It's a much better QOL thing I've found to just ssh into a remote Linux box from a Mac. The BSD stuff on macOS isn't bad at all, just an adjustment... and homebrew lets you get your environment however you'd like.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
I use UTM, it's simple and seems light. I can share my source directory with the VM so I can edit using macos pycharm, and test the containers in the VM.
What really caught me out was I downloaded an x64 image once (there was no arm64 image) and it somehow just ran anyway in the arm64 VM. That may have been some qemu magic?
I love the macos/virtualised linux dev workflow, but is isn't better than plain linux. I'm just still not convinced GUI stuff works on linux as well as it does on macos and macbook hardware is so nice (if you're not paying for it).
Well the costs had to be cut somewhere. At least they put a headphone jack in it, so they're doing better than Microsoft on that front (who inexplicably removed it from the SP line)
I don't think this is intentional to cut cost. I simply think that the chip was primarily made for devices with one port (iPhone, iPad) and this is a bit of an afterthought.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a future product with 2x USB 3.0 10 Gbps with DisplayPort support on the next generation, A19 Pro or A20 Pro maybe, if the product has enough success.
This is going to be a primary complaint people have (even if it's not terribly important) - hopefully they have some circuitry that warns you if you're plugging something into the wrong port (e.g. a USB 3 device into USB 2 at slow speeds).
> This is going to be a primary complaint people have
No. Most people never plug in anything to their USB ports where they'd notice a speed difference. Definitely not people picking up a $600 MacBook for school or casual web browsing.
I'd bet 90% of folks never do anything other than charge through these ports...
I don't think people will have many complaints about this thing, but I do think this will be one of the primary (even though it's basically a non-complaint).
It will definitely be used to justify spending $300-1500 more for a better laptop.
The same things Macbook pro users plug in where they'd see the USB speed differences. Just because someone isn't as privileged as to be able to afford a MacBook Pro instead of a Neo doesn't mean they don't have the same dreams and desires.
For monitors at least, if you plug in to the wrong port you will get a GUI prompt advising you to use the other one [1]:
> while the ports aren’t labeled, if you plug an external display into the “wrong” port, you’ll get an on-screen notification suggesting you plug it into the other port.
I hope they added (or will add) that feature to other Macs too, on mine I had to try out different ports and check the settings to find the one which can go beyond 60Hz.
If they want to get these things into schools it would be insane to expect the schools to also supply everyone with AirPods or some other kind of wireless headphones.
AirPods have too much latency for playing music. You want wired audio for running GarageBand or Logic Pro with a MIDI controller. They could have gone with a USB-C to audio adapter, but then you wouldn't be able to plug the MIDI controller and charge the computer.
... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.
> ... Only a few people make music with a Mac, but it's been an important part of its history, and Apple cares about it.
This seems to be a recent phenomenon. A lot of electronic music production uses the Macintosh and Logic/Ableton workflow, to say nothing about how many of the best DSPs were Apple-exclusive until about a decade ago. I don't really think music production, at least in the EDM and hip-hop world, got popular on the PC until the rise of Fruity Loops and FL Studio, but that's available on the Mac now too.
This is 2026. iPhones use standard USB C headphones, you can charge your phone at the same time while using your wired headphones using MagSafe and you can even by low end $59 Beats Flex headphones that have all of the Apple magic.
I’m going to need HN geeks to get over analog headphones from the 60s
I've never had a USB-C port fail with many of them being plugged / unplugged multiple times a day for years. At most they fill with dust you have to fish out. Aux ports would often get in a state where you had to very carefully position the jack for it to work.
I am a huge 3.5mm jack defender and I am still upset at how Apple created a post-USB C world. But this is a common misconception.
USB C headphones and 3.5mm headphones (and Bluetooth, USB A, etc) are all equally as "analog" as one another (with the exception of someone with all-analog equipment, of course).
You need a DAC somewhere between the chip you're getting the digital signal from and the speakers that are playing an analog signal. And so the quality of that depends on (among other things) the quality of your DAC.
With USB or Bluetooth headphones, the DAC is somewhere in the headphone. With the 3.5mm jack, the DAC is behind jack. If you have a device with a crummy built-in DAC giving you a noisy signal, you'll be better off using a USB DAC.
I haven't used Apple's USB C earbuds, but Apple does make a $10 USB C to 3.5mm DAC that performs very very well for its price point.
The difference is you always can buy USB C headphones with a known good consistent DAC. A 3.5 inch headphone jack serves no purpose in the age of USB C - even my wife’s mixing board has USB C input that she can plug her iPhone into.
Next thing HN folks are going yo want the iPhone to come with a SCSI port.
And technology moves on either way. There is not a single high end phone that still comes with a 3.5 inch headphone jack in 2026. The number of people who care in 2026 is probably less than the number of people who want to run Linux on their phone.
