Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

The fact that many people reading this post title (including me) look at it with sarcasm is telling on how apple scored big points with its new cpu. Keeping up with mac OS and the trackpad was already quite hard, but CPU could be the killing blow.

Which could lead us in a few years to a situation where mac developers will face the same fate as ios developers : forced to buy hardware to sign their app, forced to push them on the mac app store, forced to give 15/30% cut, forced to be removed whenever an app doesn't feel "right" to apple, or a government strong enough to force Apple. And competitors will probably follow the trend, because Apple will have proven that it's doable and profitable.

That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?

View on HN

> That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?

Stop buying, using, and supporting the Apple ecosystem. Vote with your money. The new chips are faster. So what? The laptop you have today works fine, you don't need the latest and greatest hardware.

i code iOS (native) app for a living.

I'm already stuck developing for the app store, using xcode to sign and deploy, using a programming language (that i love) swift that only really works on mac OS.

My personal situation isn't going to change anytime soon unfortunately. I was about to dump my iphone next time i had to pick one (and keep my current one for testing), however my laptop is my work computer.

I think "stop being part of the ecosystem" isn't realistic for many of us. We don't want to work on crap hardware, with a crap OS because that would make us unhappy and unproductive (or in my case, would simply not be an option at all).

However, we can use this current hardware /software to try and build the next generation of tools we would happily be using. My question now being : where to start ?

> My personal situation isn't going to change anytime soon unfortunately.

It's enough if you just start to seek a way out. Even if it takes years, after you eventually do it, it will be worth it.

Stopping saying that the rest is crap would be a start

"What can we do, now, as developers ?" "i code iOS (native) app for a living."

I think you answered yourself. I am not anti-Apple myself and think it's fine being in the Apple world and buying their crap but if you have doubts about Apple's overarching impact on technology in general, you should beging by ending your relationship with that ecosystem as soon as possible.

If you choose to work in their ecosystem of course you're going to be stuck with whatever Apple does. If you're capable of building iOS apps you're capable of learning other languages and working on something else.

There isn't much you can do other than sucking up what they feed you or getting a new job. If there's a 3rd option I'd love to hear it.

My question now being : where to start ?

IMO what an alternative needs is momentum, mindshare, and a reality distortion field of its own. Find out how to get a million prople to believe in the need for a next thing, and convince them to cooperatively choose the same next thing. And somehow keep that thing from being mangled in the process.

Make an extra effort to learn something else and move away. If you are already making a living by building ios apps, you're smart enough to be a developer in any other ecosystem.

I have a co-worker that was in your exact same situation and just by showing interest in the devops world and sitting next to them and expressing his interest in that area he managed to just move there and now he loves it. You might find something similar, it just takes will, courage and effort.

After ten years doing iOS apps I switched back to web development and I only wish I’d done it sooner. I feel like I escaped a long, abusive relationship.

In hindsight I marvel that I ever allowed a single corporation to have absolute control over whether or not I’m allowed to publish my work to users.

> with a crap OS

So anything that is not macOS is crap now?

>We don't want to work on crap hardware, with a crap OS because that would make us unhappy and unproductive (or in my case, would simply not be an option at all).

You consider a Thinkpad with Linux installed and configured properly as "crap hardware, with a crap OS"? Really?

>"The new chips are faster. So what?"

I am curious if it will be faster on sustained loads comparatively to some gaming grade laptops.

That's already been answered by reviews, the answer is there's a dip in sustained performance for the fanless Air but not on the Pro and Mini, and the fan noise on those is almost imperceptible.

AMD's been making some pretty fast chips, lately.

It's not even necessarily faster so much as liable to have a better battery life.

My guess from what I've seen 2X any other laptop of "similar" size and capabilities. It looks great from a technical standpoint.

Don't buy their shit. Period.

Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.

Gnome with a dock is basically the same desktop experience - Pick a distro of your choice.

I can honestly say I prefer my linux XPS to my work macbook, by a large margin.

Plus - It doesn't spy on me. I actually own it. I can release software through channels that aren't entirely abusive.

Basically - The only thing Apple does truly well at this point, in my opinion, is marketing how great Apple is. But it turns out they just aren't all that great.

Don't buy their shit.

THIS. I have recently switched back to Ubuntu after a long period of time working for a big corp under a Microsoft ecosystem. I feel like my computer is mine back again.

> Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.

I never really understood how input-driver responsibilities are divided between the Linux kernel and X/Wayland.

If you're talking about Macbook's reputation for a pleasant trackpad experience, are you saying that in Linux the relevant code resides within Wayland but not X?

The relevant code resides in libinput, and it can be used as “input source” for xserver as well.

Well of course! How many people who walk into Apple stores are reading hacker news to learn about Wayland, Gnome and XPS running Linux?

I can see you’re frustrated and lashing out with “Don’t buy their shit”. Honestly I would be too if I had to read another hn post on apple & their policies.

