> The defacto industry standard for audio ICs is I²S, an I²C-based bus optimised for audio data.
Nit: I²S has nothing to do with I²C.
(Most I²S chips also have an I²C interface since I²S only carries raw audio data, no sideband like volume control or clock configuration. But that's a separate interface and can also be SPI rather than I²C. In fact, SPI is more closely related to I²S than I²C is.)
Apple could also support open standards like UEFI/dt/acpi. Asahi uses lots of workarounds (including pretending to be MacOS) to be even able to boot the linux kernel. This would projects such as Asahi a lot easier and more reliable.
These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day. That's a valiant effort and they're doing it wonderfully. Regardless, one of the points of Linux is to install it on as much hardware as possible. Do you think people that managed to get it installed on iPods, PS5s, Wiis, Chromebooks, routers, Nintendo Switches, etc. should all stop just because they're doing something unsupported? Most of those cases were met with friction by the original OEM. If anything, Apple has been pretty laissez faire about the whole thing compared to Nintendo and Sony who will ban your console if you hack it.
They are upstreaming their patches, so upstream Linux will eventually get the necessary drivers.
Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.
They've actually been focusing on upstreaming for what feels like 2 years now. It's really slowed down progress but it's important for the longevity of the project. They still have so much left to upstream but little by little it's happening
I can’t see that being a bad thing considering that the kernel is mandatory software in the Linux world. You would want to have high standards for what gets added.
It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.
It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this. The goodwill/brand marketing alone is worth their comp, and it will absolutely move units as well. Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.
They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?
AFAIK Apple’s “services” revenue is a little over a quarter of their total; everything else is hardware, dominated by the iPhone. Mac hardware is <10% of total revenue.
iPhones are largely locked to their App Store so no risk there. Macs (currently) aren’t locked to the App Store - and I’d guess that Mac App Store usage is middling as a result.
Which is to say, I doubt that a marginal Mac App Store revenue hit from a small proportion of users switching to Linux over MacOS is the driver for not supporting Linux development. I’d guess it’s more about an inflexible company culture and maybe not wanting to extend their area of responsibility and risk.
Revenue wise, the services part is not that large. Profit-wise, though, I don't believe the same is true. Their 30% cut is barely costing them anything compared to manufacturing hardware and physical logistics.
I don't think the Mac App Store is going to get to iPhone levels of lock-down soon, but Apple thinks in ecosystems, not just in laptops. If you have an iMac, you probably have an iPhone, and you're probably going to buy an iPad should you ever want a tablet.
If they wanted, they could open source all of the drivers necessary to boot an OS as part of their Darwin core, but they choose not to. That actually breaks with their older, more open development style. I guess they just don't see the benefit of being open any longer.
Yeah probably they want to be free to bork it, but if they released some documentation or patches, they'd be expected to keep them up to date and working at the very least.
>Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.
You do realize that Apple is a public company and one can just go look at their financials like their latest 10-Q [0] right? For the most recent 6 month half (ending March 28 2026) I'm seeing $194 billion for product sales and $61 billion for service sales. The gross margins are certainly higher on services, at 77%, but 40% product margins are nothing to sneeze at either, and the disparity in absolute sales means the absolute dollar gross margins are $77 billion for products vs $46 billion for services.
So I don't see how you can assert that their "big money maker is their app store" from those numbers. Hardware matters a lot, and furthermore Apple sells services (like AppleCare+) that are specific to hardware and thus even a Linux user might still be interested in.
And without their hardware, their services would evaporate. There is a much tighter link there than with many companies. So they're on the hook for continued R&D and capex on that no matter what, you can't really separate that out, and in turn it's always going to be useful to have more volume to amortize it with.
I think primarily it comes down to corporate DNA, which is powerful. There are plenty of Mac hardware, software and service markets in pro/business/enterprise Apple has neglected or abandoned over the years, including ones making oodles of money, not out of any 4D chess but just because it doesn't fit them as an organization.
Apple's profit margins on many services are at 76% (according to Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/01/13/apples-de...), over twice that of their hardware sales. Margins are higher on reselling licensed content (their Spotify and Netflix alternatives), but their customer base for those is still rapidly growing according to their 2025 report.
If there was a Linux Apple App Store, I would buy stuff from it. I already buy from Steam. OSS doesn't have the answer to everything. Boutique software has value that people are willing to pay for.
Linux applications are being sold. In fact, GPL-licensed applications get sold, so it's not even the OSS part that's holding you back. ElementaryOS even has its optionally-paid app store: https://appcenter.elementary.io/ Autodesk and other industrial software providers are quite happy to sell you software, though unfortunately not through a unified app store.
