> The defacto industry standard for audio ICs is I²S, an I²C-based bus optimised for audio data.
Nit: I²S has nothing to do with I²C.
(Most I²S chips also have an I²C interface since I²S only carries raw audio data, no sideband like volume control or clock configuration. But that's a separate interface and can also be SPI rather than I²C. In fact, SPI is more closely related to I²S than I²C is.)
Asahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow.
There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is focused more on m1 and m2 models. Even so, to this day both of them have issues with idle power management and alt-dp implementation, preventing many to switch, by the time they will have been ironed out the value of machines would be significantly diminished.
It is a miracle how much so few can do, but in the end, despite ubiquitous media coverage it looks like team's enthusiasm and passion have dwindled to the point that even m1 air will never be ready.
If they can set a single machine as target every few years and make it work, that would be a lot better than having no alternative.
M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.
M1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch.
Hopefully, they will manage to get it done someday.
They are upstreaming their patches, so upstream Linux will eventually get the necessary drivers.
Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.
This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances.
As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)
There is an effort by the Bananas Team to get standard Debian working on Apple silicon, and they have installation instructions for how to get it running now with an additional unofficial repository: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1#The_Bana...
I haven't actually tried to install it yet, though.
I can’t see that being a bad thing considering that the kernel is mandatory software in the Linux world. You would want to have high standards for what gets added.
You'll never be able to agree on where that line should go. First because there's a cultural component to it. I'm from Spain so I can only talk for myself, but while he uses rude language, nothing I've ever read from him ever seemed particularly offensive. And second because any activity involving a large group of people will need some amount of toxicity if only to prevent other toxic people from derailing it, and since nobody thinks of themselves as the one that is being toxic to the project, there will always be some friction. You might not like fevers either, but they are necessary for a functioning immune system.
They've actually been focusing on upstreaming for what feels like 2 years now. It's really slowed down progress but it's important for the longevity of the project. They still have so much left to upstream but little by little it's happening
It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.
It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.
They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?
AFAIK Apple’s “services” revenue is a little over a quarter of their total; everything else is hardware, dominated by the iPhone. Mac hardware is <10% of total revenue.
iPhones are largely locked to their App Store so no risk there. Macs (currently) aren’t locked to the App Store - and I’d guess that Mac App Store usage is middling as a result.
Which is to say, I doubt that a marginal Mac App Store revenue hit from a small proportion of users switching to Linux over MacOS is the driver for not supporting Linux development. I’d guess it’s more about an inflexible company culture and maybe not wanting to extend their area of responsibility and risk.
Revenue wise, the services part is not that large. Profit-wise, though, I don't believe the same is true. Their 30% cut is barely costing them anything compared to manufacturing hardware and physical logistics.
I don't think the Mac App Store is going to get to iPhone levels of lock-down soon, but Apple thinks in ecosystems, not just in laptops. If you have an iMac, you probably have an iPhone, and you're probably going to buy an iPad should you ever want a tablet.
If they wanted, they could open source all of the drivers necessary to boot an OS as part of their Darwin core, but they choose not to. That actually breaks with their older, more open development style. I guess they just don't see the benefit of being open any longer.
Yeah probably they want to be free to bork it, but if they released some documentation or patches, they'd be expected to keep them up to date and working at the very least.
>Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.
You do realize that Apple is a public company and one can just go look at their financials like their latest 10-Q [0] right? For the most recent 6 month half (ending March 28 2026) I'm seeing $194 billion for product sales and $61 billion for service sales. The gross margins are certainly higher on services, at 77%, but 40% product margins are nothing to sneeze at either, and the disparity in absolute sales means the absolute dollar gross margins are $77 billion for products vs $46 billion for services.
So I don't see how you can assert that their "big money maker is their app store" from those numbers. Hardware matters a lot, and furthermore Apple sells services (like AppleCare+) that are specific to hardware and thus even a Linux user might still be interested in.
And without their hardware, their services would evaporate. There is a much tighter link there than with many companies. So they're on the hook for continued R&D and capex on that no matter what, you can't really separate that out, and in turn it's always going to be useful to have more volume to amortize it with.
I think primarily it comes down to corporate DNA, which is powerful. There are plenty of Mac hardware, software and service markets in pro/business/enterprise Apple has neglected or abandoned over the years, including ones making oodles of money, not out of any 4D chess but just because it doesn't fit them as an organization.
If there was a Linux Apple App Store, I would buy stuff from it. I already buy from Steam. OSS doesn't have the answer to everything. Boutique software has value that people are willing to pay for.
Linux applications are being sold. In fact, GPL-licensed applications get sold, so it's not even the OSS part that's holding you back. ElementaryOS even has its optionally-paid app store: https://appcenter.elementary.io/ Autodesk and other industrial software providers are quite happy to sell you software, though unfortunately not through a unified app store.
