[bigyabai]

I'd buy one if I knew I could use it. The old Intel Macs shipped with UEFI and a fairly open architecture, even Apple couldn't control when the chipset was fully depreciated. When MacOS cut off 32-bit support suddenly, hardcore software aficionados could still use Bootcamp to run the software they bought. When Apple "vintage"-ized old iMacs and Macbooks, they could still install other OSes and live on. Apple doesn't have to support their hardware forever... but their lack of a serious depreciation model means that I have to trust MacOS wholeheartedly.

And MacOS isn't worth my trust as a user. Big Sur feels like Mac by way of Windows 8 - it's stepping deeper into a service-integrated product that won't respect my time or money. If Apple published their driver code or at least documented their hardware as a gesture of good faith, I'd trust them a lot more. But Asahi is on the ropes right now (who'da thunk) and Apple isn't stepping in to heroically save anyone. Like the Halloween papers, with teeth this time.

It's all so tiring. I like my Magic Trackpad on GNOME, but I don't think modern Mac hardware is worth locking myself in with Dr. Tim Strangelove and learning to love his software.

[walterbell]

Hopefully future Qualcomm SDXE or Mediatek/Nvidia SystemReady Arm PCs will deliver an open-standard Arm platform with upstream Linux support. Until then, we have Apple Silicon Macs with:

  - official mechanism to provision non-Apple operating systems
  - global retail availability, both physical & online
  - best price/perf/watt Arm desktop via Mac Mini base
  - NPU and unified memory for LLMs
  - upcoming LTE/wifi/BT radios without Qualcomm/Broadcom firmware

> Asahi is on the ropes right now

Or on a path to long term sustainability?

https://asahilinux.org/2025/03/progress-report-6-14/

  When we stood up our OpenCollective, none of us really knew what to expect.. The sheer volume of support and the speed at which it flowed in left us floored and humbled beyond measure. The financial support provided via OpenCollective allows us to continue our work with confidence.. we have the resources we have always wanted to ensure the project’s viability long into the future..

  After getting through all the administrative work required to keep the lights on after marcan’s departure, we’ve hit the ground running with upstream patch submission. We held our first board meeting.. we must start reducing the amount of patches we’re carrying downstream. Most of what we’re carrying is stable and has been for years..

  We have submitted three new drivers upstream - the Image Signal Processor (ISP) driver, which is necessary for webcam support, and drivers for the Touchbar’s display controller and input digitiser.. both Touchbar drivers have already been accepted! Thanks to chaos_princess for taking on the responsibility of preparing and submitting all three.. Alyssa and Janne have been hard at work tidying up the GPU driver to prepare it for submission. 

  Rust for Linux abstractions are starting to be merged at a healthy pace.. every time an abstraction used by our driver is merged, we must drop our downstream version and rebase the driver atop the version accepted upstream. This is gruelling, menial, and unpleasant work, and Janne has our deepest gratitude for volunteering his time to get through it.

  We have also been working to clean up and upstream..  fixes and changes for drivers already upstreamed such as the NVMe and I2C controllers.. changes to the upstream Texas Instruments TAS2764 and TAS2770 speaker amplifier drivers.. to support the Apple-specific variants found in Apple Silicon Macs.. we found that the ASoC maintainers had already been cherry-picking some commits from our development branches!

[bigyabai]

You're welcome to hold out hope as long as you'd like, people have said that stuff since 2019. Qualcomm seems to be nose-to-grindstone right now, Nvidia's SPARK offerings ended up being more niche than expected and Microsoft is happy to go full steam ahead on x86. The status quo on PC isn't really changed with Apple Silicon, and now that the work-from-home market has died down it's not entirely clear if computing as a whole is going to respond. Add tariffs into the equation and it doesn't seem likely that ARM will be getting any new license applicants anytime soon. Nvidia might make a cheeky laptop chip just to put their GPU in a form-factor that can frustrate Apple, but the ARM market continues to stay frozen.

I'm content with my dopey $150 Thinkpad and Linux. MacOS is untenable and headed down the dark monetization path that ruined Windows a long time ago. With my Macbook I have to constantly live in fear that Apple might break my package manager, disable third-party stores, remove virtualization or depreciate 32-bit programs.

[walterbell]

> it doesn't seem likely that ARM will be getting any new license applicants anytime soon

Softbank's post-IPO business model for Arm is to move away from bespoke royalty-based licensing, standardize SoCs via a preferred partner like Mediatek, and demand a percentage of the sale price/value of final product.

Despite the lackadaisical Qualcomm Windows-on-Arm PC launch, Qualcomm has a huge pipeline in mobile and automotive, which should motivate support for Linux and virtualization with their gunyah hypervisor. Linux on Apple Silicon Macs can offer a point of reference for both macOS and non-Apple Arm PCs.

Post-apocalyptic Thinkpads are awesome resilience devices, engineering existence proofs, and inspiration for future US-manufactured computing devices.