The Forgetful CPU (Linux on M4)
yuka.devNot related to this but the other day I was searching for a good external trackpad that would work with macOS and there are very few (and not good) and every discussion was about how nothing comes close to Apple magic trackpad. The question is why can't other companies create such a good trackpad for macOS, it turns out they can't because the whole protocol for touchpad/gestures etc are proprietary and closed on macOS side so essentially any 3rd party trackpad has to emulate a mouse device. Thats what you get when a company makes computer and its OS and also its accessories and also software services, the whole stack, you either use their whole thing or not.
This is not true. It’s not about protocol or touchpad etc. Apple is just ahead of everyone else when it comes to user experience. Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft and a whole lot of other companies have not been able to replicate Apple’s trackpad for their own devices. Why not?
Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.
Apple is fucking huge! It's like the biggest (and probably most valuable) consumer electonics brand.
Just a few short years ago apple was the most valuable company period.
How big do you want them to become?
Also, how much bigger will open harware really make them? How many people really care about linux on a mac?
Apple is a vertical company. They don’t WANT to sell you hardware. They don’t want to sell you software.
They only want to sell the whole package. You might as well ask the Catholic Church to start a rap music 8-track only record club. Same probability.
The hardware is a means to an end, and nothing else to them.
Nuvia started because a few Apple engineers wanted to make server CPUs and sell them. Apple management didn’t want to do it so they left and started their own company. They were acquired by Qualcomm.
There are talks of John Ternus potentially selling Apple Silicon for server and AI use.
https://www.macrumors.com/2026/09/16/apple-may-return-to-ser...
And how are Nuvia folks going for their server dreams?
Cause neither Apple is bringing back OS X Server, nor Qualcom is that great on server space, other than now maybe with their Modular acquisition.
Nuvia cores are beating stock Arm cores in benchmarks so far. It seems like a pretty good acquisition for Qualcomm.
They are releasing a server cpu soon I believe. It’s called Dragonfly C1000.
Pretty much soon. Nuvia's design has been incorporated into 8 Elite and X Elite/Plus series. It was generational leaps ahead of 8 Gen 3, where 8 Elite is already close to Apple M1.
I'm looking for a cheap 8 Elite phone to root it and run a special kernel module that let me run LXC containers and run arbitrary Linux ARM64 program. And run a couple of services on it, maybe I can port Kubernetes whatsoever
Oh, I’m sure they exist. There’s Christian versions of any genre you can think of. That’s partly why I ended up adding in the 8-track part, to make it more ridiculous.
Maybe I should have made it Mongolian gangster rap.
That has to exist, right? Especially a rap genre - gotta stay hip with the kids to save them from Satan's influence.
But Apple could make a lot of money selling Linux servers with their CPUs.
Why would they want to? They make even more money selling their own computers with their CPUs.
The Server market is enormous with a much higher average selling price. It would make perfect sense for Apple to make servers if it meant more revenue and profit than they could make not doing it. There are rumors that Apple is planning a M8 based server in 2029.
Apple tried to address the server market 20 years ago during the PowerPC days (and later Intel). Their Xserves were really well designed machines and worked well. And yes, they also ran Linux (Yellowdog, IIRC).
It failed.
But I think that they learned something really valuable. As a company, they don’t have a good understanding the server market or how to sell to it. Their premium product style just didn’t have a place in the race to the bottom server market.
We had two in my grad school lab that we used as web servers. But that was the problem - it was a premium designed product that wasn’t any better of a web server than a plain (cheaper) Dell 1U box.
Maybe things would be different now that they have a really unique chip. ARM as a whole ecosystem has more buy-in from other companies than PowerPC did. Their performance per watt and GPU design might make more of a difference this time around.
But I can’t see Apple being able to release and sell a data center centric server. I think others might have a better chance.
The extremely important difference is that now Apple has some of the best CPUs in the world.
Apple CPUs are good except most of server workloads benefit more from 128+ core monsters and not just fewer better cores.
MacOS is not a server OS either and actually maturing M* support in Linux will take years. And for inference Nvidia is years ahead of Apple.
So best Apple can hope for is some niche market.
If Apple cared about the server market, they would have added syncookies into their TCP stack. Seems like they should have done it during the time of Xserve... it would have been somewhat straightforward to pull it in from upstream BSD back then. But they still haven't (last I checked).
