I did run a Hackintosh back in 2015. I bought all the 100% compatible hardware, ran all the updates and firmwares from tonymacx86, etc. And even went through a couple painful upgrade cycles, until the M-chips came out....
Now, I just want a Arch-based custom dev machine, and in the era of vibe-coding self-indulgent vanity software, I can more than make up for the flows and tools I had on my mac that won't work on Linux, which isn't much.
MacOS is ok, but I'm also probably going to switch as soon as the Linux supports gets to M5 (Omarchy now runs on M1,M2,M3).
One thing that surprised me recently on MacOS is that it's actually quite simple to vibecode applications you want (it just produces standard apps in swift) and it becomes also very malleable this way.
Thinking the exact same, would have bought Mac hardware long ago if Linux was supported (or even running!) on the latest gen. It's all down to the need for local llm capability!
I just get a graphics workstation/gamers quality laptops and place Linux/Windows on them.
Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0], they have more ports without funny dongles, and I get to use the winning combo of server and desktop OSes in market share, and industry APIs.
Yes there are more powerful Apple laptops available when money is no question, but I don't live in that world, nor am I getting into debt unless there is no way around it.
> Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0]
Allow me to doubt. Results vary between specific scenarios (gaming or other GPU intensive tasks being an obvious example), but the raw performance of Apple silicon for the price is unmatched.
I live in a country where there is no market for a decent business laptop with good support (like a P1) and everything is plasticy or RGB-laden tat.
I was kind of forced onto a mac as it was the only thing that had decent-enough support or I could buy an identical new one and restore a backup on, without having to use something grey market
Linux is the new Hackintosh. Well, for many of us it was always the spiritual descendant of the old-school Macintosh, the thinker's toy from the land of Woz. The ultimate malleable computer system you can build at home, where all the building blocks are written in code you can read and understand, and change the enviroment how we want while we're using it.
Apple ][ (+, e) were DIY/hacker-friendly. The //c more closed and first Mac moreso. The ][ product line more Woz and Mac was more Jobs. During those machines prime era it was clear that those with the hacker/DIY itch better served on the early IBM PC clone and MS-DOS machines. Apple lost a lot of nerds for a period and wasnt really til OS X it seems that they wanted us back.
Back in the P4-dev-machine Intel Mac days, I played a tiny part in getting OS X running on commodity hardware. It was such a vibrant, hacker-y community, and a real thrill to see OS X boot on a Dell. Long after my patches were superseded, I still told everyone I'd helped. Honestly, I was like that friend who wouldn't stop telling you about their trip to Bar-thel-ona.
Nowadays, every time I open my work Mac, the only thing I can muster is "at least it's not Windows." And the only reason I even use one for work is that the unified memory does come in handy for compute.
It's the point at which I honestly don't want any of the popular available OS/hardware for my own machine: windows is ad hell (and quality also), macos goes towards touch ui hell (and updates always break more than I would expect), linux update always break major features I use on my current laptop (sleep and hibernation), and the complexity of setting up hybrid gpu setup: i really DON'T want or need to use nvidia gpu for rendering my desktop! But there'll be no external display output without enabling nvidia gpu all-time. Sad state of the drivers quality from the top-10 tech company of today (nvidia) for the most popular professional OS (linux)! Battery life is 2h on linux (30% of the expected). Windows 10 works fine 6h on the same machine!
A local business that interacts with real humans and serves a purpose in the community.
Not the answer you are looking for but this is perfectionism at play. Use anything you like well enough and seek out the task to solve instead. These are tools, you can sharpen them to work better but cutting is the task not just sharpening all the time.
Linux with AMD graphics is much more stable than with nvidia.
I have also counterintuitivly found Arch Linux (a rolling release distro) way more stable than Ubuntu LTS. Things like sleep works, and any bugs are small and fixed quickly, bug reports are followed up on within a couple of days. With Ubuntu bug reports go without any replies from the maintainers, and maybe it will be fixed by happenstance by the next release.
Have to admit I giggled a little. Macs had hardware issues for a while with not so great cpus and butterfly keyboards. Now that Apple has gotten so good at hardware their software is struggling a lot.
Anyone that knows Apple history knows that they were the de facto standard in most graphics, audio, and video industries for decades due to their rock solid OS and driver support by 3rd parties in those fields - Adobe, Quark, Cubase, MOTU, AVID, Shake etc... There's a reason you saw so many Macbook DJs and fully Mac OS post-production houses.
macOS/OS X is pretty solid, yes. Mac OS "Classic" (Version <= 9), though, was not nearly as stable. Classic is where most of the big names in media software started, though.
Only in US and a few other countries with similar salary levels, the rest of the world has mostly used Windows versions of the same applications.
Remember the 10% market share in the 1990s did not cover all the related jobs across the planet.
And now with the demise of the workstation market, some studios have switched to Windows based workstations for their audio, graphics and visual effects gear instead of dealing with thunderbolt spaghetti.
You're never going to be able to get the Apple code off an Apple Silicon Mac anyway, because of the enormous amount of proprietary firmware that the OS has to interface with. Apple Silicon devices offload an exceptional amount of hardware functionality to firmware blobs that the OS just sends messages to. Removing the macOS container wouldn't change this.
Tying is technically illegal, and allowing other OS to be installed is your only real defense as a business. Some ignore these laws with software, but do so at their own peril.
Note, keeping competitors barely operational inside a walled garden is classic Apple policy. No other company has the goodwill inertia to pull off such stunts. =3
> Tying (informally, product tying) is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service
MacOS isn't sold anymore, it's a free download for all supported Macs - meaning Apple is not "selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product", regardless of which product you think is being tied to the other (hardware or software).
I can see where you're coming from, but Apple wouldn't necessarily be in trouble due to the wording of the law. Maybe in some countries where the spirit of a law matters more than the specific wording, but we're quoting US legal definitions here, and my mental model of the US legal system has the phrasing mattering more than the intention
It's also missing the condition. macOS is only "free" after you buy their hardware, i.e. acquiring it is still tied to buying the hardware. If it was actually independently available for free then you wouldn't be prohibited from running it on other hardware.
The dominance benchmark is usually around 70% market share. Apple's iOS holds a 52% to 58% market share in the United States. It's not terribly far off tbh.
More to the point, the EU have already slapped them with two separate $500m fines having repeatedly found that Apple used iOS and the App Store to break antitrust laws.
The US have a similar case hinging on all sorts of things ranging from green text message bubbles to heavily restricting access to the NFC API and affording to itself the privilege of host-card emulation via Apple Wallet.
Ford has been, however, sued multiple times over the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, for trying to void the warranty if you made aftermarket changes. Because you bought the Ford and the laws say it's yours, you are free to rip out the Ford engine and put in a Honda engine if you so please. (Emissions laws notwithstanding.) If Ford was saying you cannot tear out the engine on a car you own and put in a different one, and they welded the hood shut, then it would be a better comparison. Neither Ford nor Apple would be so foolish though. It's just that the metaphorical hood welds in the iPhone's case havent been broken recently.
That's a different subject matter. But how is Ford supposed to be able to guarantee the functioning of a car that they didn't make? Since you made it yourself by making changes? It makes sense that they would challenge such warranty claims all the way to the court.
A lot of things on cars are welded or otherwise very difficult for the customer to modify, and I don't think any court would have a big problem with that.
They have to prove that the changes you made is what caused the failure. If they can't and/or the changes are unrelated to the warranty claim, they have to honor it.
I think one advantage of Linux on Mac hardware is that it's a consistent target: everyone is using and developing against the same hardware, and there's millions out there.
Vs other ARM laptops there's 100s of different models, so 100s of different fixes and everyone fixing their "own" model with fixes that are only useful for that model
I stopped using my fingerprint readers on all my PCs and just set my passwords all to "asdf". It's faster, more convenient, and more consistent, than the fingerprint reader ever was. :)
I imagine some of the maintainers of distributions are uncomfortable with the amount of LLM-generated code.
I also imagine they will be left behind, for better or for worse as AI-authored software and hardware will satisfy people's needs faster than that developed by humans.
I don't see a way to merge these rapidly moving frontiers of software without radically different distributed software development and distribution networks where AIs collaborate on a global scale. Perhaps the only way to keep playing is to grow a "super cortex", a projection of ourselves into the digital. Like today's agents, but improved, grounded by our knowledge and understanding.
This smells a bit like Skynet. Also, Software Heaven.
It doesn't mean that people don't review the code, though. You still can't ask Linus to merge a million-line patch, even if it works.
And more importantly, documenting Mac hardware takes time. Components like the speaker on a Macbook can be permanently damaged if you don't write the drivers in a specific way. Other features like the Secure Enclave, power management, and TouchID might be unsupportable depending on how Apple designed it.
Asahi's stance isn't particularly crazy, and it probably aligns with how Linus feels about upstreaming code that nobody understands.
I think the other factor is all these additional projects are starting from the work Asahi has done, whether they're actually able to deliver substantial value themselves is yet to be seen, especially safely and securely.