In practice, I expect a paid Linux app store to go down about as well as the Microsoft Store has. Especially now, in the age of vibecoding.
Apple's profit margins on many services are at 76% (according to Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/01/13/apples-de...), over twice that of their hardware sales. Margins are higher on reselling licensed content (their Spotify and Netflix alternatives), but their customer base for those is still rapidly growing according to their 2025 report.
Hardware revenue is 3x the services revenue, even with half the margins it still generates more profit than services. I get that Apple would like to increase service revenue but they are a hardware company at heart and their financial statements show it too
Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store.
Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.
I believe Google's Safari payments are a significant chunk of services revenue too (around $20 billion a year.) Then there's Apple TV and Apple Music, which are not nothing.
My father purchased a new MacBook just in time to avoid the recent price increase. It wasn't because his old one didn't work anymore; it was because Apple wouldn't support it on more recent macOS versions, and some applications he runs daily (like Teams) don't work anymore on the latest supported macOS for that MacBook. Apple is an hardware company, and forcing you to upgrade your hardware gives them revenue. Admittedly, his MacBook lasted longer than many other laptops would have. But, if it wasn't for the outdated OS, he would have been happy to keep using it because the hardware was still fine for office use.
Depends on the point of view, as it is Apple not supporting that MacBook anymore, and Microsoft could have a point in not supporting macOS versions that Apple doesn't want to support anymore. You could even argue that he forced the update on himself, since the web version still worked. The point remains that somehow without upgrading the hardware some software he uses everyday doesn't work anymore.
I would put it squarely on Microsoft in this case. They decided to make their software not function anymore. Why not let older Teams clients still function and communicate with the newer?
Apple still pushes updates and security updates to OS versions which are not the latest. So I don't see how they can be blamed much here.
That's over 10 years of service. But if it's a Pro, then the latest OS officially supported is Monterey, which received its last update in 2024. So I would consider that very fair of Apple, even impressive.
It is fair if you compare Apple with other manufacturers, but it is still unfair in absolute terms. The hardware still works, and the work they're doing to support other models would let macOS work on that laptop as well, as proven by tools that let you do the upgrade unofficially.
Eh, with prebuilt PCs it’s muddy because the bulk of heavy lifting is done by Microsoft, not the manufacturer. It’s not unusual at all to pull up the firmware/drivers/etc page for a random laptop and find that updates stopped rolling out about 2 years after its introduction to the market, despite Reddit and similar being filled with reports of firmware bugs for that particular model.
They've been like this long before they were a digital services company. 25 years ago Yellow Dog Linux (another RPM based distro) had the same challenges working with PowerPC. The scientific community was clamoring for an open platform to use their native Linux software with the PowerPC, YDL filled that niche, and Apple watched their struggles supporting Linux on their platform with detached amusement.
Kinda think Asahi is not going to fair too much better in this fight. It’s an interesting exercise but most people won’t buy a Mac to use Linux. The only reason I’d buy an overpriced piece of hardware is because it can run Linux very well. But apparently people like me is negligible.
Food for thought: Apple’s services make more revenue than Macs and iPads combined, and they do so at a higher profit margin. There’s your answer.
I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable.
Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system.
CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.
And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding.
But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that.
I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you.
There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.
Yeah, they pretty much lied about that. It is only in a special Windows ultra-power saving mode that heavily throttles background tasks, forces the screen to be 30% lower brightness, heavily downclocks the CPU (50%+ less performance!), etc; The MacBook has to do no such tricks.
You're not gonna see Frameworks that equal the perf-per-watt of Apple until they release a model with a Snapdragon chip.
Frameworks have one benefit that other laptops don't: there's only a few parts. So for example for your Framework speakers you can find an EasyEffects / Pipewire (+bankstown?) tune profile that makes them sound better than 99% of laptops on the market. It's basically the Raspberry Pi effect.
It is well-documented that Panther Lake is highly power efficient. I wouldn’t personally argue against that.
The days of assuming that Apple has the best chip efficiency are coming to an end, especially if the Windows/Qualcomm platform is a workable choice for your needs (maybe someday Linux support will get better).
Apple still has a lead but it’s small enough that it’s not a good reason to choose an Apple system on its own. The M1 MacBook systems got double the battery life of competitors, now 5 years later, Apple systems are at best getting ~10% better battery life than competitors, and some systems like the XPS 14 have Apple beat entirely.
Obviously getting 20 hours in real world productivity use was never realistic, and it’s not realistic on a MacBook Pro, either. I disagree that framework was “basically lying.” They live-streamed the laptop hitting 20 hours, it doesn’t matter that they changed settings to get there. MacBooks have a brightness slider, too. You aren’t getting anywhere close to 20 hours on a MacBook without turning the screen brightness down.
IIRC the MacBook Air/Pro can’t even make it to 20 hours regardless of settings.
