[HN Gopher] Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerizati...
___________________________________________________________________
Apple announces Foundation Models and Containerization frameworks,
etc
Author : thm
Score : 816 points
Date : 2025-06-09 17:44 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple.com)
| elpakal wrote:
| Hopefully not bound to SwiftUI like seemingly everything else
| Apple Intelligence so far. But on-device llm (private) would be
| real nice to have.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| "The framework has native support for Swift, so developers can
| easily access the Apple Intelligence model with as few as three
| lines of code."
|
| Bad news.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Swift != SwiftUI
| samcat116 wrote:
| The api looks like "give it a string prompt, async get a string
| back", so not tied to any particular UI Framework.
| turnsout wrote:
| Thank goodness... this will hopefully help keep app bundle sizes
| down, and allow developers to avoid calling AI APIs for trivial
| stuff like summaries.
| amluto wrote:
| > This year, App Intents gains support for visual intelligence.
| This enables apps to provide visual search results within the
| visual intelligence experience, allowing users to go directly
| into the app from those results.
|
| How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and
| instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like _installed apps
| when searching by a prefix of their name_? As a second criterion,
| I would like to find files by substrings of their name.
|
| Spotlight is unbelievably bad and has been unbelievably bad for
| quite a few years. It seems to return things slowly, in erratic
| order (the same search does not consistently give the same
| results) and unreliably (items that are definitely there
| regularly fail to appear in search results).
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| User: yells Feedback into void.
| cube2222 wrote:
| Fwiw, spotlight in MacOS seems to be getting a major revamp too
| (basing this on the WWDC livestream, but there seems to be a
| note about it on their blog[0] too), pushing it a bit more in
| the direction of tools like Alfred or Raycast, and allegedly
| also being faster (but that's marketing speak of course, so
| we'll see when Fall comes).
|
| [0]: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/macos-
| tahoe-26-makes-...
| catoc wrote:
| "How about starting with reliably, deterministically, and
| instantly (say <50ms) finding obvious things like <...>
| searching by a prefix of their name? As a second criterion, I
| would like to find files by substrings of their name"
|
| Even I can, and have, build search functionality like this.
| Deterministically. No LLMs or "AI" needed. In fact for
| satisfying the above criteria this kind of implementation is
| still far more reliable.
| amluto wrote:
| I've also written search code like this. It's trivial, at
| least at the scale of installed apps and such on a single
| computer.
|
| AI makes it strictly worse. I do not want intelligence. I
| want to type, for example, "saf" and have Safari appear
| immediately, in the same place, every time, without popping
| into a different place as I'm trying to click it because a
| slower search process decided to displace the result. No
| "temperature", no randomness, no fancy crap.
| olyjohn wrote:
| Quicksilver worked great back in the day before Spotlight was
| ever even a thought.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I have no idea what happened to my Mac in the last month but
| for some reason, spotlight isn't able to search by name any app
| name anymore. Like if search for Safari, it will show me
| results for everything except the Safari app. Even tried
| searching for Safari.app and still no results. It can't find
| any apps.
| visarga wrote:
| I guess LLM and AI are forbidden words in Apple language. They do
| their utmost to avoid these words.
| iambateman wrote:
| LLM's get six mentions in this article.
| mbowcut2 wrote:
| Nah, I think they made it model agnostic, which is kinda smart.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Search for "large language model" instead of "LLM".
| simonw wrote:
| They took the clever (in my opinion) decision to rebrand "AI"
| as "Apple Intelligence", presumably partly in order to avoid
| the infinite tired "it's not really AI" takes that have
| surrounded that acronym for decades.
| meindnoch wrote:
| It's about as cringe as that Chinese guy with the funny-
| shaped head, who said a few years ago that AI for him means
| "alibaba intelligence".
| Geee wrote:
| And that's why we haven't heard of him since then.
| rtaylorgarlock wrote:
| Because they don't own it, or the models they (don't) own
| aren't good enough for a standalone brand? Sure seems like it.
| simonw wrote:
| Is there a beta we can install to try out these models yet?
| mathewsanders wrote:
| This press release says it will be available "starting today"
| through developer program
| https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/apple-supercharges-it...
| bitpush wrote:
| What model are they bundling? Something apple-custom? How capable
| is it?
| jjice wrote:
| Apple has their own models under the hood I believe. I remember
| from like a year or two ago they had an open line called "ELM"
| (Efficient Language Model), but I'm not sure if that's what
| they're actually using.
|
| I am excited to see what the benchmarks look like though, once
| it's live.
| tough wrote:
| they also use their ANE and CoreML for smaller on-device
| stuff
|
| https://huggingface.co/apple
| simonw wrote:
| They described their home-grown models last year:
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...
|
| I'm assuming this is an updated version of those.
| alwillis wrote:
| They're also working with Anthropic on a coding platform:
| https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/02/apple-anthropic-ai-codi...
| sabareesh wrote:
| Good move, not sure they are exposing other modalities as well ?
| dedicate wrote:
| Okay, the AI stuff is cool, but that "Containerization framework"
| mention is kinda huge, right? I mean, native Linux container
| support on Mac could be a game-changer for my whole workflow,
| maybe even making Docker less of a headache.
| marviel wrote:
| yeah -- I saw it's built on "open source foundations", do you
| know what project this is?
| underdeserver wrote:
| The CLI sure looks a lot like Docker.
| cmiles74 wrote:
| Being able to drop Docker Desktop would be great. We're using
| Podman on MacOS now in a couple places, it's pretty good but
| it is another tool. Having the same tool across MacOS and
| Linux would be nice.
| mgreg wrote:
| There's also Rancher Desktop (https://rancherdesktop.io/).
| Supports moby and containerd; also optionally runs
| kubernetes.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Orbstack
| samgranieri wrote:
| I have to drop docker desktop at work and move to podman.
|
| I'm the primary author of amalgamation of GitHub's scripts
| to rule them all with docker compose so my colleagues can
| just type `script/setup` and `script/server` (and more!)
| and the underlying scripts handle the rest.
|
| Apple including this _natively_ is nice, but I won 't be a
| able to use this because my scripts have to work on linux
| and probably WSL
| 9dev wrote:
| Migrate to Orbstack now, and get a lot of sanity back
| immediately. It's a drop-in replacement, much faster, and
| most importantly, gets out of your way.
| shellac wrote:
| If I had to guess, colima? But there are a number of open
| source projects using Apple's virtualisation technologies to
| run a linux VM to host docker-type containers.
|
| Once you have an engine podman might be the best choice to
| manage containers, or docker.
| acedTrex wrote:
| Colima is my guess, only thing that makes sense here if they
| are doing a qemu vm type of thing
| mbreese wrote:
| That's my guess too... Colima, but probably doing a VM
| using the Virtualization framework. I'll be more curious if
| you can select x86 containers, or if you'll be limited to
| arm64/aarch64. Not that it really makes that much of a
| difference anymore, you can get pretty far with Linux Arm
| containers and VMs.
| mmcnl wrote:
| My guess is Podman. They released native hypervisor support
| on macOS last year.
| https://devclass.com/2024/03/26/podman-5-0-released-with-
| nat...
| stock_toaster wrote:
| My guess is nerdctl and containerd.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Should be easy enough, look for the one with upstream
| contributions from Apple.
|
| Oh, wait.
| niteshade wrote:
| Seems to be this: https://github.com/apple/containerization
| sho_hn wrote:
| vminitd is the most interesting part of this.
| paxys wrote:
| It's impossible to have "native" support for Linux containers
| on macOS, since the technology inherently relies on Linux
| kernel features. So I'm guessing this is Apple rolling out
| their own Linux virtualization layer (same as WSL). Probably
| still an improvement over the current mess, but if they just
| support LXC and not Docker then most devs will still need to
| install Docker Desktop like they do today.
| jzelinskie wrote:
| The screenshot in TFA pretty clearly shows docker-like
| workflows pulling images, showing tags and digests and
| running what looks to be the official Docker library version
| of Postgres.
| paxys wrote:
| Every container system is "docker-like". Some (like Podman)
| even have a drop-in replacement for the Docker CLI.
| Ultimately there are always subtle differences which make
| swapping between Docker <> Podman <> LXC or whatever else
| impossible without introducing messy bugs in your workflow,
| so you need to pick one and stick to it.
| tough wrote:
| https://opencontainers.org/
| cogman10 wrote:
| If you've not tried it recently, I suggest give the
| latest version of podman another shot. I'm currently
| using it over docker and a lot of the compatibility
| problems are gone. They've put in massive efforts into
| compatibility including docker compose support.
| darkwater wrote:
| Yeah, from a quick glance the options are 1:1 mapped so an
| alias docker='container'
|
| Should work, at least for basic and common operations
| tensor wrote:
| Apple has had a native hypervisor for some time now. This is
| probably a baked in clone of something like
| https://mac.getutm.app/ which provides the stuff on top of
| the hypervisor.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Using a hypervisor means just running a Linux VM, like WSL2
| does on Windows. There is nothing native about it.
|
| Native Linux (and Docker) support would be something like
| WSL1, where Windows kernel implemented Linux syscalls.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Surely if _Windows_ kernel can be taught to respond to
| those syscalls, XNU can be taught it even easier. But,
| AIUI the Windows kernel already had a concept of
| "personalities" from back when they were trying to
| integrate OS/2 so that zero-to-one for XNU could be a
| huge lift, not the syscalls part specifically
| literalAardvark wrote:
| Exactly. So it wouldn't necessarily be easier. NT is
| almost a microkernel.
| 9dev wrote:
| Yep. People consistently underestimate the great piece of
| technology NT is, it really was ahead of its time. And a
| shame what Microsoft is doing with it now.
| okanat wrote:
| Was it ahead? I am not sure. There was lots of research
| on microkernels at the time and NT was a good compromise
| between a mono and a microkernel. It was an engineering
| product of its age. A considerably good one. It is still
| the best popular kernel today. Not because it is the best
| possible with today's resouces but because nobody else
| cares about core OS design anymore.
|
| I think it is the Unix side that decided to burry their
| heads into sand. We got Linux. It is free (of charge or
| licensing). It supported files, basic drivers and
| sockets. It got commercial support for servers. It was
| all Silicon Valley needed for startups. Anything else is
| a cost. So nobody cared. Most of the open source
| microkernel research slowly died after Linux. There is
| still some with L4 family.
|
| Now we are overengineering our stacks to get closer to
| microkernel capabilities that Linux lacks using
| containers. I don't want to say it is ripe for disruption
| becuse it is hard and again nobody cares (except some
| network and security equipment but that's a tiny
| fraction).
| 9dev wrote:
| > Was it ahead? I am not sure.
|
| You say this, but then proceed to state that it had a
| very good design back then informed by research, and
| still is today. Doesn't that qualify? :-)
|
| NT brought a HAL, proper multi-user ACLs, subsystems in
| user mode (that alone is amazing, even though they sadly
| never really gained momentum), preemptive multitasking.
| And then there's NTFS, with journaling, alternate
| streams, and shadow copies, and heaps more. A lot of it
| was very much ahead of UNIX at the time.
|
| > nobody else cares about core OS design anymore.
|
| Agree with you on that one.
| okanat wrote:
| > You say this, but then proceed to state that it had a
| very good design back then informed by research, and
| still is today. Doesn't that qualify? :-)
|
| I meant that NT was a product that matched the state of
| the art OS design of its time (90s). It was the Unix
| world that decided to be behind in 80s forever.
|
| NT was ahead not because it is breaking ground and
| bringing in new design aspects of 2020s to wider
| audiences but Unix world constantly decides to be
| hardcore conservative and backwards in OS design. They
| just accept that a PDP11 simulator is all you need.
|
| It is similar to how NASA got stuck with 70s/80s design
| of Shuttle. There was research for newer launch systems
| but nobody made good engineering applications of them.
| kergonath wrote:
| > the Windows kernel already had a concept of
| "personalities" from back when they were trying to
| integrate OS/2 so that zero-to-one for XNU could be a
| huge lift, not the syscalls part specifically
|
| XNU is modular, with its BSD servers on top of Mach. I
| don't see this as being a strong advantage of NT.
| shawnz wrote:
| WSL1 didn't use the existing support for personalities in
| NT
| heavyset_go wrote:
| XNU similarly has a concept of "flavors" and uses FreeBSD
| code to provide the BSD flavor. Theoretically, either
| Linux code or a compatibility layer could be implemented
| in the kernel in a similar way. The former won't happen
| due to licensing.
| petersellers wrote:
| Hyper-V is a type 1 hypervisor, so Linux and Windows are
| both running as virtual machines but they have direct
| access to hardware resources.
|
| It's possible that Apple has implemented a similar
| hypervisor here.
| tensor wrote:
| > The Containerization framework enables developers to
| create, download, or run Linux container images directly
| on Mac. It's built on an open-source framework optimized
| for Apple Silicon and provides secure isolation between
| container images
|
| That's their phrasing, which suggests to me that it's
| just a virtualization system. Linux container images
| generally contain the kernel.
| hackyhacky wrote:
| > Linux container images generally contain the kernel.
|
| No, containers differ from VMs precisely in requiring
| dependency on the host kernel.
| tensor wrote:
| Hmm, so they do. I assumed because you pulled in a linux
| distro that the kernel was from that distro is used too,
| but I guess not. Perhaps they _have_ done some sort of
| improvement where they have one linux kernel running via
| the hypervisor that all containers use. Still can 't see
| them trying to emulate linux calls, but who knows.
| froggit wrote:
| > I assumed because you pulled in a linux distro that the
| kernel was from that distro is used too,
|
| Thst's how docker works on WSL2, run it on top of a
| virtualised linux kernal. WSL2 is pretty tightly
| integrated with windows itself, stil a linux vm though.
| It seems kinda weird for apple to reinvent the wheel for
| that kind of thing for containers.
| froggit wrote:
| > Thst's how docker works on WSL2, run it on top of a
| virtualised linux kernal. WSL2 is pretty tightly
| integrated with windows itself, stil a linux vm though.
