Doesn't Apple support the major standard device categories: NVMe, XHCI, AHCI, and such, like most operating systems do? The challenges are all for hardware that needs a vendor-specific driver instead of conforming to a standard driver interface (which doesn't always exist). Lots of those can be supported with userspace drivers, which can be supplied by third parties instead of needing to be written by Apple.
Not for the past decade; it's been no connectors for most products, but standard PCIe connectors for the Mac Pro, and NVMe over Thunderbolt works fine.
>> XHCI
> Not on Lightning.
Again, not relevant to any recent products. And I'm pretty sure you're misunderstanding what XHCI is if you think anything with a Lightning connector is relevant here (XHCI is not USB 3.0). You can connect a Thunderbolt dock that includes an XHCI USB host controller and it works out of the box with no further driver or software support. I assume you can do the same with a USB controller card in a Mac Pro.
>> AHCI
> How exactly would Apple not support AHCI?
This might be another case of you not understanding what you're talking about and are lost in an entirely different layer of the protocol stack. Not supporting AHCI would be easy, since they're no longer selling any products that use SATA, and PCIe SSDs that use AHCI instead of NVMe died out a decade ago. But as far as I know, a SATA controller card at the far end of a Thunderbolt link or in a Mac Pro PCIe slot should still work, if the SATA controller uses AHCI instead of something proprietary as is typical for SAS controllers.
> Why does Apple need to make the drivers in a walled garden?
Isn't that the whole point of the walled garden, that they approve things? How could they aim and realize a walled garden without making things like that have to pass through them?
I think the OP is asking why Apple is enclosing macs in a walled garden when that concept is generally associated with iPhones, not general-purpose computers.
> Why does Apple need to make the drivers in a walled garden?
Because third party drivers usually are utter dogshit. That's how Apple managed to get double the battery life time even in the Intel era over comparable Windows based offerings.
Macs and PCs are fundamentally different. Their architectures have always been distinct though the Intel Mac era has somewhat blurred the line.
Modern Mac is Macintosh descendants and by contrast PC is IBM PC descendants (their real name is technically PC-clone but because IBM PC don’t exist anymore the clone part have been scrapped).
And with Apple silicon Mac the two is again very different, for example Mac don’t use NVMe, they use just nand (their controller part is integrated in the SoC) and they don’t use UEFI or BIOS, but a combination of Boot ROM, LLB and iBoot
I just loved road rash, I had the demo version initially, I used to call it demo rash. Once in a race I accidentally jumped on a building, it was first open world experience for me!
I remember back in 2006 I used to browse overclock forums to overclock my pentium 4, I tons of fun consuming lots of instructions, I learned the bios, changed PLL clocks, mem clocks etc.
The major issue is these days most software is electron based or a webapp. I miss the days of 98/XP, where you'd find tons of desktop software. A PC actually felt something that had a purpose. Even if you spin up a XP/98(especially 98/2000 VM) now, you'd see the entire OS feels something that you can spend some time on. Nowadays most PCs feel like a random terminal where I open the browser and do some basic work(except for gaming ofcourse).
I really hate the UX of win 11 , even 10 isn't much better compared to XP.
I really hope we go back to that old era.
It's a fun perception. For the longest time, all the "serious" computers were used through networks and terminals and didn't even come with any ability to connect a monitor or a keyboard (although a serial terminal would work as the system console). I used to joke (usually looking at Unisys Windows-based big servers), if the computer had VGA and PS/2 ports, it wasn't a computer, but a toy. Those Unisys servers weren't toys, but you could run Pinball and Minesweeper directly on them, which kind of said otherwise.
I think we got used to such levels of platform bloat that we don't care if the UI toolkit these days is bigger than the entire operating system that runs 95% of the world's payment transactions.
Those of us that keep using Windows or macOS, can still find native applications for many cases, especially because the culture of accepting to pay for small utilities.
It is the Year of Desktop Linux that keeps being inundated with Electron crap, to detriment of Gtk, Qt, KDE, and whatever else is out there.
I have been self hosting since couple of years, yes I got very very interested in self hosting my apps, away from the cloud overlords, but the major issue is the network.
You'll need business internet plans with redundancy and based on locations that might be prohibitively expensive. Some startups might even require their own AS numbers.
Also the connectivity to the data centers or cloud infra like WAF , CDNs etc will be definitely worse compared to cloud instances. Then comes firewalls, their configuration and their redundancy.
These things will matter if you're serious about your SaaS.You could definitely co-locate, but that's another cost, then comes the redundancy of everything, from servers, to disks to network (routers and switches etc).
I personally believe that modern hardware is pretty reliable and doesn't need redundancy in every layer, but most people won't agree with and when startups have enough money, this doesn't matter to them.
I think the only reason the common public is unable to start SaaS is handling and managing these problems. Redundancy costs a lot. And many startups don't want to deal with it even if it'll help them in long run. They just gather enough cash and throw at the overlords.
I do hope that the general infra should improve so that can properly host their own.
Nevertheless I'm still trying to start something in SaaS space and self host from my home...
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