Personally I don't think it's very likely the tables would turn and Asahi became dependent upon their contributions. I foresee a much bleaker future for Omarchy, crashing and burning from some reckless and unnecessarily abrasive whim of DHH. I'm not optimistic about Gravity Linux either, it's a single-dev project and that's prone to failure for many reasons.
> TouchID is already supported on Omarchy, I use it on my daily driver MacBook works great.
And the way they have written that driver is absolute crap, not submimissible at all. They will need to write it from scratch, properly, using a TEE driver, a sensor driver, a userspace supplicant plumbing and an fprintd patch. What they did, instead, is they run pretty much everything in-kernel.
So, can't wait for ridiculous exploits that make your fingerprint effectively a backdoor to your OS.
That fingeprint implentation to me is a perfect example of how ignorant Omarchy people and their users are about security and I wish more people were loud about it. Just point your LLM at that TouchID code to audit it, see the amount of stuff it flags.
b) being left behind is a good thing if your counterparts are headed in the wrong direction. I think projects which lean into LLMs are going to find they have a hot mess a year or two from now, whereas projects that eschewed them will be in a good place.
I don't buy that. Not everything is a race-to-the-finish competition.
The primary message we get out of the AI ecosystem is "MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER".
First off, that's not really what plenty of projects are about. You might like your favourite Linux distribution or desktop environment because it represents less, as a curated vision-- an AI "workalike" could offer ten thousand new features per week, but break the earned trust that a single clear vision provided.
Second, beyond a certain point, speed burns through the human components of a software project. There are only so many reviews that can be done, whether the source is AI or enthusiastic humans. Quality eventually suffers, contributors burn out, and the project dies.
If you point a well-funded slop cannon at an unfunded open-source project, they're not going to say "let's find 20 new reviewers to keep up with the firehose of commits!" They either have to circle their wagons and get finicky about what they allow, throw up their hands about quality, or rely on the machine itself, the dreamworld where they build enough test suites and harnesses to somehow keep Microsoft Paint from having zero-days.
Given those choices, I feel like I'd be happier to see "we circled the wagons". This doesn't necessarily mean "no AI" but it means keeping the project at a manageable scale, and right now, the way to handle that is to push away AI contributions without a bulletproof background behind them.
Going even further, it's high time we saw a "slow software" movement to counter the "move fast and break things" and its new cousin "move even faster and let the bot break things for you". I want smaller programs written by happier people under less psychic and economic assault.
this has been true for just about everything tbf. news cycles, product cycles, movies/tv all have to accelerate to feed economic demands for growth... ai just a potential accelerator of that..
It may shock you to hear that coding was never the bottleneck for emulation or reverse-engineering.
Yes, and LLMs work well for the non-coding parts too. Pointing Claude at Gravity's repos has gotten Linux running well on my M4 Pro mini, with GPU acceleration as of a few days ago. So either I'm a genius or LLMs are pretty good at this, and I'm not a genius.
Omarchy's one of the three OSs that I tried today on an Ubuntu 26.4 VM host. I was a quick install but if felt a bit rough, like driving a tractor. I also got in trouble when I tried to bring up the Display Settings and screwed things up. Not ready for prime-time, in my case anyways. Probably was my inexperience with arch distros.
Also tried LordOS very quick, very easy to install, looks and feels like macOS, but Debian distro underneath.
I also tried GhostBSD. It's easy enough to work with, but it does not have any packages for "spice-vdagent," which I needed to resize the screen size and clipboard copy/paste support between host and guest devices when using Virt Manager :(
Macs run macOS. That’s how they are sold, that’s the deal, vertical integration and all that. Annoying to get this sentiment brought up over and over. Don’t buy a Mac if you prefer another OS, complain to other hardware vendors to get their stuff together.
They run other things, too. There's no valid technical reason it can't or shouldn't, and Apple deserves the scrutiny if they won't bring macOS up to parity with Linux. Modern macOS is legitimately terrible, and ~100% to blame for why Macs are shunned for HPC, on-prem and other professional applications.
There are hundreds of millions of professionals in the world who need a computer that works for their work and daily life and aren't server admins or software developers. Please let us have the Macs in peace. We only have this option, while you have dozens of different PC makers for your Linux.
> It’s just not true that most Mac users use Macs because the hardware is better designed. They’re Mac users because of the Mac OS. What the original cloning program showed was that many of Apple’s customers were Mac fans, not Apple fans.
It was always a combo for me. But for all of the macOS warts, it's not like I'm going to switch to Windows. There was a time I could have seen myself using a Mactel system running Linux as a daily driver, but the M-series chips make that less viable today. So, macOS it still remains. Luckily, with recent career changes, I spent drastically less time on a computer every day. It's glorious.
Not really! The gulf between MacBook hardware and other laptops as well as Apple CPUs and the competitors is narrowing greatly.
Maybe we can say that they’re still the best, but it’s not 2x better like 2020, it’s more like 10-20% better.
For example, Panther Lake beats M5 battery life in real laptops available on the market, GPU performance, and multicore performance.
Just look at Marques Brownlee’s review of the Framework 13 Pro. Or the review of the ThinkPad X9 15p from Just Josh Tech.
I see this mistake all the time where there’s an assumption that MacBooks are still far and away the best without looking at more up-to-date information and evaluating current competition.
I have an X9-15p with the X7 CPU and an M4 Max 16” MBP. I love the X9, it’s so light and powerful enough for most of what I do. That being said, it’s nowhere near as powerful as the M4 Max, not even close, and here in the US, there’s no 64GB model available.
The cheapest M4 Max MacBook Pro on sale is $4500. That’s over $1000 more than a X9-15p isn’t it?
What you’re saying is true, but if your workflow involves graphics at all, Apple’s Max chips are subpar compared to getting a laptop with an Nvidia discrete GPU (e.g., 2026 ASUS Zephyrus G16).
For the Mac chips to make sense you have to specifically need very high CPU performance, be running local AI workflows (which you can do with cloud subscriptions for less money and better results, or you have alternatives like RTX Spark that cost roughly the same as MacBook Pro alternatives), and not want to play games (see gaming benchmarks on multi-platform native games like Cyberpunk 2077, high end Macs get walloped by mid-range discrete GPUs in laptops).
In short, I imagine that 90%+ of MacBook Pro buyers are buying the base M chip or at most the Pro chip, and those SKUs have much more competition.
A Mac is more of a good laptop for your employer than for you and me.
Because the benchmarks are meaningless piles of numbers that are irrelevant to day to day using of a laptop. I want to hear from a human not robot. Benchmarks have been and will be gamed. Hopefully human reviewers like Marques Brownlee and Just Josh Tech are less easily gamed.
Just Josh Tech does exactly that. They perform both synthetic benchmarks and real world benchmarks including an office productivity test involving realistic screen brightness (where the Framework 13 Pro beat any MacBook with an M5 or M4 chip).
Marques’ Framework 13 Pro review was much more of a layperson’s review with a focus on overall user experience.
Because the reviews from “random” people have benchmarks.
See, this is the problem, Mac enthusiasts refuse to do research, even when people point them in the right direction. They just want to believe their computers are the best and never shop competition.
I didn’t swap my M2 MacBook Pro because I didn’t like my Mac, I swapped it because it found a better solution for my needs.
As much as I used to love MacOS as an operating system, the more I spending time on it, I'd rather wish that my Macbook can run Linux, hopefully Asahi Linux will eventually support M5 :(
It wasn't my favorite, but my first Mac was a PowerBook G4 17-inch, which I ran Gentoo and (I think) Yellow Dog Linux on at various times. It never worked super well, and I eventually joined the dark side. In 2003, a 17-inch laptop was ludicrous among all the netbooks that seemed to be the future of laptops. People around me called it the "aircraft carrier Mac".
Given the interdependencies of Google's Android, I'm not sure I'd trust something so subjective to AI. I'm sure I would disagree with it regarding what's bloat, what's necessary, and which dependencies I'm willing to break
That’s so cool. It makes it even more of a bummer that iDevice bootloaders are locked. It’s an ongoing tragedy there’s still no macOS on iPads. Looks like if you want that, you’ll have to go with non-Apple hardware.
To prevent anti-competitive behavior (illegal tying/bundling), Apple should be legally obligated to unlock the bootloader of devices once they are offered for sale.
Amusingly someone found out how to run macOS on iPad, by jailbreaking older devices (iPad Pro (M1, M2) or iPad Air (M1)), with an older iPadOS which has a virtualization framework: https://github.com/nfzerox/VirtualMacOniPad
Everybody thinks macOS on ipad would be great, but it's not. If you are in the ecosystem, you can use your ipad as a remote display for your mac. Boom, macos on ipad.
During grad school, Dell sold a 10 inch mini laptop that just happened to have hardware compatible with an easy Hackintoch install. The change between the slow, bloated Windows install and OS X was stunning.
I loved that thing. Light, easy to take anywhere, battery life for days. I once caught someone snooping over my shoulder trying to see if it was really running OS X. Used it for years.
Seeing that Macs can now run Switch 1/2 games natively because of the ARM CPU is actually incredibly. And to me personally the first hand on sign of the end of x86.