The point is that the new framework 13 Pro laptop isn’t a 5-7 hour battery life experience like the previous models. Instead, you can expect 10+ hours depending on what you’re doing it, so it’s a full work day.
As far as I can tell, Framework’s claimed battery numbers require Windows to achieve, which is more than enough reason for many to not consider the FW 13 Pro as an option. If it can’t run Linux without sacrifice compared to Windows there’s no point.
Standby time is likely also a major issue, unless Intel suddenly reversed course and decided to support proper sleep again.
It’s still going to be a respectable performer in Linux. The whole point of the 20 hour stunt was to show that it’s a major improvement and not a small one. Maybe it would have been better to show a default-settings Linux and Windows for comparison but I can understand why they wanted to hit 20 hours for marketing.
Framework specifically has stated that they worked very hard to improve standby time and claim that it’s dramatically better. Being able to use LPDDR5x LP-CAMM2 modules aids in standby time significantly. We’ll find out soon when the first reviewers get their retail units in, probably within a month or so.
For standby time, my current framework 13 has never bothered me. It’s great that Macs have incredible standby but it’s much less of a dealbreaker than I originally thought it would be. I just have sleep to hibernate set up in Linux.
My system sleeps for 2 hours then hibernates afterward. If I am putting my system down for 2 hours I’m likely done using it for the day anyway.
I checked a 16” framework last week comparing to the 24/48GiB MBP. The ssd is significantly faster, the RAM is almost twice as fast, the CPU has more cores. The only benefit is having a dedicated gpu. At more or less the same price.
Admittedly, the screen ratio is better with the framework. But prefer the matte screen of the MacBook.
I personally think the 13 Pro is the one that’s truly competitive, the 16” is a very different story and not something I recommend specifically.
Someone looking that machine who wants strong GPU performance, I’d probably send over to a Zephyrus G16 or something like that, and give up the modularity.
SSD and RAM speed specs aren’t really something that impacts the user experience unless you’re doing local LLM work.
What does impact the user experience, for example, is having access to hundreds of thousands of PC games by not being platform locked. Or maybe your user experience is impacted by having upgradable storage.
This obviously depends on individual needs, and I’m certainly not saying either system is bad. But I am saying that the Apple “experience” is often assumed to be the best when it does have some downsides.
Even the fact that there’s no charge port on the right side of the MacBook Air/Neo is a user experience downside (of course, not every PC laptop has that feature, but you can find them in the same price category as the Air).
I sold my MacBook Pro because I needed 2TB and couldn’t afford it from Apple. Being stuck with 512GB when 2TB drives cost under $200 at the time was stifling.
I’m mainly looking at the 16” mbp because of the beautiful screen and the refined hardware. For the work I use the laptop on my lap for (or in the evening at the kitchen table) to compare products, research holidays etc, I notice that 13” is too small to comfortably hold two browsers next to each other plus room for notes.
Then sometimes when I’m on the go I like to play a game or two, but nothing seriously requiring graphics power
SSD speed and RAM speed start mattering when memory pressure is high. And when doing stuff with video and photo editing.
The storage price is indeed steep and now the RAM price as well. I wish I hit the buy button when I had the chance before the price increase.
The battery life stinks, the build quality is subpar and the fan runs all the time. If you don't care about anything that makes the MacBook Pro a premium device, then sure you can be overpriced consumer-grade slop that has a slight edge in specs (except CPU). But it's a miserable trade-off.
I would recommend something like a Zephyrus G16 to someone who is interested in a 16” laptop with powerful graphics and a MacBook Pro-like footprint.
It’s easy to diss Apple alternatives and call them unrefined and all that, but to the right person, there are downsides to a Mac.
For example, the current MacBook Pro models with higher end chips prioritize quietness over heat and get very hot to the touch under heavy workloads.
Unless you are in music production, a little fan noise never hurt anyone, and the idea that windows laptops sound like hair dryers when doing basic tasks like browsing the web is very outdated.
Apple is revered for refinement and quality yet they get some basic ergonomics wrong like the sharp edges near your wrist and the notch blocking the menu bar.
Never thought I'd think about switching from Apple. M1 was handsdown the best buy ever and I was sure my next laptop would be an Apple as well. But looking at framework, this looks really nice. Apple-ish but without some of the drawbacks (also, while windows stinks, not really a MacOS fanboy tbh). Makes me kinda regret I was lazy and locked myself in using Apple passwords app.
Their amazing laptop hardware pushes you into their ecosystem. Once you're on macOS, might as well get iphone rather than Android and benefit from the synergy, same for airpods or the apple watch.
The only reason I'd see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.
Why do you think that Apple doesn’t have developers internally that develops Linux for their own chips?
They obviously have a ton of people developing with linux and even asahi, else they wouldn’t been able to make adjustments in their uefi to shape the support of 3rd party OSes exactly how they wanted.
