I did run a Hackintosh back in 2015. I bought all the 100% compatible hardware, ran all the updates and firmwares from tonymacx86, etc. And even went through a couple painful upgrade cycles, until the M-chips came out....
Now, I just want a Arch-based custom dev machine, and in the era of vibe-coding self-indulgent vanity software, I can more than make up for the flows and tools I had on my mac that won't work on Linux, which isn't much.
Not only they are more powerful than comparable Apple hardware at the same hardware price point[0], they have more ports without funny dongles, and I get to use the winning combo of server and desktop OSes in market share, and industry APIs.
Yes there are more powerful Apple laptops available when money is no question, but I don't live in that world, nor am I getting into debt unless there is no way around it.
I was kind of forced onto a mac as it was the only thing that had decent-enough support or I could buy an identical new one and restore a backup on, without having to use something grey market
Allow me to doubt. Results vary between specific scenarios (gaming or other GPU intensive tasks being an obvious example), but the raw performance of Apple silicon for the price is unmatched.
Your power comes with a one or two ports, maybe a memory card reader or not, a GPU API that is only relevant thanks to iOS games, a broken keyboard that took six years to fix, an OS that even hardcore podcasts like ATP routinely complain about.
Nowadays, every time I open my work Mac, the only thing I can muster is "at least it's not Windows." And the only reason I even use one for work is that the unified memory does come in handy for compute.
What to set up?
A local business that interacts with real humans and serves a purpose in the community.
Not the answer you are looking for but this is perfectionism at play. Use anything you like well enough and seek out the task to solve instead. These are tools, you can sharpen them to work better but cutting is the task not just sharpening all the time.
I have also counterintuitivly found Arch Linux (a rolling release distro) way more stable than Ubuntu LTS. Things like sleep works, and any bugs are small and fixed quickly, bug reports are followed up on within a couple of days. With Ubuntu bug reports go without any replies from the maintainers, and maybe it will be fixed by happenstance by the next release.
Remember the 10% market share in the 1990s did not cover all the related jobs across the planet.
And now with the demise of the workstation market, some studios have switched to Windows based workstations for their audio, graphics and visual effects gear instead of dealing with thunderbolt spaghetti.
In 1991 Apple then launched QuickTime and FireWire was codified as a standard by 1995. They literally defined the software and firmware which made digital editing possible on a workstation in the 90s.
Adobe Premiere was architected around Quicktime. Avid alone held an estimated 80%+ market share in the professional broadcast, TV, and film industry and was exclusively Apple until mid-95. That's not in the US, that's Globally.
Apple then launched Final Cut and ended up capturing 49% of the U.S. professional editing market by the mid-2000s.
Here's a fun read and personal chronology
https://www.cined.com/apple-at-50-the-company-that-made-me-a...
"Throughout the early 1990s, virtually all nonlinear editing happened on Macintosh"
In Portugal, there was a single shop in Lisbon, Interlog, in the days before Internet, required driving down to Lisbon, or flying from the Islands into mainland, to get those computers, at double the price of getting PCs, Amiga or Atari instead.
This in Europe, in other continents with lower income levels, it was already good enough to get their hands on PC clones.
Poor fellows, did not had any multimedia productions. /s
Macintosh NuBus computers (the early PPC stuff running System 7.5 onwards) took over completely from TimeLine WaveFrame as Pro Tools established istself in film audio and foley work. Think Toy Story onwards, or anything in Skywalker Sound from the mid 90s.
But... why?
Like, Windows is a pile of dung, Windows 11 follows the general consumer Windows trend of "decent, braindead, decent, braindead" that we saw ever since Windows 98 (decent), ME (braindead), XP (decent), Vista (braindead), 7 (decent), 8 (braindead), 10 (decent), 11 (goddamn fucking braindead). And this time unfortunately I do not see Microsoft ever backing down.
Mainstream Linux, hardware compatibility questions aside, is nowhere near macOS in terms of functionality and usability, and completely off the charts in terms of UI polish.
"Linux on mainstream desktops" will only be a thing when someone shows up and invests like half a billion euros into UI and UX designers into the most common pieces of software - and yeets GNOME in the dustbin.