But the biggest gap here isn’t technology. Rather it’s empathy.

Empathy for all those people who don’t read hn and would walk into apple stores to buy the best computer they possibly can.

What could be ways to bridge that gap?

20 years ago they all bought Windows machines.

Apple didn't change that by suddenly being excellent and having great marketing. Developers changed that by realising that Macs were good dev machines and writing software that ran on Macs.

Non-tech people ask their tech-savvy friends for advice on what tech to buy. For years that was "buy Apple; it costs more but they're more reliable, the support is great, and they're way cooler".

That's no longer the case. There are manufacturers shipping great Linux laptops, that just work, and it is actually feasible to recommend one to a friend. And running Linux is way cooler these days - every muppet out there has a Macbook ;)

> Apple didn't change that by suddenly being excellent and having great marketing.

That is actually pretty much precisely the reason.

My take on it (and I lived through this) is that pre-web everyone ran on Windows. If you were writing software, it needed to run on Windows, so you had to code on a Windows machine.

Then the web changed things, and a huge number of devs moved from writing Windows desktop applications to writing web applications for the dotcom boom (I was one). This took about a decade, from around '97ish. It also freed people to use different dev machines because most of the servers were LAMP (or variants thereof), and Macs could run the AMP bit fine. Web designers who had started off in Apple-land being designers on Adobe migrated into being web developers, and that helped spread Macs into the web dev community.

Yes, Macs did get better during this same period, and there was a lot of great innovation. But if nothing else had changed then that wouldn't have mattered - if you had to write Windows applications then you couldn't do that on a Mac, no matter how sexy it was.

I find the parallel with today's situation (and this discussion) fascinating.

Therein lies a tricky obstacle for the FOSS movement:

Ethical software allows users to modify it, but most users have little desire, let alone ability or time to learn how to do so.

To quote Balmer - "Developers, Developers, Developers!"

I absolutely agree with you - The vast majority of folks don't give a rats ass about the technology.

But I don't have to convince those people.

I have to convince you, and me, and the other developers that will read this thread.

We're the facilitators that make that hardware useful to the average person. We matter SO much more.

So I'll add some more - Don't take a job at Apple. Don't develop for Apple. Don't advertise to all your non-technical friends and family that you support Apple by buying their shit.

> Wayland already has trackpad support that's nearly identical to macOS.

While PC trackpads were absolutely terrible for a long time, I actually really like the one used on my X1 Carbon. Inertia scrolling and gesters are not as smooth, but the hardware itself is quite pleasant.

> Gnome with a dock is basically the same desktop experience - Pick a distro of your choice.

No it's not, macOS has a fundamentally different approach to apps and windows. Where you open only 1 app instance that can run multiple document windows. You switch between apps, and can then switch between windows in that app. This can partly be immitated in the window manager, but not all apps will work well with this pattern. Also standardized keyboard shortcuts, spelling check, secrets management and general app behaviour is hit and miss on Linux. Whereas on macOS most apps adhere to the human interface guidelines. This consistency and predictability gives me a greater efficiency on Mac over Linux system. I tried going back to Linux for 1,5 years when my then employer didn't allow me to work on a Mac and no matter how much I tweaked it, I could never get the same enjoyment and productivity compared to macOS.

Nobody asked, yet I'll say it nonetheless: I had the same experience, reversed.

Employer gave me a MacBook pro, I tried for a year to get used to it, but no matter how much I tweaked it I couldn't completely get out of the horrible (imo) experience that is Mac os Windows manager.

It I want to switch to an open window I'll switch to the freaking opened window, stop trying to hijack what open an app means.

Anyways, Mac os isn't bad, but you have to accept to give up a lot of things. It's their way, or nothing.

It is time intensive to fix the odds & ends that Linux distros often haven’t. Kinda wish the author of the article would have taken a little more time learning about how easy it is to setup new keybinds in Kinto.sh (xkeysnail).

I mean... you're talking about exactly the same behavior as Gnome with a dock. I have a single application icon, clicking it once brings up the last window I had open. Clicking it twice displays a preview window for each open window, any of which I can click to fullscreen and focus.

It's literally the same as the macOS dock, complete the with the dot indicator for number of open windows.

Plus my upper left hotcorner displays all application windows, and I have my upper right set to display each window of the current application.

They're preeeetty much identical.

I'd know - I use both daily.

it depends on your hardware, and your requirements

i have now Manjaro Linux on a HP Spectre. (Debian installer crashed .... )

- 4K support is pretty bad for a lot of games. usually some tweaking is required to get the text size - to a readable level.

- Internal Sound-card doesn't work.

- Wifi - had to switch iwd to get stable network. (had lots of packetloss with with wpa-supplicant)

- Getting the Geforce and Intel card working was a pain.