| It seems kinda weird for apple to reinvent the wheel for
| that kind of thing for containers.
|
| Can't edit my posts mobile but realized that's, what's
| the word, not useful... But yeah, sharing the kernal
| between containers but otherwise makes them isolated
| allegedly allows them to have VMesque security without
| the overhead of seperate VMs for each image. There's a
| lot more to it, but you get the idea.
| badgersnake wrote:
| They usually do contain a kernel because package managers
| are too stupid to realise it's a container, so they
| install it anyway.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It is as native as any Linux cloud instance.
| neuralkoi wrote:
| In case you're wondering, the Hypervisor.framework C API is
| really neat and straightforward:
|
| 1. Creating and configuring a virtual machine:
| hv_vm_create(HV_VM_DEFAULT);
|
| 2. Allocating guest memory: void* memory
| = mmap(...); hv_vm_map(memory,
| guest_physical_address, size, HV_MEMORY_READ |
| HV_MEMORY_WRITE | HV_MEMORY_EXEC);
|
| 3. Creating virtual CPUs:
| hv_vcpu_create(&vcpu, HV_VCPU_DEFAULT);
|
| 4. Setting registers:
| hv_vcpu_write_register(vcpu, HV_X86_RIP, 0x1000); // Set
| instruction pointer hv_vcpu_write_register(vcpu,
| HV_X86_RSP, 0x8000); // Stack pointer
|
| 5. Running guest code: hv_vcpu_run(vcpu);
|
| 6. Handling VM exits:
| hv_vcpu_exit_reason_t reason;
| hv_vcpu_read_register(vcpu, HV_X86_EXIT_REASON, &reason);
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Thanks for this ! Apple Silicon?
| conradev wrote:
| One of the reasons OrbStack is so great is because they
| implement their own hypervisor: https://orbstack.dev/
|
| Apple's stack gives you low-level access to ARM
| virtualization, and from there Apple has high-level
| convenience frameworks on top. OrbStack implements all of
| the high-level code themselves.
| leoh wrote:
| How does it compare to apple's hv?
| conradev wrote:
| Better filesystem support
| (https://orbstack.dev/blog/fast-filesystem) and memory
| utilization (https://orbstack.dev/blog/dynamic-memory)
| bandoti wrote:
| What about macOS being derived from BSD? Isn't that where
| containers came from: BSD jails?
|
| I know the container ecosystem largely targets Linux just
| curious what people's thoughts are on that.
| hangonhn wrote:
| Conceptually similar but different implementations.
| Containers uses cgroups in Linux and there is also file
| system and network virtualization as well. It's not
| impossible but it would require quite a bit of work.
| McAlpine5892 wrote:
| BSD jails are architected wholly differently from what
| something like Docker provides.
|
| Jails are first-class citizens that are baked deep into the
| system.
|
| A tool like Docker relies using multiple Linux
| features/tools to assemble/create isolation.
|
| Additionally, iirc, the logic for FreeBSD jails never made
| it into the Darwin kernel.
|
| Someone correct me please.
| dboreham wrote:
| > what something like Docker provides
|
| Docker isn't providing any of the underlying
| functionality. BSD jails and Linux cgroups etc aren't
| fundamentally different things.
| nyrikki wrote:
| Jails were explicitly designed for security, cgroups were
| more generalized as more about resource control, and
| leverages namespaces, capabilities, apparmor/SELinux to
| accomplish what they do.
|
| > Jails create a safe environment independent from the
| rest of the system. Processes created in this environment
| cannot access files or resources outside of it.[1]
|
| While you can accomplish similar tasks, they are not
| equivalent.
|
| Assume Linux containers are jails, and you will have
| security problems. And on the flip side, k8s pods share
| UTM,IPC, Network namespaces, yet have independent PID and
| FS namespaces.
|
| Depending on your use case they may be roughly
| equivalent, but they are fundamentally different
| approaches.
|
| [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd-
| project/resources/intr...
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > BSD jails are architected wholly differently from what
| something like Docker provides. > Jails are first-class
| citizens that are baked deep into the system.
|
| Both very true statements and worth remembering when
| considering:
|
| > Additionally, iirc, the logic for FreeBSD jails never
| made it into the Darwin kernel.
|
| You are quite correct, as Darwin is is based on XNU[0],
| which itself has roots in the Mach[1] microkernel. Since
| XNU[0] is an entirely different OS architecture than that
| of FreeBSD[3], jails[4] do not exist within it.
|
| The XNU source can be found here[2].
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
|
| 2 - https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
|
| 3 - https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/
|
| 4 - https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=jail&apropo
| s=0&sek...
| bandoti wrote:
| Thank you for the links I will take a closer look at XNU.
| It's neat to see how these projects influence each other.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| ,,Container" is sort of synonymous with ,,OCI-compatible
| container" these days, and OCI itself is basically a retcon
| standard for docker (runtime, images etc.). So from that
| perspective every ,,container system" is necessarily
| ,,docker-like" and that means Linux namespaces and cgroups.
| pjmlp wrote:
| With a whole generation forgetting they came first in big
| iron UNIX like HP-UX.
| 9dev wrote:
| Does it really matter, tho?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Some people think it matters to properly learn history,
| instead of urban myths.
| 9dev wrote:
| History is one thing, who-did-it-first is often just a
| way to make a point in faction debates. In the broader
| picture, it makes little difference IMHO.
| bandoti wrote:
| Another reason it matters is they might have done it
| differently which could inspire future improvements. :)
|
| I like to read bibliographies for that reason--to read
| books that inspired the author I'm reading at the time.
| Same goes for code and research papers!
| jeberle wrote:
| Interesting. My experience w/ HP-UX was in the 90s, but
| this (Integrity Virtual Machines) was released in 2005. I
| might call out FreeBSD Jails (2000) or Solaris Zones
| (2005) as an earlier and a more significant case
| respectively. I appreciate the insight, though, never
| knew about HP-UX.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Integrity_Virtual_Machin
| es
| pjmlp wrote:
| HP-UX Vault, released with HP-UX 10.24, in 1996,
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP-UX
|
| What you searched for is an evolution of it.
| p_ing wrote:
| OS X pulls some components of FreeBSD into kernel space,
| but not all (and those are very old at this point). It also
| uses various BSD bits for userspace.
|
| Good read from horse mouth:
|
| https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/D
| a...
| bandoti wrote:
| Thank you--I'll give that a read. :)
| sarlalian wrote:
| Another really good read about containers, jails and zones.
|
| https://blog.jessfraz.com/post/containers-zones-jails-vms/
| LoganDark wrote:
| I wonder if User-Mode Linux could be ported to macOS...
| wmf wrote:
| It would probably be slower than just running a VM.
| msgodel wrote:
| If they implemented the Linux syscall interface in their
| kernel they absolutely could.
| vips7L wrote:
| Aren't the syscalls a constant moving target? Didn't even
| Microsoft fail at keeping up with them in WSL?
| asabil wrote:
| Not Linux syscalls, they are a stable interface as far as
| the Linux kernel is concerned.
| koito17 wrote:
| Linux is exceptional in that it has stable syscall
| numbers and guarantees stability. This is largely why
| statically linked binaries (and containers) "just work"
| on Linux, meanwhile Windows and Mac OS inevitably break
| things with an OS update.
|
| Microsoft frequently tweaks syscall numbers, and they
| make it clear that developers must access functions
| through e.g. NTDLL. Mac OS at least has public source
| files used to generate syscall.h, but they do break
| things, and there was a recent incident where Go programs
| all broke after a major OS update. Now Go uses libSystem
| (and dynamic linking)[2].
|
| [1] https://j00ru.vexillium.org/syscalls/nt/64/
|
| [2] https://go.dev/doc/go1.11#runtime
| PhilipRoman wrote:
| They're not really a moving target (since some distros
| ship ancient kernels, most components will handle lack of
| new syscalls gracefully), but the surface is still pretty
| big. A single ioctl() or write() syscall could do a
| billion different things and a lot of software depends on
| small bits of this functionality, meaning you gotta
| implement 99% of it to get everything working.
| NewJazz wrote:
| They didn't.
| rjsw wrote:
| FreeBSD and NetBSD do this.
| enceladus06 wrote:
| WSL throughput is not enough for file intensive operations.
| It is much easier and straightforward to just delete windows
| and use Linux.
| okanat wrote:
| Using the Linux filesystem has almost no performance
| penalty under WSL2 since it is a VM. Docker Desktop
| automatically mounts the correct filesystem. Crossing the
| OS boundary for Windows files has some overhead of course
| but that's not the usecase WSL2 is optimized for.
|
| With WSL2 you get the best of both worlds. A system with
| perfect driver and application support and a Linux-native
| environment. Hybrid GPUs, webcams, lap sensors etc. all
| work without any configuration effort. You get good battery
| life. You can run Autodesk or Photoshop but at the same
| time you can run Linux apps with almost no performance
| loss.
| thrawa8387336 wrote:
| FWIW I get better battery life with ubuntu.
| elektrontamer wrote:
| How? What's your laptop brand and model? I've never had
| better battery life with any machine using ubuntu.
| okanat wrote:
| Are you comparing against the default vendor image that's
| filled with adware or a clean Windows install with only
| drivers? There is a significant power use difference and
| the latter case has always been more power efficient for
| me compared to the Linux setup. Powering down Nvidia GPU
| has never fully worked with Linux for me.
| sarlalian wrote:
| Unless you need to have a working video or audio config as
| well.
| pjmlp wrote:
| WSL 1.0, given that WSL 2.0 is regular Linux VM running on
| HYPER-V.
| DidYaWipe wrote:
| I installed Orbstack without Docker Desktop.
| sequence7 wrote:
| WSL doesn't have a virtualization layer, WSL1 did have but it
| wasn't a feasible approach so WSL2 is basically running VMs
| with the Hyper-V hypervisor.
|
| Apple looks like it's skipped the failed WSL1 and gone
| straight for the more successful WSL2 approach.
| wmf wrote:
| They Sherlocked OrbStack.
| ale wrote:
| That's a good thing though right?
| wmf wrote:
| It would be better for the OrbStack guy if they bought it.
| WD-42 wrote:
| Apple sees some nice code under a pushover license and
| they just can't help themselves.
| wmf wrote:
| Interestingly it looks like Apple has rewritten much of
| the Docker stack in Swift rather than using existing Go
| code.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| Well, Orbstack isn't really anything special in terms of its
| features, it's the _implementation_ that 's so much better
| than all the other ways of spinning up VMs to run containers
| on macos. TBH, I'm not 100% sure 2025 Apple is capable
| anymore of delivering a more technically impressive product
| than orbstack ...
| avtar wrote:
| I thought it's more like Colima than OrbStack
|
| https://github.com/abiosoft/colima
| pjmlp wrote:
| Microsoft did it first to Virtual Box / VMWare Workstation
| thought.
|
| That is what I have been using since 2010, until WSL came to
| be, it has been ages since I ever dual booted.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, I've squeezed containerization into the title above. It's
| unsatisfactory, since multiple announced-things are also being
| discussed in this thread, but "Apple's kitchen-sink
| announcement from WWDC this year" wouldn't be great either, and
| "Apple supercharges its tools and technologies for developers
| to foster creativity, innovation, and design" is right out.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| bearjaws wrote:
| Title makes sense to me.
|
| It seems like a big step in the right direction to me. It's
| hard to tell if its 100% compatible with Docker or not, but
| the commands shown are identical (other than swapping docker
| for container).
|
| Even if its not 100% compatible this is huge news.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Small nitpick but "Announces" being capitalized looks a bit
| weird to me.
| cube2222 wrote:
| It's title case[0].
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Title_case
| badc0ffee wrote:
| Then you would expect "frameworks" to be capitalized as
| well.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality
| n2d4 wrote:
| They labeled it a nitpick. Seems fair.
| dang wrote:
| Me too - I thought I'd fixed that! Fixed now, thanks.
| nodja wrote:
| > Apple Announces Foundation Models and Containerization
| frameworks, etc.
|
| This sounds like apple announced 2 things, AI models and
| container related stuff I'd change it to something like:
|
| > Apple Announces Foundation Models, Containerization
| frameworks, more tools
| dang wrote:
| The article says that what was announced is "foundation
| model frameworks", hence the awkward twist in the title, to
| get two frameworkses in there.
| DrBenCarson wrote:
| Orbstack has been pretty bulletproof
| v5o wrote:
| Orbstack is not free for commercial use
|
| https://orbstack.dev/pricing
|
| Orbstack owners are going to be fuming at this news!
| mmcnl wrote:
| It's cool but also not as revolutionary as you make it sound.
| You can already install Podman, Orbstack or Colima right? Not
| sure which open-source framework they are using, but to me it
| seems like an OS-level integration of one of these tools.
| That's definitely a big win and will make things easier for
| developers, but I'm not sure if it's a gamechanger.
| rnubel wrote:
| All those tools use a Linux VM (whether managed by Qemu or
| VZ) to run the actual containers, though, which comes with
| significant overhead. Native support for running containers
| -- with no need for a VM -- would be huge.
| mmcnl wrote:
| Yes, it seems like it's actually a more refined
| implementation than what currently exists. Call me
| pleasantly surprised!
| SpaceNugget wrote:
| there's still a VM involved to run a Linux container on a
| Mac. I wouldn't expect any big performance gains here.
| jemmyw wrote:
| Still needs a VM. It'll be running more VMs than something
| like orbstack, which I believe runs just one for the docker
| implementation. Whether that means better or worse
| performance we'll find out.
| timsneath wrote:
| The framework that container uses is built in Swift and also
| open sourced today, along with the CLI tool itself:
| https://github.com/apple/containerization
| thde wrote:
| > Meet Containerization, an open source project written in
| Swift to create and run Linux containers on your Mac. Learn how
| Containerization approaches Linux containers securely and
| privately. Discover how the open-sourced Container CLI tool
| utilizes the Containerization package to provide simple, yet
| powerful functionality to build, run, and deploy Linux
| Containers on Mac.