As apple no longer develop their own servers (OS), they even run some internal ”production” system on Linux, on their own hardware.
Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups.
Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value.
And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.
Nobody gets promoted for building open-source software at corpos. It is allowed, at best, not condoned. So what manager is going to go for this? Let's dedicate our limited resources to gratuitous goodwill work. Carrer suicide, I expect. Unfortunately.
How would you fit Red Hat in this picture? I think the situation could be different, if it is about improving some software the company is using for its business. Not that this happens often, but I think the possibility to persuade managment that improving a piece of software crucial for the company's business is there.
They still have people working on FOSS, right? I didn't know about what your saying,but if this is the problem, then what if I gave Canonical as an example?
> It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this.
Why should they when they have macOS already?
> Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
How many people who buy Apple silicon laptops do it to run Linux on it? less than 10,000 or 20,000 people?
You should not expect Apple to care about what Linux users want. The closest you are getting from them is being able to boot a custom OS or kernel.
Everything else from the drivers to the secure enclave they do not care.
> No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux.
Almost no-one bought Intel Macs for dual-booting Linux either (Unless you are Linus Torvalds and a tiny amount of people who use Linux on Intel Macs).
> But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops.
Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them.
The entire point of Intel Macs was for running Windows on a Mac which that cohort is just as tiny as the Linux on Intel Mac customers.
Dual booting is generally reserved for those who are highly technical, so I would not expect Apple to care about either customer anyway. So that was tested already and Apple still did not care.
So of course they also do not care about Linux users who have Apple Silicon Macs either.
see homebrew, they could have made this an official thing but no, they prefer to let people work do their work for them and sleep on their mattress of cash
> The defacto industry standard for audio ICs is I²S, an I²C-based bus optimised for audio data.
Nit: I²S has nothing to do with I²C.
(Most I²S chips also have an I²C interface since I²S only carries raw audio data, no sideband like volume control or clock configuration. But that's a separate interface and can also be SPI rather than I²C. In fact, SPI is more closely related to I²S than I²C is.)
Yeah, it's much closer to SPI.
The reason why they both follow the same naming scheme is that Philips Semiconductor (now NXP) made both.
Thanks for this comment, it lead me to look into I2S and I learned something new!
I’m in absolute awe that a handful of motivated people can crack these problems
I wonder how much LLMs have been leveraged to help Asahi lately, there’s extremely powerful for reverse-engineering. Have they written about it?
Asahi could be a viable alternative, however, with this amount of funding, small manpower pool pace of development is doomed to be too slow.
There's groundwork that's already been done, as mentioned in the article, which brings some dividends, but, ultimately, there is a new mac every year that comes with a new chip, a plethora of microcontrollers and gpu changes, impossible to keep up with, that is why asahi team is focused more on m1 and m2 models. Even so, to this day both of them have issues with idle power management and alt-dp implementation, preventing many to switch, by the time they will have been ironed out the value of machines would be significantly diminished.
It is a miracle how much so few can do, but in the end, despite ubiquitous media coverage it looks like team's enthusiasm and passion have dwindled to the point that even m1 air will never be ready.
If they can set a single machine as target every few years and make it work, that would be a lot better than having no alternative.
M1 support is pretty usable nowadays, and I would imagine at least a fraction of the work translates to future devices... It's not sunshine and rainbows, but it isn't a project doomed to fail either.
M1 support is barely usable, at least on m1 air last time I checked idle battery drain was about 7-8% per hour (in macos battery health is still at 96%). Alt DP mode doesn't operate under kde wayland plasma due to inherent incompatability between implementation design and kwin, everything else is surprisingly good, albeit battery was really hard to ignore to fully switch.
Hopefully, they will manage to get it done someday.
Will this forever exist as a Fedora "remix". Or will we find the support in upstream so I can one day run Debian-based distro?
I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.
They are upstreaming their patches, so upstream Linux will eventually get the necessary drivers.
Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.
Or, if you find Ubuntu acceptable, there's Ubuntu Asahi: https://ubuntuasahi.org/
EDIT: After some googling I found this wiki article: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
This comment made me smile, as my preference is opposite - I prefer RPM-based distros and primarily use Fedora on everything (including Fedora Asahi Remix on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio), but occasionally use Ubuntu and Debian on some of my cloud instances.
As a result, I understand the desire to stick with a particular distribution that we're already familiar with - it's less work, and less having to remember subtle differences in structure. But when there is a time where I'm forced to use a new distro (e.g., when Asahi was first released exclusively as an Arch Linux ARM distro), I never regret the small learning experiences involved :-)
And at least Fedora is rock solid these days, which is more than I can say about Ubuntu. Its really a great distro.
You can still run Arch, and Ubuntu Asahi also exists. (1)
They’re working hard on upstreaming everything exactly so it’s easier for any distribution to be ported.
