I'm having to give up on Apple Silicon and macos

[Danfango]

LOL oh so it's the regulations now! This is typical IT being completely out of touch. Productive companies find a way to enable their employees by understanding what business needs they have and designing processes around that. Garbage ones just dictate poorly thought out lock down systems, mumble something about compliance or best practices, and just convince themselves that whatever business needs they are sacrificing couldn't have been that important. Worse yet, they often have a special approval process to get around the lock downs in a tacit admission that their policies are in fact hindering the business. I've worked at 5 companies. There is a direct correlation to home much freedom the user has on the PC and how much work gets done by each person. Maybe the benefit of highly locked down systems is higher than the benefit of productivity. It depends on a lot of things about the business. But, most of the time, that question is simply left unasked. AND, that's why it's out of touch.

Oh yes I work for one of those sorts of companies. Right on.

The thing is the key perspective these days is trading off the trifecta of compliance box ticking, hiring minimally competent staff and trying to patch all the holes with dubious technology sold by incompetent enterprise companies.

I am pointing fingers at the following things for being absolutely inconsequential for organisational security: ISO27001, SOC2, CloudStrike, every AV company on the planet, InTune, NCSC policy.

Source: day job is engineering management at a major fintech. It KILLS MY SOUL seeing confidence and security built on these wobbly sticks made of poo.

 

[Danfango]

k8s works very well on my M1 Max. So well I rarely shut it down, got it running all the time and don't really notice it...

Wish it did here. I have 24 different containers I need to deploy on a laptop just to get our product basically working. If I want to do something past that it's another 10-15 different ones. They all have to have memory limits of around 1Gb to support a single user or OOMkill gets the pods. Oh and then there's the DB cluster that has to sit on the native hardware because the DB is so large we can't get it to run in Kubernetes at all.

After some argument they sent me a stacked Dell Precision 7670 which just sits there making wooshing sounds and heating the room up all day with the RAM pegged at 64Gb... Ugh.

I'm slowly corrupting their thinking towards arm64 and Graviton on AWS as a cost savings measure...

 

[maflynn]

You can only replace the OS with Linux because some people are reverse engineering the hardware

Can you boot off of linux from the internal drive? I thought that apple removed that ability, and you would need an external drive to use linux

 

[ahurst]

You can only replace the OS with Linux because some people are reverse engineering the hardware. Apple wanted to avoid the controversy of locking the bios on desktop PCs (locking instead only the BIOS of tablets and cell phones), because they knew this would generate backslash. But they don't provide much help on documentation / drivers.

Is there a precedent of any other company shipping their own custom hardware with a given closed-source OS, while also providing internal hardware documentation so that others can port different OSes to it? Qualcomm and most other SoC companies certainly don't, which is a big reason Android devices often have such short official support lifetimes (a bunch of key drivers are closed-source and never upstreamed into Linux/Android).

Apple engineers have helped out with bootloader stuff for the Asahi project, though (the Ashai project lead says he was told directly that a new boot option to load 3rd-party kernels was added specifically for him).

Can you boot off of linux from the internal drive? I thought that apple removed that ability, and you would need an external drive to use linux

It's the other way around I think: Apple Silicon machines can't really boot from external media like normal computers can, but Ashai Linux is designed to be able to be installed and booted on the internal drive alongside macOS.

 

[Bodhitree]

To the OP:

I largely agree that the balance has shifted. For my last 24” M1 iMac with 16 GB ram and 512 GB storage I paid a little over €2000, which would have bought me a beast of a PC at the time. It should last me a good while, especially for the mix of casual tasks and lightweight dev tasks I use it for.

The base-spec M1 machines are still decent value, but as soon as you start speccing up the value proposition gets dramatically worse.

 

[Joe Dohn]

To the OP:

I largely agree that the balance has shifted. For my last 24” M1 iMac with 16 GB ram and 512 GB storage I paid a little over €2000, which would have bought me a beast of a PC at the time. It should last me a good while, especially for the mix of casual tasks and lightweight dev tasks I use it for.

The base-spec M1 machines are still decent value, but as soon as you start speccing up the value proposition gets dramatically worse.

Wait until you need to extend the device capabilities with something your Apple Silicon wasn't designed to do. E.g, if a desktop doesn't have Thunderbolt 4, you usually can get a separate PCI-E card, provided you have an available slot. With Apple devices? No such luck.