I'm kidding of course. Really looking forward to the days of the liberated mac hardware though!
That is something asahi has vowed to never enable.
https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#apples-unspok...
It might have worked out better if Apple had forbidden Linux on Apple Silicon instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law
Note, keeping competitors barely operational inside a walled garden is classic Apple policy. No other company has the goodwill inertia to pull off such stunts. =3
MacOS isn't sold anymore, it's a free download for all supported Macs - meaning Apple is not "selling one product or service as a mandatory addition to the purchase of a different product", regardless of which product you think is being tied to the other (hardware or software).
I can see where you're coming from, but Apple wouldn't necessarily be in trouble due to the wording of the law. Maybe in some countries where the spirit of a law matters more than the specific wording, but we're quoting US legal definitions here, and my mental model of the US legal system has the phrasing mattering more than the intention
See also Windows and Internet Explorer.
Ford isn't getting sued either for only selling cars with Ford motors inside.
A market is the set of goods or services that are fungible substitutes for one another. If Ford and Chevy use the same kind of battery as each other but Honda and Toyota use a different kind then "battery for Ford or Chevy" is a market and "battery for Honda or Toyota" is a different market. If they each require different kinds of battery then "battery for Ford" is a separate market from "battery for Chevy", but even within those markets there can be multiple competitors, i.e. Ford isn't necessarily the only company that makes batteries compatible with Ford vehicles.
Whereas if Ford vehicles use a different kind of battery than other vehicles and there is only one company who makes that kind of battery, "battery for Ford vehicles" would be a market in which that supplier has a monopoly, regardless of whether the one supplier is Ford or someone else.
Which one of these looks like what Apple is doing?
> Ford isn't getting sued either for only selling cars with Ford motors inside.
Ford isn't only selling cars with Ford motors inside. They offer them that way, and it's a popular purchase option, but they'll also sell anyone essentially any part of the car by itself. They also don't prohibit you from taking the engine out of your Ford and putting it in a Chevy or vice versa.
Because with that logic, every company in the world is a monopoly because every company in the world has their own niche and their own products which are different from others.
> Ford isn't only selling cars with Ford motors inside.
Ford would never sell you a car with an engine in it which isn't from them.
> They also don't prohibit you from taking the engine out of your Ford and putting it in a Chevy or vice versa.
Apple doesn't prohibit you either from ripping out the motherboard from the chassis of whatever device and putting your own stuff in there. People change batteries etc.
There are numerous companies that make bleach or wheat or ceramic bowls. Their products are completely fungible with their competitors. None of them has a monopoly on any of that.
Whereas the ones that have no viable substitutes for a particular use... have a monopoly. That's what a monopoly is. It's when you can't get something from anyone else.
That's not the same thing as having a vendor-specific part. It's pretty common that the brake pads for a particular vehicle won't fit on a car from any other make. However, that doesn't mean the OEM is the only one who makes that part. You can get Ford-specific brake pads from Duralast or Powerstop or others in addition to getting them from Ford.
> Ford would never sell you a car with an engine in it which isn't from them.
Ford has sold millions of cars with engines in them from Mazda and others.
> Apple doesn't prohibit you either from ripping out the motherboard from the chassis of whatever device and putting your own stuff in there. People change batteries etc.
They expressly prohibit you from running macOS or iOS on anyone else's hardware, and likewise prevent you from running any other OS on an iPhone.
More to the point, the EU have already slapped them with two separate $500m fines having repeatedly found that Apple used iOS and the App Store to break antitrust laws.
The US have a similar case hinging on all sorts of things ranging from green text message bubbles to heavily restricting access to the NFC API and affording to itself the privilege of host-card emulation via Apple Wallet.
A lot of things on cars are welded or otherwise very difficult for the customer to modify, and I don't think any court would have a big problem with that.
> instead of controlling a pet Linux project.
Huh? Apple does not control Asahi and never did.
I much prefer ARM over x64 and Linux/BSD over the alternative but it's a wasteland of patches and technical debt out there.
Disable tpm0 check at boot for reducing the boot from 50 seconds to 5 seconds...
Also tried LordOS very quick, very easy to install, looks and feels like macOS, but Debian distro underneath.