- Touch screen doesn't support reading pressure levels.

- Terminator is misses a bunch of feature that iTerm2 has.

- Last manjaro upgrade disabled the Nvidia graphics card, without warning. (had to restore a previous timeshift backup)

- external monitor doesn't work yet.

- listening to music while lock screen is on doesnt work

- fingerprint scanner doesn't work.

- have to restart bluetooth swith medium probability because it fails to connect to my airpods.

- the UI to unlock your encrypted harddisk at boottime looks also really bad. only text mode. and the text is also not very friendly.

almost all issue, i don't have on the same hardware with windows, but since i really want use linux i accepted it that the HW support is crappy.

> What can we do, now, as developers ?

Develop for open systems. If you write a program for Windows, make it also available on Linux, or at least make sure it works well on Wine. If you develop for the web, make sure it also works well on Firefox. If you develop for smartphones, make also an Android version, and make sure it also works on AOSP without the Google libraries (or with an alternative replacement). And so on. That way, if these ecosystems become too closed, users will have an alternative; and the existence of that alternative might even help prevent these ecosystems from becoming too closed in the first place.

> What can we do, now, as developers ?

Don't buy Apple products.

Don't use Apple products.

Don't support Apple products.

Don't develop for Apple products.

Raise awareness among those who would listen.

But my company only gives me the option between mac and windows.

Depending on how you feel that sounds like a reason to look for another job. I greatly prefer not using Windows and macOS is rarely an option for my line of work. OS comes up very early in my job seeking process.

I also worked at a company that gave me one option: Windows. So I took it, and installed Linux on it. First in a VM and later, I just blew the resident OS away.

Did that too, but it only works while in the office since the VPN software disallows connecting from a Linux machine.

If you think about it, _thats_ always been Apple’s MO. Back when they had 10% marketshare with macs in the ‘90s or even with 70% marketshare with iPods in the ‘00s.

The forcing function, for all the attributes you listed, over the last 10 years has been the iPhone.

Even the headway’s in 3rd app support that the Mac will get now, is funnily because of the iPhone. Can you imagine what it must look like to Bill Gates from 2003? “Wait you’re telling me that a not yet built device with zero support for existing apps is going to magically make macs have the most abundant catalog of apps in 17 years?!!”

There’s only way counter action to those problems — stop buying apple products.

/disclaimer: I love apple products. But I didn’t mean any of the above with sarcasm.

> That future looks extremely scary. What can we do, now, as developers ?

Write blogs about how Apple's business practices threaten the profession of developers, how they can hamper innovation, and how they work against the interest of the consumer (see e.g. IDFA). Also discuss the idea of breaking up Apple in a hardware and a software company, and how this would help improve the market and provide a brighter future for general purpose computing.

And then there are basic things, discussed also by others, like not supporting Apple in any way, i.e. not buying their hardware, not developing for that hardware, and not recommending friends and family to buy Apple products.

More harsh things you could do are: buying an Apple laptop and returning it (your right as a consumer; make sure you state a reason), or putting a license on your FOSS software that is more restrictive on Apple's closed hardware.

Your fears seem to come down to the idea that Apple will eventually try to force apps to go through the mac app store. I can understand why people would feel that way seeing what they have done on their mobile platforms but I don't actually think there is any evidence to suggest they want to do that on the mac.

I am not at all convinced Apple wants to go that route so the future of the mac doesn't look scary to me it looks pretty great.

I have no idea why you think this, when Apple are clearly clamping down on what software gets on "their" machines.

They have to tread carefully because anti-trust, and they'll make all the relevant noises, but I think it's clear that the end-goal is only allowing app store apps to be installed.

But tbh the same is true of Windows. They're further away, because history, but they've already played with this once and will do so again.

They really don't have motivation to lock down the Mac in that way.

Instead, they'll push iPad to be usable as a laptop alternative for more people.

Apple only has about 10% marketshare with macOS. There is no judge in the US that would rule against them in an anti-trust case over that. It's another story with iOS but that's not what we're talking about here.

Apple has no reason to turn the Mac into a total walled garden. They already have that in the iPad. Walling off macOS would mean getting rid of the Terminal and all of the other developer tools. For what? They would be cutting off their nose to spite their face.

>I don't actually think there is any evidence to suggest they want to do that on the mac

Gatekeeper, requiring Developer ID, deprecating kexts, T2 chip, deprecation of the inclusion of Tk/python/PHP. We are slowly boiling frogs here. It's being squeezed into the direction of iOS.

I got the new mac.

I don't have any intention to contribute to the mac ecosystem. I still hog in what I like best - the terminal.

I treat the mac as a client - web+cloud is my backend. The client should feel good to me with decent battery life and snappy experience, and maybe some gaming. But I don't care much else about it.

