I imagine either they or others can take their discoveries and write a real driver now, though. The hard part was always the reversing the black box system.
That's unfortunately a rosy view of it. It might be easier to take source from one platform to another but that was never the issue; the issue is keeping it up to date with releases, testing it as often as other platforms, and handling user support tickets. The chicken and egg situation still applies here and companies aren't going to spend all the time and money on a new platform if users aren't asking for it.
Then it comes down to cost of compute. Are companies going to add a multiplier on their compute costs to reach a platform with no users? It's still the same problem.
Great work! I'm the guy that's working on recompiling the iPod games for modern systems (I'm mentioned by the top comment in your Reddit post). Have you tried installing the games in the emulator? If so, this would be a huge step in figuring out the DRM so people can dump their own games. That would lead to more games being supported in siggifly's 5.5G emulator [1] and eventually the games can be brought to more modern platforms.
Do you remember if it was named Musika? [1] If so, that game has actually been decrypted so I could work on a recomp. There's also Phase [2] which seems like the more likely pick. Unfortunately, it was never decrypted. I modeled out the Metadata db structure that the iPod OS exposed to games that represented its iTunesDB so I should be able to support custom songs/albums in a recomp in the future. Long term, I'd love to be able to BYO API key for Spotify and expose your Spotify library to the game as your "iPod's" music. I feel like that would modernize the experience. I'll get there when work calms down and I'm no longer working 60 hour work weeks :(
I saw your work and I thought it was excellent; that's another step I want to take: being able to run the games and the cover flow! We're one step away from making the iPod free forever.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
I think it's great but it's important to remember that we haven't seen Xiaomi's chips in actual devices under real world tests. We don't know if the speeds are sustainable, under what wattage, etc. Competition is still great and I look forward to learning more, of course.
Specifically, the M7 is supposedly coming out in the Spring. The M6 band is going to be so small because the M7 will have a lot of AI-focused upgrades and Apple doesn't want to waste manufacturing on M6 Pro/Max/Ultra chips when they can start building the M7 sooner.
On the flip side, I've been using Fable to statically recompile a game binary from a system that's never been emulated to modern C++ while also keeping the code clean, maintainable, and portable and it's been a dream. I'm in awe of how fast Fable is able to bring a 20 year old game that's largely been lost to the sands of time to SDL3. It finished the recomp in about 3 hours. The next day has been fully rewriting the functions to remove old hardware-specific quirks and then rewriting large swaths into multiple classes, subsystems, building tests, etc. Tomorrow I'm going to add mod support and then experiment with a random platform like making a Switch build of the game.
It's expensive but it's doing in hours what no one's done in 2 decades.
iPod Classic click wheel games. Specifically Mini Golf. I've also been working on an emulator for the others and it can now boot all of the 20 decrypted games released ~20 years ago and play most of them. There's a Sims Bowling, Sims Pool, and Lost game in there which is cool from a preservation standpoint. Less cool are the SAT Prep 2008 games which have actually been surprisingly annoying to emulate due to the way the text uses blend modes.
I plan on releasing all of this at one point. It's crazy it hasn't been done in 20 years!
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