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Can't you vibecode apps for other platforms too?

> Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0]

Allow me to doubt. Results vary between specific scenarios (gaming or other GPU intensive tasks being an obvious example), but the raw performance of Apple silicon for the price is unmatched.

I live in a country where there is no market for a decent business laptop with good support (like a P1) and everything is plasticy or RGB-laden tat.

I was kind of forced onto a mac as it was the only thing that had decent-enough support or I could buy an identical new one and restore a backup on, without having to use something grey market

Snow Leopard, 10.6.8 was the last Mac OS version I truly liked --- I haven't even been able to keep track of version ordering for a long while.

Linux is the new Hackintosh. Well, for many of us it was always the spiritual descendant of the old-school Macintosh, the thinker's toy from the land of Woz. The ultimate malleable computer system you can build at home, where all the building blocks are written in code you can read and understand, and change the enviroment how we want while we're using it.

It's the point at which I honestly don't want any of the popular available OS/hardware for my own machine: windows is ad hell (and quality also), macos goes towards touch ui hell (and updates always break more than I would expect), linux update always break major features I use on my current laptop (sleep and hibernation), and the complexity of setting up hybrid gpu setup: i really DON'T want or need to use nvidia gpu for rendering my desktop! But there'll be no external display output without enabling nvidia gpu all-time. Sad state of the drivers quality from the top-10 tech company of today (nvidia) for the most popular professional OS (linux)! Battery life is 2h on linux (30% of the expected). Windows 10 works fine 6h on the same machine!

What to set up?

Anyone that knows Apple history, knows that they software was never that great, remember they almost went bankrupt while trying to write a new OS.

You're never going to be able to get the Apple code off an Apple Silicon Mac anyway, because of the enormous amount of proprietary firmware that the OS has to interface with. Apple Silicon devices offload an exceptional amount of hardware functionality to firmware blobs that the OS just sends messages to. Removing the macOS container wouldn't change this.

As far as I know, the Asahi project has absolutely no communication with Apple. It’s not Apple’s “pet” project and they don’t control it.

Tying is technically illegal, and allowing other OS to be installed is your only real defense as a business. Some ignore these laws with software, but do so at their own peril.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law

Note, keeping competitors barely operational inside a walled garden is classic Apple policy. No other company has the goodwill inertia to pull off such stunts. =3

You object to their extremely well-explained well-argued and sane position, but make no argument why or what position you prefer?

> instead of controlling a pet Linux project.

Huh? Apple does not control Asahi and never did.

I think one advantage of Linux on Mac hardware is that it's a consistent target: everyone is using and developing against the same hardware, and there's millions out there. Vs other ARM laptops there's 100s of different models, so 100s of different fixes and everyone fixing their "own" model with fixes that are only useful for that model

I had one of those … the only reason I got it was for the NPU and the ram … but then there was no PCIE bandwidth …. Moved on lol

There's also gravity linux with M4 support: https://gravitylinux.org/

Is that just Omarchy or are they sharing the progress with other distros?

Omarchy's one of the three OSs that I tried today on an Ubuntu 26.4 VM host. I was a quick install but if felt a bit rough, like driving a tractor. I also got in trouble when I tried to bring up the Display Settings and screwed things up. Not ready for prime-time, in my case anyways. Probably was my inexperience with arch distros.

Also tried LordOS very quick, very easy to install, looks and feels like macOS, but Debian distro underneath.

I also tried GhostBSD. It's easy enough to work with, but it does not have any packages for "spice-vdagent," which I needed to resize the screen size and clipboard copy/paste support between host and guest devices when using Virt Manager :(

How is this sentiment annoying to you? People want Linux on good hardware, how is that annoying to you?

> Macs run macOS.

They run other things, too. There's no valid technical reason it can't or shouldn't, and Apple deserves the scrutiny if they won't bring macOS up to parity with Linux. Modern macOS is legitimately terrible, and ~100% to blame for why Macs are shunned for HPC, on-prem and other professional applications.

It really has changed since then, wow

I have an X9-15p with the X7 CPU and an M4 Max 16” MBP. I love the X9, it’s so light and powerful enough for most of what I do. That being said, it’s nowhere near as powerful as the M4 Max, not even close, and here in the US, there’s no 64GB model available.

Why are you citing reviews from random people and not benchmarks?

No that's not a "best CPU". Arm Macs are the ones with the best CPUs, by far.

They didn't, it's basically same M1-M3 as Asahi with some extra experimental stuff.

It wasn't my favorite, but my first Mac was a PowerBook G4 17-inch, which I ran Gentoo and (I think) Yellow Dog Linux on at various times. It never worked super well, and I eventually joined the dark side. In 2003, a 17-inch laptop was ludicrous among all the netbooks that seemed to be the future of laptops. People around me called it the "aircraft carrier Mac".

Given the interdependencies of Google's Android, I'm not sure I'd trust something so subjective to AI. I'm sure I would disagree with it regarding what's bloat, what's necessary, and which dependencies I'm willing to break

Can AI port Asahi Linux to the M5+ chips? Honest question for the strong AI fans to attempt.

