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Comment by whh | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention that once you're in this ecosystem, it's usually pretty reliable.

It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.

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Indeed. TBH if I was running a Google- or even OpenAI-scale company (3000+ devices) I'd probably invest into creating a useful Linux distribution and hardware configuration myself (at that scale, it could maybe start to make sense).

10 years ago Google had Goobuntu internally.

Red Hat had most employees running a custom corporate RHEL build or Fedora on Thinkpads prior to 2018 or so, and even then most employees moved to Mac as soon as they were allowed to do so.

I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.

Most big tech companies let you pick Mac, Linux, or Windows. Whatever you’ll be the most productive with. Whatever you prefer. Most devs (75%?) seem to pick Macs. To each their own though.

Google just announced Googlebooks, which deeply integrate with Android, even running Android apps from your phone, on your laptop. Both amd64 and arm64 architectures available.

https://9to5google.com/2026/09/21/googlebook-launch/

> It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.

Xiaomi certainly does: they have billboards touting it: along the bottom they show phones, dishwashers, cars, laptops, and everything in between.

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