I remember reading somewhere that Switch 2 can run pirated Switch 1 games through some kind of Switch 1 flashcart, but this will get you banned on Nintendo servers.
I'll believe that when there's an open ecosystem of state-of-the-art ARM (or RISC-V) devices based on industry consortiums reference specs. Until then, it's device trees all the way down or waiting for Qualcomm to get their Linux shit together. Yeah, didn't think so.
Apple's value is absolutely for their software... as compared to Windows. (And as compared to Linux, for people who don't care about technology and for whom any risk of ever facing a terminal prompt is a non-starter.)
It’s always been the combo, throughout their history they’ve rarely been the best at hardware OR software but typically the best at integrating the two
the software has its strong points, particularly for media. CoreAudio has been industry leading throughout the history of audio work on computers. but most Mac heads seem to agree that general polish has been on a multi year down slope. how much Liquid Glass is to blame for that impression, i don’t know.
I worked professionally as a C++/Win32 developer for many years. I was more productive in the MacOS APIs in two weeks.
Of course, with AI coding agents you might not notice that the windows code base has mountains of hacks and is a mess, while the macOS codebase took half the tokens to develop and is much smaller.
It's always been the software. Apple has always made, and continues to make, pretty unremarkable hardware compared to their competitors. It's nice, but not uniquely so.
> the feat of running macOS on non-Apple hardware, and has a history dating back to the late 1980s
Wait, so people were somehow running macOS on non-Apple PowerPC machines? I've always assumed that hackintosh is specifically about IBM PC compatibles.
funny enough, the only use case I want to run macOS on non-Apple software is a headless build machine. Without Apple hardware, using macOS is less useful to me.
> Without Apple hardware, using macOS is less useful to me.
Assuming full hardware compatibility (which I know we're not yet at), there's a bunch of laptops out there today with better feature sets than any sub $1800 macbook.
Being able to dual-boot macOS and linux on a lightweight OLED laptop with a nicer keyboard would be extremely useful. This is before even factoring in the upcoming years of likely substantial hardware advancements in the laptop market. Laptops still have a long way to go before we reach peak laptop.
if you are student and you want to tinker with stuff, it's fine. If you want to do any serious professional work, it's not, because you want a stable working environment with proper security patch in time.
It's maybe minor but the three features that keep me on macOS address iMessage integration with my iPhone, clipboard sharing with my iPhone, and seamless projection to my Apple TV as mirrored or an external monitor.
But if you want the true deals on Linux, I am working on that personally [1]. For clipboard sharing, it should be feasible on Linux if you have AirDrop compatible Wi-Fi hardware, but for iMessage integration, it's possible given Mac hardware identifiers. Apple requires attestations derived from Apple device identifiers to flag spam on iMessage. It would be great if Apple was also allowing deriving keys from the Apple account, so it can allow alternate device to borrow trust from their iPhone for example, but for now it does not seem possible (extracting identifiers once works though, and then you can use iMessage [2]). About Apple TV, idk I never seen this thing irl so I can't tell how that works but I'd guess it's replicable.
I think he's underselling Qemu/KVM side of things, quick search shows that Tahoe works for instance. It was always a better route for this, going back to patching kexts isn't an improvement in my book. I'm sure near-native performance should be possible on ARM machines.
Such a throw back, I built a hackintosh back in x86 days and had it mostly working for a year, but of course tried to apply an update (10.08 I think?) and it blew up.
Ended up selling the hardware to some guy who insisted he would get it working and I am sure it was possible, but I pretty much switched to using Mac after that as I loved the dev experience.
Things got much better with OpenCore. Sometimes you had to tweak a few extra settings, but generally you could update it just like a regular Mac. Point updates worked especially well.
I had OSX running on an old school flip-screen HP tablet/laptop combo with touchscreen support. It was bulky but cool to use as a drawing tablet in the pre-iPad days. You did need to have a paper clip inserted into two holes of the VGA port for it to work, and I don't think it handled sleep very well. But still a fun project.
There's nothing improper about calling it Apple Silicon. Yes, the chips have ARM-based CPU cores, but those cores are designed by Apple, not Arm, and they're only one part of the overall A-series and M-series designs.
Apple, by the way, was a co-founder of Arm and helped develop ARM processors for use in the Apple Newton. Its early work on making ARM CPUs highly power efficient paved the way for their now-widespread adoption in mobile devices. There's some irony in how a part of the Apple Newton reverberates throughout the industry today.
Fair, but that money is a linchpin. Having the vision to see a commercial application and the will to fund its development into a real product is equally pivotal to the bringing about of a thing —- even if we engineers sometimes struggle to see it that way.
Apples investment track record in the 90s differs with your opinion that they were future seeing oracles who brought pre-ordained projects into existence. Hell they even sold their shares in ARM 5 years later, so they obviously didnt think that much of it.
Rather than straining to make macos work where it isn’t meant to, and its corporate overlords won’t allow it to run. Why not sink the same effort into bringing what you like back into Linux or FreeBSD?
I am not forbidding anyone from having hobbies (though Apple probably is) - but whatever you build will be undone in a year or so - Apple will never permit it.
However, writing a series of mac-like apps for a FreeBSD/Linux desktop, or even a new desktop environment which closely follows Mac, will continue to be relevant work.
There used to be a use-case for Hackintoshes maybe a decade +/- 5 years ago, especially when macOS started working with x86 and x86-64 Intel-based CPUs. But it always felt subversive and it seemed like one update away from breaking due to some unforeseen, artificial limitation.
Is there a use-case now? I don't know. Linux has made serious strides in part thanks to very user-friendly distros like Ubuntu. People may have individual grievances and I don't want to downplay those, but we're not dealing with oddball Shrike issues anymore.
Apple should seriously consider allowing their OS to be used independently of the hardware, especially the build tools, the server stuff (whatever is left of it, not a market they had a big part to play in anyway). But, it is unlikely of them to do this.
Well done nonetheless. I think it is more likely that the old PowerPC-MacOS-on-Wii will be more stable long term than any of these new releases.
Edit: I'll also add: I am questioning what value MacOS itself has, the raw OS and kernel stuff. Linux, BSD and Windows each have their own -isms which are curiosities that one can, and should, consider as pros and cons. People might say "Windows is bad", and I agree, Win 11 experience as a daily driver is god awful. But the kernel and OS itself is something else. I don't know if MacOS has any of that "meat" that we can look at and say it's worth looking deeper into.
About a decade or so ago I actually had a dual-boot hackintosh build. In practice the one update away from breaking rings so true and really cemented that vertical integration is Apple's most powerful offering. Running OS X in a fragile unsupported environment really wasn't worth it looking back.
Given Apple's recent trajectory and custom silicon, I can only imagine that the stability of these AI-assisted ports be even worse than it was back in the x86 days. These are neat demos, but nothing I would want to seriously run in any capacity.
I never really saw the appeal of Hackintoshes. MacOS is fine, but it's not so head and shoulders above the rest that I want to run a buggy unsupported version of it on commodity hardware. It's just a nice-ish Unix-ish system.
Really the hardware is most of the point of buying a Mac, since Apple somehow continues to be the only people making laptops which aren't dogshit. A Hackintosh gives you the worst of both worlds, I don't get it except as a technical curiosity like running Doom on your toaster.
Back in the 2010s much of the appeal of hackintoshing was getting the niceness of macOS on hardware that was much more powerful and better cooled than anything Apple sold.
They were also quite stable if one selected their hardware for it and adhered to best practices. My custom built i6700k hackintosh tower was solid and quiet and expandable.
Yes there’s also Linux but if one enjoys macOS as a desktop, there’s precious little in the Linux world for you. Most DEs are windows-like, and though GNOME and Pantheon share a few qualities with macOS the resemblance is skin deep at best.
It used to be that MacOS was so slick and user friendly, and had the kind of software that Windows did not have, that it was worth botching around with to get it to work.
But that hasn't -really- held up. MacOS burned a lot of the "Creative" class that Steve Jobs used to market to early on. While there are still plenty of designers that use MacOS, the market is more fragmented now since the design tools are more Web-based and less Desktop-based. Audio tools have become more cross platform as well.
This explosion of "hacking" is interesting. Like wow I can run X on Y or wow I decompiled Z and I can add feature A and B.
So there is this wow factor, but really we just enjoy mathematic transformations on a greater scale than we used to have just few years ago.
My guess is that the legal system will catch up with it, but also people will get bored.
Like, I can run macOS on thinkpad! Great! but ultimately this is a crap hardware in comparison to Mac. Will it have backdoors, will it be stable? Who will maintain it? and so on.
There are years of precedent. Mackintosh has been a thing for a while already, and the community has always made big efforts to stay off of Apple's radar.
The travel on my Macbook's Butterfly keyboard was like typing on concrete. Even with a light keystroke, it became a source of physical discomfort for day-to-day work. Add in the Touch Bar, and it was quite literally impossible to touch type on that machine.