You might would love a Chromebook. There are some really nice ones out there, and you can run apps packaged for Debian really easily. Chromebook hardware works flawlessly (suspend/resume/etc) and battery life is incredible.

I'll never give up my Fedora ThinkPad, but if I was forced to I could do all my development on a Chromebook with Linux.

Disk space is the thing that kills chromebooks for me. Instead, I spent like 800 on an xps 13, swapped out for a 1tb ssd, and man, it is nice

Yeah great point, disk space on most chromebooks sucks. I used an SD card in one for a while but SD cards wear out so fast. Now I have a USB drive constantly plugged in, but that's not great either.

Do you install linux on the Chromebook, or do you use one of the methods of running a linux userspace under ChromeOS?

I've been using a Chromebook for linux stuff with Crostini for a while (before that I used Crouton). With some frequency something (me or an update) manages to bork things up and have to reinstall the Crostini subsystem, which wipes out all my stuff (things that I care about are usually backed up).

It happens often enough that I'm thinking about going back to a dedicated linux machine, since I think probably that would be more stable for me.

I use Crostini now but used Crouton a lot before Crostini was available. Without Crouton I never had that problem, but I did occasionally have to rebuild because my kids would reboot it and press the spacebar like the scary boot message told them too :facepalm:

With Crostini something did happen that horked the VM and I had to remove and reinstall it. That is pretty annoying. Not sure if I did something to cause it, but I also respect that the feature is still "Beta" and I guess I'm so overjoyed that they're doing it that I'm willing to accept some brokenness :-)

> In Q3 2020, Apple had an 8.5% share of the market, up from 7% in Q3 2019. Apple ranks as the fourth largest PC maker, behind Lenovo, HP and Dell but ahead of Acer.

https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/12/apples-mac-sees-s...

The new Macs are fast and have great battery life, but I wouldn't worry about them taking over the market. Windows machines and Chromebooks are arguably better versus Macs now than in 2015 when you couldn't find a laptop outside of a Macbook with a decent trackpad or high resolution screen.

Freedom is less important than convenience. People will put up with all sorts of draconian control as long as they can have smoother scrolling, or a nicer feeling trackpad.

This implies that people are giving up significant control of their devices, which isn't true.

Aren't they? Look at the Epic vs Apple opinions online, people with iPhones say they actually want to be locked down to just one app store without any consumer choice.

Until some good / popular apps aren't available, or isn't compatible with Apple's terms and conditions. I know this is unlikely scenario since almost every companies want Apple's market share, however things happened with IE, so it's possible to happen again with ios.

Yeah that's what I mean, people are making themselves beholden to the whims of Apple, and I think it's just ridiculous.

IDK, the CPU has never been my bottle neck for work. I know it is for some use cases, but for general software development memory has always been my main bottleneck.

I've seen 16GB laptop sticks for 40 quid on Amazon today (OOS now though); I've had 32GB in my 14" EliteBook for a long time now, but paid much more for it. It's probably enough for my needs for some time.

> What can we do, now, as developers ?

create a killer app for the average person that _only_ works on linux, and force users to move.

If your app is attractive enough, and there is enough developers doing this, it will force users to slowly migrate.

To compete, walled-gardens will court you, and you can then negotiate conditions to make it better (instead of taking just money that they will offer).

I don’t look at it with sarcasm. I have an issue that laptops and PCs are not having the same ISA.

I expect that the x86_64 instruction set will stick around for a very long time. Rosetta is super smooth and very fast on M1 Macs, so legacy apps still work just fine for the time being.

> What can we do, now, as developers ?

Get a job at one of Apple's competitors, and make those competing products better.

Apple beats competitors because their product lineup is simpler and their products don't generally suck as much.

Look at Microsoft's attempt at ARM notebooks a few years ago compared to Apple's now. The difference is staggering.

If we want to see people move away from Apple, they need worthy competitors.

Help port Linux to M1

Apple M1 processor is an ARMv8-a processor which is commonly known as AArch64. There are many distros that support AArch64.

If Apple had created their own proprietary ISA then it is likely that almost nothing would be ported from the get go.

I imagine the post you are replying to is referring to actually getting the Linux kernel to boot (since there is no BIOS, UEFI, etc.) and writing drivers for all the possibly specialized hardware Apple put in there.

The main issue might be video drivers and other non-standard hardware. There are many reports of people being able to boot into linux on the new M1 by tweaking secure boot.

The way I understand these reports is "it's most likely possible, but we still need to actually make it work". In particular, it seems there's not a complete boot loader.

Or at least this is what this thread implies: https://twitter.com/never_released/status/132739810298317619...

> Keeping up with mac OS and the trackpad was already quite hard, but CPU could be the killing blow.

The CPU is good, but it's not a miracle. Ryzen is still faster, what makes waves is that this is the first time an ARM CPU has beat Intel.

Don't forget about sentencing your customers to Apple Sur(veillance).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com