Yes, but that's different than what we're saying. I think many more people want and use 3.5mm jacks than they do SCSI ports. The 3.5mm jack is excellent. We're in a thread about a new device released with this wonderful port.
Also, many people want to run Linux on their phone. About 7 in 10 smart phones run Linux, and smart phones are devices billions of humans use every day.
We are in a thread on HN where you have people who complain about not having root access on your iPhone, want to run Linux on everything and bemoan the fact that most websites don’t work with JavaScript disabled.
This is as far from the mainstream as you can possibly get.
Come September it will have been a decade since Apple dropped the headphone port - the world has moved on
I would very much like root on my phone and most of the websites I use don't require JavaScript. Apple hasn't dropped the headphone port, they even announced a new product today called the Macbook Neo with one. There is even a thread on HN about it :)
Or I can just not do stupid shit and listen to hifi headphones released in the past 2-3 years, many of which have a 3.5mm jack (and adapters for larger, if plugging into dac/pre-amps).
Which you said aren't being made anymore. Which is factually untrue. The best bit is, they're still being made! And there's plenty of people who are still buying them!
Why? Because a $170 pair of closed-backs sounds infinitely better than the $550 Bose Quiet Comfort Ultra nonsense.
FiiO FT1 32Ω being a prime example, if you are looking for closed back suggestions :^)
No I said high end phones are no more coming with headphone jacks than they are coming with SCSI and VGA ports. I’m sure it would be convenient for you if the iPhone came with a right and left 1/4 inch audio jack.
Why do they need to sound better? Also, in a lot of instances, they do sound better because they can offer powered functionality such as ANC. Can’t get that with a truly analog headphone. I’d never use analog headphones on a plane, for instance.
Low-end wired earbuds come in packages with dozens of units. I buy cheap earbuds because my kids love breaking them. Not everyone optimizes for the same thing. Analog remains the bees knees in certain settings.
The Blue Origin skepticism is based in how many decades they spent in making buildings instead of rockets and how long it has taken them to get anything to orbit.
> So, autocomplete done by deterministic algorithms in IDEs are okay but autocomplete done by LLM algorithms - no, that's banned? Ok, surely everybody agrees with that, it's policy after all.
Because autocomplete still requires heavy user input and a SWE at the top of the decision making tree. You could argue that using Claude or Codex enables you to do the same thing, but there's no guarantee someone isn't vibecoding and then not testing adequately to ensure, firstly, that everything can be debugged, and secondly, that it fits in with the broader codebase before they try to merge or PR.
Plenty of people use Claude like an autocomplete or to bounce ideas off of, which I think is a great use case. But besides that, using a tool like that in more extreme ways is becoming increasingly normalized and probably not something you want in your codebase if you care about code quality and avoiding pointless bugs.
Every time I see a post on HN about some miracle work Claude did it's always been very underwhelming. Wow, it coded a kernel driver for out of date hardware! That doesn't do anything except turn a display on... great. Claude could probably help you write a driver in less time, but it'll only really work well, again, if you're at the top of the hierarchy of decision making and are manually reviewing code. No guarantees of that in the FOSS world because we don't have keyloggers installed on everybody's machine.
Yes, actually. Knowingly violating the policies of a project while pretending you aren't, so you can continue participating in the fully voluntary project, does make you a jerk.
If you don't like the policies they set, just leave.
I'm willing to bet that every single person on here complaining has zero contributions to PostmarketOS.
If you only knew how the enterprise space does stuff you'd realize how little a priority maintainability is.
I'm grateful we had Java when this stuff was taking off; if any enterprise applications were written in anything else available at the time (like C/C++) we'd all suffer even more memory leaks, security vulnerabilities, and data breaches than we do now.
Now that's interesting, because I come from a world where enterprise level stuff was all done in C/C++ until quite recently, and with the shift to :web technologies" the quality of virtually everything has dropped through the floor, including the knowledge and skill level of the developers working on the tech. It is rare that I see people that have been working in excess of 10 years post graduation, if they went to college. The college grads have been pushed out by lower quality and lower skilled React developers that really do not belong in the industry at all. It's really a crime how low things have gotten, in such a short time: 10 to 15 years ago there were 2-3 decades of experienced people all over the place. Not anymore.
Except this is not the age of the Rockefellers or the Carnegies, who, despite being far more philanthropic than modern-day billionaires, drew ire from every corner of society for their wealth accumulation. It wasn't until the New Deal that the balance shifted.