|
| https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346/
| shellac wrote:
| > Containerization executes each Linux container inside of
| its own lightweight virtual machine.
|
| That's an interesting difference from other Mac container
| systems. Also (more obvious) use Rosetta 2.
| selkin wrote:
| Podman Desktop, and probably other Linux-containers on
| macOS tools, can already create multiple VMs, each hosting
| a subset of the containers you run on your Mac.
|
| What seems to be different here, is that a VM per each
| container is the default, if not only, configuration. And
| that instead of mapping ports to containers (which was
| always a mistake in my opinion), it creates an externally
| routed interface per machine, similar to how it would work
| if you'd use macvlan as your network driver in Docker.
|
| Both of those defaults should remove some sharp edges from
| the current Linux-containers on macOS workflows.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| The ground keeps shrinking for Docker Inc.
|
| They sold Docker Desktop for Mac, but that might start being
| less relevant and licenses start to drop.
|
| On Linux there's just the cli, which they can't afford to close
| since people will just move away.
|
| Docker Hub likely can't compete with the registries built into
| every other cloud provider.
| aequitas wrote:
| There is already a paid alternative, Orbstack, for macOS
| which puts Docker for Mac to shame in terms of usability,
| features and performance. And then there are open
| alternatives like Colima.
| cromka wrote:
| How does it compare to Podman, though?
| worthless-trash wrote:
| Podman works absolutely beautifully for me, other
| platforms, I tripped over weird corner cases.
| marcalc wrote:
| Use OrbStack for sometime, made my dev team's m1 run our
| kubernetes pods in a much lighter fashion. Love it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That is why they are now into the reinventing application
| servers with WebAssembly kind of vibe.
| 9dev wrote:
| It's really awful. There's a certain size at which you can
| pivot and keep most of your dignity, but for Docker Inc.,
| it's just ridiculous.
| amelius wrote:
| They got Sherlocked.
| 12_throw_away wrote:
| FWIW, here are the repos for the CLI tool [1] and backend [2].
| Looks like it is indeed VM-based container support (as opposed
| to WSLv1-style syscall translation or whatever):
| Containerization provides APIs to: [...] - Create
| an optimized Linux kernel for fast boot times. - Spawn
| lightweight virtual machines. - Manage the runtime
| environment of virtual machines.
|
| [1] https://github.com/apple/container [2]
| https://github.com/apple/containerization
| cogman10 wrote:
| WSLv1 never supported a native docker (AFAIK, perhaps I'm
| wrong?)
|
| That said, I'd think apple would actually be much better
| positioned to try the WSL1 approach. I'd assume apple OS is a
| lot closer to linux than windows is.
| selkin wrote:
| This doesn't look like WSL1. They're not running Linux
| syscalls to the macOS kernel, but running Linux in a VM,
| more like the WSL2[0] approach.
|
| [0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/announcing-
| wsl-2/...
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Yeah, it probably would be feasible to dust off the FreeBSD
| Linux compatibility layer[1] and turn that into native
| support for Linux apps on Mac.
|
| I think Apple's main hesitation would be that the Linux
| userland is all GPL.
|
| [1]: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/linuxemu/
| leoh wrote:
| If they built as a kernel extension it would probably be
| okay with gpl.
|
| There's a huge opportunity for Apple to make kernel
| development for xnu way better.
|
| Tooling right now is a disaster -- very difficult to
| build a kernel and test it (eg in UTM, etc.).
|
| If they made this better and took more of an OSS openness
| posture like Microsoft, a lot of incredible things could
| be built for macOS.
|
| I'll bet a lot of folks would even port massive parts of
| the kernel to rust for them for free.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| In the end they're probably run into the same issues that
| killed WSL1 for Microsoft-- the Linux kernel has enormous
| surface area, and lots of pretty subtle behaviour,
| particularly around the stuff that is most critical for
| containers, like cgroups and user namespaces. There isn't
| an externally usable test suite that could be used to
| validate Microsoft's implementation of all these
| interfaces, because... well, why would there be?
|
| Maintaining a working duplicate of the kernel-userspace
| interface is a monumental and thankless task, and
| especially hard to justify when the work has already been
| done many times over to implement the _hardware_ -kernel
| interface, and there's literally Hyper-V already built into
| the OS.
| torginus wrote:
| I'm kinda ignorant about the current state of Linux VMs, but
| my biggest gripe with VMs is that OS kernels kind of assume
| they have access to all the RAM the hardware has - unlike the
| reserve/commit scheme processes use for memory.
|
| Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that it's
| running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory it uses
| to the host OS?
|
| Or maybe could Apple patch the kernel to do exactly this?
|
| Running Docker in a VM always has been quite painful on Mac
| due to the excess amount of memory it uses, and Macs not
| really having a lot of RAM.
| HighGoldstein wrote:
| > Is there a VM technology that can make Linux aware that
| it's running in a VM, and be able to hand back the memory
| it uses to the host OS?
|
| Isn't this an issue of the hypervisor? The guest OS is just
| told it has X amount of memory available, whether this
| memory exists or not (hence why you can overallocate memory
| for VMs), whether the hypervisor will allocate the entire
| amount or just what the guest OS is actually using should
| depend on the hypervisor itself.
| torginus wrote:
| Just looked it up - and the answer is 'baloon drivers',
| which are special drivers loaded by the guest OS, which
| can request and return unused pages to the host
| hypervisor.
|
| Apparently docker for Mac and Windows uses these, but in
| practice, docker containers tend to grow quite large in
| terms of memory, so not quite sure how well it works in
| practice, its certainly overallocates compared to running
| docker natively on a Linux host.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| > or just what the guest OS is actually using should
| depend on the hypervisor itself.
|
| How can the hypervisor know which memory the guest OS is
| actually using? It might have used some memory in the
| past and now no longer needs it, but from the POV of the
| hypervisor it might as well be used.
|
| This is a communication problem between hypervisor and
| guest OS, because the hypervisor manages the physical
| memory but only the guest OS known how much memory should
| actually be used.
| masklinn wrote:
| A generic vmm can not, but these are specific vmms so
| they can likely load dedicated kernel mode drivers into
| the well known guest to get the information back out.
| SkiFire13 wrote:
| The driver would still be part of the guest.
| masklinn wrote:
| If you control both the VMM and the guest through a
| driver you have an essentially infinite latitude to set
| up communications between the two: virtual devices,
| iommu, interrupts, ...
| trws wrote:
| The short answer is yes, Linux can be informed to some
| extent but often you still want a memory balloon driver so
| that the host can "allocate" memory out of the VM so the
| host OS can reclaim that memory. It's not entirely trivial
| but the tools exist, and it's usually not too bad on vz
| these days when properly configured.
| StopDisinfo910 wrote:
| That's called memory balooning and is supported by KVM on
| Linux. Proxmox for example can do that. It does need
| support on both the host and the guest.
| rwmj wrote:
| It's still a problem for containers-in-VMs. You can in
| theory do something with either memory ballooning or (more
| modern) memory hotplugging, but the dance between the OS
| and the hypervisor takes a relatively long time to
| complete, and Linux just doesn't handle it well (eg. it
| inevitably places unmovable pages into newly reserved
| memory, meaning it can never be unplugged). We never found
| a good way to make applications running inside the VM able
| to transparently allocate memory. You can overprovision
| memory, and hypervisors won't actually allocate it on the
| host, and that's the best you can do, but this also has
| problems since Linux tends to allocate a bunch of fixed
| data structures proportional to the size of memory it
| thinks it has available.
| Asmod4n wrote:
| It's one reason i don't like WSL2. When you compile
| something which needs 30 GB RAM the only thing you can do
| is terminate the wsl2 vm to get that ram back.
| Quarrel wrote:
| Since late 2023, WSL2 has supported "autoMemoryReclaim",
| nominally still experimental, but works fine for me.
|
| add:
|
| [experimental] autoMemoryReclaim=gradual
|
| to your .wslconfig
|
| See: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-
| config
| geraneum wrote:
| I just noticed the addition of container cask when I ran
| b"brew update".
|
| I chased the package's source and indeed it's pointing to
| this repo.
|
| You can install and use it now on the latest macOS (not 26).
| I just ran "container run nginx" and it worked alright it
| seems. Haven't looked deeper yet.
| notpushkin wrote:
| There's some problem with networking: if you try to run
| multiple containers, they won't see each other. Could
| probably be solved by running a local VPN or something.
| mrbonner wrote:
| The containerization experience on macOS has historically been
| underwhelming in terms of performance. Using Docker or Podman
| on a Mac often feels sluggish and unnecessarily complex
| compared to native Linux environments. Recently, I experimented
| with Microsandbox, which was shared here a few weeks ago, and
| found its performance to be comparable to that of native
| containers on Linux. This leads me to hope that Apple will soon
| elevate the developer experience by integrating robust
| containerization support directly into macOS, eliminating the
| need for third-party downloads.
| nottorp wrote:
| Docker at least runs a linux vm that runs all those
| containers. Which is a lot of needless overhead.
|
| The equivalent of Electron for containers :)
| rcarmo wrote:
| Use Colima.
| mehdibl wrote:
| It's a VM just like WSL... So yeah.
| PhilippGille wrote:
| WSL 2 involves a VM. WSL 1, which is still maintained and
| usable, doesn't.
|
| https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/compare-
| versio...
| selkin wrote:
| It looks like nothing here is new: we have all the building
| blocks already. What Apple done is packaged it all nicely,
| which is nothing to discount: there's a reason people buy
| managed services over just raw metal for hosting their
| services, and having a batteries included development
| environment is worth a premium over the need to assemble it on
| your own.
| rcarmo wrote:
| I've been using Colima for a long while with zero issues, and
| that leverages the older virtualization framework.
| minimaxir wrote:
| They also just announced that Shortcuts can use these endpoints
| (or Private Cloud Compute or ChatGPT).
| retskrad wrote:
| After reading the book "Apple in China", it's hilarious to
| observe the contrast between Apple as a ruthless, amoral
| capitalist corporation behind the scenes and these WWDC
| presentations...
| bigyabai wrote:
| This just in: company that spends billions on marketing is
| effective at marketing their products. News at 11.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _News at 11._
|
| ...10 Central and Mountain.
| digianarchist wrote:
| iPadOS and OSX continue to converge into one platform.
| xattt wrote:
| Calling it: Apple allOS 27 incoming next year, with Final Cut
| Pro on your Apple Watch.
| rconti wrote:
| Multi-user iPadOS when?
| olyjohn wrote:
| Never, it'll be single user MacOS.
| xp84 wrote:
| When they figure out how to make it not dent sales of
| individual devices. If you and your spouse could easily share
| one around the house for different purposes but still having
| each of your personal apps and settings, you might not buy
| two!
| alwillis wrote:
| > If you and your spouse could easily share one around the
| house for different purposes but still having each of your
| personal apps and settings, you might not buy two!
|
| I get it, but an iPad starts at $349; often available for
| less.
|
| At this point, an iPad is no different than a phone--most
| people wouldn't share a single tablet.
|
| Laptops and desktops that run macOS, Linux, Windows which
| are multiuser operating systems have largely become single-
| user devices.
| xp84 wrote:
| > an iPad starts at $349; often available for less.
|
| It's less about the cost and more about having to have
| another stupid device to charge, update, and keep track
| of, when a tablet is not a device that gets used enough
| by any one person to be worth all that. It would be much
| more convenient to have a single device on a coffee or
| end table which all family members could use when they
| need to do more than you can do on a phone.
|
| > Laptops and desktops that run macOS, Linux, Windows
| which are multiuser operating systems have largely become
| single-user devices.
|
| Maybe. Probably 90% of work laptops are single-user, I'm
| sure. But for home computers, multi-user can be very
| useful. And it's better than ever to use laptops as dumb
| terminals, since all most people's stuff is in the cloud.
| It's not nearly as much trouble to get your secondary
| user account on a spare laptop in the living room to be
| useful as it was in the Windows XP days. Just having a
| browser that's signed into your stuff, plus Messages or
| Whatsapp, and maybe Slack/Discord/etc. is enough.
|
| > most people wouldn't share a single tablet.
|
| Since iPads have never supported doing so in a sane way,
| that unfounded assertion is just as likely due to the
| fact that it's a terrible experience today, since if you
| share one today, someone else will be accidentally
| marking your messages as read, you'll be polluting their
| browser or YouTube history, etc.
|
| It's also the kind of dismissive claim true Apple
| believers tend to trot out when someone points out a
| shortcoming: "Nobody wants to use a touchscreen laptop!"
| "Nobody wants USB-C on an iPhone when Lightning is
| slightly smaller!" "Nobody needs an HDMI port or SD slot
| on a MacBook Pro!" "Nobody needs a second port on the
| 12-inch MacBook!" Most of the above things have come true
| except the touch laptop, and somehow it hasn't hurt
| anyone, but the "nobody wants..." crew immediately stops
| when Apple finally [re-]embraces something
| spockz wrote:
| We use iPads interchangeably. All personal apps like
| banking are on phones. Some apps that only I would use such
| as for the roomba and car are on both.
|
| Having profiles for the kids however would be nice though.
| But most apps have that built in themselves.
| alt227 wrote:
| >Having profiles for the kids however would be nice
| though.
|
| I find this madness that apple doesnt have this already.
| rconti wrote:
| I think this may be overestimating how often people buy
| tablets. My wife has an iPad Air 1 or 2, so it's close to
| 10 years old and mostly sits in a drawer. I had a VERY old
| iPad 2 that I held off on replacing because I wanted to
| wait for a multi-user iPad.
|
| I finally gave up and bought a Mini6 a year or two ago,
| which gets.... also minimal use. And I'm sure not buying
| ANOTHER tablet we're not going to use.
|
| If they were multi-user I actually think we'd _both_ get
| more value out of it, and upgrade our _one_ device more
| often.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| this aged so well https://github.com/apple/ml-fastvlm/issues/7
| cpldcpu wrote:
| There is almost no information under the link
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Apple's integration of AI into its MacOS is the one reason why I
| am considering a switch back to Linux after my current laptop
| dies.
| jw1224 wrote:
| If that's the one reason, have you considered just... not using
| the AI features?