I also tried GhostBSD. It's easy enough to work with, but it does not have any packages for "spice-vdagent," which I needed to resize the screen size and clipboard copy/paste support between host and guest devices when using Virt Manager :(
I also imagine they will be left behind, for better or for worse as AI-authored software and hardware will satisfy people's needs faster than that developed by humans.
I don't see a way to merge these rapidly moving frontiers of software without radically different distributed software development and distribution networks where AIs collaborate on a global scale. Perhaps the only way to keep playing is to grow a "super cortex", a projection of ourselves into the digital. Like today's agents, but improved, grounded by our knowledge and understanding.
This smells a bit like Skynet. Also, Software Heaven.
I'm not sure how I feel.
And more importantly, documenting Mac hardware takes time. Components like the speaker on a Macbook can be permanently damaged if you don't write the drivers in a specific way. Other features like the Secure Enclave, power management, and TouchID might be unsupportable depending on how Apple designed it.
Asahi's stance isn't particularly crazy, and it probably aligns with how Linus feels about upstreaming code that nobody understands.
Personally I don't think it's very likely the tables would turn and Asahi became dependent upon their contributions. I foresee a much bleaker future for Omarchy, crashing and burning from some reckless and unnecessarily abrasive whim of DHH. I'm not optimistic about Gravity Linux either, it's a single-dev project and that's prone to failure for many reasons.
It is quite remarkable how far along support has come: https://aurorasilicon.org/devices/
And the way they have written that driver is absolute crap, not submimissible at all. They will need to write it from scratch, properly, using a TEE driver, a sensor driver, a userspace supplicant plumbing and an fprintd patch. What they did, instead, is they run pretty much everything in-kernel.
So, can't wait for ridiculous exploits that make your fingerprint effectively a backdoor to your OS.
That fingeprint implentation to me is a perfect example of how ignorant Omarchy people and their users are about security and I wish more people were loud about it. Just point your LLM at that TouchID code to audit it, see the amount of stuff it flags.
> It is quite remarkable how far along support has come
Is it? All I'm seeing from that page is that they forked Asahi's M1-M4 work, and then failed to bring up M5 and M6. What's remarkable here?
> Please note that installing on an M-series Mac is not directly supported at this time.
Then those distributions will fail.
It's 2026. Any open source project with an anti-AI stance will get its milkshake drunk by a fork that embraces AI. How can people still not see this?
b) being left behind is a good thing if your counterparts are headed in the wrong direction. I think projects which lean into LLMs are going to find they have a hot mess a year or two from now, whereas projects that eschewed them will be in a good place.
The primary message we get out of the AI ecosystem is "MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER".
First off, that's not really what plenty of projects are about. You might like your favourite Linux distribution or desktop environment because it represents less, as a curated vision-- an AI "workalike" could offer ten thousand new features per week, but break the earned trust that a single clear vision provided.
Second, beyond a certain point, speed burns through the human components of a software project. There are only so many reviews that can be done, whether the source is AI or enthusiastic humans. Quality eventually suffers, contributors burn out, and the project dies.
If you point a well-funded slop cannon at an unfunded open-source project, they're not going to say "let's find 20 new reviewers to keep up with the firehose of commits!" They either have to circle their wagons and get finicky about what they allow, throw up their hands about quality, or rely on the machine itself, the dreamworld where they build enough test suites and harnesses to somehow keep Microsoft Paint from having zero-days.
Given those choices, I feel like I'd be happier to see "we circled the wagons". This doesn't necessarily mean "no AI" but it means keeping the project at a manageable scale, and right now, the way to handle that is to push away AI contributions without a bulletproof background behind them.
Going even further, it's high time we saw a "slow software" movement to counter the "move fast and break things" and its new cousin "move even faster and let the bot break things for you". I want smaller programs written by happier people under less psychic and economic assault.
> "MORE MORE MORE FASTER FASTER FASTER".
Perhaps the 30+ years of non-LLM generated Linux support for UEFI/ACPI and ARM device tree chips has something to do with it.
The state of the art has changed.
It may shock you to hear that coding was never the bottleneck for emulation or reverse-engineering.
Again, any RE project that forbids AI use will get its milkshake drunk by a similar project that embraces AI.
