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Comment by microtonal | Hacker News Reader

They have such a moat that if they open sourced their entire OS stack today nobody would be able to do anything with it except by buying their hardware.

That doesn't make much sense, XNU and the layers above it are very portable, they went PowerPC -> x86 -> x86_64 -> ARM64 after all. They also supported multiple different GPUs in the Intel era.

If the entire OS stack was open sourced today, we would have forks running on standard Intel/AMD CPUs in a week. They wouldn't have the same optimized power management, etc. But I think it would have a good chance of wiping out desktop Linux within a brief period.

macOS/iOS are part of the moat.

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> I think it would have a good chance of wiping out desktop Linux within a brief period.

Given how polished the Linux desktop experience has become and how much software is available (gaming on Proton in particular), I don't think this is true.

If the entire stack would be open sourced there would be ports, but would there be a market for macOS devices without the optimized power management and device integration Apple offers now?

I'm still hoping some other integrated software/hardware company will stand up and offer the same attention to detail as Apple did. Instead of that everybody's actively enshittifying their own products and complaining Apple is earning so much...

Companies have tried to sell Hackintoshes before. There was a market before Apple silicon. There is still some demand it's just nigh impossible to build a modern fully compatible system.

I doubt a knockoff MBP would happen initially but it would absolutely encroach on the Mac Mini.

For the original Macintosh operating system, surprisingly a good amount of demand:

https://youtu.be/P7vvdXzcrFM

> wiping out desktop Linux

Doubt. I couldn't figure out how to do windows management under macOS to save my life. This is so needlessly obscure and inconsistent.

If it was open source, people would make their own window management modifications on top of it.

(I wouldn't call it obscure though, it's pretty much standard WIMP with some differences compared to Windows.)

You can have an i3-like window manager for macOS today if you wanted to [1].

[1]: https://github.com/nikitabobko/AeroSpace

Yeah that’s why nobody buys their computers

This but unironically. Mac market share would be larger if Apple didn't drag their feet on common-sense features for the sake of differentiation. Because Apple tries to reinvent the wheel at every corner, they ensure that Windows will always have the larger market share even if it has more ads.

I mean, without going this far, the very first computer I put my hands on as a child was a Mac, because then Apple had a reputation for user-friendliness and discoverability. Least I can say is that Apple has taken a few turns since. I don't consider myself a WM power-user, I just need boring, and MacOS is not, and the surprises I encounter along the way I can't describe as clever or well thought-out (especially stuff like this¹).

¹: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253594264

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