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Comment by uncle_j | Hacker News Reader

Apple are locking down the platform via proprietary chips etc. It isn't a long term solution and shouldn't be relied upon.

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To be fair, the Hackintosh community is pretty persistent. They added opcode emulation into the kernel, for example, to handle running on CPUs without the expected instructions (older AMD CPUs back in 10.8 or so). I wouldn't be surprised to see the cat-and-mouse continue.

Wonder what happens when Apple starts "enforcing" a Tx chip to boot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple-designed_processors#Appl...

Indeed though keep in mind that the current method for running macOS on AMD doesn't use this and instead relies on patching through Clover. The downside being that whilst the OS itself may run any applications that use an opcode that isn't implemented will simply crash.

This sounds really interesting, do you have any links that I could follow to learn more? Is it setting an invalid opcode exception handler?

They released a whitepaper on it, yeah. It was a bit annoying to dig up, but Archive.org comes to the rescue:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100217014904/http://xnu-dev.go...

It's strange that I can't find any source code for this…

https://github.com/sinetek/xnu-amd/tree/master/osfmk/OPEMU

Thanks! I still wonder how usable programs that utilize SSE3 with this, but it's a pretty cool workaround.

I'd been running Hackintosh and an rMBP for my desktop and laptop respectively... this past year I've passed on both and now running Linux for my personal desktop, and will be getting a new laptop within the next few months, some of the Ryzen Asus laptops coming soon are interesting.

Although still not without issue, my workflow has aligned so much with Linux and it's finally reached a good enough point for my day to day use... not having to use the VM based mac or windows docker has been really nice (WSL isn't good enough imho).

So, explain to me again how "the marked dictates the price"? ...

I know you are being facetious, however there are options which the market provide.

1) Other companies that are willing to sell you workstation and laptop computers that you can run other operating systems on such as one of the Linux variants, Windows, BSD etc. Nobody is forcing you to buy a computer from Apple.

2) There is a thriving second hand market of Apple machines just look at ebay, craigslist, gumtree etc.

If a new Apple machine isn't worth it to you, you are free to buy alternatives.

I am going to buy one of the newer Lenovo Thinkpads as I don't think the MacBook pro is worth it to replace my ageing Macbook Pro.

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