If Apple and other companies like them were a little less greedy we could have far more nice things for free and Alyssa and other brilliant engineers could go work on other great projects. Also if regulators were a little more vigilant and a little less corrupt.
Someday.
One important lesson I've learned regarding open source is that companies absolutely love it when you work for them for free.
Something I've learned about Apple is that one of their primary businesses is selling hardware with proprietary software running on it.
Your point about working for free is right on the money. I get that asahi is probably intellectually stimulating to work on, but I couldn’t do it knowing I am essentially enriching a company that doesn’t have public benefit in mind.
The people I know at Apple actually do have public benefit in mind. They believe in things like usability, privacy, accessibility, sustainability, etc. They don't want to replace you with intrusive AI (yet). And personally I like Apple's products and am using one right now. Unfortunately all large companies tend to turn into monsters that do their best to grind up resources - natural or human - in order to turn them into money. And the designer of the iPhone regrets turning us into zombies - that was not an intended effect.
People were already zombies. They just swapped out television for smart phones.
Which is why everyone should AGPLv3 their code.
It's still profoundly weird to me that nobody can run Safari outside MacOS, even for testing. At least the EU has strong armed them into dropping thunderbolt ports now, so we have that minor interoperability going for us, which is nice.
May I remind you of the famous `--my-next-gpu-wont-be-nvidia` flag in Linux compositor? Meanwhile, apple literally went out of their way to make secure boot for third-party OSs possible.
Apple is better at some stuff but it's really not total domination and you really need to look at things in a very particular way to think they are indisputably better. If you add value/cost, everything falls apart and it really becomes: if you have cash, you can buy that stuff that is going to be much better at this very specific use case.
It's even true for their headphones where the only thing they are better at is integration in their own system, everything else is passably competitive but if you look for value it's just plain bad. I had AirPods, I find it amazing how much better the Nothing Ears are for the cost, if you don't care about the Apple ecosystem (the "magic" gimmicks never worked that well for me anyway).
Something similar to this happened in the early days of the iPhone, with the iPhone Dev Team. Initially, iPhone "apps" were going to be web pages, but then these reverse engineers came along and developed their own toolchain. Apple realized they had to take action and their "webpages as an app" strategy wasn't going to work.
A much more plausible theory is that Apple likes their 30% app store commission from big players.
> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2023/05/developers-generated-...
"App Store developers generated $1.1 trillion in total billings and sales in the App Store ecosystem in 2022"
People forget the only thing fueling big corps is profit.
As someone who built one of the first web apps featured by Apple, I can say that your view, too, is incomplete and revisionist.
A much more plausible theory
Theories are not necessary. Apple was very up-front about its trajectory with the iPhone at launch.
what makes you think it was set in stone?
It was not. But you got contradicted by people who actually remember what happened. It is fairly well documented, and was common knowledge even at the time. Jobs was initially sold on Web Apps for several reasons, and the state of iPhoneOS 1 and its internal APIs was very precarious and not stable enough for serious third-party development. Again, this was known at the time thanks to the jailbreak community, and it has been explained in details over the years by people who left Apple since then, and Jobs himself in Isaacson’s biography.
When they pivoted towards the AppStore model, there was no predicting how big it would become, or even if it would be successful at all. The iPhone was exceeding expectations, but those were initially quite modest. It was far from world-record revenue.
Neither, I, nor anyone else, can promise you it wasn't just a simple $ calculation.
That being said, literally every signal, inside, outside, or leaked, was that apps / public SDK, if it existed meaningfully before release, had to be accelerated due to a poor reaction to the infamous "sweet solution", web apps.
I agree its logically possible, but I'd like to note for the historical record that this does not jive with what happened, at the time. Even setting that aside, it doesn't sound right in the context of that management team. That version of Apple wasn't proud of selling complements to their goods, they weren't huge on maximizing revenue from selling music or bragging about it. But they were huge on bragging about selling iPods.