I have no particular love for Asahi, but they've made 10x more progress than the vibe coded alternatives.
Yes, and LLMs work well for the non-coding parts too. Pointing Claude at Gravity's repos has gotten Linux running well on my M4 Pro mini, with GPU acceleration as of a few days ago. So either I'm a genius or LLMs are pretty good at this, and I'm not a genius.
You're downstream of all of those kernel and Mesa changes on Gravity.
I keep repeating myself, but make an effort to check the "state of the art" of the crap they added to their kernel tree.
You fanboy people are so insufferable, if you had any clue about the code quality standards and cared about security, YOU would see this other way.
I have personally vetted their code for TouchID and some other aspects, including USB-C/Thunderbolt.
I absolutely cannot wait to hear your apologist brown-nosing when you start getting targeted with exploits.
[1] https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/feature-support/m3/
They run other things, too. There's no valid technical reason it can't or shouldn't, and Apple deserves the scrutiny if they won't bring macOS up to parity with Linux. Modern macOS is legitimately terrible, and ~100% to blame for why Macs are shunned for HPC, on-prem and other professional applications.
If you think that laptops deserve to become e-waste when the OEM says so, then your opinion can be safely discarded.
So can yours? It's only opinions, my guy. I still have my 2015 MPB Retina. The battery is busted, one speaker gave out. Still works though. Runs Proxmox. But, it's 11 years old and it's done its fair share of tours of duty. I got my $ worth.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
I'm sorry that you're absorbed in your fantasy, but it's not my job to accommodate it.
They run other things, too
What other things outside of containers or iPad apps?
You're part of a minority.
> What other things outside of containers or iPad apps?
Linux with fully native Vulkan drivers, for one.
Apple eventually stops OEM support for Macs, which means that support via an alternative operating system is a foremost imperative.
> It’s just not true that most Mac users use Macs because the hardware is better designed. They’re Mac users because of the Mac OS. What the original cloning program showed was that many of Apple’s customers were Mac fans, not Apple fans.
https://daringfireball.net/2006/04/asinine_and_or_risky_idea...
I had several Mac laptops over the decade that followed, but ultimately ended up back on a Windows 11 workstation with heavy WSL usage and a NUC and Thinkpad X1 both running Ubuntu in supporting roles.
So almost by accident, my time as a Mac user overlapped perfectly with the Intel era.
Maybe we can say that they’re still the best, but it’s not 2x better like 2020, it’s more like 10-20% better.
For example, Panther Lake beats M5 battery life in real laptops available on the market, GPU performance, and multicore performance.
Just look at Marques Brownlee’s review of the Framework 13 Pro. Or the review of the ThinkPad X9 15p from Just Josh Tech.
I see this mistake all the time where there’s an assumption that MacBooks are still far and away the best without looking at more up-to-date information and evaluating current competition.
What you’re saying is true, but if your workflow involves graphics at all, Apple’s Max chips are subpar compared to getting a laptop with an Nvidia discrete GPU (e.g., 2026 ASUS Zephyrus G16).
For the Mac chips to make sense you have to specifically need very high CPU performance, be running local AI workflows (which you can do with cloud subscriptions for less money and better results, or you have alternatives like RTX Spark that cost roughly the same as MacBook Pro alternatives), and not want to play games (see gaming benchmarks on multi-platform native games like Cyberpunk 2077, high end Macs get walloped by mid-range discrete GPUs in laptops).
In short, I imagine that 90%+ of MacBook Pro buyers are buying the base M chip or at most the Pro chip, and those SKUs have much more competition.
A Mac is more of a good laptop for your employer than for you and me.
Marques’ Framework 13 Pro review was much more of a layperson’s review with a focus on overall user experience.
See, this is the problem, Mac enthusiasts refuse to do research, even when people point them in the right direction. They just want to believe their computers are the best and never shop competition.
I didn’t swap my M2 MacBook Pro because I didn’t like my Mac, I swapped it because it found a better solution for my needs.
