alt Hacker NewsThis is incredibly impressive and also quite sad. Six years later, we have a very-nearly-right kernel for the M1.
Apple is launching the M5. It seems like the future is going to be a world of closed systems and custom silicon, with any free software lagging far behind.
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Will the gap remain just as big once earlier architectures are fully covered? I would expect some inertia bringing positive feedback in the development loop.
Apple launched the M5 in October, they sell 2 devices already with it:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/10/apple-unveils-new-14-...
Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.
But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.
Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.
But we have still the power of choice: moving consumers away from such closed platforms would affect their business.
At least Apple usually supports their hardware for ~7 years so that's plenty of time to get Asahi working on newer Ms. I don't care too much about getting instant support but I definitely care about having the option to use my hardware more than 7 years
And that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had locked it down like they do on every other product then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the looming possibility that they'll just change their mind with future models.
Thankfully, hardware progress is relatively slow in a way that makes the m1 still a perfectly capable machine. Maybe we’ll have a future of “flagship community devices” where only one of every X is chosen as the supported option.
What do you expect when you nerds keep buying their closed systems?
M1 and M2 hardware isn't going anywhere. They're still great machines. And progress will be faster once the project finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distros. They have a first alpha of M3 ready, they're just refraining from releasing it in that state because they're so busy with everything else they're doing - a key difference compared to when they first came out with alpha support for the M1.