Apple are absolutely not going to do that. That would be illegal. Sony lost a class action over this, and Apple have a lot more to lose in the PR realm than them. Please don't spread FUD like this. Apple have never, not once, locked down a Mac, post facto or otherwise. It always has been a platform open to third party OSes.
They did it on iOS countless times to prevent rooting the device.
Not sure how that's supposed to be different as the tech converges, but I never owned a Mac so that's all I know of Apple.
So the 15" M1 laptop will let you custom boot if you manage to decipher its undocumented internals, but the 10" M1 tablet will actively shut down attempts on the next update. Great.
Yep. This seems to be the point the "FUD! FUD!" criers are ignoring.
Apple has a long, continuous history of locking down hardware. Never having a bootloader unlockable iDevice, unibody, glue, soldered on components that are traditionally user replaceable, soldering in displays and backs when people try to repair batteries, serializing the components so you can't even swap official parts.
Apple has never gone in the reverse direction to make components more easily user serviceable. It's always been in the more restrictive direction. More proprietary with every iteration. Now it's the CPU. Bootloader locking on an M1 Macbook is the next logical step.
I'm sympathetic to marcan's points and I don't think Apple is likely to do anything like this, personally, but this argument isn't very convincing. All this means is that they can't release a firmware update blocking use of a third party OS on existing hardware (contra techrat).
OK, great, but we're talking about a manufacturer that makes products designed to go in the rubbish bin 2-4 years after manufacture (witness the half dozen comments by users in this thread saying they have already put their M1 computers in a drawer somewhere!). Apple are constantly iterating, and the goal of a project like Asahi is to stay ahead of the game and continue running on new hardware.
The proper and correct point that techrat should have made is that the second something like Asahi is a threat to Apple for any reason, Apple can release new hardware that's locked down similar to iOS. You'll even have people on this site defending the changes too, in the name of security or something.
If people have “already put their M1 computers in a drawer somewhere” that’s hardly because Apple “designed [the product] to go in the rubbish bin 2-4 years after manufacture”. Apple has a fairly long arm of support for products. The MacBook pros made in 2014 finally this year stopped receiving new os updates (but are still receiving security updates). The iPhone 6s got iOS 15 this year and that’s a 6 year old device. If people are chucking their devices after 2 years that’s on them
The bigger point that I've been trying to make (regardless of whether or not you think Apple would try to lock down an M1 Macbook) is that I don't trust Apple because of their history.
They have a LONG history of making decisions that ultimately are hostile to the user. Apple also has a history of explicitly locking out Linux users.
> It looks like even if disabling the Secure Boot functionality, the T2 chip is reportedly still blocking operating systems aside from macOS and Windows 10.
This is further than Microsoft has ever gone with hardware.
Apple has been dipping their toes into the telemetry and ad tracking waters for a while now. If they see Asahi cutting into those margins because people are buying Apple hardware and installing an OS that prevents them from collecting user data, I can believe they'd see them as a threat.
Why? Again, history. Apple has shut down numerous developers who made "competing" features for iOS via apps in the App Store... even though those developers had the app first before Apple decided to add the features into iOS.
But yeah, something something security something...
Lots of companies have a history of making decisions that are hostile to users. If you avoided all of them, I dare say you'd have a hard time using the internet. This isn't good, but it is the state of the world.
Just buy the hardware you want to use and don't assume it will get better over time. Even if Apple suddenly decided they wanted to lock out other OS's (they won't), they can't remotely update the bootloader if you're running Linux.
To my knowledge all jailbreaks on iOS are literally exploiting security vulnerabilities that root your phone. Lord knows what these things installed...
The early ones were often open source, but between competition in the scene and making it harder for Apple to patch them, a lot of the newer ones are not, which makes it a lot harder to trust them.
Of course Apple advertise running your own kernel code on these machines. Here's the official documentation on custom kernel extensions (which are functionally equivalent to allowing other OSes):
Are you familiar with BootCamp, an explicitly advertised feature to boot into Windows (https://support.apple.com/boot-camp) - They've advertised it quite a bit. They maintain Windows drivers for their hardware.
Re on the M1 specifically, Apple suggests they'd totally be on board should Microsoft put in the effort:
> Apple's software engineering chief Craig Federighi last year said that Windows coming to M1 Macs is "up to Microsoft." The M1 chip contains the core technologies needed to run Windows, but Microsoft has to decide whether to license its Arm version of Windows to Mac users.
I imagine that once Windows on Arm is supported, they'd be totally be on board.
Perhaps if you weren't so hostile in your replies, you'd be down-voted less. You come across as angry.
Bootcamp is not allowing someone to fully boot any OS from the device. It is still a walled garden that limits hardware access, preventing the user from getting full performance out of the device.
> Perhaps if you weren't so hostile in your replies, you'd be down-voted less. You come across as angry.
You get what you read into it.
Majority of my posts are statements of fact yet they get downvoted because there's no placating the Apple horde with the truth.
No, you're getting downvoted because you're making combative statements and picking fights over something that doesn't matter. Why do you care so much about this? Even if marcan and the rest of the Asahi folks are wasting their time, it's their time to waste, and in the meantime they're clearly deriving some amount of happiness from doing this work.