1- https://ubuntuasahi.org/
I wish more people on HN learned how to build their own kernel and run it.
A distro is just window dressing and flavor.
linux-asahi is available in Void Linux:
https://voidlinux.org/download/#arm%20platforms
It's a regular package of linux in the distro: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/tree/master/srcp...
There is an effort by the Bananas Team to get standard Debian working on Apple silicon, and they have installation instructions for how to get it running now with an additional unofficial repository: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1#The_Bana...
I haven't actually tried to install it yet, though.
The founder of asahi linux famously quit due to how hard it was to upstream patches. It’s not easy to deal with linus’ project.
I can’t see that being a bad thing considering that the kernel is mandatory software in the Linux world. You would want to have high standards for what gets added.
You should have high standards.
Torvalds often crosses that line into outright toxicity. I've written a few kernel patches that I never tried to upstream for that reason.
You'll never be able to agree on where that line should go. First because there's a cultural component to it. I'm from Spain so I can only talk for myself, but while he uses rude language, nothing I've ever read from him ever seemed particularly offensive. And second because any activity involving a large group of people will need some amount of toxicity if only to prevent other toxic people from derailing it, and since nobody thinks of themselves as the one that is being toxic to the project, there will always be some friction. You might not like fevers either, but they are necessary for a functioning immune system.
"Disgusting" Linux sched_ext Source Code Restructured Following Complaint By Linus Torvalds - Phoronix https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Sched-Ext-Restructured
Upstreaming something like this is a monumental task, even small changes can take ages. It will take a while.
They've actually been focusing on upstreaming for what feels like 2 years now. It's really slowed down progress but it's important for the longevity of the project. They still have so much left to upstream but little by little it's happening
i've been using nixos on an m2 air for a year now, the kernel is enough
It is exciting that they are working on AVD driver.
if i use ffmpeg or VLC on a M1+ Mac, does it use AVD?
I wonder what the dev/CI process looks like on this.
Will it ultimately be manually loading a build into specific hardware each time, or is there a level of automation that can be done here?
m1n1 does a lot of fun stuff here: https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/tethered-boot/
It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.
Is the github sponsors link a 404 for everyone else?
Not for me, perhaps fixed in the last hour already.
God bless the asahi team
It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.
They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?
AFAIK Apple’s “services” revenue is a little over a quarter of their total; everything else is hardware, dominated by the iPhone. Mac hardware is <10% of total revenue.
iPhones are largely locked to their App Store so no risk there. Macs (currently) aren’t locked to the App Store - and I’d guess that Mac App Store usage is middling as a result.
Which is to say, I doubt that a marginal Mac App Store revenue hit from a small proportion of users switching to Linux over MacOS is the driver for not supporting Linux development. I’d guess it’s more about an inflexible company culture and maybe not wanting to extend their area of responsibility and risk.
Revenue wise, the services part is not that large. Profit-wise, though, I don't believe the same is true. Their 30% cut is barely costing them anything compared to manufacturing hardware and physical logistics.
I don't think the Mac App Store is going to get to iPhone levels of lock-down soon, but Apple thinks in ecosystems, not just in laptops. If you have an iMac, you probably have an iPhone, and you're probably going to buy an iPad should you ever want a tablet.
If they wanted, they could open source all of the drivers necessary to boot an OS as part of their Darwin core, but they choose not to. That actually breaks with their older, more open development style. I guess they just don't see the benefit of being open any longer.
Yeah probably they want to be free to bork it, but if they released some documentation or patches, they'd be expected to keep them up to date and working at the very least.
> Their big money maker is their app store
That said, their AirPods division could be a Fortune 500 on its own.
>Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.
You do realize that Apple is a public company and one can just go look at their financials like their latest 10-Q [0] right? For the most recent 6 month half (ending March 28 2026) I'm seeing $194 billion for product sales and $61 billion for service sales. The gross margins are certainly higher on services, at 77%, but 40% product margins are nothing to sneeze at either, and the disparity in absolute sales means the absolute dollar gross margins are $77 billion for products vs $46 billion for services.
So I don't see how you can assert that their "big money maker is their app store" from those numbers. Hardware matters a lot, and furthermore Apple sells services (like AppleCare+) that are specific to hardware and thus even a Linux user might still be interested in.
And without their hardware, their services would evaporate. There is a much tighter link there than with many companies. So they're on the hook for continued R&D and capex on that no matter what, you can't really separate that out, and in turn it's always going to be useful to have more volume to amortize it with.
I think primarily it comes down to corporate DNA, which is powerful. There are plenty of Mac hardware, software and service markets in pro/business/enterprise Apple has neglected or abandoned over the years, including ones making oodles of money, not out of any 4D chess but just because it doesn't fit them as an organization.
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0: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000320193/37f5e9c...