Yes so many iPads that are dead bricks, while they could be running some pure Linux distro for many purposes

I think this should extend to all device manufacturers. I have a few android devices that can be renewed with Lineage OS

To prevent anti-competitive behavior (illegal tying/bundling), Apple should be legally obligated to unlock the bootloader of devices once they are offered for sale.

  > your ipad as a remote display for your mac

But now that the new macos is forced to have touch-friendly UI, it actually could be nice.

Switch 2 user space has been jailbroken so any game can be dumped. But not the other way, so the Switch 2 can't run pirated Switch 1/2 games yet.

There are now Switch 2 emulators that can run any dumped game on PC/Mac etc. https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Nintendo_Switch...

Most Switch 2 games are getting dumped, including the just released Ocarina of Time Remake https://imagepaste.org/i/kx5c925r.png

As I mentioned in my comment there is a native Switch code compiler for Mac, so not emulation https://github.com/seedds/nxnative

Did you just use qualcomm as an example of openness? I guess you never actually worked with qualcomm...

Apple's value is absolutely for their software... as compared to Windows. (And as compared to Linux, for people who don't care about technology and for whom any risk of ever facing a terminal prompt is a non-starter.)

It definitely was in the MacOS 9 days. That OS was a joy to use. 3rd party Mac apps were incredible too.

You can run a vintage Mac today with a BlueSCSI and a 32GB microSD card and get a computing experience far snappier than any modern hardware.

It’s always been the combo, throughout their history they’ve rarely been the best at hardware OR software but typically the best at integrating the two

the software has its strong points, particularly for media. CoreAudio has been industry leading throughout the history of audio work on computers. but most Mac heads seem to agree that general polish has been on a multi year down slope. how much Liquid Glass is to blame for that impression, i don’t know.

I worked professionally as a C++/Win32 developer for many years. I was more productive in the MacOS APIs in two weeks.

Of course, with AI coding agents you might not notice that the windows code base has mountains of hacks and is a mess, while the macOS codebase took half the tokens to develop and is much smaller.

It's always been the software. Apple has always made, and continues to make, pretty unremarkable hardware compared to their competitors. It's nice, but not uniquely so.

if you are student and you want to tinker with stuff, it's fine. If you want to do any serious professional work, it's not, because you want a stable working environment with proper security patch in time.

It's maybe minor but the three features that keep me on macOS address iMessage integration with my iPhone, clipboard sharing with my iPhone, and seamless projection to my Apple TV as mirrored or an external monitor.

Yes and no. Apple was a co founder when ARM was spun off from Acorn and the ARM processor already existed for 5 years.

Acorn supplied the engineers, VLSI supplied the manufacturing, Apple supplied the money

Typical 90s Apple, short sighted and not seeing the wood for the trees.

If they had kept their stake instead of selling it off they would own the majority of the entire computing world by now.

Back in the 2010s much of the appeal of hackintoshing was getting the niceness of macOS on hardware that was much more powerful and better cooled than anything Apple sold.

They were also quite stable if one selected their hardware for it and adhered to best practices. My custom built i6700k hackintosh tower was solid and quiet and expandable.

Yes there’s also Linux but if one enjoys macOS as a desktop, there’s precious little in the Linux world for you. Most DEs are windows-like, and though GNOME and Pantheon share a few qualities with macOS the resemblance is skin deep at best.

> I never really saw the appeal of Hackintoshes.

CI and build farms

It used to be that MacOS was so slick and user friendly, and had the kind of software that Windows did not have, that it was worth botching around with to get it to work.

But that hasn't -really- held up. MacOS burned a lot of the "Creative" class that Steve Jobs used to market to early on. While there are still plenty of designers that use MacOS, the market is more fragmented now since the design tools are more Web-based and less Desktop-based. Audio tools have become more cross platform as well.

Interesting. I have a few Thinkpads and I hate their keyboards with passion, but I could type on my Mac for days. I guess each to their own.

> ... Doom running on refrigerators and pregnancy tests ...

If that's a real example and you didn't make it up, I want to know what pregnancy-test devices have enough buttons to make it possible to control the game. Or are they coming with touchscreens now? Refrigerators, sure, I can easily see that. But pregnancy-test devices? Why would they have enough buttons to be able to simulate WASD and a fire button? The only pregnancy-test devices I've seen are the home test ones where you put the sample in the device then wait to see if there's one line or two (some of them arrange the two lines in a + shape so that - means a negative result and + means a positive result, which is clever), with no electronics. What pregnancy-test devices are using more than that?

Exactly this. There was a point in the late 2000's / early 2010's where Mac's were very overpriced relative to the hardware they were selling.

I built two Hackintoshes in those years, and they were rock solid. You did have to pay attention to the hardware you were buying (mostly motherboard and GPU), but if you got that right, they worked really well.

Usually the way is to favour the competition instead, all those arguments are known to me.

Maybe it helps that in my part of the globe Apple was largely irrelevant until they manage to survive bankruptcy with the iPod, and iMacs.

Getting to play around with new GPUs was one of the things that kept me excited.

Hence why we buy stuff from the competition instead.

In my part of the globe, ignoring iOS development, any computer does the job.

So in such case I would have opted out for a cheap PC built of parts running some Linux distro, or Windows, which has most audio and design tooling as OS X has.