An Introduction to ARM64 Assembly on Apple Silicon Macs

Have you done anything interesting with what the guide has shared? I see people talking about how it's amazing but... where? in what?

Sure. That's pretty acidic wording, but I think it's fair to say they want more consumer market share and lock-in helps that.

The original post's point was that by being more open they would encourage more software to be built for their platform. That would create more demand for their products from consumers.

If that's the case, then why does the GPU portion have to be reverse-engineered for Asahi Linux? Of course I knew about the ARM portion, there are lots of ARM chips licensed to by ARM Holdings, it's not exactly a secret. But the "apple silicon" chip in its entirety, is not completely documented.

There are a lot of undocumented parts of the Apple CPUs, for instance AMX. All such undocumented features can normally be exploited only by the libraries and applications provided by Apple themselves, but not by the applications and libraries written by other parties, which are disadvantaged.

This is the same mechanism by which Microsoft has eliminated the competition for Microsoft Office, which used undocumented Windows APIs so that the products of any other vendor could not keep up with it, especially after the launch of any new Windows version.

Now one can find some more complete documentation for the Apple CPUs as the result of reverse engineering work done by various people, but after each introduction of a new Apple CPU model the reverse engineering work may need to be done again.

Examples:

https://github.com/name99-org/AArch64-Explore

https://github.com/corsix/amx

They're not publishing any docs about the GPU portion. See: the rest of the thread currently. They give you the Metal API (only designed for Apple OS'es), and that's it.

In contrast, AMD and Intel publish GPU documentation.

It was a reference to Arthur C. Clarke's book, "2010: Odyssey Two" https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/992255-all-these-worlds-are...

Undefined Behavior - anything from "well, that was harmless" to "your computer restarted because of a problem."

Name another company that makes debatably the best consumer laptops?

its the trackpad for me, no other laptop is comparable afaik

I recently purchased an M3 Max MacBook with a ton of RAM. It was expensive, but I love that I can run various containers, Emacs, Slack, and more, while never swapping a single byte. More importantly, I can have all of these containers running yet have battery that lasts a whole day. I usually charge my laptop once every two days. Most other laptops I've used would last 2-3 hours under the same workload, and produce tons of heat and fan noise when compiling software.

I will concede that some aspects of the laptop are pretty bad. For instance, the keyboard is subpar compared to even the cheapest mechanical keyboards. The trackpad seems overrated. On desktops, I always use an ergonomic trackball mouse, so trackpads and even "regular" mice put my hand in relatively awkward position and I can't keep it stationary. Something that isn't mentioned often is that the mini-LED displays have considerable bloom, especially compared to the previous generation of MacBooks that used IPS displays.

Personally speaking, the pros of this machine vastly outweight the cons I've just listed.

Mac laptop quality is just so good. Granted i DID enjoy the osx from back when jobs was still alive and imposed his visions. But the hardware is still, like back then rock solid. I have yet to find another producer that has the same build quality. If you know a product that can compete, please inform me, as i would ultimately want to have a linux setup.

Not very debatable though. Mention the many others that have;

As good a trackpad, As good a battery, As good speakers.

Just to mention a few. Lots of other stupidities like their RAM pricing, OS magick etc, but other companies have rarely come close to the hardware.

>>1) they make the best consumer laptops by far

> Very debatable. That's just your opinion.

Sorry, no, I'm not handholding PC manufacturers anymore. When Macbooks were Intel based there were trade-offs, you were buying a laptop that would overheat and underpeform for the spec. The keyboards were iffy to the point where they removed essential keys etc;.

Now, there isn't a better laptop that's an all-rounder for 95% of people. They are fast, cool, do not compromise on display quality or audio quality, afaik they're the only laptop manufacturer giving you full 40GB/s out of each and every USB4 port and they optically seal them (and always have) making USB-Killers ineffective.

They are stupid expensive for upgrades, this is true, however the comparable systems (XPS/Precision, Elitebook, Thinkpad X) are all within spitting distance of the price and still have significant compromises.

PC manufacturers need to do better.

A human is rare to explain their own manipulation.

>several class leading products

See.

I mean, 'class leading', like Nintendo leads, pick something no one cares about and peer pressure people into caring.