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Sure you can for now. But what when it's forced upon you to
| use them?
| jw1224 wrote:
| Well if that hypothetical situation ever happens, you can
| just switch to Linux then.
| sph wrote:
| Why do you care if they switch now?
| jug wrote:
| There is no real need and the issue is hypothetical?
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I find it offensive to have any generative AI code on my
| computer.
| azinman2 wrote:
| So, then don't do that? It's not like it's automatically
| generating code without you asking.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I didn't say "generating code", I meant I find it
| offensive to have any code sitting on my computer that
| generates code, whether I use it or not. I prefer
| minimalism: just have on my computer what I will use, and
| I have a limited data connection which means even more
| updates with useless code I won't use.
| socalgal2 wrote:
| I think I know what you meant. You mean you don't want code
| that runs generative AI in your computer? But, what you
| wrote could also mean you don't want any code running that
| was generated by AI. Even with open source, your computer
| will be running code generated by AI as most open source
| projects are using it. I suspect it will be nearly
| impossible to avoid. Most open source projects will accept
| AI generated code as long as it's been reviewed.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Good point, and you were right. I was ambiguous. I meant
| a system that generates stuff, not stuff that was
| generated by AI. But I'd rather not use stuff that was
| generated by AI, either. But you are also right. That
| will become impossible, and probably already is. Not a
| very nice world, I think. Best thing to do then is to
| minimize it, and avoid computers as much as possible....
| dkdcio wrote:
| I promise you there is Linux code that has been tab-
| completed with Copilot or similar, perhaps even before
| ChatGPT ever launched
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| That is true. I actually was ambiguous in my post,
| because I meant code that generates stuff, not that was
| generated by AI, even though I don't like the latter,
| either.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _I find it offensive to have any generative AI code on my
| computer._
|
| Settings - Apple Intelligence and Siri - toggle Apple
| Intelligence off.
|
| It's not enabled by default. But in case you accidentally
| turned it on, turning it off gets you a bunch of disk space
| back as the AI stuff is removed from the OS.
|
| Some people are just looking for a reason to be offended.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| The theatrics of being *forced* to use completely
| optional, opt-in features has been a staple of
| discussions regarding Apple for years.
|
| Every year, macOS and iPadOS look superficially more and
| more similar, but they remain distinct in their
| interfaces, features, etc. But the past 15 years have
| been "we'll be *forced* to only use Apple-vetted
| software, just like the App Store!"
|
| And yeah, the Gatekeeper mechanism got less straight-
| forward to get around in macOS 15, but ... I don't know,
| someone will shoot me down for this, but it's been a
| _long_ 15 years to be an Apple user with all that noise
| going on around you from people who really don 't have
| the first clue what they're talking about -- and on HN,
| no less.
|
| They can come back to me when what they say actually
| happens. Until then, _fifteen dang years_.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Not forced to use, forced to download and waste 2GB of
| disk space.
| reaperducer wrote:
| I presume you're talking about Apple Intelligence.
|
| It's not forced. It's completely optional. It has to be
| downloaded.
|
| And if you activate it, then change your mind, you get
| the disk space back when you turn it off.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I have a limited connection, and don't want to update my
| computer with AI garbage.
| reaperducer wrote:
| So don't. You have to tell the computer to download Apple
| Intelligence. It doesn't just happen on its own.
|
| Just don't push the Yes button when it offers.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Well, I thought it came with the OS update, so I guess I
| was mistaken then.
| echelon wrote:
| This reads like the crotchety and persnickety 60-somethings in
| the 1990's who said the internet was a passing and annoying
| fad.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I do think there is a lot of valid criticism of the internet.
| I certainly don't think it's an annoying fad but I do think
| it has caused a lot of bad things for humanity. In some ways,
| life was much better without it, even though there are some
| benefits.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Actually, most "AI" cults blindly worship at their own
| ignorance:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sV7C6Ezl35A
|
| The ML hype-cycle has happened before... but this time
| everyone is adding more complexity to obfuscate the BS. There
| is also a funny callback to YC in the Lisp story, and why
| your karma still gets incinerated if one points out its
| obvious limitations in a thread.
|
| Have a wonderful day, =3
| sph wrote:
| It is impossible to have a negative opinion of AI without
| silly comments like this just one step removed from calling
| you a boomer or a Luddite. Yes all technological progress is
| good and if you don't agree you're a dumb hick.
|
| AI maximalists are like those 100 years ago that put radium
| everywhere, even in toothpaste, because new things are cool
| and we're so smart you need to trust us they won't cause any
| harm.
|
| I'll keep brushing my teeth with baking soda, thank you very
| much.
| echelon wrote:
| On the other side of that are the people screaming that AI
| is murder.
|
| There are lots of folks like this, and it's getting
| exhausting that they make being anti-AI their sole defining
| character trait: https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtistHate
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| It's also exhausting to see endless new applications of
| AI, even worse IMO.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I am a Luddite, but I think that's a good thing. I don't
| mind the negative comments at all. I get them all the time.
| pests wrote:
| I was musing before sleep days ago about how maybe the
| internet still is just a fad. We've had a few decades of it,
| yeah, but maybe in the future people will look at it as
| boring tech just like I viewed VCRs or phones when I was
| growing up. Maybe we're still addicted to the novelty of it,
| but in the future it fades into the background of life.
|
| I've read stories about how people were amazed at calling
| each other and would get together or meet at the local home
| with a phone installed, a gathering spot, make an event about
| it. Now it's boring background tech.
|
| We kind of went through a faze of this with the introduction
| of webcams. Omegle, Chatroulette, it was a wild Wild West.
| Now it's normalized, standard for work with the likes of
| Zoom, with FaceTiming just being normal.
| aquariusDue wrote:
| A few years ago I would've said you were incredibly
| cynical, but nowadays with so much AI slop around social
| media and just tonnes of bad content I tend to agree with
| you.
|
| Now the Cyberpunk pen and paper RPG seems prophetic if turn
| your head sideways a bit https://chatgpt.com/share/684762cc
| -9024-800e-9460-d5da3236cd...
| pests wrote:
| I think younger me would think the same. Its not even the
| AI slop or bad content but also the intrusive tracking,
| data collection, and the commercialization of interests.
| I just feel gross participating.
| antipaul wrote:
| With a single toggle, you can turn off Apple Intelligence
|
| See (System) Settings
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| But I can't toggle off downloading it, which is 2GB on my
| limited connection and 2GB of MY disk space.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| iPad update is going to encourage a new series of folks trying to
| use iPads for general programming. I'm curious how it goes this
| time around. I'm cautiously optimistic
| msgodel wrote:
| Isn't it still impossible to run any dev tools on the iPad?
| robterrell wrote:
| IIRC Swift Playgrounds goes pretty deep -- a full LLVM
| compiler for Swift and you can use any platform API -- but
| you can't build something for distribution. The limitations
| are all at the Apple policy level.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| Not quite. As another user mentioned, there's Swift
| Playgrounds which is complete enough that you can even upload
| apps made in it to the App Store. Aside from that, there are
| also IDEs like Pythonista for creating Python-based apps and
| others for Lua, JavaScript, etc. many of which come with
| their own frameworks for making native iOS/iPadOS interfaces.
| mohsen1 wrote:
| I can assume that they are going to bring the Container stuff
| to iPad at some point. That would unlock so many things...
| eastbound wrote:
| You can't run Docker on an iPad.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| I think the story might actually be changing this time
| rs186 wrote:
| No vscode, no deal. I don't see that happening any time soon.
| codethief wrote:
| > New Design with Liquid Glass
|
| Looks like software UI design - just like fashion, film,
| architecture and many other fields I'm sure - has now officially
| entered the "nothing new under the sun" / "let's recycle ideas
| from xx years ago" stage.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aqua_%28user_interface%29
|
| To be clear, this is just an observation, not a judgment of that
| change or the quality of the design by itself. I was getting
| similar vibes from the recent announcement of design changes in
| Android.
| kif wrote:
| I love it. Reminds me of Windows 7. The nostalgia is too strong
| with this one.
| ordinaryradical wrote:
| I used to find these changes compelling but now I think they
| are mostly a pain in the ass or questionable.
|
| Proof of a well-designed UI is stability, not change.
|
| Reads to me strongly of an effort to give traditional media
| something shiny to put above the headline and keep the
| marketing engine running.
| crawsome wrote:
| If you read the press release, you can see it's 100% about
| marketing and nothing else.
|
| Apple will spend 10x the effort to tell you way a useless
| feature is necessary before they look at user feedback.
| crooked-v wrote:
| I kind of hate it. Every use of it in the videos shown so far
| has moments where it's so transparent as to have borderline
| unreadable contrast.
| summarity wrote:
| The last example in the first carousel is the worst, the
| bottom glass elements have complete unreadable text
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| Same. And white on light blue is just as bad. Looks like I'll
| be using more accessibility features.
| SlowTao wrote:
| I agree with you, I hope they quickly tweak this into
| something more readable. There could be a really nice mid
| ground here.
| MBCook wrote:
| This is the first time I have ever thought "maybe I don't
| want to update my phone". Entirely because of the look.
| zapzupnz wrote:
| In Settings -> Accessibility -> Display, you can enable
| Increase Contrast or Reduce Transparency to get rid of some
| of the worse glass effects, and Settings -> Accessibility
| -> Motion, you can enable Reduce Motion to get rid of the
| some of the light effects for content passing under glass
| buttons.
| daveidol wrote:
| To me it looks more like Windows Vista's "Aero" than OS X's
| "Aqua".
| buildbot wrote:
| Yes, I immediately thought of Windows Aero too!!! I wasn't
| able to enable it until I got a 9800GX2 a few years later,
| very cool at the time combined with the ability to have
| movies as your desktop background. It was a nice vibe.
| SlowTao wrote:
| And I couldnt be happier to see it back. I have not been a
| fan of the flattening of UI design over the last 15 years.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| But the opposite of "flat" is not "transparent".
|
| This was posted in another HN thread about Liquid Glass:
| https://imgur.com/a/6ZTCStC . I'm sure Apple will tweak the
| opacity before it goes live, but this looks horribly insane
| to me.
| NoPicklez wrote:
| Agreed, people have said perhaps its Apple's way of
| bringing VR vibes to the UI, showing layers of UI
| elements.
|
| But I'm not so sure if I want transparent.
| crawsome wrote:
| I'll just want the option to turn it off because it will
| use extra CPU cycles just existing.
|
| I remember the catastrophe of Windows Vista, and how you
| needed a capable GPU to handle the glass effect.
| Otherwise, one of your (Maybe two) CPU cores would have
| to process all that overhead.
| dundarious wrote:
| The explicitly mention this is (paraphrasing) "bringing
| elements from visionOS to all your devices" in the video
| in TFA.
| mickdarling wrote:
| bleary eyed, waking up while trying to find my reading
| glasses would make that interface essentially useless.
| SlowTao wrote:
| Yeah it definetly needs work. But I hope they do tone it
| down like Microsoft did with Aero glass effects between
| Vista and win 7.
|
| They are heading in a good direction, it just needs to be
| toned down. But like any new graphics technology the
| first year is the "WOW WE CAN DO X!!!!" then the more
| tame stuff comes along.
| montagg wrote:
| It's the second coming of Frutger Aero[1]
|
| [1]: https://aesthetics.fandom.com/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| It also looks like KDE 4.
|
| Maybe this is consequence of the Frutiger Aero trend, and
| that users miss the time where user interfaces were designed
| to be cool instead of only useful
| Krssst wrote:
| Current interfaces are not aimed at being optimally useful.
| Padding everywhere as of today means more time scrolling
| and wasted screen space. Animations everywhere means a lot
| of wasted time watching pixels moving instead of the
| computer/phone giving us control immediately after it did
| the thing we (maybe) asked for. Hiding scrollbars is a
| nightmare in general in desktop OSes but is the default
| (once lost half an hour setting up a proxy because the
| "save" button was hidden behind a scrollbar).
|
| Usability feels it has only been down since Windows 7. (on
| another hand, Windows has plenty of accessibility features
| that help a lot in restoring usability)
| spike021 wrote:
| I'm usually on board with Apple UI changes but something about
| all the examples they showed today just looked really cheap.
|
| My only guess is this style looks better while using the
| product but not while looking at screenshots or demos built off
| Illustrator or whatever they're using.
| hbn wrote:
| I love that we're getting some texture back. UI has been so
| boring since iOS 7.
|
| Sebastiaan de With of Halide fame did a writeup about this
| recently, and I think he makes some great points.
|
| https://www.lux.camera/physicality-the-new-age-of-ui/
| adolph wrote:
| Open link and type into this box "physicality is the new
| skeumorphism"
|
| Read on and:
|
| _They are completely dynamic: inhabiting characteristics
| that are akin to actual materials and objects. We've come
| back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces -- but this time
| not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the
| interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know
| from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is
| what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality._
|
| Well worth reading for the retrospective of Apple's website
| taking a twenty year journey from flatland and back.
| lobsterthief wrote:
| They're describing material design, which Google
| popularized. Skeuomorphism with things that could exist in
| the real world, avoid breaking the laws of physics, etc.
| Which then morphed into flat design as things like drop
| shadows were seen as dated. You are here.
| krackers wrote:
| Interesting, I never made the connection between dashboard
| widgets UI and early iPhone UI. It does make sense, early
| iPhone had a UI that was glossier and more colorful than
| "metallic" aqua.
| breadwinner wrote:
| Liquid Glass is not adding a dimension. It is still flat UI,
| sadly. They just gave the edges of the window a glass like
| effect. There's also animation ("liquid" part). Overall, very
| disappointing.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| Just one or two years ago I remember a handful of articles
| popping up that Gen Z was really into Frutiger Aero, that's the
| first thing I thought of, with the nature themes and
| skeuomorphic UI elements.