The modern Lenovo keyboards aren't perfect, but they're comfortable for desktop-esque use. Plus, I prefer the arrow cluster with pgup/pgdn nearby so I don't have to reach for the function key every time. It's also nice to be able to buy a replacement on Ebay for $20, too.
On one hand, this is kinda cool.
On the other hand, why would I want to run MacOS in the first place?
Modern versions I mean. With the deterioration general quality, Liquid Glass and all that.
The only reason I do that is because I _have_ to do that due to MDM and the fact that Asahi doesn't do the Standby. Excellent hardware, bound by a sad OS.
Why take normal hardware and add a sad OS without being forced to do so?
I suppose "for the sake of it" is a good answer here. For the fun of making computers do something they really do not want to do.
The author seems to have done it, at least in part, for the purposes of iOS development. That seems to be a bit more compelling than "because you can", though Doom running on refrigerators and pregnancy tests shows that's already plenty on its own.
> ... Doom running on refrigerators and pregnancy tests ...
If that's a real example and you didn't make it up, I want to know what pregnancy-test devices have enough buttons to make it possible to control the game. Or are they coming with touchscreens now? Refrigerators, sure, I can easily see that. But pregnancy-test devices? Why would they have enough buttons to be able to simulate WASD and a fire button? The only pregnancy-test devices I've seen are the home test ones where you put the sample in the device then wait to see if there's one line or two (some of them arrange the two lines in a + shape so that - means a negative result and + means a positive result, which is clever), with no electronics. What pregnancy-test devices are using more than that?
If you did it right it was like having a Mac except you had better specs and it was more customisable while costing much less to build.
For others it was just about the money. If you needed to run Mac software e.g. Xcode but didn't want to have to buy a Mac for that reason alone it was much cheaper to do a bit of tinkering to get OSX working on the hardware they already had.
When I first build my Hackintosh it took less effort than installing Linux on some of the other computers I had.
Exactly this. There was a point in the late 2000's / early 2010's where Mac's were very overpriced relative to the hardware they were selling.
I built two Hackintoshes in those years, and they were rock solid. You did have to pay attention to the hardware you were buying (mostly motherboard and GPU), but if you got that right, they worked really well.
In my part of the globe, ignoring iOS development, any computer does the job.
So in such case I would have opted out for a cheap PC built of parts running some Linux distro, or Windows, which has most audio and design tooling as OS X has.
There was a time when I used to wish for OSX (wasn't macOS yet) on other hardware. Now I want anything but macOS on mac hardware.
100% this.
I did run a Hackintosh back in 2015. I bought all the 100% compatible hardware, ran all the updates and firmwares from tonymacx86, etc. And even went through a couple painful upgrade cycles, until the M-chips came out....
Now, I just want a Arch-based custom dev machine, and in the era of vibe-coding self-indulgent vanity software, I can more than make up for the flows and tools I had on my mac that won't work on Linux, which isn't much.
MacOS is ok, but I'm also probably going to switch as soon as the Linux supports gets to M5 (Omarchy now runs on M1,M2,M3). One thing that surprised me recently on MacOS is that it's actually quite simple to vibecode applications you want (it just produces standard apps in swift) and it becomes also very malleable this way.
Can't you vibecode apps for other platforms too?
you can vibecode even multiplatform apps!
Thinking the exact same, would have bought Mac hardware long ago if Linux was supported (or even running!) on the latest gen. It's all down to the need for local llm capability!
I just get a graphics workstation/gamers quality laptops and place Linux/Windows on them.
Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0], they have more ports without funny dongles, and I get to use the winning combo of server and desktop OSes in market share, and industry APIs.
Yes there are more powerful Apple laptops available when money is no question, but I don't live in that world, nor am I getting into debt unless there is no way around it.
> Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0]
Allow me to doubt. Results vary between specific scenarios (gaming or other GPU intensive tasks being an obvious example), but the raw performance of Apple silicon for the price is unmatched.
I live in a country where there is no market for a decent business laptop with good support (like a P1) and everything is plasticy or RGB-laden tat.
I was kind of forced onto a mac as it was the only thing that had decent-enough support or I could buy an identical new one and restore a backup on, without having to use something grey market
The trick is to stay on 10.15, modern macOS is rubbish.
Snow Leopard, 10.6.8 was the last Mac OS version I truly liked --- I haven't even been able to keep track of version ordering for a long while.
Absolutely, Linux is now far superior to other commercial OSes when it comes to power users.
Linux is the new Hackintosh. Well, for many of us it was always the spiritual descendant of the old-school Macintosh, the thinker's toy from the land of Woz. The ultimate malleable computer system you can build at home, where all the building blocks are written in code you can read and understand, and change the enviroment how we want while we're using it.
Apple ][ (+, e) were DIY/hacker-friendly. The //c more closed and first Mac moreso. The ][ product line more Woz and Mac was more Jobs. During those machines prime era it was clear that those with the hacker/DIY itch better served on the early IBM PC clone and MS-DOS machines. Apple lost a lot of nerds for a period and wasnt really til OS X it seems that they wanted us back.
At least it's not Windows. MacOS is still pretty decent compared to that.
Back in the P4-dev-machine Intel Mac days, I played a tiny part in getting OS X running on commodity hardware. It was such a vibrant, hacker-y community, and a real thrill to see OS X boot on a Dell. Long after my patches were superseded, I still told everyone I'd helped. Honestly, I was like that friend who wouldn't stop telling you about their trip to Bar-thel-ona.
Nowadays, every time I open my work Mac, the only thing I can muster is "at least it's not Windows." And the only reason I even use one for work is that the unified memory does come in handy for compute.
It's the point at which I honestly don't want any of the popular available OS/hardware for my own machine: windows is ad hell (and quality also), macos goes towards touch ui hell (and updates always break more than I would expect), linux update always break major features I use on my current laptop (sleep and hibernation), and the complexity of setting up hybrid gpu setup: i really DON'T want or need to use nvidia gpu for rendering my desktop! But there'll be no external display output without enabling nvidia gpu all-time. Sad state of the drivers quality from the top-10 tech company of today (nvidia) for the most popular professional OS (linux)! Battery life is 2h on linux (30% of the expected). Windows 10 works fine 6h on the same machine!
What to set up?
>What to set up?
A local business that interacts with real humans and serves a purpose in the community.
Not the answer you are looking for but this is perfectionism at play. Use anything you like well enough and seek out the task to solve instead. These are tools, you can sharpen them to work better but cutting is the task not just sharpening all the time.
Linux with AMD graphics is much more stable than with nvidia.
I have also counterintuitivly found Arch Linux (a rolling release distro) way more stable than Ubuntu LTS. Things like sleep works, and any bugs are small and fixed quickly, bug reports are followed up on within a couple of days. With Ubuntu bug reports go without any replies from the maintainers, and maybe it will be fixed by happenstance by the next release.
Have to admit I giggled a little. Macs had hardware issues for a while with not so great cpus and butterfly keyboards. Now that Apple has gotten so good at hardware their software is struggling a lot.
Anyone that knows Apple history, knows that they software was never that great, remember they almost went bankrupt while trying to write a new OS.
Anyone that knows Apple history knows that they were the de facto standard in most graphics, audio, and video industries for decades due to their rock solid OS and driver support by 3rd parties in those fields - Adobe, Quark, Cubase, MOTU, AVID, Shake etc... There's a reason you saw so many Macbook DJs and fully Mac OS post-production houses.
macOS/OS X is pretty solid, yes. Mac OS "Classic" (Version <= 9), though, was not nearly as stable. Classic is where most of the big names in media software started, though.
Only in US and a few other countries with similar salary levels, the rest of the world has mostly used Windows versions of the same applications.
Remember the 10% market share in the 1990s did not cover all the related jobs across the planet.
And now with the demise of the workstation market, some studios have switched to Windows based workstations for their audio, graphics and visual effects gear instead of dealing with thunderbolt spaghetti.
I just want a Snow Leopard port to my Macbook Pro M4
Came here to say this. If this thing ran Windows, it'd be a dream computer!
I'm kidding of course. Really looking forward to the days of the liberated mac hardware though!
I wish I could get the mac hardware with linux. MacOS I am not a fan of. But they have the best hardware and the best cpus for laptops bar none.
More than that, I wish I could get all the apple crap off the drive that is glued into the Macbook.
That is something asahi has vowed to never enable.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
It might have worked out better if Apple had forbidden Linux on Apple Silicon instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
You're never going to be able to get the Apple code off an Apple Silicon Mac anyway, because of the enormous amount of proprietary firmware that the OS has to interface with. Apple Silicon devices offload an exceptional amount of hardware functionality to firmware blobs that the OS just sends messages to. Removing the macOS container wouldn't change this.
Reversing said blobs is only a few tokens away.
Keep us posted. I assume you have a few tokens to spare.
Linuxes are now running up to M3 CPUs (and also A18, which is funny).
Can you explain why this is funny?
So we can have iPhones that run Linux.
As far as I know, the Asahi project has absolutely no communication with Apple. It’s not Apple’s “pet” project and they don’t control it.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
It says “unspoken”. It’s a constraint Asahi team have understood that they have. Not an actual agreement.