 

[jdb8167]

You can only replace the OS with Linux because some people are reverse engineering the hardware. Apple wanted to avoid the controversy of locking the bios on desktop PCs (locking instead only the BIOS of tablets and cell phones), because they knew this would generate backslash. But they don't provide much help on documentation / drivers.

So in other words, the Apple silicon Macs are open? Open doesn’t imply help from the manufacturer though Apple did help a bit with the boot loader.

Locking down the Mac would kill it. People buy Macs to do things that aren’t possible on locked down devices like iPads.

 

[Gudi]

Nobody even cares about booting other OSes on Macs. There's an entire world of PC OEMs to provide hardware for them. It's all about the variety of software that can run on top of macOS, in a virtual machine or otherwise. You buy a Mac for all the benefits of macOS and then additionally you want openness to other platforms.

E.g, if a desktop doesn't have Thunderbolt 4, you usually can get a separate PCI-E card, provided you have an available slot. With Apple devices? No such luck.

And which Mac doesn't have Thunderbolt 4? It comes with the M1, Apple's entry level cpu.

 

[diamond.g]

Nobody even cares about booting other OSes on Macs. There's an entire world of PC OEMs to provide hardware for them. It's all about the variety of software that can run on top of macOS, in a virtual machine or otherwise. You buy a Mac for all the benefits of macOS and then additionally you want openness to other platforms.


And which Mac doesn't have Thunderbolt 4? It comes with the M1, Apple's entry level cpu.

TB4 requires 2 external display support (three total) which is why on the base laptops they say TB3 and not 4.

 

[Gudi]

TB4 requires 2 external display support (three total) which is why on the base laptops they say TB3 and not 4.

Are you sure TB 3 or 4 makes such a big difference? What if the next bunch of Macs do support TB4, will you finally declare separate PCIe expansion slots to be unnecessary?

The Original Macintosh: Diagnostic Port
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a strong believer in hardware expandability, and he endowed the Apple II with luxurious expandability in the form of seven built-in slots for peripheral cards, ...

Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature.


The Macintosh is fighting the expandability hawks all his life and prevailed. TB4 won't kill it.

 

[Joe Dohn]

The Macintosh is fighting the expandability hawks all his life and prevailed.

Which is why it has no USB ports, right?
Oh.
Well, I have an idea: why don't we get rid of those pesky USB ports that allow for expandability?

 

[Gudi]

Why don't we get rid of those pesky USB ports that allow for expandability?

You're mixing up connectivity and expandability.

 

[Joe Dohn]

You're mixing up connectivity and expandability.

I'm not. It's you who's moving the goalposts. You can absolutely expand the capabilities of a device with USB without nearly a fraction of the hassle before its invention. Storage comes to mind, but you can also expand multimedia capabilities (USB DACs; TV capture cards), or even do computing with it if you want to (with USB being slow for that, of course).

 

[Gudi]

It's you who's moving the goalposts. You can absolutely expand the capabilities of a device with USB without nearly a fraction of the hassle before its invention.

Please read, so that you know what the controversy was/is about:

The Original Macintosh: Diagnostic Port

 

[Joe Dohn]

Please read, so that you know what the controversy was/is about:

The Original Macintosh: Diagnostic Port

I see what you mean.
I read the article, and it goes to show that not liking expandability is in Apple's DNA, tracing back to Steve Jobs in the 1980s. And it's such a shame Apple is not very flexible. It's a business instance that hindered them.

I'm pretty sure Apple would remove USB ports if they could (hello, Macbooks with 1-2 USB ports!), but being too radical about this is something that only hurts them on the long run.

 

[Gudi]

I'm pretty sure Apple would remove USB ports if they could (hello, MacBooks with 1-2 USB ports!), but being too radical about this is something that only hurts them on the long run.

Adding functionality through a universal port is so much easier than expansion slots and it doesn't add complexity to the system itself. You don't need to care about extra heat, separate fans and drivers. Apple has always been pushing for more capable universal ports, so that you only ever need one for data, power and display combined.

This is what a Cinema Display cable looked like:

The Thunderbolt Display reduced the number of plugs to two:

And now were finally down to one (expensive) cable to rule them all.

 

[Joe Dohn]

Adding functionality through a universal port is so much easier than expansion slots and it doesn't add complexity to the system itself. You don't need to care about extra heat, separate fans and drivers. Apple has always been pushing for more capable universal ports, so that you only ever need one for data, power and display combined.

I'm not so sure they have, considering that their laptop trend has been proving as few USB ports as possible (which is why people needed hubs until recently). If they could get away with it, they would definitely get rid of all USB ports.