|
| https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/why-gen-z-infatuated-frutige...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frutiger_Aero
| codethief wrote:
| Thanks, I wasn't even aware the style had gotten a name in
| the meantime.
| SlowTao wrote:
| Back when Jobs was introducing one of the Mac OS X versions,
| there was a line that stuck with me.
|
| Showing off the pulsating buttons he said something like "we
| have these processors that can do billions of calculations of
| second, we might as well use them to make it look great".
|
| And yet a decade later, they were undoing all of that to just
| be flat an boring. Im glad they are using the now trillions of
| calculations a second to bring some character back into these
| things.
| scyzoryk_xyz wrote:
| He was selling. The audience were sales. OS's were fully
| matured at that point. Computers were something you buy at a
| store. It was a selling point.
|
| A decade later they were handling the windfall that came with
| smartphone ascendancy. An emergence of an entirely new design
| language for touch screen UI. Skeumorphism was slowing that
| all down.
|
| Making it all flat meant making it consistent, which meant
| making it stable, which meant scalability. iOS7 made it so
| that even random developers' apps could play along and they
| needed a lot of developers playing along.
| sho_hn wrote:
| In fact, Apple once did a version of Aqua that did an
| overengineered materials-based rasterization at runtime,
| including a physically correct glass effect.
|
| It was too slow and was later optimized away to run off of pre-
| rendered assets with some light typical style engine procedural
| code.
|
| Feels like someone just dusted off the old vision now that the
| compute is there.
| dheera wrote:
| The world flip flops from flat to 3D UI design every few years.
|
| We were in a flat era for the last several years, this kicks
| off the next 3D era.
| visiondude wrote:
| Excited to try these out and see benchmarks. Expectations for on
| device small local model should be pretty low but let's see if
| Apple cooked up any magic here.
| cjrd wrote:
| some benchmarks here:
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-foundation-...
| chakintosh wrote:
| Some 15 years ago, A friend of mine said to me "mark my words,
| Apple will eventually merge OSX with iOS on the iPad". And with
| every passing keynote since then, it seemed Apple's been inching
| towards that prophecy, and today, the iPad has become practically
| a MacBook Air with a touch screen. Unless you were a video
| editor, programmer who needs resources to compile or a 3D artist,
| I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.
| jeron wrote:
| ipad hardware is a full blown M chip. There's no real hardware
| limitation that stops the iPad from running macOS, but merging
| it cannibalizes each product line's sales
| chakintosh wrote:
| The new windowing feature basically cannibalizes MacBook Air.
| threetonesun wrote:
| A Macbook Air is cheaper than an iPad Pro with a keyboard
| though. Not to mention you still can't run apps from
| outside the app store, and most of these new features we're
| hoping work as well as they do on MacOS, but given that
| background tasks had to be an API, I doubt they will.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| iPad+keyboard is also awkwardly top heavy and not very
| well suited for lap use. That might cease to be an issue
| with sufficiently dense batteries bringing down the
| weight of the iPad though.
| tarentel wrote:
| There's still software I can't run on an iPad which is
| basically the only reason I have a MacBook Air. Maybe for
| some a windowing system may be the push to switch but that
| seems doubtful to me.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| I told that to John Gruber and he said never will happen
| omega3 wrote:
| Does an iPad allow for multiple users?
| crooked-v wrote:
| Yes, but only if it's enrolled in MDM, bizarrely enough.
| alwillis wrote:
| > Yes, but only if it's enrolled in MDM, bizarrely enough
|
| In education or corporate settings, where account
| management is centralized, you want each person who uses an
| iPad to access their own files, email, etc.
| iAMkenough wrote:
| In home settings, where devices are shared with multiple
| family members, you want each person who uses an iPad to
| access their own files, email, etc.
|
| Parents and spouses would appreciate if they could take
| the multiple user experience for tvOS and make it an
| option for iPadOS.
| ics wrote:
| Same applies to "families" and it's somewhat bizarre that
| this is still ignored in 2025.
| thimabi wrote:
| I don't think that's bizarre at all, there's a clear
| financial incentive for things to be this way. Apple can't
| have normal people sharing a single device instead of
| buying one for each.
| eastbound wrote:
| I wish Apple provided the MDM, rather than relying on a
| random consumer ecosystem of dodgy companies who all charge
| 3-18$ per machine per month, which is a lot.
|
| Auth should be Apple Business Manager; image serving should
| be passive directories / cloud buckets.
| cj wrote:
| Apple launched their own solution last year (maybe it was
| the year before).
|
| Haven't tried it though, still using JamF.
|
| https://www.apple.com/business/essentials/
| paxys wrote:
| The fact that they haven't done it in 15 years should be an
| indication that they don't intend to do it at all. Remember
| that in the same time period Apple rebuilt every Macbook from
| scratch from the chipset up. Neither the hardware nor software
| is a barrier to them merging the two platforms. It's that the
| ecosystems are fundamentally incompatible. A true
| "professional" device needs to offer the user full control, and
| Apple isn't giving up this control on an i-Device. The 30% cut
| is simply too lucrative.
| LoganDark wrote:
| If anyone wants to read up on how much effort Apple actually
| went through to keep Apple Silicon Macs open, take a look
| here: https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/security/#per-
| container...
|
| Secure Boot on other platforms is all-or-nothing, but Apple
| recognizes that Mac users should have the freedom to choose
| exactly how much to peel back the security, and should never
| be forced to give up more than they need to. So for that
| reason, it's possible to have a trusted macOS installation
| next to a less-trusted installation of something else, such
| as Asahi Linux.
|
| Contrast this with others like Microsoft who believe all
| platforms should be either fully trusted or fully
| unsupported. Google takes this approach with Android as well.
| You're either fully locked in, or fully on your own.
| amoshebb wrote:
| the only macbook I've tried to put linux on was a t2
| machine, and it still doesn't sleep/suspend right, so I'm a
| bit skeptical that apple is really leading the way here,
| but maybe I've just not touched any recent windows devices
| either
| LoganDark wrote:
| To be fair, sleep/suspend has been a rather infamously
| difficult problem for Linux when it comes to devices that
| weren't designed to run Linux. I think the Macs with T2
| chips were a bit weird anyway and I wonder if they had
| already been working on Apple Silicon Macs that far back
| and that's why the T2 became a thing?
| bigyabai wrote:
| Apple is also rather notorious for tinkering with Intel's
| ACPI files, for better or worse. Suspend is finnecky
| enough on hardware that supports it, and probably
| outright impossible if your CPU power states disagree
| with what the software is expecting.
| NotPractical wrote:
| > You're either fully locked in, or fully on your own.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by that. You can trivially root
| a Pixel factory image. And if you're talking about how they
| will punish you for that by removing certain features:
| Apple does that too (but to a lesser extent).
|
| https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/RecordingIndicatorUtil
| i...
| LoganDark wrote:
| On Android devices with AVB (so basically everything
| nowadays), once the bootloader is unlocked, so many
| things already either lock you out or degrade your
| service in various ways. For example, Netflix will
| downgrade you to 480p, Google Pay will stop working, many
| apps will just straight up disappear from the Play Store
| because SafetyNet will stop passing (especially on newer
| devices with hardware attestation), banking apps (most
| notably Cash App) will often stop working, many other
| third-party apps that don't even have anything to do with
| banking will still lock you out, etc.
|
| On many Android devices, unlocking the boot loader at any
| point will also permanently erase the DRM keys, so you
| will never again be able to watch high resolution Netflix
| (or any other app that uses Widevine), even if you
| relocked the bootloader and your OS passed verified boot
| checks.
|
| On a Mac, you don't need to "unlock the bootloader" to do
| anything. Trust is managed per operating system. As long
| as you initially can properly authenticate through
| physical presence, you totally can install additional
| operating systems with lower levels of trust and their
| existence won't prevent you from booting back into the
| trusted install and using protected experiences such as
| Apple Pay. Sure, if you want to modify that trusted
| install, and you downgrade its security level to
| implement this, then those trusted experiences will stop
| working (such as Apple Pay, iPhone Mirroring, and 4K
| Netflix in Safari, for instance), but you won't be
| rejected by entire swathes of the third-party app
| ecosystem and you also won't lose the ability to install
| a huge fraction of Mac apps (although iOS and iPadOS apps
| will stop working). You also won't necessarily be
| prevented from turning the security back up once you're
| done messing around, and gaining every one of those
| experiences back.
|
| So sure, you can totally boil it down to "Apple still
| punishes you, only a bit less", but not only do they not
| even punish your entire machine the way Microsoft and
| Google do, but they even only punish the individual
| operating system that has the reduced security, don't
| punish it as much as Microsoft and Google do, and don't
| permanently lock things out just because the security has
| ever been reduced in the past.
|
| Do keep in mind though, the comparison to Android is a
| bit unfair anyway because Apple's equivalent to the
| Android ecosystem is (roughly; excluding TV and whatever
| for brevity) iPhone and iPad, and those devices have
| never and almost certainly will never offer anything
| close to a bootloader unlock. I just had used it as an
| example of the all or nothing approach. Obviously Apple's
| iDevice ecosystem doesn't allow user tampering at all,
| not even with trusted experiences excluded.
|
| Fun fact though: The Password category in System Settings
| will disappear over iPhone Mirroring to prevent the
| password from being changed remotely. Pretty cool.
| privacyking wrote:
| Out of interest, are you currently using android (or
| fork) or iOS?
| LoganDark wrote:
| I used Android until around last January year when I
| switched to iPhone, because it works better with Mac
| (which I'd switched back to about a month prior, after
| having enough of around four years of dealing with
| Windows's bullshit). Not that Android worked well with
| Windows... I just didn't even have the idea in my head
| that devices could work well together at all. AirDrop
| changed my mind! (And all the other niceties, like Do Not
| Disturb syncing, and so on...)
|
| I used to tweak/mod Android and most recently preferred
| customizing the OEM install over forks. I stopped doing
| that when TWRP ran something as OpenRecoveryScript and
| immediately wiped the phone without giving me any
| opportunity to cancel. My most recent Android phone I
| never bothered to root. I may never mod Android again.
| NotPractical wrote:
| That is a good point. I wish dual booting with different
| security settings was possible on Android as well. The
| incentives for Google to implement that aren't really
| there though.
| resource_waste wrote:
| This is a pretty wild take.
|
| Its reasonable to install a different OS on Android, even
| if some features don't work. I've done this, my friends
| and family have done this, I've seen it IRL.
|
| I've never seen anyone do this on iPhone in my entire
| life.
|
| But I flipped and I'm a Google hater. Expensive phones
| and no aux port. At least I can get cheap androids still.
| alt227 wrote:
| Whats an aux port?
| LoganDark wrote:
| Headphone jack.
| LoganDark wrote:
| > I've never seen anyone do this on iPhone in my entire
| life.
|
| My comment's about macOS. Even though it's a completely
| different market segment than Android, I'm only using
| Android as an example.
| bigyabai wrote:
| If anyone wants to read up on all the features Apple _didn
| 't_ implement from Intel Macs that made Linux support take
| so long, here is a list of UEFI features that represents
| only a small subset of the missing support relative to AMD
| and Intel chipsets:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI#Features
|
| Alternatively, read about iBoot. Haha, just kidding! There
| is no documentation for iBoot, unlike there is for uBoot
| and Clover and OpenCore and SimpleBoot and Freeloader and
| systemd-boot. You're just expected to... know. Yunno?
| LoganDark wrote:
| To be fair, this is how homebrew for Apple devices has
| always worked. You've always had to effectively reverse
| engineer the platform in order to write privileged code.
| Although I get the argument that if Apple were explicitly
| trying to support alternative operating systems they
| probably could have done more to make it easy, really
| what they were doing with this was first and foremost
| enabling additional use cases for macOS, and then maybe
| silently doing it in a way that third parties would also
| be able to benefit from. The Asahi wiki does a bit of a
| better job of explaining this, but the suspicion is that
| Apple did this not necessarily to make it easier for
| alternative operating systems to exist but to prevent the
| Mac from needing to be jailbroken when alternative
| operating systems were bound to happen anyway.
| bigyabai wrote:
| It's not how homebrew worked on Intel Macs, or even
| PowerMacs[0] either. It's a change made with the Apple
| Silicon lineup - I cannot speak on Apple's behalf to tell
| you why they did that. But I can blame UEFI as the reason
| why the M3 continues to have pitiful Linux support when
| brand-new AMD and Intel chips have video drivers and
| power management on Day One.
|
| [1] https://mac-classic.com/articles/open-firmware-
| basics/
| comex wrote:
| The EFI environment does provide some basic drivers for
| the boot environment, but they all go away once the OS
| loads, except for a handful of functions such as EFI
| variable management. (Linux can also reuse a framebuffer
| originally obtained from EFI for a very limited form of
| video support - efifb - but that's not proper video
| support.) So EFI doesn't get credit for video drivers or
| power management.
|
| For power management, you can however give some credit to
| ACPI, which is not directly related to UEFI (it predates
| it), but is likewise an open standard, and is generally
| found on the same devices as UEFI (i.e. PCs and ARM
| servers). ACPI also provides the initial gateway to PCIe,
| another open standard; so if you have a discrete video
| card then you can theoretically access it without
| chipset-specific drivers (but of course you still need a
| driver for the card itself).
|
| But for onboard video, and I believe a good chunk of
| power management as well, the credit goes to drivers
| written for Linux by the hardware vendors.
| LoganDark wrote:
| Sorry, I should have specified Apple Silicon rather than
| just "Apple devices". Obviously the devices that used
| widely supported CPUs running pretty much widely
| supported firmware were pretty easy to install non-Apple
| things on. My Mid-2015 A1398 ran a triple boot between
| macOS, Windows and Arch Linux thanks to rEFInd.
| ivape wrote:
| They don't want to overtake their desktop device market. If
| the UI fully converges, then all you have a iPad with a
| keyboard across all devices (laptops, desktop).