In practice, I expect a paid Linux app store to go down about as well as the Microsoft Store has. Especially now, in the age of vibecoding.
Food for thought: Apple’s services make more revenue than Macs and iPads combined, and they do so at a higher profit margin. There’s your answer.
I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable.
Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system.
CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.
And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding.
But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that.
I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you.
There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.
I checked a 16” framework last week comparing to the 24/48GiB MBP. The ssd is significantly faster, the RAM is almost twice as fast, the CPU has more cores. The only benefit is having a dedicated gpu. At more or less the same price.
Admittedly, the screen ratio is better with the framework. But prefer the matte screen of the MacBook.
The battery life stinks, the build quality is subpar and the fan runs all the time. If you don't care about anything that makes the MacBook Pro a premium device, then sure you can be overpriced consumer-grade slop that has a slight edge in specs (except CPU). But it's a miserable trade-off.
Never thought I'd think about switching from Apple. M1 was handsdown the best buy ever and I was sure my next laptop would be an Apple as well. But looking at framework, this looks really nice. Apple-ish but without some of the drawbacks (also, while windows stinks, not really a MacOS fanboy tbh). Makes me kinda regret I was lazy and locked myself in using Apple passwords app.
Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store.
Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.
My father purchased a new MacBook just in time to avoid the recent price increase. It wasn't because his old one didn't work anymore; it was because Apple wouldn't support it on more recent macOS versions, and some applications he runs daily (like Teams) don't work anymore on the latest supported macOS for that MacBook. Apple is an hardware company, and forcing you to upgrade your hardware gives them revenue. Admittedly, his MacBook lasted longer than many other laptops would have. But, if it wasn't for the outdated OS, he would have been happy to keep using it because the hardware was still fine for office use.
Depends on the point of view, as it is Apple not supporting that MacBook anymore, and Microsoft could have a point in not supporting macOS versions that Apple doesn't want to support anymore. You could even argue that he forced the update on himself, since the web version still worked. The point remains that somehow without upgrading the hardware some software he uses everyday doesn't work anymore.
I would put it squarely on Microsoft in this case. They decided to make their software not function anymore. Why not let older Teams clients still function and communicate with the newer?
Apple still pushes updates and security updates to OS versions which are not the latest. So I don't see how they can be blamed much here.
That's over 10 years of service. But if it's a Pro, then the latest OS officially supported is Monterey, which received its last update in 2024. So I would consider that very fair of Apple, even impressive.
It is fair if you compare Apple with other manufacturers, but it is still unfair in absolute terms. The hardware still works, and the work they're doing to support other models would let macOS work on that laptop as well, as proven by tools that let you do the upgrade unofficially.
Their amazing laptop hardware pushes you into their ecosystem. Once you're on macOS, might as well get iphone rather than Android and benefit from the synergy, same for airpods or the apple watch.
The only reason I'd see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.
Why do you think that Apple doesn’t have developers internally that develops Linux for their own chips?
They obviously have a ton of people developing with linux and even asahi, else they wouldn’t been able to make adjustments in their uefi to shape the support of 3rd party OSes exactly how they wanted.
As apple no longer develop their own servers (OS), they even run some internal ”production” system on Linux, on their own hardware.
Nobody gets promoted for building open-source software at corpos. It is allowed, at best, not condoned. So what manager is going to go for this? Let's dedicate our limited resources to gratuitous goodwill work. Carrer suicide, I expect. Unfortunately.
How would you fit Red Hat in this picture? I think the situation could be different, if it is about improving some software the company is using for its business. Not that this happens often, but I think the possibility to persuade managment that improving a piece of software crucial for the company's business is there.
Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups.
Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value.
And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.
> It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this.
Why should they when they have macOS already?
> Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
How many people who buy Apple silicon laptops do it to run Linux on it? less than 10,000 or 20,000 people?
You should not expect Apple to care about what Linux users want. The closest you are getting from them is being able to boot a custom OS or kernel.
Everything else from the drivers to the secure enclave they do not care.
see homebrew, they could have made this an official thing but no, they prefer to let people work do their work for them and sleep on their mattress of cash
Nit: I²S has nothing to do with I²C.
(Most I²S chips also have an I²C interface since I²S only carries raw audio data, no sideband like volume control or clock configuration. But that's a separate interface and can also be SPI rather than I²C. In fact, SPI is more closely related to I²S than I²C is.)
And I'm not even talking about drivers
I think the last time I used an RPM-based distro was almost 2 decades ago.