That only works to Apple's advantage and against Asahi's. Unspoken agreements are the easiest to nullify unilaterally.
Tying is technically illegal, and allowing other OS to be installed is your only real defense as a business. Some ignore these laws with software, but do so at their own peril.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
Note, keeping competitors barely operational inside a walled garden is classic Apple policy. No other company has the goodwill inertia to pull off such stunts. =3
> Tying (informally, product tying) is the practice of selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product or service
MacOS isn't sold anymore, it's a free download for all supported Macs - meaning Apple is not "selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product", regardless of which product you think is being tied to the other (hardware or software).
I can see where you're coming from, but Apple wouldn't necessarily be in trouble due to the wording of the law. Maybe in some countries where the spirit of a law matters more than the specific wording, but we're quoting US legal definitions here, and my mental model of the US legal system has the phrasing mattering more than the intention
You may have missed the context of the conversation, and the sales-funnel of the app store installed along with the "OS". =3
It's also missing the condition. macOS is only "free" after you buy their hardware, i.e. acquiring it is still tied to buying the hardware. If it was actually independently available for free then you wouldn't be prohibited from running it on other hardware.
See also Windows and Internet Explorer.
Neither MacOS nor iOS are anywhere near being dominant in their markets in the same way Microsoft was with Windows.
Ford isn't getting sued either for only selling cars with Ford motors inside.
The dominance benchmark is usually around 70% market share. Apple's iOS holds a 52% to 58% market share in the United States. It's not terribly far off tbh.
More to the point, the EU have already slapped them with two separate $500m fines having repeatedly found that Apple used iOS and the App Store to break antitrust laws.
The US have a similar case hinging on all sorts of things ranging from green text message bubbles to heavily restricting access to the NFC API and affording to itself the privilege of host-card emulation via Apple Wallet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Apple_(2024)
Ford has been, however, sued multiple times over the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act of 1975, for trying to void the warranty if you made aftermarket changes. Because you bought the Ford and the laws say it's yours, you are free to rip out the Ford engine and put in a Honda engine if you so please. (Emissions laws notwithstanding.) If Ford was saying you cannot tear out the engine on a car you own and put in a different one, and they welded the hood shut, then it would be a better comparison. Neither Ford nor Apple would be so foolish though. It's just that the metaphorical hood welds in the iPhone's case havent been broken recently.
That's a different subject matter. But how is Ford supposed to be able to guarantee the functioning of a car that they didn't make? Since you made it yourself by making changes? It makes sense that they would challenge such warranty claims all the way to the court.
A lot of things on cars are welded or otherwise very difficult for the customer to modify, and I don't think any court would have a big problem with that.
They have to prove that the changes you made is what caused the failure. If they can't and/or the changes are unrelated to the warranty claim, they have to honor it.
You object to their extremely well-explained well-argued and sane position, but make no argument why or what position you prefer?
> instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
Huh? Apple does not control Asahi and never did.
Seeing the amount of trouble I'm having getting my HP omnibook X 14 (Snapdragon / ARM) to run linux with all peripherals; don't hold your breath.
I much prefer ARM over x64 and Linux/BSD over the alternative but it's a wasteland of patches and technical debt out there.
I think one advantage of Linux on Mac hardware is that it's a consistent target: everyone is using and developing against the same hardware, and there's millions out there. Vs other ARM laptops there's 100s of different models, so 100s of different fixes and everyone fixing their "own" model with fixes that are only useful for that model
I had one of those … the only reason I got it was for the NPU and the ram … but then there was no PCIE bandwidth …. Moved on lol
Interesting. What did you move on to?
M1-M3 support: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/11/omarchy-4-5/ And the later models are being actively worked on.
There's also gravity linux with M4 support: https://gravitylinux.org/
"Alpha" support. Not for day-to-day use.
Is there any that supports that fingerprint reader? Asahi doesn't.
I stopped using my fingerprint readers on all my PCs and just set my passwords all to "asdf". It's faster, more convenient, and more consistent, than the fingerprint reader ever was. :)
Is that just Omarchy or are they sharing the progress with other distros?
I imagine some of the maintainers of distributions are uncomfortable with the amount of LLM-generated code.
I also imagine they will be left behind, for better or for worse as AI-authored software and hardware will satisfy people's needs faster than that developed by humans.
I don't see a way to merge these rapidly moving frontiers of software without radically different distributed software development and distribution networks where AIs collaborate on a global scale. Perhaps the only way to keep playing is to grow a "super cortex", a projection of ourselves into the digital. Like today's agents, but improved, grounded by our knowledge and understanding.
This smells a bit like Skynet. Also, Software Heaven.
I'm not sure how I feel.
Linus is full steam ahead on AI, so one way or another those distros will be running AI code unless they want to fork the kernel.
It doesn't mean that people don't review the code, though. You still can't ask Linus to merge a million-line patch, even if it works.
And more importantly, documenting Mac hardware takes time. Components like the speaker on a Macbook can be permanently damaged if you don't write the drivers in a specific way. Other features like the Secure Enclave, power management, and TouchID might be unsupportable depending on how Apple designed it.
Asahi's stance isn't particularly crazy, and it probably aligns with how Linus feels about upstreaming code that nobody understands.
I think the other factor is all these additional projects are starting from the work Asahi has done, whether they're actually able to deliver substantial value themselves is yet to be seen, especially safely and securely.
Personally I don't think it's very likely the tables would turn and Asahi became dependent upon their contributions. I foresee a much bleaker future for Omarchy, crashing and burning from some reckless and unnecessarily abrasive whim of DHH. I'm not optimistic about Gravity Linux either, it's a single-dev project and that's prone to failure for many reasons.
TouchID is already supported on Omarchy, I use it on my daily driver MacBook works great. The speaker too.
It is quite remarkable how far along support has come: https://aurorasilicon.org/devices/
> TouchID is already supported on Omarchy, I use it on my daily driver MacBook works great.
And the way they have written that driver is absolute crap, not submimissible at all. They will need to write it from scratch, properly, using a TEE driver, a sensor driver, a userspace supplicant plumbing and an fprintd patch. What they did, instead, is they run pretty much everything in-kernel.
So, can't wait for ridiculous exploits that make your fingerprint effectively a backdoor to your OS.
That fingeprint implentation to me is a perfect example of how ignorant Omarchy people and their users are about security and I wish more people were loud about it. Just point your LLM at that TouchID code to audit it, see the amount of stuff it flags.
https://github.com/omacom/omarchy/blob/quattro/manual/44-mac... but here they say
> Please note that installing on an M-series Mac is not directly supported at this time.
Support would be great, but there seems no way to download it atm: https://aurorasilicon.org/docs/download/
For M4 and M5, the speakers are not listed as working. M1, M2 and M3 are all using Asahi drivers.
> It is quite remarkable how far along support has come
Is it? All I'm seeing from that page is that they forked Asahi's M1-M4 work, and then failed to bring up M5 and M6. What's remarkable here?
> I imagine some of the maintainers of distributions are uncomfortable with the amount of LLM-generated code.
Then those distributions will fail.
It's 2026. Any open source project with an anti-AI stance will get its milkshake drunk by a fork that embraces AI. How can people still not see this?
a) it's not a race.
b) being left behind is a good thing if your counterparts are headed in the wrong direction. I think projects which lean into LLMs are going to find they have a hot mess a year or two from now, whereas projects that eschewed them will be in a good place.
I don't buy that. Not everything is a race-to-the-finish competition.
The primary message we get out of the AI ecosystem is "MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER".
First off, that's not really what plenty of projects are about. You might like your favourite Linux distribution or desktop environment because it represents less, as a curated vision-- an AI "workalike" could offer ten thousand new features per week, but break the earned trust that a single clear vision provided.
Second, beyond a certain point, speed burns through the human components of a software project. There are only so many reviews that can be done, whether the source is AI or enthusiastic humans. Quality eventually suffers, contributors burn out, and the project dies.
If you point a well-funded slop cannon at an unfunded open-source project, they're not going to say "let's find 20 new reviewers to keep up with the firehose of commits!" They either have to circle their wagons and get finicky about what they allow, throw up their hands about quality, or rely on the machine itself, the dreamworld where they build enough test suites and harnesses to somehow keep Microsoft Paint from having zero-days.
Given those choices, I feel like I'd be happier to see "we circled the wagons". This doesn't necessarily mean "no AI" but it means keeping the project at a manageable scale, and right now, the way to handle that is to push away AI contributions without a bulletproof background behind them.
Going even further, it's high time we saw a "slow software" movement to counter the "move fast and break things" and its new cousin "move even faster and let the bot break things for you". I want smaller programs written by happier people under less psychic and economic assault.
> How can people still not see this?
Perhaps the 30+ years of non-LLM generated Linux support for UEFI/ACPI and ARM device tree chips has something to do with it.
Developed with techniques that were state-of-the-art at the time.
The state of the art has changed.
> The state of the art has changed.
I keep repeating myself, but make an effort to check the "state of the art" of the crap they added to their kernel tree.
