Hacker News Reader

Apple uses Homebrew internally; it is in their best interest to keep it working on Apple silicon.

Didn't know that, thanks - have they contributed to homebrew in the past? If they have then then it's just sloppiness to release hardware without contributing a port and maybe later on we will see it happen?

Homebrew works today (w/ build all packages instead of prebuilt bottles available), however they have a policy of not having downstream patches, so that source trees upstream have to have the Apple Silicon patches.

For packages such as GCC, that of course will take a lot of time. For Java, there are other supported runtimes like Azul Zulu, but Homebrew just wants OpenJDK and not much else.

Perhaps Homebrew Cask might be receptive to alternative Java runtimes?

You need them to be registered on Homebrew as the Java package, if just for dependency resolving...

Perhaps they could (ab)use the versioning system, vending it as openjdk@azul or something? I'm not an expert on how Homebrew does dependency resolution.

They hired Max Howell, the author of Homebrew. I don't think he works there anymore though.

Perhaps, but not such high interest that Homebrew would prove to work today.

It works very well today through Rosetta.

They aren't required to upstream their fixes.

I doubt they make many.

Me too, just making the point that the licenses chosen by the majority of the packages don't force them to do.

> Apple doesn't really have any interest in making it easier for people to use Macs for anything that doesn't benefit their closed ecosystem - they are still ok with you using it for open source or enterprise work so long as they don't have to do anything special. That part of their stance has been very consistent.

Besides being used internally as mentioned, making the Alpha Geeks (to use Tim O'Reilly's phrase) happy would be prudent for their continued success. If the Alpha Geeks aren't using your product, they will not recommended it to their friends when asked for computer advise, and it will not be installed in relatives' home where the Alpha Geeks tend to do tech support.

The Alpha Geeks was how Apple probably got more popular that PCs in the first place, and they may now have a lot/enough inertial to keep moving forward, but Microsoft and PCs used to be the 800-pound (400 kg) gorilla, and they're less so now.

There's a lot of Unix-y stuff being used in academy, research, and HPC: plenty of folks there would be just as willing to switch to a PC with Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS (which run the world's HPC clusters) if macOS gets in the way of their workflow if Homebrew or Macports don't work.

>The Alpha Geeks was how Apple probably got more popular that PCs in the first place

At which point in time was that?

From the statistics I could google in a few seconds, for the last 20 years, MacOS was always hovering around 10-15% of the worldwide desktop PC market share with Windows at around 75-85% and linux/BSD the rest of the scraps.

> There's a lot of Unix-y stuff being used in academy, research, and HPC: plenty of folks there would be just as willing to switch to a PC with Ubuntu/Debian/CentOS (which run the world's HPC clusters) if macOS gets in the way of their workflow if Homebrew or Macports don't work.

Absolutely. I'd say Linux is the default for science and ML!

All of the Apple products that have achieved broader success have been derided by ‘Alpha Geeks.’ The original candy coloured iMacs, iPods, iPhones, iPads, were all attacked by geeks.

If Microsoft is less successful in the home market now, it is because Windows is seen by many consumers as too techy, and too difficult.

But Apple is very big now. They can now afford to not court the "Alpha Geeks" since they already have captured the mainstream market(at least in the US).

You may say that's not true. But just look at their actions and not their marketing speak.

This isn't true. Apple donated Macs to Homebrew.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25188225

It's better than nothing but clearly it doesn't seem to be a priority for them and the rest of my point still stands - they don't do nearly enough outside of their priorities.

It is a priority. However, the macOS on arm64 port has only been revealed to everyone in June. These things take time.

You do realize homebrew has worked as well on Apple silicon since launch under Rosetta as it ever did on more Intel Macs?

There is essentially no regression, and Apple is donating hardware to enable Homebrew to do the work to extract more performance from the new chips.

What ‘more’ do you think they should do?

Contribute patches for all the blockers mentioned towards native homebrew in this post?

Contribute patches for all the blockers mentioned towards native homebrew in this post?

This is classic of the all or nothing attitude that anti-Apple and anti-Mac people have. Unless Apple does some Herculean task that shows they're worthy, they're shit.

Homebrew does have a policy of not having downstream patches, so that source trees upstream have to have the Apple Silicon fixes.

That makes the process much more complex.

Why should they do that? How is it in their responsibility?

They haven’t impacted homebrew users negatively at all.

I consider that developing software for the Apple platform is a free job to benefit Apple. It rarely pays, and you need to be always on the look for ways Apple is breaking the platform on their frequent releases. I personally wouldn't do that unless I had a very clear motivation.

You know Boot Camp exists, right? That is a huge amount of work, done specifically by Apple themselves, in order to support running completely different OSes on their hardware.

Apple make extensive use of homebrew internally, so this is clearly bullshit.