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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

> Why Apple does not at least provide the specs to the community?

Because then they'll have to compete with Linux, which opens them up to someone else making a cheaper computer that does the same stuff.

I mean, I'm typing this on a junky Raptor Lake laptop I found on eBay for $220. Would I buy a Neo or MBP to replace it just to run the same software stack? Probably not.

If you believe OS X is the best environment and Apple Silicon will remain the best hardware in perpetuity, it seems silly for Apple not to allow some experimentation. Apple executives, to be blunt, know better. Lean times are always ahead.

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Apple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.

Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.

I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.

I'm in the same boat.

Hell, I was given a bunch of old iphones recently, all of which are newer and better hardware than my phone. I wiped them and donated them to charity.

> It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.

Not sure what generation you're talking about? Intel c. 18-25 years ago was wildly ahead on everything, much more so than Apple is now, in fact.[1] Apple Computer, quite famously, straight up abandoned their previous CPU architecture and started shipping Intel chips just to have something competitive in the market.

Again, everything goes in cycles in this industry and Apple's executive decisionmaking is 100% not placing bets on being the best forever just to make a bunch of Linux nerds happy.

[1] Process innovation mattered more at the time, where now we're hitting the scaling limit and chips are much more comparable.

Intel have a chance to be relevant today, but they couldn’t imagine a future with smaller better faster, computers the same applies to IBM and Motorola of Schaumburg, Illinois. They just couldn’t imagine anything beyond.

Intel was asked to design a chip for a new smartphone. They said no, which was the end…

Note: Intel and Microsoft have trouble competing when the playing field is level.

The 1980s was filled with many companies that made the operating system and the hardware, Apple is basically the last vertical company left from that era. Why would they sacrifice that?

Many of those companies from the 1980s were very very good companies, but they gave up in the face of Wintel, Sun, SGI, Digital, Acorn (Arm processor), Amiga, Atari, etc… I would take any of those systems updated to today over Linux.

Only Apple with a mad man at the controls was able to survive (no Microsoft isn’t the reason). I would’ve loved to have been a fly on the wall when Intel said no to designing iPhone chips and then Steve Jobs still mad told his manager group that we have to design a new processor in house that would’ve been interesting, of course everyone in the room probably, said it can’t be done and many are probably saying the same thing about in house memory today which needs to be done.

How does providing the specs to run Linux on a MacBook open them them up to competition from junky used eBay laptops?

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