You still need documentation. Asahi on M1 is 7 years old, with no ACPI substitute.
It may shock you to hear that coding was never the bottleneck for emulation or reverse-engineering.
LLMs are arguably even more superhuman for the bits that do matter for reverse engineering, than they are at coding!
Again, any RE project that forbids AI use will get its milkshake drunk by a similar project that embraces AI.
I'll believe it when I see it. As I said, there are still unsolved problems that AI can't fix taking shots in the dark.
I have no particular love for Asahi, but they've made 10x more progress than the vibe coded alternatives.
It may shock you to hear that coding was never the bottleneck for emulation or reverse-engineering.
Yes, and LLMs work well for the non-coding parts too. Pointing Claude at Gravity's repos has gotten Linux running well on my M4 Pro mini, with GPU acceleration as of a few days ago. So either I'm a genius or LLMs are pretty good at this, and I'm not a genius.
The Honeykrisp driver and upstream M4 Linux support was written by Asahi, not Gravity: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.4-SoCs
You're downstream of all of those kernel and Mesa changes on Gravity.
> How can people still not see this?
You fanboy people are so insufferable, if you had any clue about the code quality standards and cared about security, YOU would see this other way.
I have personally vetted their code for TouchID and some other aspects, including USB-C/Thunderbolt.
I absolutely cannot wait to hear your apologist brown-nosing when you start getting targeted with exploits.
Maybe it's you who are seeing what you want, not what's there. :)
Asahi doesn't take AI generated code, so they won't take Omarchy code, but they are trying to get upstream core Linux to accept their patches.
It's Asahi Alarm + Omarchy configs.
Fedora and Void Linux both can run on Asahi Linux (M1-M3 macs)
Omarchy's one of the three OSs that I tried today on an Ubuntu 26.4 VM host. I was a quick install but if felt a bit rough, like driving a tractor. I also got in trouble when I tried to bring up the Display Settings and screwed things up. Not ready for prime-time, in my case anyways. Probably was my inexperience with arch distros.
Also tried LordOS very quick, very easy to install, looks and feels like macOS, but Debian distro underneath.
I also tried GhostBSD. It's easy enough to work with, but it does not have any packages for "spice-vdagent," which I needed to resize the screen size and clipboard copy/paste support between host and guest devices when using Virt Manager :(
Macs run macOS. That’s how they are sold, that’s the deal, vertical integration and all that. Annoying to get this sentiment brought up over and over. Don’t buy a Mac if you prefer another OS, complain to other hardware vendors to get their stuff together.
How is this sentiment annoying to you? People want Linux on good hardware, how is that annoying to you?
Apple sells what it says on the tin. Vertical integration, macOS. If you want to hack the HW, do, but don't blame Apple, blame yourself.
> Macs run macOS.
They run other things, too. There's no valid technical reason it can't or shouldn't, and Apple deserves the scrutiny if they won't bring macOS up to parity with Linux. Modern macOS is legitimately terrible, and ~100% to blame for why Macs are shunned for HPC, on-prem and other professional applications.
There are hundreds of millions of professionals in the world who need a computer that works for their work and daily life and aren't server admins or software developers. Please let us have the Macs in peace. We only have this option, while you have dozens of different PC makers for your Linux.
but nobody is trying to take that away from you? having a reliable linux distro for apple hardware couldn't affect you in any way
"bring macOS up to parity with Linux" sounds like a direction of development which wouldn't be very desirable for people like me.
unless the OS was behind on features that wouldn't affect you if they were there
Terrible? I love it. Since 84.
They run other things, too
What other things outside of containers or iPad apps?
John Gruber in 2006:
> It’s just not true that most Mac users use Macs because the hardware is better designed. They’re Mac users because of the Mac OS. What the original cloning program showed was that many of Apple’s customers were Mac fans, not Apple fans.
https://daringfireball.net/2006/04/asinine_and_or_risky_idea...
It really has changed since then, wow
It was always a combo for me. But for all of the macOS warts, it's not like I'm going to switch to Windows. There was a time I could have seen myself using a Mactel system running Linux as a daily driver, but the M-series chips make that less viable today. So, macOS it still remains. Luckily, with recent career changes, I spent drastically less time on a computer every day. It's glorious.
Omarchy on Macs (Arch linux) is AMAZING. And the new release (3.5?) supports the Apple Silicon ones.
https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple
Not really! The gulf between MacBook hardware and other laptops as well as Apple CPUs and the competitors is narrowing greatly.
Maybe we can say that they’re still the best, but it’s not 2x better like 2020, it’s more like 10-20% better.
For example, Panther Lake beats M5 battery life in real laptops available on the market, GPU performance, and multicore performance.
Just look at Marques Brownlee’s review of the Framework 13 Pro. Or the review of the ThinkPad X9 15p from Just Josh Tech.
I see this mistake all the time where there’s an assumption that MacBooks are still far and away the best without looking at more up-to-date information and evaluating current competition.
I have an X9-15p with the X7 CPU and an M4 Max 16” MBP. I love the X9, it’s so light and powerful enough for most of what I do. That being said, it’s nowhere near as powerful as the M4 Max, not even close, and here in the US, there’s no 64GB model available.
The cheapest M4 Max MacBook Pro on sale is $4500. That’s over $1000 more than a X9-15p isn’t it?
What you’re saying is true, but if your workflow involves graphics at all, Apple’s Max chips are subpar compared to getting a laptop with an Nvidia discrete GPU (e.g., 2026 ASUS Zephyrus G16).
For the Mac chips to make sense you have to specifically need very high CPU performance, be running local AI workflows (which you can do with cloud subscriptions for less money and better results, or you have alternatives like RTX Spark that cost roughly the same as MacBook Pro alternatives), and not want to play games (see gaming benchmarks on multi-platform native games like Cyberpunk 2077, high end Macs get walloped by mid-range discrete GPUs in laptops).
In short, I imagine that 90%+ of MacBook Pro buyers are buying the base M chip or at most the Pro chip, and those SKUs have much more competition.
A Mac is more of a good laptop for your employer than for you and me.
Why are you citing reviews from random people and not benchmarks?
Because the benchmarks are meaningless piles of numbers that are irrelevant to day to day using of a laptop. I want to hear from a human not robot. Benchmarks have been and will be gamed. Hopefully human reviewers like Marques Brownlee and Just Josh Tech are less easily gamed.
Just Josh Tech does exactly that. They perform both synthetic benchmarks and real world benchmarks including an office productivity test involving realistic screen brightness (where the Framework 13 Pro beat any MacBook with an M5 or M4 chip).
Marques’ Framework 13 Pro review was much more of a layperson’s review with a focus on overall user experience.
Because the reviews from “random” people have benchmarks.
See, this is the problem, Mac enthusiasts refuse to do research, even when people point them in the right direction. They just want to believe their computers are the best and never shop competition.
I didn’t swap my M2 MacBook Pro because I didn’t like my Mac, I swapped it because it found a better solution for my needs.
Lenovo Yoga.
Maybe they offer Intel variants again one day. 2014-2018 Intel Mac Minis work great with Linux.
No that's not a "best CPU". Arm Macs are the ones with the best CPUs, by far.
I think Omarchy just rolled out support for Apple
They didn't, it's basically same M1-M3 as Asahi with some extra experimental stuff.
Forget tech bro's Omarchy crap, go with the original project (Fedora Gnome and KDE spins available): https://asahilinux.org/
As much as I used to love MacOS as an operating system, the more I spending time on it, I'd rather wish that my Macbook can run Linux, hopefully Asahi Linux will eventually support M5 :(
It's heresy, but my favorite laptop was a 17" Macbook Pro with Bootcamp.
It wasn't my favorite, but my first Mac was a PowerBook G4 17-inch, which I ran Gentoo and (I think) Yellow Dog Linux on at various times. It never worked super well, and I eventually joined the dark side. In 2003, a 17-inch laptop was ludicrous among all the netbooks that seemed to be the future of laptops. People around me called it the "aircraft carrier Mac".
Use AI to fix the things you don't like?
I just got a new-to-me Android phone and told AI to use adb to debloat and install the custom APKs that I normally run.
Given the interdependencies of Google's Android, I'm not sure I'd trust something so subjective to AI. I'm sure I would disagree with it regarding what's bloat, what's necessary, and which dependencies I'm willing to break
So ask it to list the things and have a conversation with it instead of trying to one-shot it?
Can AI port Asahi Linux to the M5+ chips? Honest question for the strong AI fans to attempt.
Yes, M5+ support is currently an active focus of Aurora Silicon (an AI-enabled fork of Asahi Linux), development is in progress as we speak:
https://github.com/aurora-silicon/linux/discussions/142 https://aurorasilicon.org/devices/?device=j873s https://x.com/JoshuaSWarren/status/2118331083330629847
It is coming along impressively fast, one of the developers has a goal "full support on the M5 Max by Thanksgiving here in the US (November 26th)." https://x.com/JoshuaSWarren/status/2118375325805547666
So, no? Dude doesn’t even own an m5 Mac. Lmao.
