Craig Federighi confirms Apple Silicon Macs will not support booting other OS
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https://twitter.com/never_released/status/127585087215369011...
See also https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/ 19:00
While I understand there are advantages to what Apple is doing, I worry that we will soon see lockdowns to what apps you can run on your computer. As an Apple fanboy for at least 20 years, that makes me sad.
If I had money I would buy Apple stock - they got it down good strategy wise.
Money does not justify evil.
CUPS would have made the point better.
All we can do is evaluate every new program, every new hardware, and every company policy on its own merits and demerits.
This has been on my mind a lot recently. Of course, I knew this. But the grip of corporations on our daily live has increased a lot now that software is eating the world. So the effects are more profound.
It has also enforced my belief that it is only worth investing significant mental energy and free time in non-profit, free software communities. While they are not perfect, their interests are typically much more aligned with our own. And in the worst case, the source code, hardware designs, etc. are always available to pass the baton.
- CD-ROM Today: https://archive.org/details/CDROMToday/mode/2up
- MacFormat: https://archive.org/details/Macformat44S/mode/2up
- MacAddict: https://archive.org/details/MacAddict-009-199705/mode/2up
My conclusion is that being a fanboy was never really a tenable position, it’s just that back in the 1990s, you had to spend something like $2,500 just to own a nice computer.
Soon? Phones are already like this, MacOs you have to flip a setting to get things off store. Windows has been flirting with the idea.
This is false, until recently you could just run any signed application without changing settings. Currently any application that is signed and notarized.
(IIRC this only applies when the quarantined bit is set.)
My computer has always been a bicycle for the mind. My phone is an assistive device that I use to look at cat photos while waiting in a line.
I could not care a rat's ass if I have to replace my cat addiction with taking a paper book along with me. I do very much care for a platform where authors of myriad free/open source software can continue to create.
Secure Boot can and will continue to be disable-able through csrutil.
This is clearly the trajectory macOS is taking, given their move to block unapproved software behind a security setting and the enforcement of notarization. If you don't pay the Apple tax of $99/year, your software is a second-class citizen on macOS.
I am not so thrilled by them building Linux-proof ones.
I would, however, welcome the ability to boot Linux for when Apple decides it's time to sunset the model.
I've only ever booted true linux on devices made for the purpose--dedicated hardware. Really any other time it's in a virtual machine. Especially because VMware Fusion is so performant that I don't feel much penalty at all for being in a virtualized environment.
As long as the new Macs have similar virtualization performance, I really don't care. If I really wanted dual booting I wouldn't be buying a Mac.
I suspect most of the people throwing a fit about this don't even own Mac hardware.
But according to Craig Federighi in the video, Apple will not allow (or will ban) booting to other OS on Apple Silicon Macs.
Maybe we need to find a bootrom bug to install linux in the future like iPhone.
It seems a stretch to hear that as "Apple will not allow (or will ban) booting to other OS". I hear it as "there is no Apple software for booting other OSes on ARM".
It remains to be seen whether Apple will take advantage of this change to introduce some tighter, secure boot type controls that might impact the ability to boot other OSes. I can see that happening, but more as a side-effect rather than an insidious plan to mess with all 0.003% (or whatever) of their user base that currently dual boots Linux.
Apple treats phones differently from Macs.
I read somewhere that boot camp usage is down to something like 2% of Mac users. In the early days of boot camp it was in the double digits. A lot of the people who “switched to Mac” used it as a safety net in case their apps weren’t on the Mac.
In 2020, third party application support for macOS is so much more comprehensive that booting into another operating system doesn’t really make sense. Even though it’s possible, the Mac is really a terrible machine for other operating systems. Aside from Windows being a mediocre experience it’s already very difficult to run Linux.
Apple’s business model in a way predates Microsoft’s disruptive strategy of selling operating system licenses to compatible OEMs. In my understanding of computing history, the earliest computers around the Apple II era largely had each computer manufacturer writing their own operating system software. Apple seems to just happen to be the only company that survived that particular business model.
Because Apple mostly made really good computers this was an acceptable tradeoff.
Fast fordward to 2020, and I dread that my ageing Macbook Pro (2015-2016?) is going to kick the bucket because newer Macbooks have compromised hardware. If it kicks the bucket I have to make a choice. Do I stay on OSX or am I going to start migrating everything off OSX. (I have half a dozen Macs - iMacs, Mac Minis, Macbooks etc)
Apple no longer make laptops that you can buy without any thought. You have to wait and see what problems this iteration will have. And how much pain others go through to get them fixed. And while I used to own a Mac Pro and am definitively in the segment of users that looks for high power options, I would never risk buying a Mac Pro today. I simply can't afford to pay that kind of money and not know if it will cost me a fortune to fix if it breaks -- or if it will be fixed at all.
This in itself isn't a big dramatic change for me. I'm not happy about it, but I only run OSX anyway. It doesn't change anything for me. But it is another notch on the ratchet. And there have been numerous notches in the last decade. Slowly making the walls around the garden higher and higher, while the rent has been going up and the quality has been going down.
If Apple doesn't make a quality product and a product they will stand by and support unquestioningly when it fails, I think at least I will find myself where I was 13 years ago. With Windows as the platform for running applications, Linux to do software development and PC hardware to do it on.
Apple will have to nail the next MacBook Pro or I think developers will start leaving.
