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Comment by creativeCak3 | Hacker News Reader

The fact that it is very unlikely that you will be able to run linux(or any other OS; unix-based or otherwise) on a computer that you PAY(potentially more than 1500 hundred dollars) and all you get some "BootCamp" Spagetti Windows on the hardware asides from macOS. I'm sure the ones in the Apple Cult will still pay for these ARM-based machines, but Apple really is shooting themselves the foot with all this lockdown. And nybody who thinks this makes their platform "secure" or "less prone to attacks" is full of it. I'm kind of interested in seeing the clusterfuck this will turn into when Apple comes out with their own proprietary firmware for EVERYTHING on their glorified Apple Silicon.

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Why so angry?

There will be some inconveniences, but the reign of desktop x86 can't come to an end fast enough.

> The fact that it is very unlikely that you will be able to run linux

The jury is still out. There's some problem with booting other operating systems natively (BIOS support?). If people can get that to boot up, Linux on ARM runs fine.

Apple has never supported Linux on Macs, and yet people have run it successfully, myself included.

Also note that many (maybe most?) people get Apple computers in order to run OSX. Linux users are a tiny minority - even Windows users are quite niche.

I’m not angry about anything. Was just offering my POV. My point was, given Apple’s recent history, they are going to lock down apple computers even further now. Last I checked, you could not run anything other than what was “approved” by Apple because they GLUED an ssd to a motherboard. Now that they call the shots on the CPU(you know, the actual computer), they might require people to log in with their icloud-crap account to just play candy crush on a computer. And not that I care about karma, downvote away. But you all need to chill.

> Last I checked, you could not run anything other than what was “approved” by Apple because they GLUED an ssd to a motherboard.

This isn’t really accurate at all.

Apple seems committed to supporting running Linux in a VM at least. Federighi said:

> We’re also introducing new virtualization technologies in macOS Big Sur. So for developers who want to run other environments like Linux or tools like Docker, we have you covered.

You’ve got to acknowledge that people have been saying this for 30+ years and it keeps working for them. If anything the history of the company shows that when they use other people’s tech it burns them.

ESR wrote the cathedral and the bazaar how many years ago?

They have been relying on "other people's tech" like Linux Kernel, Apache Mesos and now Kubernetes to power their own systems for decades now, doesn't seem to burn them in the slightest. It's all about controlling users for them.

I guess I should have been specific and said hardware. Obviously Apple uses open source software. In fact I saw a claim on here that they are one of the worlds largest upstream OSS contributors.

The parent comment you replied was specifically talking about software lockdown that Apple unnecessarily forces on their hardware and will further go down the road with their own chips. Being open source contributor and oppose user freedom are two different things.

All the rants and objections aside, isn’t it exciting that we get to see something new and complicated to tear apart and burn down? Because otherwise we’ll just be paying $250/yr for New Core i2000-100006000086 for coming decades

Except that AMD is killing it lately. 7nm MOSFET process, large L3 caches, chiplet design. Even better: everyone can get their hands on them. At least it seems that AMD's resurgence already had the effect of Intel increasing core counts.

Mac on Apple CPUs is exciting, but Apple doesn't sell their CPU or designs to third parties. So, the impact is limited to Mac users.

Of course, it may have the side-effect of making AArch64 more popular on servers as well.

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