I believe chasing the latest hardware prevents you from getting Asahi Linux support :)
Asahi Linux has great support for M1/M2, or so I heard.
That’s so cool. It makes it even more of a bummer that iDevice bootloaders are locked. It’s an ongoing tragedy there’s still no macOS on iPads. Looks like if you want that, you’ll have to go with non-Apple hardware.
To prevent e-waste, Apple should be legally obliged to unlock the bootloader of devices once they declare them obsolete.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/102772#ipadobsolete
Yes so many iPads that are dead bricks, while they could be running some pure Linux distro for many purposes
I think this should extend to all device manufacturers. I have a few android devices that can be renewed with Lineage OS
To prevent anti-competitive behavior (illegal tying/bundling), Apple should be legally obligated to unlock the bootloader of devices once they are offered for sale.
Amusingly someone found out how to run macOS on iPad, by jailbreaking older devices (iPad Pro (M1, M2) or iPad Air (M1)), with an older iPadOS which has a virtualization framework: https://github.com/nfzerox/VirtualMacOniPad
Everybody thinks macOS on ipad would be great, but it's not. If you are in the ecosystem, you can use your ipad as a remote display for your mac. Boom, macos on ipad.
And. It. Sucks.
It's a terrible, shitty experience.
But now that the new macos is forced to have touch-friendly UI, it actually could be nice.
During grad school, Dell sold a 10 inch mini laptop that just happened to have hardware compatible with an easy Hackintoch install. The change between the slow, bloated Windows install and OS X was stunning.
I loved that thing. Light, easy to take anywhere, battery life for days. I once caught someone snooping over my shoulder trying to see if it was really running OS X. Used it for years.
Seeing that Macs can now run Switch 1/2 games natively because of the ARM CPU is actually incredibly. And to me personally the first hand on sign of the end of x86.
Is Switch 2 emulation actually happening? I haven't been following that
Switch 2 user space has been jailbroken so any game can be dumped. But not the other way, so the Switch 2 can't run pirated Switch 1/2 games yet.
There are now Switch 2 emulators that can run any dumped game on PC/Mac etc. https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Nintendo_Switch...
Most Switch 2 games are getting dumped, including the just released Ocarina of Time Remake https://imagepaste.org/i/kx5c925r.png
As I mentioned in my comment there is a native Switch code compiler for Mac, so not emulation https://github.com/seedds/nxnative
I remember reading somewhere that Switch 2 can run pirated Switch 1 games through some kind of Switch 1 flashcart, but this will get you banned on Nintendo servers.
Thanks! I tried nxnative just now, performance is great. Appreciate the info.
> the end of x86
I'll believe that when there's an open ecosystem of state-of-the-art ARM (or RISC-V) devices based on industry consortiums reference specs. Until then, it's device trees all the way down or waiting for Qualcomm to get their Linux shit together. Yeah, didn't think so.
Did you just use qualcomm as an example of openness? I guess you never actually worked with qualcomm...
I think Apple's value is not on their software anymore but in their hardware. Those machines are really pleasant to use
I don't know if it was ever on their software
Apple's value is absolutely for their software... as compared to Windows. (And as compared to Linux, for people who don't care about technology and for whom any risk of ever facing a terminal prompt is a non-starter.)
Agreed. In the creative space there is no equal. Macs have provided consistency and stability from the 90s.
Not when comparing classical Mac OS to Windows 9X/NT, which is why they were into trouble during the 1990's.
It definitely was in the MacOS 9 days. That OS was a joy to use. 3rd party Mac apps were incredible too.
You can run a vintage Mac today with a BlueSCSI and a 32GB microSD card and get a computing experience far snappier than any modern hardware.
You mean the OS they failed to find a replacement for and almost went bankrupt, had it not been for the NeXT reverse acquisition?
It’s always been the combo, throughout their history they’ve rarely been the best at hardware OR software but typically the best at integrating the two
the software has its strong points, particularly for media. CoreAudio has been industry leading throughout the history of audio work on computers. but most Mac heads seem to agree that general polish has been on a multi year down slope. how much Liquid Glass is to blame for that impression, i don’t know.
I worked professionally as a C++/Win32 developer for many years. I was more productive in the MacOS APIs in two weeks.
Of course, with AI coding agents you might not notice that the windows code base has mountains of hacks and is a mess, while the macOS codebase took half the tokens to develop and is much smaller.
It's always been the software. Apple has always made, and continues to make, pretty unremarkable hardware compared to their competitors. It's nice, but not uniquely so.
> the feat of running macOS on non-Apple hardware, and has a history dating back to the late 1980s
Wait, so people were somehow running macOS on non-Apple PowerPC machines? I've always assumed that hackintosh is specifically about IBM PC compatibles.
There were no PowerPC Macs in the '80s. Running Mac software on non-Apple 68k machines was a thing, though[1].
Apple itself also had a project, started in the late '80s, to port the Mac OS to x86[2].
Incidentally, PowerPC Mac OSes, especially later pre-OS X OSes like Mac OS 9.x, run quite well today on vanilla QEMU, no hacking required.
[1] https://www.atarimagazines.com/startv3n6/mac_pc_on_st.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek_project
Including non-PowerPC machines with PowerPC daughter cards
funny enough, the only use case I want to run macOS on non-Apple software is a headless build machine. Without Apple hardware, using macOS is less useful to me.
Agreed, I’m much more interested in the Asahi Linux project these days, even though I went through a hackintosh phase in university.
> Without Apple hardware, using macOS is less useful to me.
Assuming full hardware compatibility (which I know we're not yet at), there's a bunch of laptops out there today with better feature sets than any sub $1800 macbook.
Being able to dual-boot macOS and linux on a lightweight OLED laptop with a nicer keyboard would be extremely useful. This is before even factoring in the upcoming years of likely substantial hardware advancements in the laptop market. Laptops still have a long way to go before we reach peak laptop.
if you are student and you want to tinker with stuff, it's fine. If you want to do any serious professional work, it's not, because you want a stable working environment with proper security patch in time.
I built a couple hahah
More secure than windows, more supported for bank apps etc than Linux and with most of the same software and looks amazing as a media center pc haha
Became Linux for servers , hackintosh for everything else lol
Interesting. If it can be installed in any cheapo mini-pc this definitely would be a game changer for macos penetration in under developed economies
If macOS has to compete apples-to-apples it will likely lose to Linux.
It's maybe minor but the three features that keep me on macOS address iMessage integration with my iPhone, clipboard sharing with my iPhone, and seamless projection to my Apple TV as mirrored or an external monitor.
For substitutes I guess you could use Tether [0]
But if you want the true deals on Linux, I am working on that personally [1]. For clipboard sharing, it should be feasible on Linux if you have AirDrop compatible Wi-Fi hardware, but for iMessage integration, it's possible given Mac hardware identifiers. Apple requires attestations derived from Apple device identifiers to flag spam on iMessage. It would be great if Apple was also allowing deriving keys from the Apple account, so it can allow alternate device to borrow trust from their iPhone for example, but for now it does not seem possible (extracting identifiers once works though, and then you can use iMessage [2]). About Apple TV, idk I never seen this thing irl so I can't tell how that works but I'd guess it's replicable.
[0]: https://github.com/zackb/tether
[1]: notably in https://tangled.org/dadoum.zone/apple-crates but I also have more private crates implementing a kind of userland.
[2]: https://openbubbles.app/quickstart.html
I think he's underselling Qemu/KVM side of things, quick search shows that Tahoe works for instance. It was always a better route for this, going back to patching kexts isn't an improvement in my book. I'm sure near-native performance should be possible on ARM machines.
Is it still the case that Asahi can physically damage macbook speakers?
Such a throw back, I built a hackintosh back in x86 days and had it mostly working for a year, but of course tried to apply an update (10.08 I think?) and it blew up.
Ended up selling the hardware to some guy who insisted he would get it working and I am sure it was possible, but I pretty much switched to using Mac after that as I loved the dev experience.
Things got much better with OpenCore. Sometimes you had to tweak a few extra settings, but generally you could update it just like a regular Mac. Point updates worked especially well.
I had OSX running on an old school flip-screen HP tablet/laptop combo with touchscreen support. It was bulky but cool to use as a drawing tablet in the pre-iPad days. You did need to have a paper clip inserted into two holes of the VGA port for it to work, and I don't think it handled sleep very well. But still a fun project.
I ran OS X on a Dell mini 9 for two years while travelling. Other than sleep, it was excellent.
> we saw Apple release the first ARM-based Mac in 2021
Refreshing to hear it called its proper name instead of Apples marketing terminology.
There's nothing improper about calling it Apple Silicon. Yes, the chips have ARM-based CPU cores, but those cores are designed by Apple, not Arm, and they're only one part of the overall A-series and M-series designs.
Apple, by the way, was a co-founder of Arm and helped develop ARM processors for use in the Apple Newton. Its early work on making ARM CPUs highly power efficient paved the way for their now-widespread adoption in mobile devices. There's some irony in how a part of the Apple Newton reverberates throughout the industry today.
