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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#501

Post by mhh__ »

ogre_codes wrote: post #490
bitwize wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was for x86 Macs. Apple is not supporting alternative operating systems on the M1 Mac except via virtualization.

From the sounds of it, Apple hasn't put anything in the way of installing Linux or Windows on the M1 based Macs. They don't have the sort of built in support the Intel based Macs have, but they should be able to boot Linux or Windows on bare metal. Recently there was a Apple support article posted here on HN detailing it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25145119

Making Linux work on an ARM SOC is a lot harder than on a regular laptop. It basically requires help from the vendor to make the peripherals and such work, although there. Will be a lot of eyes on this so I'd be surprised if someone hasn't got it working within a year or so (working is not equal to usable)

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#502

Post by quantummkv »

ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

Given that Linux desktop cannot properly utilize even the limited amounts of very common HW accelerators build into AMD and Intel chips (video decoders) and the existing GPU's (all of them suck in different ways), running Linux on M1 would be a waste of everything without giving Linux any noticeable improvement over existing x86 machines.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#503

Post by ogre_codes »

ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

> Apple's walled garden

Apparently over the years the definition of "Walled Garden" has drifted a lot. The iPhone has a "Walled Garden", unless you jailbreak, it's very difficult to run anything outside the App Store.

My Mac? Almost nothing I run is from the App Store. Nothing needs to be from the App Store. Most of what I run doesn't even go through Gatekeeper and it certainly never touches software I build or compile myself.

If a "Walled Garden" can be disabled by bypassed by a single entry in your hosts file, by running from the command line, or any other number of ways, it's a damned short wall around that garden.

Lots of valid criticisms of MacOS, but it's nowhere in the ballpark of a walled garden.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#504

Post by vbezhenar »

brundolf wrote: post #25

This is fascinating: > Retain and release are tiny actions that almost all software, on all Apple platforms, does all the time. ….. The Apple Silicon system architecture is designed to make these operations as fast as possible. It’s not so much that Intel’s x86 architecture is a bad fit for Apple’s software frameworks, as that Apple Silicon is designed to be a bespoke fit for it …. retaining and releasing NSObjects i…

I don't think this applies to good software. Nobody will retain/release something in a tight loop. And typical retain/releases don't consume much time. Of course it improves metrics like any other micro-optimization, so it's good to have it, but that's about it.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#505

Post by brirec »

kube-system wrote: post #429
nycticorax wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, large businesses at least get Windows 10 Enterprise, which doesn't come with all of that nonsense. The real shame is that you can't get Windows 10 Enterprise without a volume license.

You can get Win 10 Pro. I don’t remember my system having any of that junk preinstalled

It installed itself on any Win 10 machine I saw (most of which run Pro), except those running Enterprise (or LTSC/LTSB), or an education license.

Er, I heard that junk doesn’t install itself on “Pro for Workstations,” but I’m not certain and even then that’s another hundred dollars more expensive than Pro.

And even Enterprise still comes with a lot of junk that, like, 90% of users won’t need. Windows AR? Paint 3D? And so on… half the things in the start menu of a stock Windows 10 Pro install are either crap like Candy Crush, fluff like 3D viewer, or niche like the Windows AR thing.

The worst part about this is that there’s definitely a middle ground between not including anything and pushing crap on people — both nearly every Linux distro I have ever seen, as well as Apple nail that balance, and to be frank with the App Store or Microsoft Store and such I really don’t see the need to include hardly anything.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#506

Post by ogre_codes »

ianhowson wrote: post #184
crazygringo wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I'm utterly baffled by all the people claiming that 8 GB isn't enough for the average user. The only situation I ever ran into where it was a problem was in trying to run multiple VM's at once. Otherwise it's just a non-issue. Programs often reserve a lot more memory than they actually use (zero hit in performance) so memory stats are misleading, and the OS is really good at swapping memory not touched in…

> people claiming that 8 GB isn't enough for the average user I'm not claiming anything of the sort. My point is that memory consumption seems to be greatly reduced in Big Sur, and that might make 8GB machines much better to use than before. All of my testing is on Intel machines. It's not exclusively an M1 phenomenon. I would still recommend 16GB to anyone, and if the extra $200 was a factor, I would recommend that…

> I'm not claiming anything of the sort.

You kind of did:

> (a) every 8GB Mac I've used in the past has been unusably slow

Personally, I stick to 16GB+ as well. Though my wife's Mac likely has 4GB since it's something like 8 years old and it runs just fine.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#507

Post by hrktb »

momokoko wrote: post #426
chongli wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does not want to offer to the hackintosh/enthusiast market because they are the most price conscious segment. Targeting that segment means putting out extremely performant, low-margin commodity machines. Doing so then cannibalizes the market for their ultra-high-end stuff. Not only that, though. Enthusiasts are also extremely fickle and quick to jump ship to a cheaper hardware offering. If you look at all of Ap…

I would be extraordinarily grateful for some insight into why this comment was downvoted.

I think the parent comment is just completely ignoring the argument of the post they reply to.

Just looking at the first sentences:

GP: > I have zero issues with an Apple premium or paying a lot for hardware.

parent: > the hackintosh/enthusiast market [...] are the most price conscious segment

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#508

Post by hapticmonkey »

EugeneOZ wrote: post #489
ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

Same here. I took my decision to leave macOS after their release of BigSur. It's absolutely, 101% unacceptable to me when someone else controls what program I can run on my hardware, and I should hope that their server will not go down. I still congratulate the team of Apple Silicone. Hope it will force Intel to create something similar.

They're adding an option to disable this in a future update. But I agree that it shouldn't have been forced to start with.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#509

Post by the_duke »

seabrookmx wrote: post #480
koffiezet wrote: post #188

I understand the machine is great or going to be great for most use cases. My mbp is my main workhorse, but as a freelance SRE "devops" guy, the Apple ARM platform won't be suitable for my job any time soon, if ever. Docker is not yet available - but even when it would become available, emulating virtualised x86 code is explicitly not going to be supported. That in many cases means pulling a docker image built in a c…

> emulating virtualized x86 code I don't think this is an issue for Docker. They can run an ARM64 Linux VM instead of the current x86 one, and then use QEMU to run x86 Docker containers within it if they want. The bummer is that this won't be taking advantage of Rosetta 2 so it'll likely perform bad, but it might be good enough for debugging the odd image or even development depending on _how_ bad.

Qemu performance without hardware virtualization is painfully slow and is not really practical for eg running a Kubernetes cluster.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#510

Post by mcintyre1994 »

ur-whale wrote: post #482

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

I honestly can’t think of any Apple policy that restricts what I run on my Mac. I haven’t upgraded to Big Sur yet, and maybe I just don’t rely on anything yet that’s against their policies and will be mad when I hit that point. What concretely are the awful policies that are restrictive on Mac that you’re thinking of?
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