Though their kernel fork is (obviously) open source, so there's nothing stopping you from taking a Debian aarch64 roots, build your own Asahi kernel (or take the build from Fedora), and set up Debian on these machines with Debian yourself. Just requires some elbow grease.
Or, if you find Ubuntu acceptable, there's Ubuntu Asahi: https://ubuntuasahi.org/
EDIT: After some googling I found this wiki article: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/Apple/M1
They’re working hard on upstreaming everything exactly so it’s easier for any distribution to be ported.
1- https://ubuntuasahi.org/
https://voidlinux.org/download/#arm%20platforms
It's a regular package of linux in the distro: https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/tree/master/srcp...
Will it ultimately be manually loading a build into specific hardware each time, or is there a level of automation that can be done here?
It allows you to do some remote control and automation for kernel loading and debugging where you get a very thin layer in between the real hardware and the kernel, without affecting the hardware I/O behaviour.
They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?
iPhones are largely locked to their App Store so no risk there. Macs (currently) aren’t locked to the App Store - and I’d guess that Mac App Store usage is middling as a result.
Which is to say, I doubt that a marginal Mac App Store revenue hit from a small proportion of users switching to Linux over MacOS is the driver for not supporting Linux development. I’d guess it’s more about an inflexible company culture and maybe not wanting to extend their area of responsibility and risk.
I don't think the Mac App Store is going to get to iPhone levels of lock-down soon, but Apple thinks in ecosystems, not just in laptops. If you have an iMac, you probably have an iPhone, and you're probably going to buy an iPad should you ever want a tablet.
If they wanted, they could open source all of the drivers necessary to boot an OS as part of their Darwin core, but they choose not to. That actually breaks with their older, more open development style. I guess they just don't see the benefit of being open any longer.
You do realize that Apple is a public company and one can just go look at their financials like their latest 10-Q [0] right? For the most recent 6 month half (ending March 28 2026) I'm seeing $194 billion for product sales and $61 billion for service sales. The gross margins are certainly higher on services, at 77%, but 40% product margins are nothing to sneeze at either, and the disparity in absolute sales means the absolute dollar gross margins are $77 billion for products vs $46 billion for services.
So I don't see how you can assert that their "big money maker is their app store" from those numbers. Hardware matters a lot, and furthermore Apple sells services (like AppleCare+) that are specific to hardware and thus even a Linux user might still be interested in.
And without their hardware, their services would evaporate. There is a much tighter link there than with many companies. So they're on the hook for continued R&D and capex on that no matter what, you can't really separate that out, and in turn it's always going to be useful to have more volume to amortize it with.
I think primarily it comes down to corporate DNA, which is powerful. There are plenty of Mac hardware, software and service markets in pro/business/enterprise Apple has neglected or abandoned over the years, including ones making oodles of money, not out of any 4D chess but just because it doesn't fit them as an organization.
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0: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0000320193/37f5e9c...
That said, their AirPods division could be a Fortune 500 on its own.
Tim Cook said it himself: Apple is not a hardware company (https://www.businessinsider.com/tim-cook-apple-is-not-a-hard...).
In practice, I expect a paid Linux app store to go down about as well as the Microsoft Store has. Especially now, in the age of vibecoding.
I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable.
Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system.
CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.
And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding.
But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that.
I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you.
There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.
Admittedly, the screen ratio is better with the framework. But prefer the matte screen of the MacBook.
Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.
iPhone: 50.4%
Mac: 8.1%
iPad: 6.7%
Wearables, home and accessories: 8.6%
Services: 26.2%
I assume that the majority of service revenue is App store revenue.
Other services they provide are iCloud and Apple care
Apple still pushes updates and security updates to OS versions which are not the latest. So I don't see how they can be blamed much here.
The only reason I'd see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.
They obviously have a ton of people developing with linux and even asahi, else they wouldn’t been able to make adjustments in their uefi to shape the support of 3rd party OSes exactly how they wanted.
As apple no longer develop their own servers (OS), they even run some internal ”production” system on Linux, on their own hardware.
Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups.
Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value.
And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.
Why should they when they have macOS already?
> Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.
How many people who buy Apple silicon laptops do it to run Linux on it? less than 10,000 or 20,000 people?
You should not expect Apple to care about what Linux users want. The closest you are getting from them is being able to boot a custom OS or kernel.
Everything else from the drivers to the secure enclave they do not care.
But if they could, Apple would sweep the market for Linux laptops. Macbook hardware completely outclasses even the high end options.
Because Apple cuts support for old MacBooks eventually, even if the hardware still works perfectly. See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48745199
despicable business practices really