A couple of batteries died for no apparent reason on machines newer than 6 months, I think one screen failure was due to bad thermal design (hot airstream vs connector), we've had keyboards crapping out and the fans tend to be on constantly when running workloads that are more than "mostly idling".
Even though the batteries are glued down, we stared doing those repairs ourselves. But anything that requires an inventory of dubiously sourced parts tends to mean a bad, time-consuming and expensive repair job at some authorized shop - and most of the time they don't actually repair stuff; they chuck the board in the bin, put in a new one and make you pay for it.
How do you cope with the thermal throttling? Or do you run light loads?
And whether your claim of their outsourcing is true or not, Apple is still on the hook for warranty on the repairs. I highly doubt it’s common.
Lastly Apple has by far the highest customer satisfaction in the industry in a good part because of how they handle repairs.
How many Macbooks, iPads and iPhones have you sent off for repair?
... "without voiding the warranty", anyway. Where there's a will, there's a way.
Even current Intel MacBooks are full of glitches and things that don't work due to custom T2 chips. In the future, I expect this to be more of a problem as Apple continues pushing custom chips. This makes a lot of sense for them as they can develop significant advantages by controlling their architecture, like e.g. Commodore did with Amiga.
In contrast, early Intel MacBooks were fantastically open. For example, the MacBook 2,1 is one of the few machines to be able to run Libreboot. The MacBook Air Late 2012 was run by many people as a daily driver, including Linus, as it was a pure Intel machine. Silent and simple, everything was supported.
The question of course is... why bother? I kind of get it as far as the laptops go, because of the hardware design. Though I think that gap has closed considerably in recent years and you can get a decent laptop that runs Windows or Linux. Though in the Linux case, support for features like suspend / resume and such tend to be spotty.
For desktop hardware, I don't see the value proposition for running an alternate OS.
if someone wants to run Linux/otherOS on their computer, they should be allowed to do so.
You might be able to do something like encrypting the macOS partitions with a key which won’t be given to a non-trusted boot path but that’s a lot of work and new security risk for something which almost nobody will use since most people are buying Macs for the software and very few people have needs which can’t be satisfied by running Linux under the built-in hypervisor.
There is a clear value proposition for taking an old mac and installing Linux. No value for Apple, they want you to landfill the laptop and buy a new one.
I should have been more clear. What I meant was that buying a mainstream laptop with Windows pre-installed, and then putting Linux on it. In that case, things like suspend / resume may or may not work.
Sure, one of those rare Linux-specific laptops (System 76, Dell, etc.) will see dramatically better hardware support.
System76 seems like the most likely candidate I am aware of. If anyone there is reading, I would be happy to subscribe to a yearly PopOS update to keep it improving as an Open Source OS built for your specific hardware.
And lacking that, standard x86 Windows isn't going to run. And even if there were a version of Windows which worked--by no means a given even if there's an Arm version for the Surface--none of the standard Windows apps would run. So I'm not sure what use running Windows on a Mac is doing to be to anyone in that case.
There are a few things in the section "What Can't Be Translated?", including
Virtual Machine apps that virtualize x86_64 computer platforms
VMWare has also strongly hinted that their stuff will work on ARM-based Macs.
"Not supported by Apple" doesn't necessarily mean "can't be done".
- First step, only Os X is able to run and the machine and apple control all the layers of the "stupid buyers" hardware to ensure TPM and signed bootloader/os.
- When no OS alternative, they can complete the current evolution to force using signed/notarized third party applications.
- Once everyone will already submit their binaries for apple validation, they could suddenly force users to use the Mac App Store. And prevent any installation outside of it. (As always, officially it will be for security and convenience of users...)
- Then, they will have the same level of control of your computer as they have on the iPad and iPhone.
- Then, you will have no right anymore on your own computer...
That is the dream of Apple and Microsoft for a few years. Hopefully this strategy failed for Microsoft and their AppStore, but in their case they did not have control over the hardware!
With Boot Camp, Apple produced an installation wizard and an entire fleet of drivers to make Windows work acceptably on a Mac. They spent man-hours working on and testing Windows on their hardware. That was them “supporting” Windows.
So far, there is nothing that suggests that the bootloader will be locked or that it’ll be in any way impossible. It’s more about the fact that Apple just won’t help you do it, much in the way that booting Linux on a Mac works today but it isn’t a “supported” Boot Camp platform.
But we can take the bet here and I will come back here to tell you that I was right in 1 or 2 years.
There is literally no evidence at all to support your assertion.
No, it may be a side-effect. (1) the real reason is that they are not dependent on Intel for their product schedules anymore; (2) they can use the custom silicon that they are already shipping on iOS devices (e.g. the Neural Engine); (3) investments in their silicon pay off across more products; and (4) all of their hardware will be on the same architecture.
They do not care about hobbyist niches of people that run hackintoshes or run Linux on the Mac. These niches are so small that it does not effect their bottom line.
(Doesn't mean that closed platforms don't suck.)
Yeah. I was thinking that if the number were a lot higher than I'm guessing, that would be the reason.
This is a niche feature which a very small percentage of users use even now: AAA gamers usually don’t buy Macs and most of the Windows-only software which people have doesn’t run on ARM anyway — and given how good cloud services are now you’d have to ask how many sales are going to be lost by someone who needs bare-metal Windows or Linux but won’t buy a PC.