I did an interview with Sickcodes a couple of years ago when this first emerged. He does extremely interesting stuff and his point of view is unique.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdmb8/open-source-app-lets-...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akdmb8/open-source-app-lets-...
Apple allows you to run a maximum of 2 virtual machines on Apple hardware.
Someone is going to get sued by Apple for going against this part of the license agreement and I must say I really like that thought because the result of that trial will give clarity to the rest of us.
We had to deal with a gray area in our project as well. DeepL does not allow use of their translator in critical infrastructure. Our client is in the transportation business and has been using DeepL for years to translate emails. They wanted to integrate DeepL into a customer portal that we develop for them. When we told them that we will not be complicit in breaking DeepL’s license agreement, they weren’t too happy.
Shortly after the M1 released, this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25064593
For me, back in the day, it was about power: I wanted a Trash Can Pro for development (I had a fully-specced retina MacBook Pro) but I didn’t want to pay Apple tax; I already had a gaming rig. So I dual booted.
... And hacking entire operating systems under virtual machines is just fun :).
This is the myth that just won't die even though every fair comparison of Mac hardware to available PC hardware, carefully matching feature for feature, reveals prices within $100 of each other. What you don't want to pay for is the features that you're not interested in, such as perhaps Thunderbolt ports.
Show me this put together beige box, and I will show you a machine with missing features found in the Mac Pro. Then you will say, "I didn't want that stuff, I would never use it," but when added in, the prices will be within a close margin.
I do see your point, but even if that's so, the problem of Apple hardware inaccessibility to an average computer hardware buyer cannot be considered as "resolved" or "unavoidable", but only pivots from the circumstance of "Apple forcing high profit margins on hardware buyers" to "Apple forcing a set of (unwanted, yet costly) hardware features on hardware buyers" (through the lack of appropriately varied hardware models and hardware configuration options).
Which is too bad, because if Apple hardware was appropriately inexpensive while delivering the features that I do care about, I would probably consider switching to their hardware and macOS as my primary O/S. (... But then again, maybe not - I really like the latest Linux KDE/Plasma.)
Apple still makes a 40-50% margin on every iPhone sold. The iPhone could be the cheapest smartphone around, and it would still be generally agreeable that Apple has enormous profit margins.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233647272_The_Cult_...
For myself, I needed a lot of parallel processing, and Mac Pro back then just got you so far.
For friends, it was because I’m a Mac shill. This was my way of getting them to buy a Mac when the future of the platform was still a little uncertain.
I still have a “MacBook Nano” which was an ASUS netbook that dual booted
If you had told me thirty years ago that one day I’d be developing on a Mac I would have laughed, but once I had one I realized developing under Windows was a pain - everything is unnecessarily difficult because Microsoft wants you to develop FOR windows and they want you giving money to all their partners who forever have their hands out, and they make everything else hard.
It’s like a pain that never goes away - you can learn to ignore it but at some level it’s always there.