Unconstrained accumulation of capital into the hands of the few without appropriate investment into labor is illiberal and incompatible with democracy and true freedom. Those of us who are capitalists see surplus value as a compromise to ensure good economic growth. The hidden subtext of that is that all the wealth accumulated needs to be re-allocated to serve not only capital enterprise, but the needs of society as a whole. It's hard to see the current system as appropriate for that given how blindly and wildly investments are made with no DD or going long, or no effort paid to the social or environmental opportunity costs of certain practices.
A lot of this comes down to the crippling of the SEC and FTC, but even then, investors cry and whine every time you suggest reworking the regs to inhibit some of the predatory practices common in this post-80s era of hypernormalization. Our current system does not resemble a healthy capitalist economy at all. It's rife with monopsony and monopolistic competition, inequality of opportunity, and a strained underclass that's responsible for our inverted population pyramid -- how can you have kids when we're so atomized and there is no village to help you? You can raise kids in a nuclear family if and only if you have enough money to do so. Otherwise, historically, people relied on their communities when raising children in less-than-ideal circumstances. Those communities are drying up.
> Those of us who are capitalists see surplus value as a compromise to ensure good economic growth.
I think the problem is that every system of economics requires ignoring human nature in order to believe it possibly can work. In order to believe that capitalism doesn't lead to despotic rule you have to ignore the fact that civilizations love a good hierarchy far more than they love justice and fairness.
You can make any system of economics work if you figure out how to deal, head on, with the particular human nature factor that it tries to ignore.
I don't really believe that the strongman theory and hierarchy is inherent to human social structure, or at least not the way in which we do it. Some level of hierarchy is inevitable, but the longest-lasting and most stable hierarchies were somewhat bureaucratic and highly meritocratic (think China and their civil service exams) and our system is extremely bureaucratic and not meritocratic whatsoever.
The fact that whether or not doing something like this (which is bizarre, incredibly unhealthy, and just not how humans are wired socially) is considered at all in the AI space and met with a "oh well, we'll wait and see long-term" is sort of a microcosm of how out of touch the push behind LLMs is. Anthropic, OpenAI, etc have thrust a poorly functioning product with unhealthy obsequiousness and a clever obfuscative instinct to hide its numerous limitations upon a legion of unsuspecting normal people who mistake its cleverness for true wit and insight. And now these people are blowing up their relationships, their passions, and their hobbies, and for what? What, actually, would routing your texts through Gemini or ChatGPT possibly do for your relationship? Is the onus not on us when we individuate and socialize to take it upon ourselves to learn how to communicate our feelings and emotions with each other? What sort of Kafkaesque absurdity are we living in?
I suppose Zizek predicted all of this years ago with his little anecdote about how in the future, I paraphrase, but he suggested even sex will be outsourced to technology; perhaps on a date one will purchase an artificial phallus and the other a male pleasure item, and the two will sit on the floor and watch their pleasure objects mating with one another. That's about how absurd this reality is that the genAI pushers seek to impose upon the world.
Quote from a VP at a big tech megacorp a few months back:
> "If we don't start using this technology every day in every aspect of our jobs we will be left behind and never catch up."
I'm gonna get that one embroidered and framed on the wall above my toilet so for the rest of my life every day I can look at it and chuckle at the memory of how broken people were before the bubble popped.
I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers (which given the current curve of improvements despite what the naysayers of human intellect might suggest, is unfeasible).
Accountants didn't die off when calculators came on the scene. In no scenario is an LLM a drop-in replacement for any career field the same way CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers, doing CAD drafting and design rather than using raw pen-and-paper skills.
Claude and Codex are exceptionally useful for reducing workload and improving productivity. But that's all they are. They're calculators replacing the slide-rule, drafting-esque drudgery of typing out all your code by hand. So why not market them like that? As helpers, assistants, tools to enable you to do things better and more efficiently? Which, in my usage of them, is what they're really only good at. Instead, there's been a mad rush to shoehorn agents and LLMs and genai into everything, outlandish claims like GPT writing better than Hemingway and Ginsberg, and creating absurd tools like Grok or Sora that are fundamentally broken, don't work well, and have flooded the internet with noise and disgusting slop.
And in all of this, they've created a cancerous gold rush that threatens to wipe out the entire economy when the jig is up and people realize how useless these claims are, and that at the end of the day, it's a fancy search engine, a calculator, that can think a little better and reason more than the ones of old.
It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.
> I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers
Because labor is the largest line item in almost every software company on Earth. Executives' primary KPI is their market cap, so convincing investors that your profit/expense ratio is going to 2x in 6 months when you finally get full LLM adoption is an excellent way to juice your performance metrics, and thereby your bonus (mutatis mutandis for various finacial setups).
But then what about the fact that it's exposing so many firms to immense risk and essentially straight-up lying to investors as well as product adopters? No one thought of that reality, when the chickens finally come home to roost?
