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IIRC Marcan mentioned something he found that had been deliberately put into the Mac boot loader that made booting alternative operating systems easier and perhaps making it possible altogether.

That's apparent enough from the fact that you don't need a jailbreak exploit to boot non-Apple-signed kernels on a Mac, unlike iPads with exactly the same silicon. They are intentionally configured differently.

Why the locking difference on platforms?

I so want to run my os on ipad and save it from the ewaste bin.


iPads are cheaper than MacBooks and more popular. They'd rather prefer if you bought another one instead of using it indefinitely. The same with smartphones. The answer always has been: I like money!

This is a weird conspiracy theory because people don’t really do that with macs.

iPads and MacBooks are architecturally different devices with different purposes (but soon the difference may vanish). People tend to upgrade their phones/tablets more often than their PCs/laptops. Macs aren't locked down because they are designed NOT to be locked down. You can write drivers for macOS (otherwise it couldn't compete with Windows or Linux) but not for iPadOS.

That's weird response because people really did that with Macs. People used to run Windows (Boot Camp) on their Mac devices.

There were approximately 0 people extending the lifespan of their Mac by running Windows on it.

The way how you were using Windows did not matter. There was no way how Apple could distinguish this use anyway. Apple did not know if you were using Windows to extend the lifespan or just needed Windows apps. If you're allowing Windows, there's no reason to lock the bootloader down since people could heavily modify Windows and use Linux on Windows anyway.

Since Apple has moved onto arm, they don't need to lock it down, at least yet, because Windows is a no-go on arm, and it's slowly becoming AI slop anyway. There's only Linux but then if they locked the bootloader down they would distance themselves from the competition. And people do write drivers for macs.

Meanwhile jailbreaking iOS or iPadOS has more use than doing anything you want on macOS. For example removing ads on Spotify, YT or running cracked apps or ebooks. Yes, you can do the same on macs, but you do not keep a Mac in your pocket.

However if iPads and MacBooks become one thing, I'm pretty sure they're still be more restrictions.


How did installing windows increase the lifespan of a MacBook?

Earlier you said this:

>iPads are cheaper than MacBooks and more popular. They'd rather prefer if you bought another one instead of using it indefinitely

How does that work? People are still buying new MacBooks instead of using them indefinitely.


How does your question relate to "I so want to run my os"? You're assuming that people who want to run custom OS do only so to increase the lifespan.

On Android that's definitely the case (more people do so to increase the lifespan than to hack apps), but the desktop market progresses slower than mobile in terms of software. I was running my Xiaomi Mi 6 for 7 years thanks to LineageOS, and it would've been longer if I hadn't dropped it the second time (the screen cracked, battery was 60% and repair wasn't worth it). Now I'm running Nothing Phone 2 am switching to LineageOS once the support goes out. Now try to do the same with Samsung. You can't. The bootloader is locked down since OneUI 8.0 and you can't do a thing about it, gotta buy a new one after security updates are gone.

Phones are very cheap now (can get more expensive soon tho). For $200 you can get a very decent Android (Snapdragon 7s gen2, 8GB RAM, 256GB storage + other very nice stuff such as OIS, 144Hz etc.), buy a wireless display or cast to TV and use it as a workstation (obviously you need a wireless keyboard and a mouse). Office work? Web coding? Sure. Did that myself.

Since we are focusing on MacBooks now...

> People are still buying new MacBooks instead of using them indefinitely.

I'm not hearing anyone with M1 or above switching to a new Mac yearly. People who switched to M-series were using their MacBooks for years.

It seems Apple is happy with having Linux as an unofficial alternative on Macs.

> How did installing windows increase the lifespan of a MacBook?

Via Windows Updates? And Windows software doesn't usually require you to upgrade to the newest version possible (however many games started to require W11)? Try to install new Xcode on an older version of macOS, good luck.


xeno-kovah is responsible for that one. see the most excellent 39c3 video "asahi linux porting linux to apple silicon" for more information.

Yes, because if they didn't, the fact that macOS doesn't lock you down in a sandbox means that is more like the entire boot chain would've been jailbroken. The boot chain shared for the most part with iOS devices, where Apple 100% does not want "jailbreaks" because it means App Stores that they don't get to take 15-30% from.

The happy path on the Mac was provided so the talent capable of booting Linux on it could take the happy path that hides all of the stuff Apple would rather not have a bunch of reverse engineers sniffing around.


It doesn't work for transitive dependencies, so you're reliant on third party composite actions doing their own SHA locking.


The company I used to work for was developing a self driving car with stereo depth on a wide baseline.

It's not all sunshine and roses to be honest - it was one of the weakest links in the perception system. The video had to run at way higher resolutions than it would otherwise and it was incredibly sensitive to calibration accuracy.


The UK doesn't need to put restrictions in for 3d printing guns because the viable approaches for 3d printing them usually require _some_ off the shelf gun parts not to mention actual ammunition which you can't feasibly acquire in the UK to begin with.


You can acquire guns, gun parts, and ammunition quite easily in the UK, and entirely legally.

You need to hold a suitable licence, which isn't expensive and is mostly an exercise in proving to the police that you're not a violent psychopath who's likely to run up to people in cars and shoot them in the face.


But no one forces pre-commit hooks onto you? You can just not install the hook into git and run the tool manually instead.


No one forces you to install the pre-commit hook on your local checkout so what you're suggesting is universally the case. You're perfectly free to just run it manually or let it fail in CI or use `--no-verify` when committing to skip the hook if you install it.


It depends on the hooks you're using and how many of them.

For some languages there are some rather slow hooks, and using it on a big monorepo can take a while (a full run across my work's main repo takes minutes). If you update python based hooks all the time then installing and creating the virtualenvs can be slow too which prek speeds up.


The pre-commit tool (which prek is based on) has a large ecosystem of off the shelf checks for various language linters and other checks and a convenient way of writing them (including working out which files have changed and which checks to run based off of that)

The benefit to many of having them as a hook is that you discover it's broken before you pushed your changes, and not when you finally get around to checking the CI on your branch and realising it failed after 30s.

There is of course no reason why you have to have it installed as a precommit hook - many people prefer to run it manually, and the pre-commit tool/prek allows for that.


Ground stations would be the major problem.

Maybe if Elon launched himself and the dev team into orbit and didn't use any ground stations and just Starlink terminals he could start getting into legal loopholes.


At that point, country could just sanction the company, so that it's illegal for its citizens to pay them any money. Seems like a standard thing to do to a company that breaks laws and that you cannot otherwise reach.


Sony have actually been fairly chill about emulators etc. so I'd be surprised if lawyers got involved here.

They actually used an open source Playstation emulator when they released the "Playstation Classic" in 2018.


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