Case in point, which I will emphasize: Apple could have provided eGPU expansion support without any changes to their current design. They already have Thunderbolt 3 implemented. But for some reason, M1 Macs won't recognize eGPUs.

According to the Asahi Linux team, in theory it IS possible for an open source team to restore this capability. But coding something that will recognize an eGPU and map the memory is very difficult. BUT it's something that's only difficult for a small team with few resources. I'm sure Apple COULD more easily implement this, if they so wished.

 

[diamond.g]

Are you sure TB 3 or 4 makes such a big difference? What if the next bunch of Macs do support TB4, will you finally declare separate PCIe expansion slots to be unnecessary?

View attachment 2123065

The Original Macintosh: Diagnostic Port
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a strong believer in hardware expandability, and he endowed the Apple II with luxurious expandability in the form of seven built-in slots for peripheral cards, ...

Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature.


The Macintosh is fighting the expandability hawks all his life and prevailed. TB4 won't kill it.

I don’t think it makes a big difference. Was just pointing out there is a difference.

The Mac Pro is an interesting beast. It sells so few (compared to all their other products) I am surprised this Apple bothers to keep it alive.

 

[120FPS]

So I have built my system, it’s still on an open test bench as there are no good ITX cases for Nvidia 4090’s available and I think I will wait for the new FormD case or if Loque releases a new one that supports massive GPUs

So Windows is still a pain to use (but I expected that), I had to find a Windows user to create a Windows 11 bootable disk as Balenda Etcher and Raspberry Pi imager did not work for me. Also the installer out of the box requires Wifi but my AM5 ITX MB did not support it using the USB drive so I had to find a command to override that installation requirement.

Windows 11 Pro is much nicer to use than Windows 10, not sure why Windows users hate it so much but I think it’s a cleaner look and the dock situation makes it an easier transition for me. It‘s still Windows but at least now I can easily upgrade the storage at reasonable prices which for me (mentioned in a previous post on here) is a particular downside to buying a Mac these days. If I could I would run MacOS but it’s out of my hands so I have to make do with this.

 

[maflynn]

o good ITX cases for Nvidia 4090’s available and I think I will wait for the new FormD case or if Loque releases a new one that supports massive GPUs

Given the power requirements and the heat generated - those cases (while really cool looking) seem too small to cool a 4090

 

[dgdosen]

Oh yes I work for one of those sorts of companies. Right on.

The thing is the key perspective these days is trading off the trifecta of compliance box ticking, hiring minimally competent staff and trying to patch all the holes with dubious technology sold by incompetent enterprise companies.

I am pointing fingers at the following things for being absolutely inconsequential for organisational security: ISO27001, SOC2, CloudStrike, every AV company on the planet, InTune, NCSC policy.

Source: day job is engineering management at a major fintech. It KILLS MY SOUL seeing confidence and security built on these wobbly sticks made of poo.

You work for a "major fintech" and BYO hardware? That seems crazy. I can't think of any company that allows you to touch any systems without those machines being managed by their own IT.

-- Disregard... I looked at this debate on previous pages and have no desire to take part in it

 

[diamond.g]

Given the power requirements and the heat generated - those cases (while really cool looking) seem too small to cool a 4090

I would surmise any case that can fit a FE 3090 (TI) should be able to fit a FE 4090 just fine.

 

[maflynn]

I would surmise any case that can fit a FE 3090 (TI) should be able to fit a FE 4090 just fine.

I think many small itx cases will not work
The 4090 is significantly thicker

RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 - Different generation, different outcome?

We're comparing the RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 to see how these two high-end GPUs stack up against each other. Who wins? We'll let you know.

www.pcguide.com

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[diamond.g]

I think many small itx cases will not work
The 4090 is significantly thicker

RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 - Different generation, different outcome?

We're comparing the RTX 4090 vs RTX 3090 to see how these two high-end GPUs stack up against each other. Who wins? We'll let you know.

www.pcguide.com

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I am not sure filling out a 3 slot cooler versus not quite filling it out is significant.

 

[120FPS]

Given the power requirements and the heat generated - those cases (while really cool looking) seem too small to cool a 4090

In the O-Series? They will probably have vented side panels as an option so it should be good. There is a big small form-facor community out there Putting 3080’s and 90’s in the T-Series cases so shouldn't be a problem with the bigger ones. I think Nvidia decided to go overboard for their cooling solution as the next Ti GPU's will probably produce much more heat.