Apple Exclaves

I wonder how much of a boost you'd get for that? I'm sure it would depend on the work load.

Note that the Mac is way more open than the iPhone (or iPad, which is funny considering how some chips are shared between Mac & iPad), specifically to preserve (some) of the kind of control people expect from their Mac.

That's why you can run Asahi Linux on Macs, but not iPads.

So you & GP may be talking past each other, them grousing over the locked-down nature of the iPhone, while you celebrate the control of your Mac.

Do I, a highly technical person, want a machine that has been made in to an appliance, where I have very little control over what's going on in the background, where I have to trust one of the largest companies on the planet to Do The Right Thing™?

Well, I know I don't want to run an OS like Windows where the end user is treated with contempt and distain, where the price of the license means nothing because I'm still treated as someone who doesn't know enough to even choose my own browser, where third party programs have more control over my own machine than I do, unless I happen to have a lot of specialized knowledge and plenty of time to circumvent these biases.

But let's compare the Apple appliance to an open source OS running on an Intel CPU. Now I have an OS that gives me more freedom to do what I want and need, that has only documentation and technical issues as roadblocks, not intentional design. Better, yes? But now I'm also required to trust a company that has a literal hardware back door built in to it, that comes from a company that acts like they have no real understanding of security but might just be playing dumb, that has lied to users many times over years, that has knowingly chosen speed and marketing numbers over security time and time again.

Now add the fact that we need to trust binary blobs for wifi chipsets, some ethernet chips, GPUs, et cetera. Not great, if we want to both control our machine and trust it.

So, really, would I want to run an open OS on top of a janky CPU with lowest common denominator hardware, where each part might have issues, possibly security issues, or would I want an appliance?

I wish there were more options... AMD is better than Intel, but not sufficiently. They have less of a history of lying, of manipulation of marketing information, et cetera, but they still have that hardware back door. People are working on open source firmware for wifi chips, et cetera. ARM is nice, but ARM laptops and desktops still come at a premium.

So do I see the appeal of an appliance that has incredible performance, battery life, the best exploitation of the hardware on the planet, excellent quality and security? I do, particularly when all aspects of that appliance are in the hands of a company that makes their insane profits from being "premium". So long as their profits depend on being premium, I will trust them, because my trust needs align with their profit desires. When that stops, my trust stops.

Would it be nice if I could run my own choice of OS on it? It would. But sometimes we need a device that gets things done, and in many instances, an appliance is better than the alternatives.

Can I still run pretty much what I want on this appliance, aside from my OS of choice? Yes, I can. So unless I'm interfacing directly with hardware, these appliances mean less work for me.

That's not to say your case isn't valid, but it's easy to see a case for most people having appliances.

If I had to bet, exclaves will be a bridge to something bigger, either a more modular OS (like Fuchsia) or a CHERI-inspired security model where memory safety is enforced at the hardware level.

Apple is leading the pack in consumer OS security, but exclaves are a patchwork improvement rather than a total rethinking of system design. That said, this is probably the biggest security shift in mainstream OS design in the last decade, and it will take years before we see its full impact.