Comment by mixdup
12 hours ago
>but we're not a fan of the ever-closing hardware and ecosystem
What has changed about Apple's ecosystem vis a vis openness, hardware, or the 'ecosystem'?
The macOS ecosystem is pretty much the same as it has been since 1997
The Tn chip.
Prior to that, modern Macs were just PCs. Then Apple started to introduce, and then depend upon, their unique hardware.
Then the ARM migration using proprietary CPUs and GPUs really kicked it up a level. The OS relies on the hardware, which is unique to Apple now.
It seems so weird that the M series are really SOCs and not just CPUs. I also don't really want a home computer to have coprocessors just for machine learning...
At least they always allow installing your own arbitrary OS.
a lot of the kernel extensions are closed source proprietary. The core is still open but a lot of what makes modern Mac, Mac, are those kexts.
how has that changed over the past 20 years? the proprietary parts of Mac OS X and now macOS have been proprietary from the beginning
There used to be a bootable Darwin instance that Apple published, which on paper would've made things a bit easier, but they stopped publishing it a while ago. It never resulted in any serious OS with a UI however.
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By referencing the 90s it is a reminder that Mac started on an entirely closed source kernel. It's a regression towards the Mac mean more than a regression away from it.
Correct, but to dismiss the NeXT contributions from BSD into modern mac and Darwin would be to dismiss Darwin entirely. Macintosh from the System7 days was a dramatically different beast.
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