I've been a software engineer for 25 years, doing Linux stuff at startups and big companies (the biggest even). In all my time as a software engineer, I've seen maybe 3 people who didn't use a MacBook Pro for work. Apple makes the bulk of its money from tech companies and schools and they cater very well to both. If it stops being Unix-like, they lose the thing they make the most money from. They are smarter than that.
I don't think apple makes the bulk from professionals at all, the iphone is their flagship product and their laptop line has been expanding towards casual markets with budget models.
They absolutely do not want their developers to mass migrate to another platform. Walk into any SF startup and you'll see 100% Mac laptops, except for the Finance guy who needs Excel on Windows, and that one dev who insists on Linux, and all those devs build webpages that work on Safari, and iOS apps before they (maybe) eventually get around to making an Android app.
Apple is highly incentivized to keep devs on Macs, even if it turned out to be a loss leader for them.
The money they make from MacOS is a footnote compared to the money they make from phone hardware, the app store transaction tax, and ads. To a first approximation, the only reason that Apple cares about MacOS is so that people can make iOS apps.
This is a poor approximation, as there would be no need for such an extensive Mac product lineup if this were true. The Mac mini and one laptop product line with two or three sizes would be more than sufficient, and continuing development of first-party Mac applications like Logic and FCP would serve little purpose.
They don't make any money on macOS anymore. You get it preinstalled on their computers, you can't buy it separately, you can't install it on other computers, and major upgrades are free.
It is a part of the computer that people pay for. This is like saying they don't get any money from Apple Silicon because its already installed on the motherboard.
And so are developers on Linux. 99.5% of your backend stuff will run just fine on macOS without any modification, but it's been a good practice for a long time now to run stuff in containers (Docker/OrbStack/podman/etc.) in order to have a reproducible environment free of contamination. My development process in macOS is basically no different than it was on Linux.
You still end up in uncanny valley often enough, with commands that are missing, or working unexpectedly differently. It often feels like macOS could be made so much better for developers, but Apple just doesn't care because people buy their devices anyway.
It’s not that. It’s that their lawyers won’t let the engineering side distribute gnu tools. Period.
At Apple, if you even use GPL tools in your workflow you have to seek approval, and most often there’s pushback of “why won’t this (alternative that isn’t GPL) work ?”
Their lawyers aren’t stupid, they understand the GPL and its limits, but they’re simply doing a risk assessment- which one is less risky, the GPL variant or the BSD. For a corporation, that’s generally BSD.
It’s a computer. I can make a computer go beep if I want, that is not the issue.
The fact that someone who didn’t grow up at the time when open source was an idealistic concept instead of free support to corporations needs to learn about the gnutils and how to install them with homebrew is what makes me sad.
Why do we seriously not have a command-line package manager on macOS yet? Windows has one by now. It’s just sad to me that you need a manual checklist of post-setup steps to turn a Mac into a useful machine for software development.
The point I was making was that knowing what GNU means in the first place probably requires some cultural background that many people lack, especially younger ones.
Right, and the point I'm making is that you can learn this from Google once you notice there is a difference from how common commands work on Linux and MacOS. You don't need to know about GNU, you just have to wonder why its different.
It already feels a bit like it's two separate operating systems on one machine. It's still usable, but I am starting to notice odd behaviours. Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI, there seems to be no notification from the filesystem to Finder, informing it that the terminal has created a file.
Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux. More and more I see colleague either switching to Linux, or have a mac laptop for administrative tasks and then a Linux workstation, or VMs, where they do their actual work.
> Developers and operations people are already starting to move to Linux.
I’ve been in this industry for a long time now. Linux always had more credibility among devs and ops folk. This “starting to move” view is weird.
My view is that OS X was acceptable by these teams because it was close enough to Linux and corporate could deal with it.
When I worked in corporate IT Linux was simply not an option for a primary workstation because there was no standard configuration or management tooling that made everyone happy. Macs were an easy compromise.
I personally don’t see macos anyhow competing with Linux or to be anyhow comparable to Linux in each others sweat points. linux dominated server side, so be its fair victory but it’s continually shit kind of clone of many things done in MacOs desktop experience. It just kept cloning Apple since forever to repeat a glimpse of that experience even during Next times with WindowMaker and then with many incarnations of modern desktop systems to compare with OSX and MacOs continually and in that direction. Linux is open, it’s different, that comes with value but still a little handicapped brother to MacOS desktop experience with continually f*up fundamentals even if you include wayland as the base. So is MacOs in servers but there Apple just resigned last year and stopped pretending they have servers. Both have only one thing in common, shell with base posix tools. Nothing else. And none are as open as original idea for Unix as this idea is long dead and linux tries to make Stallman’s wet dream about GNU system come true as his own kernel implementation did not move forward much it at all since mid 80s.. that’s the only UNIX reality that matters.. rest is bureaucracy and 5000 pages of POSIX standard nobody cares about as this is more about C libraries than kernel’s internals.
I don’t think it makes business sense for them to mass produce these for a consumer market but a data center of M5 chips sounds amazing for the workloads they’re running.