Even if you're right that Apple deliberately locks things down so the 4th or 5th or whatever generation of this hardware can't run anything but macOS, this project still has value. Maybe not to you, but it will to lots of people. And that's really all that matters. Your negativity here is a waste of time and is frankly boring and off topic.
> And Microsoft could ask the OEMs to push a UEFI update that enforces secure boot with only the Windows keys. I don’t think they will though.
Well, let's be fair: They could try, but again, that'd require those OEMs to cooperate. And you'd still end up with folks like System76 and Framework that'd go their own way because nothing can stop a vendor from creating an open x86-based design. They just wouldn't be able to ship Windows pre-installed.
Apple, by contrast, could just do it by fiat because they own the entire ecosystem, and no one could do a damn thing about it.
That's the difference between an open, interoperable ecosystem and a closed one.
I genuinely don't understand the debate, here. Are you seriously trying to claim that the Apple hardware platform and the x86 ecosystem are equally open/closed?
What I'm saying is that I feel it's a better use of man hours of open source advocates to code for hardware from companies that support OSS and not one that is viciously hostile to its users.
I'd much rather reverse engineer proprietary hardware; I get to have fun doing that and I get to play the upstreaming game better than any of those companies that "support open source" that you love so much (have you seen the mess AMD made? They have hundreds of megabytes of autogenerated headers in the Linux tree now!), while working with a team of motivated and experienced developers and working to make everyone's life as pleasant as possible, minimizing churn, red tape, and inefficiency.
Seriously, there's no way I'd be half as happy working at Intel on Linux drivers as I am working on the M1. And it's not like they support external developers either - most of the chip documentation for Intel/AMD stuff is not public. You can't actually build working graphics drivers from their public docs, not even remotely close. Heck, I had to reverse engineer AMD's GPU microcode to get the variant in the PS4 to work. Totally undocumented stuff.
I didn't even own any modern Apple hardware until last year. My rationale for supporting these machines is that they're awesome machines, better than anything with Intel/AMD chips, and people should be able to run Linux on them.
Of course, if that doesn't convince you, we can always fall on the fact that you aren't the person writing the code, and in the world of free software you don't get to tell others what they ought to spend their time on.
> And yet here I am, with Linux on an Intel laptop that can't play video without tearing.
Odd, because here I am with an Intel laptop running Linux that manages that just fine.
> Support from chip manufacturers doesn't mean you're actually going to end up with a better user experience.
Honestly, this is just ridiculous. Go ask the Nouveau folks how their reverse engineering project is going.
I love the drive you guys have, and I wish you the best of luck. But Apple could pull the rug out from under you any time they want in a future hardware rev (either deliberately or accidentally), and all you can do is keep on reverse engineering in the hopes of keeping up.
Edit: Updated pronouns since apparently the OP is one of the project maintainers.
> Odd, because here I am with an Intel laptop running Linux that manages that just fine.
Then it's not an Ivy Bridge running multiple external displays on KDE.
> Honestly, this is just ridiculous. Go ask the Nouveau folks how their reverse engineering project is going.
Nvidia created an actively hostile firmware situation. We already have the firmware story worked out. Plus having to support a bazillion GPU generations with incompatible interfaces burns people out. We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design.
> and all you can do is keep on reverse engineering in the hopes of keeping up.
And we will keep on reverse engineering, and we'll keep up :-)
> Then it's not an Ivy Bridge running multiple external displays on KDE.
Tiger Lake (whose microarchitecture I just learned is Willow Cove) running Gnome via Wayland (damn HiDPI...), single external display via USB C dock plus an onboard.
More fully, previously I was running a Lenovo X1C5 with Intel integrated graphics. Again, no issues there. In that case I ran Xorg with TearFree enabled.
I'm currently running a Framework sporting an i7-1165G7 with the aforementioned setup.
It was genuinely a little shocking, having spent my earlier days manually hacking modelines in X, to see this hardware come up flawlessly on first boot with Ubuntu 21.04... amazing what a reasonably open hardware ecosystem will enable. jab jab ;)
> We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design.
Absolutely a fair point! I concede that the reverse engineering story with Apple may very well be less painful than it is with other vendors. Honestly, I hope for your sanity that it is! :D
I think it's a little bizarre that you seem to think that just because you have no issues with video tearing on a few different Linux-based setups you've used, no one else possibly could on their (likely pretty different) setup.
I think you're being incredibly reductive with your claims about screen tearing. I've run a 1080p display off my horribly outdated i5 520m, and I never noticed any tearing on it. Same goes for my Skylake notebook, desktop Haswell iGPU and even my old Raspberry Pi from 2014. You may have just gotten extremely unlucky with your hardware.
I feel like the "everything works great on my machine, so if it doesn't on yours then you must be really unlucky" argument should have been retired years ago.
cough You may as well say “you” instead of “these guys” btw, perhaps a careless mistake but you were speaking to the lead developer of the Asahi effort and I would hazard a guess his views on the Linux kernel and vendor support are a tad more nuanced than “ridiculous”
You made an absolutist statement that support from a manufacturer will always result in a better user experience than community support only.
That sounds entirely ridiculous and unsupportable to me.
And please don't trot out the "appealing to authority" bit. That absolutely doesn't apply here; when it comes to an opinion about some hardware/software project, I would 100% take the word of the lead developer on that project over a rando on HN who has for some inexplicable reason decided to pick a fight about something they appear to not have any domain knowledge about.
