They do it because it lets them drive the speakers much louder than they could do safely with a simple power limiter. Apparently there are amplifier chips which can do that smart regulation internally but Apple decided to do it in software for whatever reason. Maybe they can squeeze out more sound quality with a more complex DSP that way, I doubt it's cost-cutting given their margins.
I get being upset at Apple for e.g. 30% take on in-app purchases. But what exactly would they be trying to do by making it complex to control their speakers?
Making it harder for alternative OSes to use their hardware without accidentally damaging it, further cementing macOS' position as the only OS to be trusted.
It's similar to their war against third-party repair shops by deliberately making it difficult to replace parts, even with genuine ones --- see my second link about the iPhone 12 camera.
This is the automotive equivalent of adding sensors and ECU firmware that detects if the engine is using the manufacturer's proprietary oil, and subtly changing the parameters to decrease power and fuel economy, increase emissions, and/or shorten the life of the engine if it isn't. Then blaming third-party repair shops when customers complain.
They make and sell more speakers than any other company on earth and are routinely praised for their quality to size ratio.
If apple wanted to kill asahi linux, they wouldn't have had to lift a finger. Its the opposite - Apple engineers have needed to do several small things to keep the door open to easily run 3rd party operating systems on their computers. Remember, a modern mac has essentially identical hardware as an ipad. Apple has locked down the entire boot process and uses digital signatures all through the boot chain. They actively changed how macs boot to make sure things like asahi linux can run on their computers at all.
I don't think they deserve special praise for that. But it does make it a stretch to claim their speakers were intentionally designed hurt linux-on-mac. If they wanted to stop asahi linux, they had plenty of much easier, much more effective ways to do so.
Sometimes I wonder if it really makes sense to spend so much time to do the work Apple should have done in the first place & with no guarantee it will even work after a firmware upgrade or on the next model.
Spending the same effort on more open platforms or open hardware efforts might be wiser in the long term.
On the other hand, I adore the security and cross-application sandboxing that iOS brings. I wish Linux had more ways to sandbox applications from one another - since it’s clear that “trust all computer programs” is an insanely idiotic policy in 2024. And “implicitly trust all code” is de facto how Linux, npm, cargo, etc all run today.
My comment was in response to the idea that the speakers are maliciously designed to hurt asahi Linux, which just seems obviously wrong given how much power Apple has over their devices. They could completely kill asahi Linux with a flick of the wrist if they ever want to. There’s no way that’s the reason for their complex speaker setup.
If they killed off asahi Linux, they would face far more backlash than if they just made it harder for them (with ostensible reasons why), while keeping it strictly worse than macOS.
> Apple has been caught sabotaging third-party repair multiple times and this sort of design is totally in line with that strategy.
Using fewer specialized hardware chips to dynamically regulate speaker temperatures and implementing it in software seems like it would be more repair-friendly, not less. Unless you meant this in some more general sense that doesn't include repair, per se?
This, and the nannying nature of their OS is why I could never have a mac as a primary machine. I'm always slightly mind-boggled at the amount of technical people that do. But then I guess many just live in an IDE which works fine.
It doesn't require malice or conspiracy to wind up with a closed proprietary design that makes up for cheap flawed hardware with software workarounds. It's the default if you don't have the opposite as an key value and make a deliberate effort to achieve it.
It really puts into relief how weird it is that we get such good quality out of phone cameras. They’re almost as much generative AI images as they are actual photos.
Also I note that it took them more than a decade to fix the bug where left-right balance would drift.
I think it's just a different, integrated, approach to hardware a software development. If you're doing things custom anyway, then why add an extra chip?
Because: 1. Software is more likely to fail at protection with worse consequences when it does (fire, damaged goods, warranty claims). Not just now, but also the future updates. 2. It eats away at the resources that are intended for the user. In other words: it makes the machine slightly slower for the user, for no good reason to the user. 3. You can do things that are impossible in laptop OS software. It gives redundancy, even if the OS freezes you can still make sure the speaker doesn't overheat. If it's implemented in a seperate chip. Also there is real time ability, etc. 4. It makes the OS and drivers much much simpler, which is important if you want to support other OSes on the same laptop.
Advantages, for Apple, to do it in software: 1. Software upgrade is easier and cheaper (assuming they never ever fail). 2. Cheaper. 3. You can keep competing OS'es off of your hardware, because it's too hard to write drivers for your secret sauce closed source drivers that include functionality that is "preventing parts from frying themselves".