Also, I assume you haven't read the Steve Jobs biography, which discusses this and contradicts your point.
One positive outcome of your comment is that it reminded me I still have the 2008 book, "iPhone Open Application Development" by Jonathan Zdziarski. That was a nice walk down memory lane.
https://www.amazon.com/iPhone-Open-Application-Development-A...
Could you give 3 examples of this? Because I cannot think of many.
However since their moat is now filling with European soil this is not something they will attempt at this point IMO.
That didn't happen accidentally.
It would take an outright legal revolution in the definition of antitrust for this to be even a remote possibility, and frankly that is not happening.
By your logic, Apple could also be sued for not doing it. See how your logic doesn't add up?
This used to be one of the best things about Apple when Steve Jobs was still running the company: you'd get a bunch of features that a purely profit-focussed "rational business" would never approve, just because Steve wanted them. And I suspect Apple still has some of that culture.
As long as Apple wants people to develop software for its platforms and/or sell to web developers, Android developers, scientific computing, etc. they will not lock down the Mac.
Also if they really cared, they would operate/manage brew and integrate it better than have people spend their free time to make apple's products more usable for software developers.
There's no getting around the sexiness of Apple hardware. But there's also no getting around how closed it is. You implicitly support Apple's business model when you buy their hardware, regardless of whether you run Asahi or Mac OS.
I’m pretty sure that Turing and newer work the same way. The drivers basically do nothing but load the firmware & do some basic memory management if I recall correctly.
m3 support still not there (let alone m4) because things broke. Which is expected from Apple, they are just doing their thing and improving their products.
If they cared they would have at least hired these people by now. It wouldn't make a dent in their budget.
They don't want to leave M1/M2 half botched before moving on to the next gen that will ultimately support more features.
If you are not happy with the pace go on and contribute, but don't invent false issues.
You can also trade it back in to get recycled, no one should be straight up throwing computer hardware in the trash.
The only sustainable thing you can do with a bad laptop is fix it or part it out, but for all my years taking apart fragile electronics, is it really worth the effort to take apart a device that was intentionally designed to be difficult or impossible for the owner to repair?
I also have a really old iPad 2. It works perfectly HW wise, screen, wifi etc. But is effectively a paper weight due to software.
I am logged into it from my old Apple account, that was only ever used for this tablet. I have the username and password but cannot log in as I don't know the security questions, so I can't reset the device or try to install apps. I even phoned apple but they said there's nothing they can do.
It pains me to just dump a perfectly good piece of hardware.
If you think you want to run Linux, don't buy hardware from a company that views it as a threat to their business model, simple as that.
Show me any hardware that is 100% "libre"? Even the pinephone itself has plenty of closed source blobs running as firmware.
If you take some random windows laptop off the shelf, it will boot linux (and continue to do so in the future) because they have to support UEFI. If you take a "linux" friendly vendor off the shelf, you may even have coreboot or something on-board.
But with this apple situation there is no guarantee the next generation of hardware won't lock you out, or they might push out an OTA firmware update that locks you out. It's like porting linux to the playstation or something.
Apple does not have a reason to support any other operating system.
Apple engineers do however both officially and unofficially support Asahi, so there's that.
It just so happened that after possibly even more painstaking reverse engineering, the responsible hardware vendor later realized that server machines are de facto linux, and they better support it properly. Like, that Intel chip working that good was not achieved differently, we just like to wear rose-tinted glasses.
I believe the best solution to proprietary hardware is not to buy them in the first place. Buy from vendors who are more open/supportive, like Framework and Thinkpad. This helps those vendors keep supporting open source.
I personally consider it very inspirational though I recognize that I will probably never be able to undertake such a difficult task. I can imagine that it is very inspirational to the next generation of extremely proficient and dedicated teens who want to master software development and explore leading edge hardware.
2. Some people want to use Apple's impressive ARM hardware, but their needs require an alternative operating system.