Apple doesn't have the business to business support organization to make this kind of thing work either.
Apple also has no api to write a fast server.
Libdispatch is a burden to use for a server because of its book keeping overhead, and their history with kqueue makes it hard to convince someone to use it.
If Apple can create one of the best CPUs in the world they can create and support a server that uses it.
The rumors are that it’s for internal use. It’s already known that they have custom M2 or M3 servers that they don’t sell to the public. Source: multiple episodes of the Accidental Tech Podcast that discuss articles about this.
And it makes a ton of sense in that context. I don’t think it makes any sense as a commercial product.
A mega-AI workstation could.
But server? Nah.
Lol they don't even have tun tap in the kernel, can't even host VMs properly without extra setup or hacks
That's a helluva rumor. Apple tried b2b with Xserve, back in the day, but didn't have the stomach for it.
That’s because they tried integration with the rest of their SW ecosystem.
If they just did motherboards with cpu/ram/pcie and let other OEMs build complete systems the story would be very different
That still doesn’t overcome the issue that they are selling every single one they can already. They have no need for additional chip sales.
All the capacity at all the fabs is booked up for years. They can’t make more if they want to.
So any hypothetical sales of OEM style guts would only cut into the number of Macs they can sell to existing customers. And there’s no way they would ever do that.
> They have no need for additional chip sales.
Higher margins?
Servers need a lot of RAM. Apple can either make 42 iPhones with 12GB or one server with 512GB RAM.
42 people with iPhone will buy airpods, some subscriptions and apps. They also be vendor locked into Apple ecosystem and almost guaranteed to bring more iPhone sale in 3 years.
Apple must be dumb to canibalize their own market.
They tried it with various open systems that allowed licensed powerpc clones of their systems and they ended it because it reduced their profits as people bought the clones instead of mac hardware. I don't see them redoing that anytime soon.
Also in that case they didn’t even own the hardware. They were IBM chips. They just had a reference design and a BIOS.
With the Xserve, all Apple had to sell was repackaged Intel systems—with an Apple markup. They had nothing special to offer on the hardware side.
Now they have Apple Silicon.
It really isn't that great when comparing against server systems.
I think most people here never seen the inside of sliding pizza boxes on server racks, really seeing them.
If they sell every CPU they can make there’s not much headroom to make more
Mentioning a church in this context, we know what had to be done.
I fail to see how that adds to the discussion. Is there a point I’m missing?
Or is this just “punch buggy” for Wikipedia references.
The “information wants to be free” folks worship at that altar.
They would be bankrupt, if you actually knew Apple history would you have known they once upon a time tried exactly that.
Also we already have the PC clones with WinIntel for the alternative experience.
Support Linux OEMs if you care.
It's funny how it was the macOS that everyone wanted to run on non-Apple hardware, starting with the Sony Vaio rumour, ending with the Hackintosh.
Now it's the other way round.
Define big. They're one of the biggest companies in history. You're saying that if they appealed to 1% of the market that already uses Macs... what? And then they have to support these users?
A small percentage very loyal and very loud customer base has been the success ingredient of Apple for decades
And it wasn't enough, they got very lucky with NeXT reverse acquisition.
Is the hardware so much better, or is their integration superior? macOS can be bloated but still more efficient, right?
I mean, the "so much better" in my experience is really the battery life.
They are the only laptop company who makes a fanless laptop that never gets hot to touch with long batery life. I'm still on my m1 air with the smallest configuration you could get at the time. Yet it's somehow capable of matching my T14 i7 with 32gb og ram for most of the work I do, and it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off. To be fair my t14 is a corporate windows machine, so it's not like it's a fair fight.
I'd love to replace it with something like a framework or a tuxedo, but they all get hot to touch. Maybe I'm in the minority, but a laptop not heating up when you turn it on is one of the most important things for it. It doesn't matter much for work, because it'll sit in a dock anyway, but I rarely use my m1 air at a table.
I was required to use a Macbook Air in my last job. I hated small things like the window management, the keyboard lack of delete, home, etc keys. There were ways to work around this. Cold aluminium in an aircon office though was no fun, and the keyboard lacked travel.