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Nothing Apple can do to iPadOS is going to fix the fundamental
| problem that:
|
| 1. iPadOS has a lot of software either built for the "three
| share sheets to the wind" era of iPadOS, or lazily upscaled
| from an iPhone app, and
|
| 2. iPadOS does not allow users to tamper with the OS or third-
| party software, so you can't fix any of this broken mess.
|
| Video editing and 3D would be possible on iPadOS, but for #1.
| Programming is genuinely impossible because of #2. All the APIs
| that let Swift Playgrounds do on-device development are private
| APIs and entitlements that third-parties are unlikely to ever
| get a provisioning profile for. Same for emulation and
| virtualization. Apple begrudgingly allows it, but we're never
| going to get JIT or hypervisor support[0] that would make those
| things not immediately chew through your battery.
|
| [0] To be clear, M1 iPads supported hypervisor; if you were
| jailbroken on iPadOS 14.5 and copied some files over from macOS
| you could even get full-fat UTM to work. It's just a software
| lockout.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Then why break it off as iPadOS?
| losvedir wrote:
| I don't use an iPad much, but it's been interesting to watch
| from afar how it's been changing over these years.
|
| They _could_ have gone the direction of just running MacOS on
| it, but clearly they don 't want to. I have a feeling that the
| only reason MacOS is the way it is, is because of history. If
| they were building a laptop from scratch, they would want it
| more in their walled garden.
|
| I'm curious to see what a "power user" desktop with windowing
| and files, and all that stuff that iPad is starting to get,
| ultimately looks like down this alternative evolutionary
| branch.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| Its obvious isn't it? It will look like a desktop, except
| Apple decides what apps you can run and takes their 30% tax
| on all commerce.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| Yeah, it's like we're watching two parallel evolution paths:
| macOS dragging its legacy along, and iPadOS trying to
| reinvent "productivity" from first principles, within Apple's
| tight design sandbox.
| burntalmonds wrote:
| I think practically everyone is better off with a laptop. iPad
| is great if you're an artist using the pencil, or just
| consuming media on it. Otherwise a macbook is far more powerful
| and ergonomic to use.
| ZeroTalent wrote:
| I don't understand why my MacBook doesn't have a touchscreen.
| I'm switching to an iPad Pro tomorrow. I use Superwhisper to
| talk to it 90% of the time anyway.
| dexwiz wrote:
| My theory is because of the hinge, which is a common point
| of failure on laptops. Either you are putting extra strain
| on it by having someone constantly touching the screen, and
| some users just mash their fingers into touch screens. Or
| users want a fully openable screen to mimic a tablet
| format, and those hinges always seem to fail quicker. Every
| touchscreen laptop I've had eventually has had the hinge
| fail.
| raydev wrote:
| Apple is capable of solving it if they want to. They
| don't want to (yet at least).
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| There seems to be some kind of incompatibility between
| antiglare and oleophobic coatings that may also
| contribute.
|
| Every single touch screen laptop I've seen has huge
| reflection issues, practically being mirrors. My
| assumption is that in order for the screen to not get
| nasty with fingerprints in no time, touchscreen laptops
| need oleophobic coating, but to add that they have to use
| no antiglare coating.
|
| Personally I wouldn't touch my screen often enough to
| justify having to contend with glare.
| thetallguyyy wrote:
| Because MacBooks have subpar displays, at least the M4 Air
| does. The iPad Pro is a better value.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| I think perhaps you are overestimating the computing needs of
| the majority of the population. Get one of the iPad cases
| with a keyboard and an iPad is in many ways a better laptop.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Or maybe a stand and separate keyboard. Better ergonomics
| than a laptop that way with similar portability.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Any keyboard you recommend? I'm looking around myself.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Something wireless would be nice for portability IMO,
| e.g. Apple or Logitech Bluetooth. Security considerations
| there though.
|
| I wouldn't want a numpad. A track point would be ape.
|
| I struggle with keyboard recommendations b/c I'm not
| fully satisfied lol.
| nottorp wrote:
| But the majority won't pay extra for an ipad and a
| keyboard, when they can pay less for an air with everything
| included...
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| I'm not sure - I just looked casually at some options and
| it appears one can find an iPad between $700-$900 for a
| pretty solid model, which includes the $250 folio
| keyboard. The base model MBA starts at $999. So depends
| on whether you want a traditional laptop or a "computing
| device."
| kyawzazaw wrote:
| yes they will
| lucasoshiro wrote:
| I have an iPad and really like it, but no, it is not.
|
| Several small things combined make it really different to
| the experience that I have with a desktop OS. But it is
| nice as side device
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| I'm guessing you are coming at it from the perspective of
| a laptop user and likely a power user. The majority of
| the population just needs to scroll social media, message
| some friends, send an email or two, do a little shopping,
| maybe write a document or two. For this crowd an iPad is
| plenty. When I was a software developer - yeah, I had a
| Mac Pro on my desk and a MBP I carried when I traveled.
| Now as a real estate agent, an iPad is plenty for when
| I'm on the go.
| tiltowait wrote:
| The problem is that almost everything, including basic web
| browsing, is straight-up worse on the iPad. Weird
| incompatibilities, sites that don't honor desktop mode,
| tabs unloading from memory, random reloads, etc. all mar
| the experience.
| threeseed wrote:
| > practically everyone is better off with a laptop
|
| The majority of the world are using their phones as a
| computing device.
|
| And as someone with a MacBook and iPad the later is
| significantly more ergonomic.
| solomatov wrote:
| I prefer MacBook to iPad most of the time. The only use
| case for iPad for me where it shines is when I need to use
| a pencil.
| focusedone wrote:
| I used to think that, not having used an iPad. Now I carry a
| work-issued iPad with 5G and it's actually pretty convenient
| for remote access to servers. I wouldn't want to spend a day
| working on it, but it's way faster than pulling out a laptop
| to make one tiny change on a server. It's also great for
| taking notes at meetings/conferences.
|
| It's irritatingly bad at consuming media and browsing the
| web. No ad blocking, so every webpage is an ad-infested
| wasteland. There are _so many_ ads in YouTube and streaming
| music. I had no idea.
|
| It's also kindof a pain to connect to my media library. Need
| to figure out a better solution for that.
|
| So, as a relatively new iPad user it's pleasantly useful for
| select work tasks. Not so great at doomscrolling or streaming
| media. Who knew?
| pkage wrote:
| There's native ad blocking on iOS and has been for a while
| --I've found that to significantly enhance the usability of
| the device. I use Wipr[0], other options are available.
|
| [0]: https://kaylees.site/wipr2.html
| nottorp wrote:
| I use Wipr on my phone, the experience is a lot worse
| than ublock origin on desktop...
| poglet wrote:
| Try the Brave browser for YouTube. I used Jellyfin for my
| media library and that seemed to work fine for tv and
| movies.
|
| I just got a Macbook and haven't touched my iPad Pro since,
| I would think I could make a change faster on a Macbook
| then iPad if they were both in my bag. Although I do miss
| the cellular data that the iPad has.
| e6quisitory wrote:
| Use Orion Browser. It allows installing Firefox/Chrome
| extensions. Install Firefox unlock Origin.
| athenot wrote:
| Whether or not they eventually fuse, I don't know--I doubt it.
| But the approach they've taken over the past 15 years to
| _gradually_ increase the similarities in user experience, while
| not trying to force a square peg in a round hole, have been the
| best path in terms of usability.
|
| I think Microsoft was a little too eager to fuse their tablet
| and desktop interface. It has produced some interesting
| innovations in the process but it's been nowhere near as
| polished as ipadOS/macOS.
| jonplackett wrote:
| I wish they'd focus on just enabling actual functionality on
| iPad - like can I have Xcode please? And a shell?
|
| I dgaf what the UI looks like. It's fine.
| dcchambers wrote:
| > The iPad has become practically a MacBook Air with a touch
| screen. Unless you were a video editor, programmer who needs
| resources to compile or a 3D artist, I don't see how you'd need
| anything other than an iPad.
|
| No! It's not - and it's dangerous to propagate this myth. There
| are so many arbitrary restrictions on iPad OS that don't exist
| on MacOS. Massive restrictions on background apps - things like
| raycast (MacOS version), Text Expander, cleanshot, popclip, etc
| just aren't possible in iPad OS. These are tools that anyone
| would find useful. No root/superuser access. I still can't
| install whatever apps I want from whatever sources I want.
| Hell, you can't even write and run iPadOS apps in a code editor
| on the iPad itself. Apple's own editor/development tool - Xcode
| - only runs on MacOS.
|
| The changes to window management are great - but iPad and
| iPadOS are still extremely locked down.
| msgodel wrote:
| They can't do this. It would destroy their ability to rent
| their iOS users out because they'd have access to dev tools and
| could "scale the wall."
| renrutal wrote:
| With Microsoft opening Windows's kernel to the Xbox team, and a
| possible macOS-iPadOS unification, we are reaching multiple
| levels of climate changes in Hell. It's hailing!
| Bengalilol wrote:
| > I don't see how you'd need anything other than an iPad.
|
| For the same price, you still get a better mac.
| gnatman wrote:
| But when you have so many customers buying and using both,
| seems like it'd be bad business for them to fully merge those
| lines.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| I still find iPadOS frustrating for certain "pro" workflows.
| File management, windowing, background tasks - all still feel
| half-baked compared to macOS. It's like Apple's trying to
| protect the simplicity of iOS while awkwardly grafting on
| power-user features
| nicbou wrote:
| I really wish there was some sort of hybrid device. I often
| travel by foot/bike/motorbike and space comes at a premium. I'd
| have a Microsoft Surface if Windows was not so unbearable.
|
| On the other hand, I have come to love having a
| reading/writing/sketching device that is completely separate
| from my work device. I can't get roped into work and emails and
| notifications when I just want to read in bed. My iPad Mini is
| a truly distraction-free device.
|
| I also think it would be hard to have a user experience that
| works great both for mobile work and sitting-at-a-desk work. I
| returned my Microsoft Surface because of a save dialog in a
| sketching app. I did not want to do _file management_ because
| drawing does not feel like a computing task. On the other hand,
| I do want to deal with files when I 'm using 3 different apps
| to work on a website's files.
| qn9n wrote:
| Yeah I think the majority of users, even in an office
| environment would be better of with an iPad in 99% of cases.
| All standard office stuff, like presentations; documents and
| similar are going to run better on an iPad. There are less foot
| guns, users are less likely to open 300 tabs just because they
| can.
|
| If you are a developer or a creative however, then a Mac is
| still very useful.
| nehalem wrote:
| I wonder what happened to Siri. Not a single mention anywhere?
| m3kw9 wrote:
| hope to show you more later this year. was like the first thing
| they said about apple intelligence
| alt227 wrote:
| Which is the same as what they said last year.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| I actually loved Siri when it first came out. It felt magical
| back then (in a way)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| I like that there's support for locally-run models on Xcode.
|
| I wish I thought that the Game Porting Toolkit 3 would make a
| difference, but I think Apple's going to have to incentivize game
| studios to use it. And they should; the Apple Silicon is good
| enough to run a lot of games.
|
| ... when are they going to have the courage to release MacOS
| Bakersfield? C'mon. Do it. You're gonna tell me California's all
| zingers? Nah. We know better.
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| yeah, getting better LLM support for XCode is great!
| bandoti wrote:
| Not sure about that Liquid Glass idea.
|
| Ultimately UI widgets are rooted in reality (switches, knobs,
| doohickeys) and liquid glass is Salvador-Dali-Esque.
|
| Imagine driving a car and the gear shifter was made of liquid
| glass... people would hit more grannies than a self-driving
| Tesla.
| dorian-graph wrote:
| Will they ever update Terminal.app?
| garciasn wrote:
| Just use iTerm2 (Warp or Kitty are two other options out of
| many) and be done w/it; why would Apple even worry about this
| when so few people who care about terminal applications even
| think twice about it?
| Onavo wrote:
| Also ghostty
| dorian-graph wrote:
| I've tried all of them, including ones that yourself, and
| others, haven't mentioned like Rio. I stand by wanting
| Terminal.app simply updated with better colour support, then
| it's one less alternative program to get.
| davidcox143 wrote:
| Unlikely to happen soon. It's maintained by one engineer who is
| very against anything resembling iTerm2.
| visiondude wrote:
| They did!!! At least color options. Just announced at platform
| state of the union
| dorian-graph wrote:
| Yes! In another comment of mine, that was the main thing I
| mentioned, haha.
|
| edit: For those curious, https://youtu.be/51iONeETSng?t=3368.
|
| - New theme inspired by Liquid Glass
|
| - 24-bit colour
|
| - Powerline fonts
| dblooman wrote:
| Can someone who uses Xcode daily compare to say Cursor or VsCode
| how the developer experience is. Just curious how Apple is
| keeping up
| nikolayasdf123 wrote:
| XCode so far is very rudimentary. miles behind VSCode in
| autocomplete. autocomplete is very small, single line, and
| suggests very very rarely. and no other features except
| autocomplete exist.
|
| very good to see XCode LLM improvements!
|
| > I use VSCode Go daily + XCode Swift 6 iOS 18 daily
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| Several years ago XCode also had "jump to definition" and a
| few other features.
| babyshake wrote:
| Does the privacy preserving aspect of this mean that Apple
| Intelligence can be invoked within an app, but the results
| provided by Apple Intelligence are not accessible to the app to
| be transmitted to their server or utilized in other ways? Or is
| the privacy preservation handled in a different way?
| jonplackett wrote:
| I think they just mean private from Apple. I don't see how they
| can keep it private from the developer if it's integrated into
| the app
| esafak wrote:
| Does this mean we will longer need Docker Desktop or colima?
| badc0ffee wrote:
| That's what it sounds like:
| https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346
| leoh wrote:
| Not if musl is standard
| Aaron2222 wrote:
| That's just for the statically-linked vminitd binary in the
| VM I believe. Containers should still be running whatever's
| packaged into them.
