Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.
They only want to sell the whole package. You might as well ask the Catholic Church to start a rap music 8-track only record club. Same probability.
The hardware is a means to an end, and nothing else to them.
If they just did motherboards with cpu/ram/pcie and let other OEMs build complete systems the story would be very different
All the capacity at all the fabs is booked up for years. They can’t make more if they want to.
So any hypothetical sales of OEM style guts would only cut into the number of Macs they can sell to existing customers. And there’s no way they would ever do that.
Higher margins?
42 people with iPhone will buy airpods, some subscriptions and apps. They also be vendor locked into Apple ecosystem and almost guaranteed to bring more iPhone sale in 3 years.
Apple must be dumb to canibalize their own market.
Now they have Apple Silicon.
I think most people here never seen the inside of sliding pizza boxes on server racks, really seeing them.
Apple doesn't have the business to business support organization to make this kind of thing work either.
Libdispatch is a burden to use for a server because of its book keeping overhead, and their history with kqueue makes it hard to convince someone to use it.
There’s no io_uring, but in practice, almost all servers run epoll anyway, don’t they?
MacOS’s implementation is an order of magnitude or more slower than (say) FreeBSD though, so its not a valid comparison that the syscall simply exists.
Another example of a syscall performing differently would be gettimeofday() in OpenBSD vs linux, its an extremely cheap operation in Linux but quite costly in OpenBSD despite being identical at the kernel boundary.
A mega-AI workstation could.
But server? Nah.
It failed.
But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.
We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.
Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.
But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.
MacOS is not a server OS either and actually maturing M* support in Linux will take years. And for inference Nvidia is years ahead of Apple.
So best Apple can hope for is some niche market.
The issue is that the current Apple way of designing hardware doesn't really work for servers. An individual 1U server can easily cost $50,000 or more. Soldering everything together so that if a single memory chip goes bad you have to replace the entire machine instead of that one stick is going to make customers unhappy. Likewise, they expect to be able to add storage or network ports, and expect the software to have enough openness that the new systems will work with their existing enterprise SAN or what have you.
Obviously Apple could make open server hardware, but then people might start wondering why they can't make open laptop hardware.
The primary advantage of soldering compared to DIMMs is that the traces can be slightly shorter without routing them through an edge connector, but if you need that then you can use CAMM.
They solder the memory because then you can't upgrade it. Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD, for which there is no even plausible other justification.
> Strong evidence for this is that they do the same thing with the SSD
Worse, they have a proprietary module that they use in the Mac Mini. Couldn't have just used M.2.
Maybe I should have made it Mongolian gangster rap.
Or is this just “punch buggy” for Wikipedia references.
There are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/16/apple-may-return-to-ser...
Cause neither Apple is bringing back OS X Server, nor Qualcom is that great on server space, other than now maybe with their Modular acquisition.
They are releasing a server cpu soon I believe. It’s called Dragonfly C1000.
I'm looking for a cheap 8 Elite phone to root it and run a special kernel module that let me run LXC containers and run arbitrary Linux ARM64 program. And run a couple of services on it, maybe I can port Kubernetes whatsoever
No one is saying they're proven.
At the very least they ought to consider doing a macOS-based server chip. Given how many providers are racking Mac Minis these days. It's mostly for CI testing for code deployed to Apple platforms, so it very much supports their business.
Just a few short years ago apple was the most valuable company period.
How big do you want them to become?
Also, how much bigger will open harware really make them? How many people really care about linux on a mac?
That NeXT acquisition turned out great.
https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment
If macOS wasn't required for app development, it would be even smaller pie slice.
Me and most developers I know IRL would switch to Apple hardware (for laptops, not everything obviously) if Apple just cared one iota about Linux users, as the hardware is simply so good, and the software/OS so trash. But, we're also all professionals who can't be bothered about having to hack in our own support for a OS, at least anymore. So we end up staying with our Carbon X1s, workstations, desktops and Thinkpads.
Also we already have the PC clones with WinIntel for the alternative experience.
Support Linux OEMs if you care.
Now it's the other way round.
Why should it matter how big Apple is (to Apple itself, or anyone else)? How does being that, or aiming to be that, motivate people to work at Apple? Versus, say, making the 'best' product they can, or making the 'most useful' product for people/customers?
Given how "big" Apple is already, it seems that not aiming to be big got them pretty good results (using their current motivations), and IMHO it's pretty questionable that they would have reached the same place in 'bigness' if bigness had been their goal.
Mind you that this (me dabbling around with it) was 2004, with most other GUIs still in stone age, and I think it was developed back in the Nextstep days.
As were Hypercard, Smalltalk and Lisp environments.
Interface Builder was originally a Lisp application, before being acquired by NeXT.
Note that BeOS wasn't POSIX compatible, that came with Haiku rewrite.