Yes and no. Apple was a co founder when ARM was spun off from Acorn and the ARM processor already existed for 5 years.
Acorn supplied the engineers, VLSI supplied the manufacturing, Apple supplied the money
Fair, but that money is a linchpin. Having the vision to see a commercial application and the will to fund its development into a real product is equally pivotal to the bringing about of a thing —- even if we engineers sometimes struggle to see it that way.
Apples investment track record in the 90s differs with your opinion that they were future seeing oracles who brought pre-ordained projects into existence. Hell they even sold their shares in ARM 5 years later, so they obviously didnt think that much of it.
https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/gadgets/high-tech-gadg...
Typical 90s Apple, short sighted and not seeing the wood for the trees.
If they had kept their stake instead of selling it off they would own the majority of the entire computing world by now.
Love how they're calling the privilege of running Apple's buggy and clunky interface operating system a "glimmer of hope".
> As much as we lament the cost of AI, there are some glimmers of hope: you just might be able to have your hardware and own it too.
Didn’t you omit the “by relying on a technology which is built on far-reaching copyright violations and significant ecological impact” part here?
Rather than straining to make macos work where it isn’t meant to, and its corporate overlords won’t allow it to run. Why not sink the same effort into bringing what you like back into Linux or FreeBSD?
I am not forbidding anyone from having hobbies (though Apple probably is) - but whatever you build will be undone in a year or so - Apple will never permit it.
However, writing a series of mac-like apps for a FreeBSD/Linux desktop, or even a new desktop environment which closely follows Mac, will continue to be relevant work.
I don't get it. ARM macOS can run on other hardware now, because... computers are magic now?
There used to be a use-case for Hackintoshes maybe a decade +/- 5 years ago, especially when macOS started working with x86 and x86-64 Intel-based CPUs. But it always felt subversive and it seemed like one update away from breaking due to some unforeseen, artificial limitation.
Is there a use-case now? I don't know. Linux has made serious strides in part thanks to very user-friendly distros like Ubuntu. People may have individual grievances and I don't want to downplay those, but we're not dealing with oddball Shrike issues anymore.
Apple should seriously consider allowing their OS to be used independently of the hardware, especially the build tools, the server stuff (whatever is left of it, not a market they had a big part to play in anyway). But, it is unlikely of them to do this.
Well done nonetheless. I think it is more likely that the old PowerPC-MacOS-on-Wii will be more stable long term than any of these new releases.
Edit: I'll also add: I am questioning what value MacOS itself has, the raw OS and kernel stuff. Linux, BSD and Windows each have their own -isms which are curiosities that one can, and should, consider as pros and cons. People might say "Windows is bad", and I agree, Win 11 experience as a daily driver is god awful. But the kernel and OS itself is something else. I don't know if MacOS has any of that "meat" that we can look at and say it's worth looking deeper into.
About a decade or so ago I actually had a dual-boot hackintosh build. In practice the one update away from breaking rings so true and really cemented that vertical integration is Apple's most powerful offering. Running OS X in a fragile unsupported environment really wasn't worth it looking back.
Given Apple's recent trajectory and custom silicon, I can only imagine that the stability of these AI-assisted ports be even worse than it was back in the x86 days. These are neat demos, but nothing I would want to seriously run in any capacity.
I never really saw the appeal of Hackintoshes. MacOS is fine, but it's not so head and shoulders above the rest that I want to run a buggy unsupported version of it on commodity hardware. It's just a nice-ish Unix-ish system.
Really the hardware is most of the point of buying a Mac, since Apple somehow continues to be the only people making laptops which aren't dogshit. A Hackintosh gives you the worst of both worlds, I don't get it except as a technical curiosity like running Doom on your toaster.
Back in the 2010s much of the appeal of hackintoshing was getting the niceness of macOS on hardware that was much more powerful and better cooled than anything Apple sold.
They were also quite stable if one selected their hardware for it and adhered to best practices. My custom built i6700k hackintosh tower was solid and quiet and expandable.
Yes there’s also Linux but if one enjoys macOS as a desktop, there’s precious little in the Linux world for you. Most DEs are windows-like, and though GNOME and Pantheon share a few qualities with macOS the resemblance is skin deep at best.
> I never really saw the appeal of Hackintoshes.
CI and build farms
It used to be that MacOS was so slick and user friendly, and had the kind of software that Windows did not have, that it was worth botching around with to get it to work.
But that hasn't -really- held up. MacOS burned a lot of the "Creative" class that Steve Jobs used to market to early on. While there are still plenty of designers that use MacOS, the market is more fragmented now since the design tools are more Web-based and less Desktop-based. Audio tools have become more cross platform as well.
Love it. I was a Hackintosher for like 10 years. It was a fun time.
This explosion of "hacking" is interesting. Like wow I can run X on Y or wow I decompiled Z and I can add feature A and B.
So there is this wow factor, but really we just enjoy mathematic transformations on a greater scale than we used to have just few years ago.
My guess is that the legal system will catch up with it, but also people will get bored.
Like, I can run macOS on thinkpad! Great! but ultimately this is a crap hardware in comparison to Mac. Will it have backdoors, will it be stable? Who will maintain it? and so on.
For me, that's meh.
There are years of precedent. Mackintosh has been a thing for a while already, and the community has always made big efforts to stay off of Apple's radar.
I triple booted macOS on my Thinkpad specifically because my Macbook had one of the worst keyboards I had ever used.
For the brief period where Apple refused to sell you non-Butterfly keyboards, it was one of the best ways to use macOS.
Interesting. I have a few Thinkpads and I hate their keyboards with passion, but I could type on my Mac for days. I guess each to their own.
The travel on my Macbook's Butterfly keyboard was like typing on concrete. Even with a light keystroke, it became a source of physical discomfort for day-to-day work. Add in the Touch Bar, and it was quite literally impossible to touch type on that machine.
The modern Lenovo keyboards aren't perfect, but they're comfortable for desktop-esque use. Plus, I prefer the arrow cluster with pgup/pgdn nearby so I don't have to reach for the function key every time. It's also nice to be able to buy a replacement on Ebay for $20, too.
On one hand, this is kinda cool. On the other hand, why would I want to run MacOS in the first place? Modern versions I mean. With the deterioration general quality, Liquid Glass and all that.
The only reason I do that is because I _have_ to do that due to MDM and the fact that Asahi doesn't do the Standby. Excellent hardware, bound by a sad OS.
Why take normal hardware and add a sad OS without being forced to do so?
I suppose "for the sake of it" is a good answer here. For the fun of making computers do something they really do not want to do.
The author seems to have done it, at least in part, for the purposes of iOS development. That seems to be a bit more compelling than "because you can", though Doom running on refrigerators and pregnancy tests shows that's already plenty on its own.
> ... Doom running on refrigerators and pregnancy tests ...
If that's a real example and you didn't make it up, I want to know what pregnancy-test devices have enough buttons to make it possible to control the game. Or are they coming with touchscreens now? Refrigerators, sure, I can easily see that. But pregnancy-test devices? Why would they have enough buttons to be able to simulate WASD and a fire button? The only pregnancy-test devices I've seen are the home test ones where you put the sample in the device then wait to see if there's one line or two (some of them arrange the two lines in a + shape so that - means a negative result and + means a positive result, which is clever), with no electronics. What pregnancy-test devices are using more than that?
https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/ncmegl/doom_running...
Other people are not you. They have different needs and different likes than you do.
An example could be as simple as somebody whose Mac broke and needs to use MacOS specific software and workflows, but can't afford to get a new Mac.
Never understood Hackintoshes, either jump into Apple ecosystem, or embrace something else.
If you did it right it was like having a Mac except you had better specs and it was more customisable while costing much less to build.
For others it was just about the money. If you needed to run Mac software e.g. Xcode but didn't want to have to buy a Mac for that reason alone it was much cheaper to do a bit of tinkering to get OSX working on the hardware they already had.
When I first build my Hackintosh it took less effort than installing Linux on some of the other computers I had.
Exactly this. There was a point in the late 2000's / early 2010's where Mac's were very overpriced relative to the hardware they were selling.
I built two Hackintoshes in those years, and they were rock solid. You did have to pay attention to the hardware you were buying (mostly motherboard and GPU), but if you got that right, they worked really well.
I had the same eperience. I built an “iMac” on top of all-in-one PC. Was rock solid.
Usually the way is to favour the competition instead, all those arguments are known to me.
Maybe it helps that in my part of the globe Apple was largely irrelevant until they manage to survive bankruptcy with the iPod, and iMacs.
Getting to play around with new GPUs was one of the things that kept me excited.
I wanted a Mac that they wouldn't sell me. That's why.
Hence why we buy stuff from the competition instead.
Because I was broke
I got my current job thanks to having one. I probably wouldn't have a tech career without hackintoshes being a thing.
In my part of the globe, ignoring iOS development, any computer does the job.
So in such case I would have opted out for a cheap PC built of parts running some Linux distro, or Windows, which has most audio and design tooling as OS X has.
Any computer doesn’t do the job if your job is dependent on the ecosystem.
So iOS development then.