| N_A_T_E wrote:
| > New Design with Liquid Glass Yes, bringing back aqua! I even
| see blue in their examples.
| pxc wrote:
| I hoped for a moment that "Containerization Framework" meant that
| macOS itself would be getting containers. Running Linux
| containers and VMs on macOS via virtualization is already pretty
| easy and has many good options. If you're willing to use
| proprietary applications to do this, OrbStack is the slickest,
| but Lima/Colima is fine, and Podman Desktop and Rancher Desktop
| work well, too.
|
| The thing macOS really painfully lacks is not ergonomic ways to
| run Linux VMs, but actual, _native_ containers-- macOS
| containers. And third parties can 't really implement this well
| without Apple's cooperation. There have been some efforts to do
| this, but the most notable one is now defunct, judging by its
| busted/empty website[1] and deleted GitHub organization[2]. It
| required disabling SIP to work, back when it at least sort-of
| worked. There's one newer effort that seems to be alive, but it's
| also afflicted with significant limitations for want of macOS
| features[3].
|
| That would be super useful and fill a real gap, meeting needs
| that third-party software can't. Instead, as wmf has noted
| elsewhere in these comments, it seems they've simply "Sherlock'd"
| OrbStack.
|
| --
|
| 1: https://macoscontainers.org/
|
| 2: https://github.com/macOScontainers
|
| 3: https://github.com/Okerew/osxiec
| NewJazz wrote:
| What would these be useful for?
| wpm wrote:
| Same thing containers/jails are useful for on Linux and *BSD,
| without needing to spin up an entirely separate kernel to run
| in a VM to handle it.
| tensor wrote:
| MacOS apps can already be sandboxed. In fact it's a
| requirement to publish them to the Mac App Store. I agree
| it'd be nice to see this extended to userland binaries
| though.
| Etheryte wrote:
| You can't really sandbox development dependencies in any
| meaningful way. I want to throw everything and the
| kitchen sink into one container per project, not install
| a specific version of Python, Node, Perl or what have you
| globally/namespaced/whatever. Currently there's no good
| solution to that problem, save perhaps for a VM.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Hmm have you tried devenv?
|
| https://devenv.sh/
|
| UV is pretty good for python too.
| haiku2077 wrote:
| uv doesn't provide strong isolation; a package you
| install using uv can attempt to delete random files in
| your home folder when you import it, for example.
| NewJazz wrote:
| People use containers server side in Linux land mostly...
| Some desktop apps (flatpak is basically a container
| runtime) but the real draw is server code.
|
| Do you think people would be developing and/or distributing
| end user apps via macOS containers?
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| Orchestrating macOS only software, like Xcode, and software
| that benefits from Environment integrity, like browsers.
| raydev wrote:
| Clean build environments for CICD workflows, especially if
| you're building/deploying many separate projects and repos.
| Managing Macs as standalone build machines is still a huge
| headache in 2025.
| BrandonSmith wrote:
| What's wrong with Cirrus CLI and Tart built on Apple's
| Virtualization.framework?
|
| https://tart.run
|
| https://github.com/cirruslabs/cirrus-cli
| pxc wrote:
| Tart is great! This is probably the best thing available
| for now, though it runs into some limitations that Apple
| imposes for VMs. (Those limitations perhaps hint at why
| Apple hasn't implemented this-- it seems they don't
| really want people to be able to rent out many slices of
| Macs.
|
| One clever and cool thing Tart actually does that sort of
| relates to this discussion is that it uses the OCI format
| for distributing OS images!
|
| (It's also worth noting that Tart is proprietary. Some
| users might prefer something that's either open-source,
| built-in, or both.)
| pxc wrote:
| Providing isolated environments for CI machines and other
| build environments!
|
| If the sandboxing features a native containerization system
| relied on were also exposed via public APIs, those could
| could also potentially be leveraged by developer tools that
| want to have/use better sandboxing on macOS. Docker and
| BuildKit have native support for Windows containers, for
| instance. If they could also support macOS the same way, that
| would be cool for facilitating isolated macOS builds without
| full fat VMs. Tools like Dagger could then support more
| reproducible build pipelines on macOS hosts.
|
| It could also potentially provide better experiences for
| tools like devcontainers on macOS as well, since sharing
| portions of your filesystem to a VM is usually trickier and
| slower than just sharing those files with a container that
| runs under your same kernel.
|
| For many of these use cases, Nix serves very well, giving
| "just enough" isolation for development tasks, but not too
| much. (I use devenv for this at work and at home.) But Nix
| implementations themselves could also benefit from this! Nix
| internally uses a sandbox to help ensure reproducible builds,
| but the implementation on macOS is quirky and incomplete
| compared to the one on Linux. (For reasons I've since
| forgotten, I keep it turned off on macOS.)
| itake wrote:
| I might misunderstand the project, but I wish there was a
| secure way for me to execute github projects. Recently, the
| OS has provided some controls to limit access to files, etc.
| but I'd really like a "safe boot" version that doesn't allow
| the program to access the disk or network.
|
| the firewall tools are too clunky (and imho unreliable).
| csomar wrote:
| ie: You want to build a binary for macOS from your Linux
| machine. Right now, it is possible but you still need a macOS
| license and to go through hoops. If you were able to
| containerize macOS, then you create a container and then
| compile your program inside it.
| nixosbestos wrote:
| No, that's not at all how that would work. You're not
| building a macOS binary natively under a Linux kernel.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| It's not that macoscontainers is empty, it's that the site is
| https://darwin-containers.github.io
|
| Read more about it here - https://github.com/darwin-containers
|
| The developer is very responsive.
|
| One of Apple's biggest value props to other platforms is
| environment integrity. This is why their containerization /
| automation story is worse than e.g. Android.
| pxc wrote:
| Ah, that's great! I'd forgotten it moved and struggled to
| track it down.
| emadda wrote:
| > The thing macOS really painfully lacks is not ergonomic ways
| to run Linux VMs, but actual, native containers-- macOS
| containers
|
| Linux container processes run on the host kernel with extra
| sandboxing. The container image is an easily sharable and
| runnable bundle.
|
| macOS .app bundles are kind of like container images.
|
| You can sign them to ensure they are not modified, and put them
| into the "registry" (App Store).
|
| The Swift ABI ensures it will likely run against future macOS
| versions, like the Linux system APIs.
|
| There is a sandbox system to restrict file and network access.
| Any started processes inherit the sandbox, like containers.
|
| One thing missing is fine grained network rules though - I
| think the sandbox can just define "allow outbound/inbound".
|
| Obviously ".app"s are not exactly like container images , but
| they do cover many of the same features.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| You're kind of right. But at the same time they are nowhere
| close. The beauty of Linux containerization is that processes
| can be wholly ignorant that they are not in fact running as
| root. The containers get, what appear to them, to be the
| whole OS to themselves.
|
| You don't get that in macOS. It's more of a jail than a
| sandbox. For example, as an app you can't, as far as I know,
| shell out and install homebrew and then invoke homebrew and
| install, say, postgres, and run it, all without affecting the
| user's environment. I think that's what people mean when they
| say macOS lacks native containers.
| griels wrote:
| Hard same. I wonder if this does anything different to the
| existing projects that would mean one could use the WSL2
| approach where containerd is running in the Linux micro-VM. A
| key component is the RPC framework - seems to be how orbstack's
| `macctl` command does it. I see mention of GRPC, sandboxes and
| containers in the binfmt_misc handling code, which is
| promising:
|
| https://github.com/apple/containerization/blob/d1a8fae1aff6f...
| xyst wrote:
| back to "glass" UI element/design? Early 2000s is back, I guess.
|
| Edit: surprised apple is dumping resources into gaming, maybe
| they are playing the long game here?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| > Every Apple Developer Program membership includes 200GB of
| Apple hosting capacity for the App Store. Apple-Hosted Background
| Assets can be submitted separately from an app build.
|
| Is this the first time Apple has offered something substantial
| for the App store fees beyond the SDK/Xcode and basic app
| distribution?
|
| Is it a way to give developers a reason to limit distribution to
| only the official App Store, or will this be offered regardless
| of what store the app is downloaded from?
| Klonoar wrote:
| Huh. Does this cover if you use public CloudKit databases...?
| glhaynes wrote:
| Background Assets have existed for years. I'm not sure that
| 200GB figure is new.
| samcat116 wrote:
| > Is this the first time Apple has offered something
| substantial for the App store fees beyond the SDK/Xcode and
| basic app distribution?
|
| They've offered 25hrs/mo of Xcode Cloud build time for the last
| couple years.
| pjmlp wrote:
| WebKit is also being swiftified, as mentioned on the platforms
| state of the union.
| Klonoar wrote:
| As in they're integrating Swift into the WebKit project, or
| exposing Swift-y wrappers over WebKit itself?
| pjmlp wrote:
| There is probably going to be a session later this week, the
| reference seemed to imply they are integrating Swift into
| Webkit project for new development.
| Klonoar wrote:
| Interesting, I wonder if that pushes Swift on Linux further
| given other projects (webkitgtk etc).
| pjmlp wrote:
| Most likely not, for Apple what matters for Swift on
| Linux, is being a good server language for app developers
| that want to share code between app and server, with
| Apple no longer caring to sell macOS for servers.
|
| Everything else they would rather see devs stay on their
| platforms, see the official tier 1 scenarios on
| swift.org.
| Illniyar wrote:
| Oh, Apple is doing windows Aero now? Wonder how long that one'll
| last.
| bearjaws wrote:
| All this focus on low power gaming makes me think Apple wants to
| get in on the Steam Deck hype.
| SlowTao wrote:
| Apple is in a reasonably good place to make gaming work for
| them.
|
| Their hardware across the board is fairly powerful (definetly
| not top end), they have a good API stack especially with Metal.
| And they have systems at all levels including TV. If they were
| to just make a standard controller or just say "PS5 dualshock
| is our choice" they could have a nice little slice for
| themselves.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| As I understand it, Apple has a long history of entitlement
| and burning bridges with every major game developer while
| making collaboration extremely painful. They were in a much
| better place to make gaming work 10 years ago when major
| gaming studios were still interested in working with them.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| Just let me have JIT! My jailbroken iPad Pro can emulate Wii
| at 4k without getting warm. Unfortunately you have to hack
| around enabling JIT on newer ios releases.
| bigyabai wrote:
| They better have a partnership with Sony in the works, then.
| Valve and Apple's approach to supporting video games diverged a
| decade ago. Hearing "Steam" and "Apple" uttered in the same
| breath is probably giving people panic attacks already.
| throwaway314155 wrote:
| Until Apple-ported games are able to be installed from Steam
| instead of the App Store, you can count me out.
| raydev wrote:
| They've been hyping up their hardware capabilities and APIs for
| years now.
| bishfish wrote:
| I sure hope they provide an accessibility option to turn down
| translucency to improve contrast or this UI is a non-starter for
| me. Without using it, this new UI looks like it may favor design
| over usability. Why don't they do something more novel and let
| user tweak interface to their liking?
| encom wrote:
| >favor design over usability
|
| That's... kinda what Apple is famous for.
| alt227 wrote:
| The files are _INSIDE_ the computer!
| glhaynes wrote:
| They've had Reduce Transparency (under Accessibility) for a
| long time now. It still works.
| mrbonner wrote:
| I don't understand the foundation models here. Are they new LLMs
| trained by Apple such as Qwen?
| wmf wrote:
| Yes.
|
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-foundation-...
| hrdwdmrbl wrote:
| But actually released in 2024?
| gdubs wrote:
| There's a different thread if you want to wax about Fluid Glass
| etc [1], but there's some really interesting new improvements
| here for Apple Developers in Xcode 26.
|
| The new foundation frameworks around generative language model
| stuff looks very swift-y and nice for Apple developers. And it's
| local and on device. In the Platforms State of the Union they
| showed some really interesting sample apps using it to generate
| different itineraries in a travel app.
|
| The other big thing is vibe-coding coming natively to Xcode
| through ChatGPT (and other) model integration. Some things that
| make this look like a nice quality-of-life improvement for Apple
| developers is the way that it tracks iterative changes with the
| model so you can rollback easily, and the way it gives context to
| your codebase. Seems to be a big improvement from the previous,
| very limited GPT integration with Xcode and the first time Apple
| Developers have a native version of some of the more popular
| vibe-coding tools.
|
| Their 'drag a napkin sketch into Xcode and get a functional
| prototype' is pretty wild for someone who grew up writing
| [myObject retain] in Objective-C.
|
| Are these completely ground-breaking features? I think it's more
| what Apple has historically done which is to not be first into a
| space, but to really nail the UX. At least, that's the promise -
| we'll have to see how these tools perform!
