Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by webmobdev 1351 days ago
> They had the opportunity to do this when introducing the M-series Macs

No, they didn't because a Mac computer that is fully locked like the iDevices wouldn't have been popular and would have meant a lot of bad publicity for the M1 mac desktops. Apple Silicon M1 / M2 macs can only run crippled versions of other OSes and macOS is being slowly converted to be more and more like ios. It's the Boiling Frog strategy - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog - to ensure that they don't scare away their users. With soldered harware, no viable alternate OSes, and taking away developer options from macOS, all Apple Silicon M1/M2 macs are now just a few more steps away from becoming like the iDevices.
2 comments
kitsunesoba 1351 days ago
What do you mean by “crippled”? As far as I can tell the only limiting factor on the capabilities of other OSes on Apple Silicon is the state of hardware support, which is marching forward at a brisk pace and it doesn’t look like there’s anything stopping third parties from fully leveraging the capabilities of that hardware.
link
kergonath 1351 days ago
> No, they didn't because a Mac computer that is fully locked like the iDevices wouldn't have been popular and would have meant a lot of bad publicity for the M1 mac desktops.

Approximately nobody would have passed on a Mac because it could not boot Windows or Linux. This has been more or less the state of Macs since the release of the first M1 devices, and they sell rather well. There is demonstrably quite a lot of interest for these devices running macOS.

> Apple Silicon M1 / M2 macs can only run crippled versions of other OSes

How so? What do they do to cripple other OSes?

> It's the Boiling Frog strategy

Quoting Wikipedia for common phrases does not make you more credible. Again, people have been saying that for more than a decade. It is not inconceivable that it could happen in the future, but then anything could happen in the future. And in the meantime you still sound like a broken clock.

> to ensure that they don't scare away their users.

The whole history of iOS demonstrates the opposite. As said in the parent comment. They’ve had opportunities to actually go to that direction. Nobody was expecting third-party OS support.

link