> when they can just share a pdf.
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.
Apple wouldn't want to be liable or responsible if someone implements an OS based on their incomplete and imperfect and outdated spec and gets hacked.
If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
Not to mention coming from something like Niri, or even default Gnome to MacOS Tahoe is just gimping productivity tenfold. It is so incredibly unintuitive in every way for window management and keyboard shortcuts and everything in between.
My Mac Mini M4 is for building the Mac/iOS apps, other than that it's useless as a daily driver. I will patiently wait for Asahi while I use my other computers that can run serious operating systems.
> A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled.
Sure you can
> You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
No
No, really you can't disable all of the services with SIP disabled, at least not the latest Tahoe. Maybe there's a better tool than launchctl, but I don't know what that is. Plus, you disable one, and it crashes and you have to debug it for an hour.
Yes, I'm exaggerating about the networking. Yes, you can lock it down by turning off all of the devices, but honestly, I'm still not 100% on that. It was a surprise to me after I disabled ethernet and wifi and turned off everything in system settings, and someone passed by with an ios device.
However, if you're an expert - please save me a year of trial and error and point me to the minimal list of services and daemons.
So many daemons. And while a lot can be disabled, some of them cause important stuff to break if you disable them, or even cause the OS to crash in a Heisenbugian fashion. And there's no documentation. So debugging this crap is anything but simple.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
I suspect there would be an element of induced demand here. IMO the MacBook range are the only laptops on the market worth buying - but not having support for gaming (or at least, hilariously bad support for a limited range of games) is compelling enough reason to install Linux for a large portion of users (filling the void left behind by the widely adopted Bootcamp).
> but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF.
Yeah, GPU ISA, controllers, power management, NPU, and who knows what else. I still believe that companies should be compelled by regulators to offer documentation and support necessary to write drivers as I believe it is part of the "right to repair" (M1 will lose support in 2 years, it's still a great platform).
> They chose to leave it open.
I _really_ wonder on this point. It's so uncharacteristic of Apple. Were they concerned about potential anti-competitive lawsuits and maliciously did the bare minimum to avoid them? "It's technically open hardware, but good luck figuring out how it works"
If you don't count wine on macOS then Linux without wine has bad support for gaming too.
This is nonsense. Chinese vendors like Rockchip and Allwinner provide fairly halfassed docs at times, but they try. It's housnads of pages, total, sure. But even this along with public code samples allows to create almost perfectly FOSS supported implementations for their HW. And it's a complex HW similar to what Apple has. I've worked with all kinds of just annoyingly incomplete and badly written datasheets, and if you put some work into it having at least something helps tremendously, even if the manufacturer ignores you completely and you have no field engineer access, and just throws incomplete crap over the public fence.
No docs is clear statement Apple hates FOSS. "how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop" argument is very weak considering that only consumer platforms that engage in a complete lockdown are maybe some gaming consoles, and those are basically appliances and not a general computing machines.
Darwin is open source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system) https://www.puredarwin.org/
Darwin doesn't cover any usecase here.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
It's only going to grow every year as apple stops releasing OS updates for perfectly functioning hardware.
At the point its vintage people will just buy something new as it will perform better.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.
Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into account.
They had a revenue of $416 billion in 2025.
That would be like you buying something at the dollar store.
If Apple doubled their Mac revenue, the financial benefit of Linux would remain the same. That means it would then be effectively half as important for their business, but the operational challenges and risks remain the same.
At some point the ongoing maintenance and support as well as coordination and organizational distraction mean it wouldn't get approved if internal engineers offered to start it off for free.
That's not why they're avoiding it, though.
They're avoiding it because installing Linux (or Windows, even), would actually decrease their income. I doubt people running Windows on Intel Macs were avid Apple Music subscribers.
would actually decrease their income per device, but they would still make money on the device.
or are you saying apple devices are loss-leader prior the app store revenue ?
that's the model taken to the extreme
No, they're not loss leaders, but in 2015 services were about 9% of Apple revenue. Now they're about 28%.
It's fairly clear which direction the wind is blowing.
Also, hardware - software integration pushes more hardware sales. People with iPhones are a lot more likely to buy Macs than people with Android phones. Same story for Airpods & co. I've also basically never seen an Apple keyboard used with non-Apple computers.
Also Apple stops supporting the hardware and the software at the same time. The case that Linux support lets hardware be used longer is a harder sell when the company stops manufacturing/stocking parts for servicing at the point where someone would consider Linux.
> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
In the beginning, Bootcamp had a real job.
It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.
Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.
If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.
And Linux support on M Macs would also have a "real job", what is your point exactly?
I find it so bizarre that some of you here are defending a megacorporation that could have easily afforded to provide drivers for Linux Kernel like their competitors do.
You're clapping for free volunteers to spend hundreds of hours reverse engineering Thunderbolt controllers when companies like Intel outright contribute them.
The reverse of that argument is why are you applauding Intel for doing something they had to do well in order to get any sales?
I'm pretty sure Intel is providing Xenon CPUs for free when they are used in Linux servers, so they have no financial interest in providing first party Linux drivers.
Sure, they relied on community Linux drivers in the past, but that didn't have anything to do with money.
There is no "applause" in my post - please learn to read before you take up your bigcorp defender shield and think for a second why you're fighting against your own benefit.
Wft?
> not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful
Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple is laughable at best. Even more so when Apple used to release such docs in the past when it was much less financially capable.
They just don't care.
Bootcamp on Intel Macs was a different story because Apple's hardware was mostly an assortment of other vendors' hardware (with some custom components and set up). That means they could bundle drivers for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvell, Synaptics, etc plus a couple of their own (the camera, the touchpad, the mouse, etc) and call it a day. Since the hardware was x86-64 it mostly just worked. That's an immensely different world from their custom hardware. They would need to write Linux drivers for all of their networking chips, each of their processors, their GPUs, work around Linux/Windows' 16KB memory page issues, their neural engines, the SEP, their DCP, the interrupt controller, IOMMU, their custom storage drivers, etc. You're vastly underselling or misunderstanding the size of the situation.
They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.
Darwin is out there and you too can license Arm and design something from the ground up if you have the ability and the will…
It’s all there and it’s been 25-26 years no one has bothered maybe that’s Apple is still the only vertical computer company left from the 1980s.
At one time there were many choices in hardware and OS software combined with that hardware that era is basically gone because no one wants to take the bull by the horns and do anything they want someone else to give it to them free.
> Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple
That's not what they said. Please don't misrepresent
> is laughabe
And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.
The implication of saying it's a "huge effort" is that the effort is too much. You're nitpicking at this point and the flat refusal is just as much a problem as tossing out "laughable" in a sentence focused on calling Apple bad.
> And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.
Nothing about that statement is disparaging - just because you don't want to hear it, doesn't make it insulting.
Calling out nonsense is important, especially on this website.
Apple until a few years ago had killed off all first party monitors because they thought that business line was a distraction.
The challenge isn't finding an engineer. It is picking what project doesn't get done in its place.