If there was a Linux Apple App Store, I would buy stuff from it. I already buy from Steam. OSS doesn't have the answer to everything. Boutique software has value that people are willing to pay for.
Linux applications are being sold. In fact, GPL-licensed applications get sold, so it's not even the OSS part that's holding you back. ElementaryOS even has its optionally-paid app store: https://appcenter.elementary.io/ Autodesk and other industrial software providers are quite happy to sell you software, though unfortunately not through a unified app store.
In practice, I expect a paid Linux app store to go down about as well as the Microsoft Store has. Especially now, in the age of vibecoding.
This is just plain wrong. Apple generates most revenue and profits with hardware and it's not even close.
Apple's profit margins on many services are at 76% (according to Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/01/13/apples-de...), over twice that of their hardware sales. Margins are higher on reselling licensed content (their Spotify and Netflix alternatives), but their customer base for those is still rapidly growing according to their 2025 report.
Tim Cook said it himself: Apple is not a hardware company (https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hard...).
Hardware revenue is 3x the services revenue, even with half the margins it still generates more profit than services. I get that Apple would like to increase service revenue but they are a hardware company at heart and their financial statements show it too
If you read the last link you'll see he just means Apple could slash its hardware margins (if needed) and still make tons of money.
As we saw recently, they decided they are, after all, a hardware company, since they decided not to slash their margins...
Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store.
Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.
The ad revenue is a drop in the bucket compared to the app store rent, which is a drop in the bucket compared to hardware sales.
Do you have any sources for hardware sales vs app store revenue?
https://bullfincher.io/companies/apple/revenue-by-segment
iPhone: 50.4%
Mac: 8.1%
iPad: 6.7%
Wearables, home and accessories: 8.6%
Services: 26.2%
I assume that the majority of service revenue is App store revenue.
Other services they provide are iCloud and Apple care
That's revenue though. Fixed costs for hardware is probably much higher. If we looked at profits, the percentages would probably look quite different.
I believe Google's Safari payments are a significant chunk of services revenue too (around $20 billion a year.) Then there's Apple TV and Apple Music, which are not nothing.
Let’s not conflate total App Store revenue and Ad revenue.
Yes, but I was willing to grant (even if only for the sake of argument) that ad revenue is probably a lot smaller than the other two in the list.
My father purchased a new MacBook just in time to avoid the recent price increase. It wasn't because his old one didn't work anymore; it was because Apple wouldn't support it on more recent macOS versions, and some applications he runs daily (like Teams) don't work anymore on the latest supported macOS for that MacBook. Apple is an hardware company, and forcing you to upgrade your hardware gives them revenue. Admittedly, his MacBook lasted longer than many other laptops would have. But, if it wasn't for the outdated OS, he would have been happy to keep using it because the hardware was still fine for office use.
FYI there’s software that can upgrade old Macs to officially unsupported OSs: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/
He found out about one of those, but wasn't comfortable using it anyway.
But in this case it was Microsoft who forced him to upgrade, wasn't it?
Depends on the point of view, as it is Apple not supporting that MacBook anymore, and Microsoft could have a point in not supporting macOS versions that Apple doesn't want to support anymore. You could even argue that he forced the update on himself, since the web version still worked. The point remains that somehow without upgrading the hardware some software he uses everyday doesn't work anymore.
I would put it squarely on Microsoft in this case. They decided to make their software not function anymore. Why not let older Teams clients still function and communicate with the newer?
Apple still pushes updates and security updates to OS versions which are not the latest. So I don't see how they can be blamed much here.
I'm not sure he's still receiving security updates, as the MacBook in question is from ~2015. But, if this is the case, then you would have a point.
That's over 10 years of service. But if it's a Pro, then the latest OS officially supported is Monterey, which received its last update in 2024. So I would consider that very fair of Apple, even impressive.
It is fair if you compare Apple with other manufacturers, but it is still unfair in absolute terms. The hardware still works, and the work they're doing to support other models would let macOS work on that laptop as well, as proven by tools that let you do the upgrade unofficially.
Eh, with prebuilt PCs it’s muddy because the bulk of heavy lifting is done by Microsoft, not the manufacturer. It’s not unusual at all to pull up the firmware/drivers/etc page for a random laptop and find that updates stopped rolling out about 2 years after its introduction to the market, despite Reddit and similar being filled with reports of firmware bugs for that particular model.
Fair point, but I think the lack of those updates impacts the average consumer much less than lack of OS updates.
They've been like this long before they were a digital services company. 25 years ago Yellow Dog Linux (another RPM based distro) had the same challenges working with PowerPC. The scientific community was clamoring for an open platform to use their native Linux software with the PowerPC, YDL filled that niche, and Apple watched their struggles supporting Linux on their platform with detached amusement.
Kinda think Asahi is not going to fair too much better in this fight. It’s an interesting exercise but most people won’t buy a Mac to use Linux. The only reason I’d buy an overpriced piece of hardware is because it can run Linux very well. But apparently people like me is negligible.
