. Nearly every program available for Linux (excepting OS-specific stuff like desktop environments) is available for macOS, commercial and free, and there's plenty more that's macOS-only. Asahi is cool, but it's mostly used by enthusiasts - there's very little practical use for it as a macOS alternative. I think that you'd have a hard time convincing regulators that this cause really matters.
In any case, though, Apple agrees with you, and they explicitly built support for non-macOS OSes into the bootloader. This is a bug in the first developer beta of a new release.
>I think that you'd have a hard time convincing regulators that this cause really matters.
"A foreign power could potentially deny access to the OS" sounds like a compelling argument.
foreign or domestic