My read is that it's a mix of tech firms having overhired a lot during the ZIRP+COVID era, as well as executives having a pretty short horizon for risk if the potential bonus is large enough.
There's an easy fix, you start hiring again. Probably don't even have to explain it, what happened just before was that you improved corporate finances by lowering your labour expenses, i.e. you're clearly growing and hence you need more people.
That marketing has been used to fire a lot of people, I think that's an important reason why it has that character. Then there were some true believers too, who were obviously important to the people firing other people.
Being able to remove a lot of people from your large work force and have other corporations do it too is quite profitable, on average it pushes down the price of labour and you'll rehire some of them and replace some of the others, and perhaps your organisation managed to become more efficient at the stuff that make you money in the short run too.
Then there was that thing with the change in US tax code, where R&D became more expensive some years ago.
> CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers
You’re off my an order of magnitude here. Even ignoring departments that were significantly downsized, you would need substantially more draftsmen to do the work currently done by a smaller number with AutoCAD.
The skill required is also much lower, doubly so if you consider Solidworks/Inventor. You get everything for free; design the 3D model and your projections are free.
lack of regulation in the VC space? I mean, in order to get these vast sums of money, they have to make all these sky high claims, but I feel like in the old days, someone would get at least a wrist slap for defrauding investors
I mean that's certainly part of it, but Altman's grotesque comments today about the idea of raising a child being "more inefficient" than training an AI model there's something deeper, darker, psychologically I think; that the VC people are fundamentally misanthropic and antisocial and despite AI not really fulfilling their desire for a world where humans are entirely fungible they want to sell it that way as a sort of bizarre wishcasting. It's just incredibly odd.
> I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers
> It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.
Because the people at the top of these companies have absolutely no idea about how the average human goes through life or what a normal human life even is. They don't know what having a job means, what a job is, what it means to be in charge of a family, to struggle for basic things, &c. Look at zuck presenting his ridiculous image gen ai [0], or their embarrassing "Uh HeLp Me MaKe A SaUcE FoR My KoReAn SaNdWiCh" [1], or his Wii tier metaverse that no one above the age of 13 found remotely interesting, this is what these people spent hundreds of billions on, that's what they dream about, that's the future they want even though 90% of the population does not give a single shit about it,
And then you have altman and his very unsettling takes on all kind of topics like "ai will develop bioweapons in 2027 but ai is also the solution to this problem", "humans use too much energy" or "I cannot imagine having gone through figuring out how to raise a newborn without ChatGPT” no shit my dude, a gay man who never worked a day in his life, exit scammed his way to the top and who paid for someone to incubate their offspring have no clue about what evolution should have encoded in his DNA over 300m+ years? and we have to give him $7 trillion to speed run the next stage of evolution, lol, lmao even...
Ah, and they need to raise trillions of dollars, literally, that's why they keep mentioning outrageous (but very profitable) things like curing cancer, skynet, terraforming mars and solar powered satellites datacenters even though none of these things make any fucking sense. They need the next """hypergrowth""" vector, one more scam before we eventually reach the point of no return, it's all greed and FOMO as always. One day they shill self driving cars, the next bitcoin, the next AI, always full of "in two years it'll be amazing we promise, I can't explain how or why but give me a few trillions", meanwhile it's going downhill fast for everyone outside of these echo chambers
These solutions are often proposed as easy fixes but I'm skeptical that they actually will do much to reduce healthcare costs. Healthcare is fundamentally expensive. Not-for-profit hospitals and for-profit hospitals don't really substantively differ in terms of out-of-pocket expenditures for patients; I find it difficult to imagine that forcing insurance companies to be nonprofit would do much to reduce costs.
> large insurance pools that must span age groups and risk groups.
What you describe (community rating) has been tried and it works. But it requires that a lot of young, healthy people enroll, and seniors receive most of the care. In an inverted demographic pyramid like most Western economies have, this is a ticking time bomb, so costs will continue to rise.
> Mandate at least decent minimal coverage standards
I think a better solution is to allow the government to threaten in negotiating prices with companies as Canada does; it greatly reduces rent-seeking behavior by pharmaceutical companies while allowing them to continue earning profits and innovating. (I understand a lot of the complaints against big pharma but they are actually one of the few sectors of the economy that doesn't park their wealth and actually uses it for substantive R&D, despite what the media will tell you, and countless lives have been saved because of pharma company profits)
Essentially the gist of what I'm saying, as someone who has been involved with and studied this industry for the better part of five years, is that it's much more complex than what meets the eye.
There are a lot of not-for-profit insurance companies and they aren't noticably cheaper, though I'm not in HR and they may well be cheaper for the employer.
I am curious how long Apple is going to continue to support XQuartz though. There seems to be no equivalent wayland project.
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