However without UNIX/POSIX to sell Apple to those frustrated Linux users looking for shinny UNIX laptops, and the management skills from Steve Jobs (vs Gassé), probably Apple would be no more instead.
Haiku has archived what BeOS programming looked like,
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/programming_the_be_oper...
However I am afraid I bought a macOS Air with M1 and recently a Neo for my daughter, because, while they are excellent computers, their closed ecosystem hardware goes directly against free software projects like Linux and others as well.
Microsoft has always been much criticised but, for its own interest, it promoted from the '90 a general purpose ecosystem of hardware where free software thrived. It just got a little bad later for the GPUs where proprietary, undocumented hardware becomes the norm and Direct3D the only viable abstraction layer to use them, making it Windows only. It was this ecosystem that made free software thrive, including Linux, GCC, Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk and a lot of wonderful project that empowered people and make computer better to use.
I think we must be aware that free software needs general purpose, well documented hardware to thrive and I think we - the power users, developers, etc - we should choose responsibly what hardware we purchase to choose those that are favorable to free software. We should be also aware that in some cases this means getting a machine with lower performances or that costs a little more but there is a trade-off to be done.
Some people may say: who cares about free software, we just want the best product that works and proprietary, closed, stuff is fine. However, when we think that we are forgetting that we enjoy today a free software ecosystem that was made possible from the open hardware ecosystem of 20 - 30 years ago. We need to remember that when companies are unchallenged they inevitably begin to produce shitty products and make the user's life miserable as long as they can. This can as long as to stifle progress and significantly diminish the usefulness of a computer system.
So, no, apple will not make open hardware but we, the developers and power users, may consider to not buy their computers when they use proprietary, undocumented hardware that is hostile to free software.
I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
And yes, Intel Iris was a good leap forward for their iGPUs at the time! But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
> But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Dang, didn't notice until you pointed it out. So it's a really good thing I got the 13".
I don't remember exactly what the chip options were back then, but currently Intel enforces that by ensuring that the laptop chip with the larger iGPU doesn't actually have enough PCIe lanes to connect a dGPU.
The current ones are really good, but honestly I'm kind of afraid Apple would build crap like that again, because it's not like you can "just" switch to a competitor.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
Even for pretty intense workloads it rarely struggles or slows down. And even with some pretty intense battery degradation (reasonable, to be expected after five years of heavy use) it still runs for more than long enough for me on a single charge, although I really can't go to a coffee shop without a charger if I'm doing development work. All that, and it's dead quiet? I could never go back to the old ways!
I understand the thinking of "I'd like to do local inference on a laptop", but as long as I have a beefier Mac Mini sitting at home that can do all of that for me remotely, why bother?
I can see myself putting Asahi on this thing and giving it to my yet-unborn kids for them to finally drop it down a staircase someday. I've been rough with it and it hasn't broken yet!
For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
For delete, if you mean delete-under instead of delete-before (what the key labelled "delete" does), Fn-Delete is delete-under.
Home/End are either Cmd-Up/Down (doc begin/end) or Opt-Up/Down (line begin/end) (I haven't used a PC in a while, so I can't remember what Home/End do)
Obviously, this is not a problem for most Mac users. Personally, I've used a MacBook Pro for more than a decade, and I eventually found that so annoying that I bought an external keyboard with full size arrow keys and dedicated Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys.
And a proper external wired mouse, with 5 buttons and a scroll wheel.
It's lovely.
I sold my Magic Mouse, Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad, and may their new owners enjoy them. I am happy I never need to touch the damned things again. I have a centimetre of key travel and a big fat mechanical click, and it's lovely.
It's laptops that are the pain. There, you have no choice. When I travel with this MBA I take a Lenovo USB keyboard and a cheapo 3rd party Bluetooth mouse, but I still need to fsck around with hubs and external power adaptors and so on and it's a pain. The all-day battery life sort of makes up for it. Sort of.
In other words, things that you would have had to touch in Linux too, but because they didn't work at all, here work but until configured, do not work like you'd want them to.
It's still hilarious when defender does it's thing and the fan goes mach 1, or when the firmware updater force reboots in the middle of a meeting after you've clicked the 10 minute extend two times.
It is what it is. I'm sure we'd figure out a way to make enterprise IT horrible on any OS.
That looks like a corporation problem.
You answered that: _Corporate_.
Normal Windows doesn't have all those problems, and most of them sound like they're network, configuration or specific tools related, exactly where corporate setups tend to do things "their own way".
I think eventually they pushed a spyware update that improved a bit the situation but not by a lot.
Meanwhile my personal M1 Pro had truly full day battery life.
Unless one is lucky to work for small to medium size companies whose organisation hasn't yet grown to such politics and processes, with certifications, IT tickets for admin actions, and so on.
With battery saver mode it even lasts over 6 hours.
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
We’re in the windows Vista days of Apple.