Tag: apple

Porting Linux to the M1

interesting, very detailed bringup report.

The Asahi Linux project officially kicked off at the beginning of the year, but at that time we were all waiting for 1 crucial piece: support from Apple for booting alternate kernels on Apple Silicon systems. While the feature had been documented and mostly implemented, there was 1 final missing piece of the puzzle: support for the kmutil configure-boot command, which is what lets you install a non-Apple kernel. This didn’t stop us from making progress, however, as the first step to porting an OS to an undocumented platform is documenting it!

Apple should help Intel

Helping Intel stay in the semiconductor manufacturing game should be among one of the highest priorities for all US-based technology companies. While TSMC is the leader in manufacturing process technology, they remain a geo-political risk should China decide to enforce its will on the region. Samsung is not far behind, but being a Korean company, again, future politics guarantee no safe bets. Having a leading semiconductor company founded and based in the US is incredibly strategic given how critical semiconductors are to our digital future. Apple may be one of the only companies that can help Intel right the ship.

Apple Monopoly

It’s that last bit — the multiple generations bit — that is of interest here. Apple first released its notorious butterfly keyboard in April 2015, and has only now replaced it in 1 model in November 2019. Over that time period the company has sold $99b worth of Macs, the majority of which have been laptops. This is truly the power of integration! Or, to put it another way, the power — and downside — of monopoly. No, Apple does not have a monopoly in computers — how amazing would that be! — but the company does have a monopoly on macOS. It sells the only hardware that runs macOS, which is why millions of customers kept buying computers that, particularly in the last couple of years, were widely reported to be at risk of significant problems.

2021-02-04: On the many ways Apple is sketchy as hell, and what can be done about it.

Apple A13

Apple’s new chip contains 8.5b transistors. Also, there are 6 CPU cores: 2 high-performance cores running at 2.66 GHz, and 4 efficiency cores. It has a quad-core graphics processor, an LTE modem, an Apple-designed image processor, and an 8-core neural engine for machine intelligence functions that can run 1t operations per second.

This new chip is smarter, faster, and beefier, and yet it somehow manages to consume less power than its predecessor. It’s 30% more efficient than last year’s A12 chip, 1 of the factors that contributes to the extra 5 hours per day of battery life in the new iPhones.

Privacy Fundamentalism

a takedown of (one of the many) nonsense NYT articles on privacy.

the privacy debate needs to be reset around these 3 assumptions:

  1. Accept that privacy online entails trade-offs; the corollary is that an absolutist approach to privacy is a surefire way to get policy wrong.
  2. Keep in mind that the widespread creation and spread of data is inherent to computers and the Internet, and that these qualities have positive as well as negative implications; be wary of what good ideas and positive outcomes are extinguished in the pursuit to stomp out the negative ones.
  3. Focus policy on the physical and digital divide. Our behavior online is one thing: we both benefit from the spread of data and should in turn be more wary of those implications. Making what is offline online is quite another.

Jony Ive Design Legacy

In conversation, he would always be unfailingly polite (if not always prompt in recent years), a gentle soul in the body of a rugby player. He’d shimmer with intensity as he dove into the tiny things that were always paramount in bringing his visions into physical form. Like Carl Sagan awed at some mind-bending celestial wonder, he’d extol the sound that a laptop made when it closed shut, or praise the way concrete had been poured in the parking garage at Apple headquarters. When we talked about the iPod, he would launch into reveries about its whiteness. “It’s not just a color. So brutally simple and so … pristine … so shocking.” That word again.