I don’t think the open source model will ever make an Apple quality UI because that’s the result of highly opinionated executives like Steve Jobs who don’t need to compromise or allow customization.
I’m glad both exist. I use them both and my life is good
> Files created in the terminal not showing up in the UI
You might wanna look into that because that’s not how it works at all. I frequently switch between terminal and GUI apps and have not once noticed Finder failing to catch up with whatever it is I’m doing in the terminal.
Strange, because I have the same issue on two different machines. It doesn't happen all the time, but frequently enough that I assumed that Finder does some re-scan every now and then (or when you open a new Finder window).
Microsoft just shipped a full-fledged first class Linux container runtime as part of Windows[1]. I don’t think it even made front page of HN, which shows how far windows has fallen as a developer environment, but it is absolutely something Apple should be offering as a first class capability on OS X. The compatibility of the host OS file system with being mounted into docker images makes it a better environment for running such things.
> which shows how far windows has fallen as a developer environment,
Be mindful of living in an echo chamber. HN is one. There is a startup/SV-oriented culture here, which selects for a specific niche of people that is not representative of the general population. Going by this forum, you'd also think Java and especially C# were dead languages by how many votes and comments their threads get. Yet in the real world, Windows dev environments dwarf Linux, and Java/C# are everywhere in enterprise.
Has it really, though? Because outside the HN bubble, Windows still seems to be the most common developer environment for most things that don't specifically target Linux or Apple platforms, and a popular option even then (e.g., in game dev).
I'm suspecting some forces at Apple would be perfectly content with ripping most of the BSD core and the assorted CLI out and just have Linux containers spawned in VMs, WSL2-style.
You missed the point by focusing on the wrong part (containers) instead of the part that's relevant (kill darwin CLI userland).
Imagine the only scriptability you get for the OS is Automator or Shortcuts, https://github.com/apple/container is at best an API at worst a GUI app and certainly not a CLI, and that's it. macOS is MacOS (pre-X). Or iOS-like. Terminal.app spawns a sandboxed Linux microvm. You never see the host from a shell. Dear colima can't even _exist_.
I haven't tried it. colima also simplifies linux VMs which is more of an analog to WSL2 than just running containers. It has really nice integration with Incus as well, if you like persistent system containers.
In some alternative dimension Ternus decides to realize the full potential of the Mach kernel by embracing Hurd in place of XNU. Users are discouraged because the new system is not enough like GNU/Linux.
yeah I guess there isn't really much to move to... a new custom Kernel and Userspace? extremely unlikely - I guess it's here to stay, despite not being formally Unix.
It's distinctly problematic there unfortunately. Particularly the moment you add any UI toolkits to it. I've had so many problems with stuff that uses Qt because Qt takes a while to catch up with things Apple broke inside their Cocoa internals. Very irritating platform to work on.
Edit: love how I get downvoted for facts?! They literally broke Cocoa so it was throwing hopeless useless exceptions at the bottom of the stack when they changed the native file open boxes to run in another process. Two bits of software I use couldn't raise an open file dialog window any more.
From that Wayback page, it looks like only one version of macOS is certified at any one time: the latest version. Since macOS Golden Gate was only recently released, perhaps it's a process blip and we'll see Golden Gate listed soon.
Interesting - when I visit the original page from this post and choose "Filter by Standard" I can see Tahoe under UNIX 03, but only AIX is listed under UNIX V7.
This suggests that different parts of the website aren't necessarily in sync with other parts, information wise...
The this is much ado about nothing. Every single entry on the page you linked goes to its product page with the exact Unix standard it is certified as. Once you select a filter, you cannot get back to unfiltered list without the back button on the browser.
This is just a site rendering issue. Rather than silently removed, it's more like some bug was introduced. macOS 26 is still Unix 03 certified.
Too little, too late. With the growing enshittification of macOS and the Apple ecosystem in general, I couldn't be happier having made the move back to Linux on a Framework laptop, after almost 2 decades.
> What about all the stuff they've done to keep it open
I don't understand the purpose of your reply?
One of your examples is "Disabling SIP", but you're replying to a thread that has already been discussing this very topic, so it makes no sense to ask us "what about" that.
The issue is really the difficulty of using macOS as an expert user, and this has become significantly more difficult over the years. You mention "Developer ID distribution and notarisation", but both of those are actually restrictions that were added later to a previously open system. Notarization in particular has become a major pain for developers. Also "Gatekeeper Open Anyway override" has become significantly more difficult for users over the years.
I don't think that's fair, they've spent a lot of time and effort ensuring the Mac is still an open/UNIX like platform, including (where they didn't have to):
These are basically all things that an engineering org can justify as necessary for some reason but can immediately disappear when leadership announces a change in strategy.
Not to take away from your point too much - this is a significant amount of work that shows their current stance towards maintaining the mac as a premium development platform. But I imagine they will start to split this - lower cost SKUs will get the iOS-ified OS while "Pro" SKUs will get (some of) the above and can still install homebrew, to prevent a full developer revolt.
Techies will figure out how to "jailbreak" the lower SKUs to unlock the full experience and the amount of people that follow through with that will round to 0%. Tech businesses will buy the >$3k Pros for their devs.
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