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44226612
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| > And it's local and on device.
|
| Does that explain why you don't have to worry about token
| usage? The models run locally?
| hbcondo714 wrote:
| > You don't have to worry about the exact tokens that
| Foundation Models operates with, the API nicely abstracts
| that away for you [1]
|
| I have the same question. Their _Deep dive into the
| Foundation Models framework_ video is nice for seeing code
| using the new `FoundationModels` library but for a "deep
| dive", I would like to learn more about tokenization.
| Hopefully these details are eventually disclosed unless
| someone else here already knows?
|
| [1] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/301/?tim
| e=1...
| refulgentis wrote:
| I guess I'd say "mu", from a dev perspective, you shouldn't
| care about _tokens_ _ever_ - if your inference framework
| isn 't abstracting that for you, your first task would be
| to patch it to do so.
|
| To parent, yes this is for local models, so insomuch
| worrying about token implies financial cost, yes
| IanCal wrote:
| Ish - it always depends how deep in the weeds you need to
| get. Tokenisation impacts performance, both speed and
| results, so details can be important.
| refulgentis wrote:
| I maintain a llama.cpp wrapper, on everything from web to
| Android and cannot quite wrap my mind around if you'd
| have any more info by getting individual token IDs from
| the API, beyond what you'd get from wall clock time and
| checking their vocab.
| lqstuart wrote:
| I don't really see a need for token IDs alone, but you
| absolutely need per-token logprob vectors if you're
| trying to do constrained decoding
| refulgentis wrote:
| Interesting point, my first reaction was "why do you need
| logprobs? We use constrained decoding for tool calls and
| don't need them"...which is actually false! Because we
| need to throw out those log probs then find the highest
| log prob of a token _meeting the constraints_.
| pzo wrote:
| I might we wrong but I guess this will only works on iphone 16
| devices and iphone 15 pro - thus drastically limits your user
| base and you would still have to use online API for most apps.
| I was hoping they provide free ai api on their private cloud
| for other devices even if also running small models
| jjcob wrote:
| If you start writing an app now, by the time it's polished
| enough to release it, the iPhone 16 will already be a year
| old phone, and there will be plenty potential customers.
|
| If your app is worthwhile, and gets popular in a few years,
| by that time iPhone 16 will be an old phone and a reasonable
| minimum target.
|
| Skate to where the puck is going...
| geodel wrote:
| Exactly, it can take at least a couple of years to get
| big/important apps to use iOS, macOS features. By that
| Iphone 16 would be quite common.
| rs186 wrote:
| Developers could be adding a feature utilizing LLMs to
| their existing app that already has a large user base. This
| could be a matter of a few weeks from an idea ti shipping
| the feature. While competitors use API calls to just "get
| things done", you are trying to figure out how to serve
| both iPhone 16 and older users, and potentially Android/web
| users if your product is also available elsewhere. I don't
| see how an iPhone 16 only feature helps anyone's product
| development, especially when the quality still remains to
| be seen.
| edude03 wrote:
| Basically this - network effects are huge. People will
| definitely by hardware if it solves a problem for them - so
| many people bought blackberries just for BBM.
| charliebwrites wrote:
| If the new foundation models are on device, does that mean
| they're limited to information they were trained on up to that
| point?
|
| Or do have the ability to reach out to the internet for up to
| the moment information?
| dwaite wrote:
| In addition to context you provide, the API lets you
| programmatically declare tools
| rubicon33 wrote:
| The direction the software engineering is going in with this
| whole "vibe coding" thing is so depressing to me.
|
| I went into this industry because I grew up fascinated by
| computers. When I learned how to code, it was about learning
| how to control these incredible machines. The joy of figuring
| something out by experimenting is quickly being replaced by
| just slamming it into some "generative" tool.
|
| I have no idea where things go from here but hopefully there
| will still be a world where the craft of hand writing code is
| still valued. I for one will resist the "vibe coding" train for
| as long as I possibly can.
| tansan wrote:
| This sounds like a boomer trying to resist using Google in
| favor of encyclopedias.
|
| Vibe coding can be whatever you want to make of it. If you
| want to be prescriptive about your instructions and use it as
| a glorified autocomplete, then do it. You can also go at it
| from a high-level point of view. Either way, you still need
| to code review the AI code as if it was a PR.
| hooverd wrote:
| You can take an augmented approach, a sort of capability
| fusion, or you can spam regenerate until it works.
| fragmede wrote:
| No, that's what's separates the vibecoding from the
| glorified autocomplete. as originally defined, vibe coding
| doesn't include the final code review of the generated
| code, just a quick spot check, and then moving on to the
| next prompt.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| Is any AI assisted coding === Vibe Coding now?
|
| Coding _with an AI_ can be whatever one can achieve,
| however I don't see how _vibe_ coding would be related to
| an autocomplete: with an autocomplete you type a bit of
| code that a program (AI or not) complete. In VC you almost
| doesn't interact with the editor, perhaps only for copy
| /paste or some corrections. I'm not even sure for the
| manual "corrections" parts if we take Simon Willinson
| definition [0], which you're not forced to obviously,
| however if there's contradictory views I'll be glad to read
| them.
|
| 0 > If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you've
| reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that's not vibe
| coding in my book--that's using an LLM as a typing
| assistant
|
| https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/is-vibe-coding-with-ai-
| gn...
|
| (Your may also consider rethinking your first paragraph up
| to HN standards because while the content is pertinent, the
| form sounds like a youngster trying to demo iKungFu on his
| iPad to Jackie Chan)
| swsieber wrote:
| No, this sounds like an IC resisting becoming a manager.
| msgodel wrote:
| Karpathy's definition of vibe coding as I understood it was
| just verbally directing an agent based on vibes you got
| from the running app without actually seeing the code.
| spagoop wrote:
| To be meta about it, I would argue that thinking
| "generatively" is a craft in and of itself. You are setting
| the conditions for work to grow rather than having top-down
| control over the entire problem space.
|
| Where it gets interesting is being pushed into directions
| that you wouldn't have considered anyway rather than
| expediting the work you would have already done.
|
| I can't speak for engineers, but that's how we've been
| positioning it in our org. It's worth noting that we're
| finding GenAI less practical in design-land for pushing code
| or prototyping, but insanely helpful helping with research
| and discovery work.
|
| We've been experimenting with more esoteric prompts to really
| challenge the models and ourselves.
|
| Here's a tangible example: Imagine you have an enormous
| dataset of user-research, both qual and quant, and you have a
| few ideas of how to synthesize the overall narrative, but are
| still hitting a wall.
|
| You can use a prompt like this to really get the team
| thinking:
|
| "What empty spaces or absences are crucial here? Amplify
| these voids until they become the primary focus, not the
| surrounding substance. Describe how centering nothingness
| might transform your understanding of everything else. What
| does the emptiness tell you?"
|
| or
|
| "Buildings reveal their true nature when sliced open. That
| perfect line that exposes all layers at once - from
| foundation to roof, from public to private, from structure to
| skin.
|
| What stories hide between your floors? Cut through your
| challenge vertically, ruthlessly. Watch how each layer speaks
| to the others. Notice the hidden chambers, the unexpected
| connections, the places where different systems touch.
|
| What would a clean slice through your problem expose?"
|
| LLM's have completely changed our approach to research and, I
| would argue, reinvigorated an alternate craftsmanship to the
| ways in which we study our products and learn from our users.
|
| Of course the onus is on us to pick apart the responses for
| any interesting directions that are contextually relevant to
| the problem we're attempting to solve, but we are still in
| control of the work.
|
| Happy to write more about this if folks are interested.
| alt227 wrote:
| Reading this post is like playing buzz word bingo!
| tough wrote:
| they mention kata, so is this using kata underneath instead of
| their Hypervisor.framework?
|
| im confused
|
| https://katacontainers.io/
|
| https://developer.apple.com/documentation/hypervisor
| cayleyh wrote:
| Repo says it uses Hypervisor.framework on Apple Silicon
| devices.
| tough wrote:
| ah ty i should have read more
| sheerun wrote:
| k
| xpe wrote:
| > including over 250,000 APIs that enable developers to integrate
| their apps with Apple's hardware and software features.
|
| This doesn't sound impressive, it sounds insane.
| glhaynes wrote:
| Which ones would you like to get rid of?
| can16358p wrote:
| I hope they don't turn Liquid Glass into Aqua... which I hated.
| The only time I started to like the iOS interface was iOS 7 with
| flat design. I hope they don't turn this into old, skeuomorphic,
| Aqua-like UI by time.
| badc0ffee wrote:
| The video on Containerization.framework, and the Container tool,
| is live [0].
|
| It looks like each container will run in its own VM, that will
| boot into a custom, lightweight init called vminitd that is
| written in Swift. No information on what Linux kernel they're
| using, or whether these VMs are going to be ARM only or also
| Intel, but I haven't really dug in yet [1].
|
| [0] https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/346
|
| [1] https://github.com/apple/containerization
| ilyagr wrote:
| If you search the code, they support Rosetta, which means an
| ARM Linux kernel running x86 container userspace with Rosetta
| translation. Linux kernel can be told to use a helper to
| translate code using non-native architecture.
|
| Actually, they explain it in detail here:
| https://github.com/apple/containerization/issues/70#issuecom...
|
| It's unclear whether this will keep being supported in macOS
| 28+, though: https://github.com/apple/container/issues/76,
| https://www.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/1l7maqp/comment/...
| w10-1 wrote:
| HN should have a conference-findings thread for something like
| WWDC, with priority impact rankings
|
| P4: Foundation models will get newbies involved, but aren't ready
| to displace other model providers.
|
| P4: New containers are ergonomic when sub-second init is
| required, but otw no virtualization news.
|
| P2: Concurrency now visible in instruments and debuggable, high-
| performance tracing avoid sampling errors; are we finally done
| with our 4+ years of black-box guesswork? (Not to mention
| concurrency backtracking to main-thread-by-default as a
| solution.)
|
| P5: UI Look-and-feel changes across all platforms conceal the
| fact that there are very few new API's.
|
| Low content overall: Scan the platforms, and you see only L&F,
| app intents, widgets. Is that really all? (thus far?) - It's
| quite concerning.
|
| Also low quality: online links point no where, half-baked
| technologies are filling presentation slots: Swift+Java interop
| is no where near usable, other topics just point to API
| documentation, "code-along" sessions restating other sessions.
|
| Beware the new upgrade forcing function: adding to the memory
| requirements of AI, the new concurrency tracing seems to require
| M4+ level device support.
| Havoc wrote:
| TIL macOS doesn't have native containers, just in vm.
|
| Don't use macOS but had just kinda assumed it would by virtue of
| shared unixy background with Linux
| makapuf wrote:
| Dont containers imply a linux kernel interface ? hence, you can
| only have truly native containers on linux or use containers in
| a VM or some kind of Wine-like translation layer.
| chr15m wrote:
| It's the year of Linux on the desktop!
| alt227 wrote:
| Another one? lol
| sammysheep wrote:
| I watched the video and it seems they are statically linking atop
| musl to build their lightweight VM layer. I guess the container
| app itself might use glibc, but will the musl build for the VM
| itself cause downstream performance issues? I'm no expert in
| virtualization to be able to understand if this should be a
| concern or not.
|
| See also:
|
| - https://edu.chainguard.dev/chainguard/chainguard-images/abou...
|
| - https://andygrove.io/2020/05/why-musl-extremely-slow/
| dang wrote:
| Related ongoing threads:
|
| _Containerization is a Swift package for running Linux
| containers on macOS_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229348 - June 2025 (158
| comments)
|
| _Container: Apple 's Linux-Container Runtime_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44229239 - June 2025 (11
| comments)
| guybedo wrote:
| looks like there isn't much to take away from this, here's a few
| bullet points:
|
| Apple Intelligence models primarily run on-device, potentially
| reducing app bundle sizes and the need for trivial API calls.
|
| Apple's new containerization framework is based on virtual
| machines (VMs) and not a true 'native' kernel-level integration
| like WSL1.
|
| Spotlight on macOS is widely perceived as slow, unreliable, and
| in significant need of improvement for basic search
| functionalities.
|
| iPadOS and macOS are converging in terms of user experience and
| features (e.g., windowing), but a complete merger is unlikely due
| to Apple's business model, particularly App Store control and
| sales strategies.
|
| The new 'Liquid Glass' UI design evokes older aesthetics like
| Windows Aero and earlier Aqua/skeuomorphism, indicating a shift
| away from flat design.
|
| Full summary (https://extraakt.com/extraakts/apple-intelligence-
| macos-ui-o...)
| cromka wrote:
| App Store control is something that EU is challenging,
| including on iPads. So while there's no macOS APIs on ipadOS, I
| can totally see 3rd party solutions running macOS apps (and
| Linux or Windows, too) in a VM and outputting the result as now
| regular iPad windowed apps.
| KolibriFly wrote:
| I'm cautious. Apple's history with developer tools is hit or
| miss. And while Xcode integrating ChatGPT sounds helpful in
| theory, I wonder how smooth that experience really is.
| thiyagutenysen wrote:
| Does this mean, we can use llm for free in developing ios apps?
| runjake wrote:
| In case others are confused about the term "Foundation Models":
|
| "Foundation Models" is an Apple _product name_ for a framework
| that taps into a bunch of Apple 's on-device AI models.
| dwaite wrote:
| No, the model itself is one of the two Apple foundation
| language models (the AFM-on-device, specifically)
|
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/introducing-apple...
|
| https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/apple-intelligenc...
|
| The architecture is such that the model can be specialized by
| plugging in more task-specific fine-tuning models as adapters,
| for instance one made for handling email tasks.
|
| At least in this version, it looks like they have only enabled
| use of one fine-tuning model (content tagging)
| pzo wrote:
| I'm still a little dissapointed. It seems those models are only
| available for iPhone series 16 and iPhone 15 pro. According to
| mixpanel that's only 25% of all iOS devices and even less if
| taking into account iPadOS. You will still have to use some other
| online model if you want to cover all iOS 26 users because I
| doubt apple will approve your app if it will only work on those
| Apple Intelligence devices.
|
| Why should I bother then as a 3rd party developer? Sure nice not
| having a cost for API for 25% of users but still those models are
| very small and equivalent of qwen2.5 4B or so and their online
| models supposed equivalent of llama scout. Those models are
| already very cheap online so why bother having more complicated
| code base then? Maybe in 2 years once more iOS users replace
| their phones but I'm unlikely to use this for developing iOS in
| the next year.
|
| This would be more interesting if all iOS 26 devices at least had
| access to their server models.
| greggsy wrote:
| Uptake of iPhone 16+ devices will be much more than 25% by the
| time someone develops the next killer app using these tools,
| which will no doubt spur sales anyway.
| rs186 wrote:
| App development could be as quickly as a few weeks. If the
| only "killer apps" we have seen in the past three years are
| the ChatGPT kind, I'm not holding my breath for a brand new
| "killer app" that runs only on iPhone 16+.
| alt227 wrote:
| If there was a killer app for AI (sorry LLMs) then it would
| have come out by now and AI (sorry LLMs) would have taken off
| properly.
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Why would anyone bother with Apple. Let their product
| deteriorate and die. It only takes one product to get people
| off iphone and theyre (tim) cooked.
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