I think it'll have more of an impact with used hardware buyers. I wouldn't buy an M5 for Linux, but repurposing a cheap M1 in a few years? Absolutely.
Food for thought: Apple’s services make more revenue than Macs and iPads combined, and they do so at a higher profit margin. There’s your answer.
I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable.
Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system.
CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.
And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding.
But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that.
I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you.
There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.
> Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.
Yeah, they pretty much lied about that. It is only in a special Windows ultra-power saving mode that heavily throttles background tasks, forces the screen to be 30% lower brightness, heavily downclocks the CPU (50%+ less performance!), etc; The MacBook has to do no such tricks.
You're not gonna see Frameworks that equal the perf-per-watt of Apple until they release a model with a Snapdragon chip.
Frameworks have one benefit that other laptops don't: there's only a few parts. So for example for your Framework speakers you can find an EasyEffects / Pipewire (+bankstown?) tune profile that makes them sound better than 99% of laptops on the market. It's basically the Raspberry Pi effect.
It is well-documented that Panther Lake is highly power efficient. I wouldn’t personally argue against that.
The days of assuming that Apple has the best chip efficiency are coming to an end, especially if the Windows/Qualcomm platform is a workable choice for your needs (maybe someday Linux support will get better).
Apple still has a lead but it’s small enough that it’s not a good reason to choose an Apple system on its own. The M1 MacBook systems got double the battery life of competitors, now 5 years later, Apple systems are at best getting ~10% better battery life than competitors, and some systems like the XPS 14 have Apple beat entirely.
Obviously getting 20 hours in real world productivity use was never realistic, and it’s not realistic on a MacBook Pro, either. I disagree that framework was “basically lying.” They live-streamed the laptop hitting 20 hours, it doesn’t matter that they changed settings to get there. MacBooks have a brightness slider, too. You aren’t getting anywhere close to 20 hours on a MacBook without turning the screen brightness down.
IIRC the MacBook Air/Pro can’t even make it to 20 hours regardless of settings.
The point is that the new framework 13 Pro laptop isn’t a 5-7 hour battery life experience like the previous models. Instead, you can expect 10+ hours depending on what you’re doing it, so it’s a full work day.
As far as I can tell, Framework’s claimed battery numbers require Windows to achieve, which is more than enough reason for many to not consider the FW 13 Pro as an option. If it can’t run Linux without sacrifice compared to Windows there’s no point.
Standby time is likely also a major issue, unless Intel suddenly reversed course and decided to support proper sleep again.
It’s still going to be a respectable performer in Linux. The whole point of the 20 hour stunt was to show that it’s a major improvement and not a small one. Maybe it would have been better to show a default-settings Linux and Windows for comparison but I can understand why they wanted to hit 20 hours for marketing.
Framework specifically has stated that they worked very hard to improve standby time and claim that it’s dramatically better. Being able to use LPDDR5x LP-CAMM2 modules aids in standby time significantly. We’ll find out soon when the first reviewers get their retail units in, probably within a month or so.
For standby time, my current framework 13 has never bothered me. It’s great that Macs have incredible standby but it’s much less of a dealbreaker than I originally thought it would be. I just have sleep to hibernate set up in Linux.
My system sleeps for 2 hours then hibernates afterward. If I am putting my system down for 2 hours I’m likely done using it for the day anyway.
I checked a 16” framework last week comparing to the 24/48GiB MBP. The ssd is significantly faster, the RAM is almost twice as fast, the CPU has more cores. The only benefit is having a dedicated gpu. At more or less the same price.
Admittedly, the screen ratio is better with the framework. But prefer the matte screen of the MacBook.
I personally think the 13 Pro is the one that’s truly competitive, the 16” is a very different story and not something I recommend specifically.
Someone looking that machine who wants strong GPU performance, I’d probably send over to a Zephyrus G16 or something like that, and give up the modularity.
SSD and RAM speed specs aren’t really something that impacts the user experience unless you’re doing local LLM work.
What does impact the user experience, for example, is having access to hundreds of thousands of PC games by not being platform locked. Or maybe your user experience is impacted by having upgradable storage.
This obviously depends on individual needs, and I’m certainly not saying either system is bad. But I am saying that the Apple “experience” is often assumed to be the best when it does have some downsides.
Even the fact that there’s no charge port on the right side of the MacBook Air/Neo is a user experience downside (of course, not every PC laptop has that feature, but you can find them in the same price category as the Air).
I sold my MacBook Pro because I needed 2TB and couldn’t afford it from Apple. Being stuck with 512GB when 2TB drives cost under $200 at the time was stifling.
I’m mainly looking at the 16” mbp because of the beautiful screen and the refined hardware. For the work I use the laptop on my lap for (or in the evening at the kitchen table) to compare products, research holidays etc, I notice that 13” is too small to comfortably hold two browsers next to each other plus room for notes.