I just got a new-to-me Android phone and told AI to use adb to debloat and install the custom APKs that I normally run.
https://github.com/aurora-silicon/linux/discussions/142 https://aurorasilicon.org/devices/?device=j873s https://x.com/JoshuaSWarren/status/2118331083330629847
It is coming along impressively fast, one of the developers has a goal "full support on the M5 Max by Thanksgiving here in the US (November 26th)." https://x.com/JoshuaSWarren/status/2118375325805547666
Asahi Linux has great support for M1/M2, or so I heard.
And. It. Sucks.
It's a terrible, shitty experience.
> your ipad as a remote display for your mac
I loved that thing. Light, easy to take anywhere, battery life for days. I once caught someone snooping over my shoulder trying to see if it was really running OS X. Used it for years.
There are now Switch 2 emulators that can run any dumped game on PC/Mac etc. https://emulation.gametechwiki.com/index.php/Nintendo_Switch...
Most Switch 2 games are getting dumped, including the just released Ocarina of Time Remake https://imagepaste.org/i/kx5c925r.png
As I mentioned in my comment there is a native Switch code compiler for Mac, so not emulation https://github.com/seedds/nxnative
I'll believe that when there's an open ecosystem of state-of-the-art ARM (or RISC-V) devices based on industry consortiums reference specs. Until then, it's device trees all the way down or waiting for Qualcomm to get their Linux shit together. Yeah, didn't think so.
Is there a use-case now? I don't know. Linux has made serious strides in part thanks to very user-friendly distros like Ubuntu. People may have individual grievances and I don't want to downplay those, but we're not dealing with oddball Shrike issues anymore.
Apple should seriously consider allowing their OS to be used independently of the hardware, especially the build tools, the server stuff (whatever is left of it, not a market they had a big part to play in anyway). But, it is unlikely of them to do this.
Well done nonetheless. I think it is more likely that the old PowerPC-MacOS-on-Wii will be more stable long term than any of these new releases.
Edit: I'll also add: I am questioning what value MacOS itself has, the raw OS and kernel stuff. Linux, BSD and Windows each have their own -isms which are curiosities that one can, and should, consider as pros and cons. People might say "Windows is bad", and I agree, Win 11 experience as a daily driver is god awful. But the kernel and OS itself is something else. I don't know if MacOS has any of that "meat" that we can look at and say it's worth looking deeper into.
Given Apple's recent trajectory and custom silicon, I can only imagine that the stability of these AI-assisted ports be even worse than it was back in the x86 days. These are neat demos, but nothing I would want to seriously run in any capacity.
Really the hardware is most of the point of buying a Mac, since Apple somehow continues to be the only people making laptops which aren't dogshit. A Hackintosh gives you the worst of both worlds, I don't get it except as a technical curiosity like running Doom on your toaster.
They were also quite stable if one selected their hardware for it and adhered to best practices. My custom built i6700k hackintosh tower was solid and quiet and expandable.
Yes there’s also Linux but if one enjoys macOS as a desktop, there’s precious little in the Linux world for you. Most DEs are windows-like, and though GNOME and Pantheon share a few qualities with macOS the resemblance is skin deep at best.
But that hasn't -really- held up. MacOS burned a lot of the "Creative" class that Steve Jobs used to market to early on. While there are still plenty of designers that use MacOS, the market is more fragmented now since the design tools are more Web-based and less Desktop-based. Audio tools have become more cross platform as well.
CI and build farms
You can run a vintage Mac today with a BlueSCSI and a 32GB microSD card and get a computing experience far snappier than any modern hardware.
If you're at all curious, you can start here [1] with John Siracusa's famous piece on the Finder.
Yes, I remember that article, doesn't mean everyone likes spatial Finder abilities.
Of course, with AI coding agents you might not notice that the windows code base has mountains of hacks and is a mess, while the macOS codebase took half the tokens to develop and is much smaller.
Assuming full hardware compatibility (which I know we're not yet at), there's a bunch of laptops out there today with better feature sets than any sub $1800 macbook.
Being able to dual-boot macOS and linux on a lightweight OLED laptop with a nicer keyboard would be extremely useful. This is before even factoring in the upcoming years of likely substantial hardware advancements in the laptop market. Laptops still have a long way to go before we reach peak laptop.
More secure than windows, more supported for bank apps etc than Linux and with most of the same software and looks amazing as a media center pc haha
Became Linux for servers , hackintosh for everything else lol