For I came from almost a decade on Debian. I had become used to the ways of GNOME, I enjoyed GNOME 3 even and had no gripes about systemd.
Now I am in Windowsland. This is hell. I have no filesystem and cloud works the exact opposite way it should pretending we all see the same thing. I cannot email an attachment without closing - why is this? The concept of a shared folder has changed to everyone sharing their 'personal drives' while having no user-facing audit on what is shared with whom and via what link. Somehow a 4-digit pin is as authorative as a password to everything but a network printer that demands passwordy login. At the sane time, windows lacks handy preset printing like mac or linux - its there but buried, like everything in windows, thus not handy. The sleep key wakes the laptop and bypasses all login security. Copilot cannot be turned off unless done so by an organisation admin. At the same time, trusty fallback productivity tools like VBA fail as there is no filesystem - productivity workers are cripled using their 'everything looks like a nail if all I have is a windows hammer tool'. Teams still isn't as good for simple chat as Windows Communicator was a decade and a half ago and there isn't another option in the windows stable in sight. A 10th gen Intel chip gets overpowered by this all every hour or two. Possibly triggered by Adobe Acrobat - software that no one needs - trying to install a further part itself again.
Corporate Windows is a horror. How did it get so bad?
Using Windows since 3.1, UNIX since Xenix, introduced to Mac OS on LC II.
That looks like a corporation problem.
Are you sure about ESC? I looked at MacBook Air pictures on DDG, and they all had an escape key in the upper left. I've never seen a Mac without one. If you're using it for VI, Ctrl-[ is also ESC (and avoids stretching your fingers).
For delete, if you mean delete-under instead of delete-before (what the key labelled "delete" does), Fn-Delete is delete-under.
Home/End are either Cmd-Up/Down (doc begin/end) or Opt-Up/Down (line begin/end) (I haven't used a PC in a while, so I can't remember what Home/End do)
On a Mac keyboard, Home is Fn+Left arrow, End is Fn+Right arrow, Page up is Fn+Up arrow and Page down is Fn+Down arrow, and as you said, Delete is Fn+Backspace. The Fn key is at the bottom left of the Mac keyboard, which is diametrically opposed to the top right position of the Backspace key. You need to use your two hands to produce any of these combinations. Also, the arrow keys are half the size of the other keys.
Obviously, this is not a problem for most Mac users. Personally, I've used a MacBook Pro for more than a decade, and I eventually found that so annoying that I bought an external keyboard with full size arrow keys and dedicated Del, Home, End, PgUp, PgDn keys.
Most of that sounds like trivial misconfiguration and printer compatibility problems.
In other words, things that you would have had to touch in Linux too, but because they didn't work at all, here work but until configured, do not work like you'd want them to.
I'm fortunate enough to have WSL so I frankly do everything in bash. I am also in control of the Intune endpoint exceptions for development machines, to make sure they are allowed to run stuff like cargo, but it has the advantage of letting me remove my devices from the Adobe Acrobat group.
It's still hilarious when defender does it's thing and the fan goes mach 1, or when the firmware updater force reboots in the middle of a meeting after you've clicked the 10 minute extend two times.
It is what it is. I'm sure we'd figure out a way to make enterprise IT horrible on any OS.
> it does it without getting hot or having it's fan sound like it's a fighter jet taking off.
I have an M4 MacBook Pro. It gets hot. The fan kicks in, and it gets noisy. I can't say whether it is T14 noisy since I never heard one. As for the cool and fanless MacBook Air, my understanding is that Apple is quite aggressive with thermal throttling. That's perfectly acceptable, even desirable, under some workloads. Under other workloads, it is not.
There is no doubt that it throttles. For the most part I don't notice. I've build a rust SDK around apache arrow which produces Typescript, Python and Go interactions with our datalake. Compiling that is rather slow. It'll take 5-10 minutes on myh corporate pc vs the 15–30 minutes on the air. Whenever I absolutely have to work on it on myh mac I'll usually end up letting Azure DevOps spend it's 30-60 minutes while I do something else.
Try a Mac with corporate spyware installed. My company issued M2 pro was draining the battery in 3 hours while being super hot and noisy.
I think eventually they pushed a spyware update that improved a bit the situation but not by a lot.
Meanwhile my personal M1 Pro had truly full day battery life.
