About the next ARM-based macbook....

[bcnaz]

Hello! I recently received a Pinebook pro and I love the aestetichs and the idea of an arm-based laptop. However I see lag of support regarding most Distros that could do wonders in this machine. 
Meanwhile the rumors of a new arm-based Macbook Air are real and I was wondering if somebody would be brave enough to eventually port arm-MacOS to the Pinebook pro. that would be the ultimate Operative System goal IMO. Any thoughts?

  Well Linux systems do get FOSS ratings,  some better,  some worse  ...  BUT I have never seen a Microsoft or Apple or Android O.S. get any FOSS ratings !

   **   BUT Linux IS about giving you 'Choices'  !

 Some users here DO install Google/Android on their devices...

BUT you may run into legal battles as well,     putting proprietary software on your device(s)...  ?

***  WHY purchase a device aimed at privacy,   then install a privacy invading operating system ?

Does NOT make any sense to me,  but  if It is your choice  go for it...

 

**********

    I see Apple just added 'their' Covid app to my son's phone without asking permission from him. !

This app monitors everywhere you go and sends the information to unknown parties !

****************

[z4v4l]

well, it's funny. apple never made OSX or how they call it a standalone product. it's only meant to run on their hardware, and it's much easier for them to support. it's their choice and noone can blame them for this. but what looks really ugly - they make running other OSs on their HW either impossible or much harder. this is really a practice that should be punishable, because it's a clearly anticompetitive practice.
so no, you won't be able to run macos on pinebook pro or anything except apple's hw.

what's more realistic is getting, at some point, Windows support. if you are not a hopeless zealot and efficiency and productivity are your priorities, then it might be both much more attractive and feasible option for you (for me it is). here, as with PCs, vendors should be a little bit more nimble, - supplying drivers, meaning. MS provides Windows for ARM, WDK for driver development, sooo, it's a matter of those who makes SoCs to get, that having Windows support is a HUUUGE plus for them in addition to ugly android BSPs they spit on.

[Syonyk]

I see Apple just added 'their' Covid app to my son's phone without asking permission from him. !

This app monitors everywhere you go and sends the information to unknown parties !

That's a quite false characterization of their proximity tracking system.

You can find details on it here, including design docs and such: https://www.apple.com/covid19/contacttracing

And the FAQ directly covers "location tracking" - https://covid19-static.cdn-apple.com/app...AQv1.1.pdf

Specifically, there are built in mutual exclusions in the OS - if you want contact tracing information, you are forbidden by the OS from getting location data.

===========

ARM OS X won't run on anything but Apple hardware. They can tie it to the cryptographic roots of trust in the processor easily enough.

[walterego]

Thanks everybody for your responses! Linux is indeed the best OS if you know how to use it. WIndows ARM would definitely be nice to have and would attract many more people, even if the ethics of Windows might be counterproductive for some of you. I just wish there was more options of fast and stable distros. But I still do not regret the laptop purchase. I have another laptop that I use as a Desktop running Lubuntu.

[Syonyk]

If you want to run OS X, buy Apple hardware. It's well built, expensive, and runs OS X.

If you want to run Windows... buy some x86 laptop. I've heard nothing particularly good about Windows on ARM.

If you want open source, repairable hardware, buy a PineBook Pro and run Linux.

Fundamentally, Windows for ARM won't run on much Microsoft doesn't deliberately support. It's far harder to get it working on random hardware, because while most x86 PCs look generally alike from the perspective of an operating system, the same isn't true of ARM. I won't call it a total mess now that we have device tree support in the kernel, but... compared to x86, it's really quite tricky.

If you want to run Windows ARM, you can (supposedly) virtualize it halfway decent on the PBP, though I don't know what the point would be.

[jiyong]

If you want to run OS X, buy Apple hardware.  It's well built, expensive, and runs OS X.

Louis Rossmann disagrees with you on that point. ;-)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUaJ8pDlxi8

[slyecho]

Running macOS on the Pinebook is as feasible as running iOS on a Samsung tablet. There's a lot more to the chipset that is different than the ARM machine code that is the same. And "Apple Silicon" processors have a lot of stuff in them that other ARM processors don't have.

The best bet would be to have some kind of virtualization, and I do believe that Big Sur has Linux virtualization and containers available (and Windows 10 ARM also supports running Linux distros under WSL)

It's kind of sad because if I want to run Linux, Windows and macOS in ARM I would have to get three computers for it.

[wdt]

Not to say also..
the arm cpu apple is developing is probably 10-20 times as fast as 3399
So, how long do you want to wait?

[jiyong]

Not to say also..
the arm cpu apple is developing is probably 10-20 times as fast as 3399
So, how long do you want to wait?

When Apple does some decent coding, it should be just as fast as Manjaro on the Pinebook Pro.

[tso4ev]

my dream is just to get official ubuntu 20.04 something like the auyfans build but official release with less bugs .. not everybody likes manjaro and he have a point most distros for the pinebook pro barely work and that's disappointing.. I love the hardware but the support side is absolute 0..
ps. only the hope that one day we will get stable 20.04 keeping me from selling it or just trow it away