Then sometimes when I’m on the go I like to play a game or two, but nothing seriously requiring graphics power
SSD speed and RAM speed start mattering when memory pressure is high. And when doing stuff with video and photo editing.
The storage price is indeed steep and now the RAM price as well. I wish I hit the buy button when I had the chance before the price increase.
The battery life stinks, the build quality is subpar and the fan runs all the time. If you don't care about anything that makes the MacBook Pro a premium device, then sure you can be overpriced consumer-grade slop that has a slight edge in specs (except CPU). But it's a miserable trade-off.
I would recommend something like a Zephyrus G16 to someone who is interested in a 16” laptop with powerful graphics and a MacBook Pro-like footprint.
It’s easy to diss Apple alternatives and call them unrefined and all that, but to the right person, there are downsides to a Mac.
For example, the current MacBook Pro models with higher end chips prioritize quietness over heat and get very hot to the touch under heavy workloads.
Unless you are in music production, a little fan noise never hurt anyone, and the idea that windows laptops sound like hair dryers when doing basic tasks like browsing the web is very outdated.
Apple is revered for refinement and quality yet they get some basic ergonomics wrong like the sharp edges near your wrist and the notch blocking the menu bar.
Never thought I'd think about switching from Apple. M1 was handsdown the best buy ever and I was sure my next laptop would be an Apple as well. But looking at framework, this looks really nice. Apple-ish but without some of the drawbacks (also, while windows stinks, not really a MacOS fanboy tbh). Makes me kinda regret I was lazy and locked myself in using Apple passwords app.
FYI Apple Passwords supports exporting of items including Passkeys, which can be then imported in e.g. Bitwarden.
TIL about exporting Passkeys, that’s a great tip.
I read somewhere that Apple even uses Linux kernels to bring up new hardware but I don't know if it's actually/still true.
Their amazing laptop hardware pushes you into their ecosystem. Once you're on macOS, might as well get iphone rather than Android and benefit from the synergy, same for airpods or the apple watch.
The only reason I'd see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.
Why do you think that Apple doesn’t have developers internally that develops Linux for their own chips?
They obviously have a ton of people developing with linux and even asahi, else they wouldn’t been able to make adjustments in their uefi to shape the support of 3rd party OSes exactly how they wanted.
As apple no longer develop their own servers (OS), they even run some internal ”production” system on Linux, on their own hardware.
Or they could just make their schematics available and save 99% of the reverse engineering the Asahi team has to do.
1000s of hours of work for what is just sitting in a drawer in Cupertino. But they won’t.
It’s less a question of people and more one of "Why doesn't a hardware company want to give away their IP design documentation?"
Are you really baffled as you say?
Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups.
Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value.
And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.
Nobody gets promoted for building open-source software at corpos. It is allowed, at best, not condoned. So what manager is going to go for this? Let's dedicate our limited resources to gratuitous goodwill work. Carrer suicide, I expect. Unfortunately.
How would you fit Red Hat in this picture? I think the situation could be different, if it is about improving some software the company is using for its business. Not that this happens often, but I think the possibility to persuade managment that improving a piece of software crucial for the company's business is there.
You mean the company that rescinds your contract if you exercise the rights granted to you by GPL licenses? What about it?
They still have people working on FOSS, right? I didn't know about what your saying,but if this is the problem, then what if I gave Canonical as an example?
> It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this.
Why should they when they have macOS already?
> Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
How many people who buy Apple silicon laptops do it to run Linux on it? less than 10,000 or 20,000 people?
You should not expect Apple to care about what Linux users want. The closest you are getting from them is being able to boot a custom OS or kernel.
Everything else from the drivers to the secure enclave they do not care.
No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux.
But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Macbook hardware completely outclasses even the high end options.
> No one buys Apple Silicon laptops to run Linux because they can barely run Linux.
Almost no-one bought Intel Macs for dual-booting Linux either (Unless you are Linus Torvalds and a tiny amount of people who use Linux on Intel Macs).
> But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops.
Not true. They cannot even run Windows on them.
The entire point of Intel Macs was for running Windows on a Mac which that cohort is just as tiny as the Linux on Intel Mac customers.
Dual booting is generally reserved for those who are highly technical, so I would not expect Apple to care about either customer anyway. So that was tested already and Apple still did not care.
So of course they also do not care about Linux users who have Apple Silicon Macs either.
> Why should they when they have macOS already?
Because Apple cuts support for old MacBooks eventually, even if the hardware still works perfectly. See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745199
see homebrew, they could have made this an official thing but no, they prefer to let people work do their work for them and sleep on their mattress of cash
despicable business practices really
IIRC Apple actually helped with MacPorts in the beginning
actually long ago before homebrew there was MacPorts which Apple actually was part of.