That is the thing, all corporate laptops suck regardless of the OS.
Unless one is lucky to work for small to medium size companies whose organisation hasn't yet grown to such politics and processes, with certifications, IT tickets for admin actions, and so on.
That was the case with the M1 indeed. Subsequent releases have been allowed to consume more power. My M5 Pro gets too hot to use on my lap when full out compiling or playing games.
To be fair. I can also make my m1 air hot if try playing civilization 7 on it. Compiling doesn't make it hot though, but it's not exactly fast.
Same here. Have a Base M1 Air. Will trade that for M7 Base Air maybe if I can drag this one for a while. I can't go back to computers with noisy fans. It seems too last generation since the M1 launched.
I really do not know when I will replace my five year old M1 Pro. I'm not even starting to begin to get to the point where I start thinking about replacing this thing which I'm frankly astonished by.
I think the interesting part of that sort of success is that if/when this thing will start to lose a step (local inference would be cool, 16GB of RAM is starting to get a little tight, especially for rust builds and agentic programming), I really have no serious qualms about spending $5000+ on its replacement.
On a base M1 air, running local inference (non tool calling).
please share your setup
LM Studio Qwen 2.5 7B Instruct (Q4_K_M GGUF) with metal offloading
The Intel period of MacBooks allowed a more direct comparison. Don't think macOS itself is the differentiator vs Windows.
But vs Linux, well even Linux on a non-Apple laptop tends to mean screwed up power management. The display system might be less efficient too, depending whether it's X11 or Wayland, and idk which one is the good one.
A significant portion of the Apple Silicon efficiency gains would have come from shifting away from discrete GPUs. At that time it was very normal for the integrated GPU to be minimal (slow) because people who need it get a discrete GPU. Things are very different now because we push far more onto the GPU now vs. back then, which made Intel and AMD scale them up out of uselessness. Now most people don't really need a discrete GPU because the integrated ones are fast enough to even handle some gaming.
The majority(?) of Intel MacBooks didn't have dGPUs though. That was a higher-end option on the larger models. I also vaguely remember there being a big leap in iGPU performance with Intel Iris around 2013. I had a high-end MBP from work and wished I could perma disable the dGPU, cause I didn't need it and it just made the thing get hot.
But yeah, the remaining people who needed dGPUs can now just use the integrated AS graphics, so they'll notice an even bigger difference.
Skimming Wikipedia it looked like you get discrete graphics unless you have a MacBook Air or 13-inch MacBook Pro. A higher-end option, yes, but probably the more likely one that people actually had here.
And yes, Intel Iris was a good leap forward for their iGPUs at the time! But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Oh yeah, I was thinking of 2015 and earlier. They used to have "IG" and "DG" models. https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2015.h... And I never wanted the 2016-2020 ones because of all the issues, so my personal MBP was a 2015 model until like 2024.
> But I don't see any models with Iris and a dGPU, so if you got a model with the dGPU then you would be switching between a potato iGPU and the dGPU.
Dang, didn't notice until you pointed it out. So it's a really good thing I got the 13".
I will deal with everything I dislike about MacOS for laptops that never cook my lap and never, ever, ever randomly turn on full power while in my bag
That is my exact take - new Mac Book Pro M5. Love the battery, like the hardware quality, don't care at all for the rest of it. MacOS is annoying.
nice that you can simply run your favorite OS (virtualized)
their single core perf is just much better than anyone else
Not just single core perf though. Very efficient idle TDP, efficient all core boost, efficient all core TDP, and efficient mid-high performance tier accelerator (GPU, NPU) TDP.
And the benchmarks seem to understate this. That i9-9001THIKK doesn't matter when it thermal throttles a few seconds into a task. Are they testing these laptops inside freezers or something?
They also seem to have the biggest memory pool attached to a GPU at a “reasonable“ price don’t they? There’s a reason people really want Mac Studios.
Apple is one of the biggest companies on earth. If every single person on earth who wanted to use Desktop Linux were to buy the most expensive Apple sells to do that, the revenue would not be material relative to Apple's existing size. Please exit your bubble.
Weird to buy machine with company actively hostile to anything open to run open stuff
Is Apple taking steps to purposefully blocking open stuff, or are they just pointedly ignoring it and continuing to develop new hardware? I am genuinely asking, I don't know myself.
edit: speaking mostly about macOS here, mobile OSes are much more locked down
For desktops and laptops, the latter. But for phones and tablets they do not want user control. And even where they do allow it, even a tiny effort in hardware documentation that would make it so much easier never happens. So it's quite hostile overall.
Yep, good point. Their mobile OSes are annoyingly locked down, that is for sure...
The fact that they still allow this would point towards the latter. They are quite capable of locking it down like they do the iPhones.
And I suspect they will lock it down in a year or two.
It was only really open to ease the transition between intel and arm.
Give it up. People have been predicting this for 15 years.
You can’t have a development machine locked down like iOS. As long as the Mac is the development machine at apple it will need to be able to run arbitrary code.
It will still run arbitrary code... Within macos...
But they'll remove support for other OS's
What support? Asahi had to fight to exist, especially early on when they essentially had to reimplement much of the graphics pipeline. And now its in mainline linux - short of a complete hostile lockdown of the bootloader, it’s not like they support other OS’s very much as is.
The company making locked down laptops is Google.
I mean it'd be pretty easy for Apple to just make a special version of the OS/bootloader/whatever for their internal use
They could. They won't. Macs will never be bootloader locked, on that I'm confident.
It’s the latter
Because it works, and it works well.
I had a bad experience with my Lenovo laptop. It had a firmware issue that caused the trackpad to become unresponsive after suspend and Lenovo never fixed it.
Made the laptop miserable to use, so I went for a MacBook instead which wouldn't have such an obvious issue be unfixed because Apple has so few SKUs to support.
Also went for it in part because I do not like Windows and macOS typically would save me when Linux support was lacking. Just had to hope for a quick port of Asahi Linux to become (unfortunately didn't happen for my M3, but thankfully it's been progressing recently).
You want a butterfly keyboard?
Show me the butterfly keyboard on MacBook less than 6 years old?
I think you might be forgetting where you are. They call it "Hacker News" for a reason.
Yep. There's a post somewhere here about someone running Mac OS X on a Nintendo Wii. That's closed software on closed hardware.
I wonder if AI could make this work? Have there been any attempts to have AI do the work needed?
AFAIK the M4 and M6 reverse engineering is AI-assisted.
So we get a good article finally on someone actually doing impressive hacking and the response is “give it up, let AI“?
Where is the challenge or the fun or feeling of accomplishment in that?
From a hacker's perspective, yeah the feeling of accomplishment in figuring out something manually is great. But from the end user's perspective, if I get to choose between "shit ain't working" vs "it's working flawlessly but AI was involved in getting there", I'm picking the latter every single time.
reaching the goal is what matters. I never understood people who don't get satisfaction from getting there. I don't care that AI writes the code.
It's not an unsympathetic position. macOS' current direction is controversial; many people want an alternative. They see Linux less as a hacking curiosity and more of an escape hatch.
Even with years of excellent, tireless reverse-engineering, Asahi's power management for M1 is not on-par with macOS, let alone what AMD/Intel chipsets get on Linux day-1. It's just inevitable that the hacking efforts will fragment into a fast-and-loose vs slow-and-steady mentality. And both of them will be equally right, since there is no official support for any of this hardware.
I get why someone may use AI to try to speed things up. Let’s put aside if that would even be useful at that point on the M4
I don’t understand complaining someone who spent their own time doing something isn’t using AI instead.
Is it all that different from asking why someone painted something when AI could generate an image of a painting for you?
It probably wasn’t intended as such but the sentiment that comes across to me is “why did you bother?”
There are certainly people who would always be anti-AI. But there are a lot of people like me who continually bristle at how an AI booster seems to show up in every discussion implicitly implying you’re dumb for wasting your time by not using it.
You know how people got really sick really fast on HN of people asking “why not Rust” on any discussion vaguely related to programming no matter how little it made sense? Or “A blockchain would fix that”?
Yeah. That. Again.
> Is it all that different from asking why someone painted something when AI could generate an image of a painting for you?
I don't agree. In this case it's asking AI to analyze the high-res photos of Van Gogh to learn what paint he used, what techniques, how he held his pencil and how did his strokes look like.
Sure, you could then also ask to paint one for you in similar style, but that's not what is being suggested here.