I’ve never understood the appeal of Apple Macbooks as a developer platform. Sure, it’s “Linux-like” in some respects with it’s BSD kernel. It’s often chosen by developers because of these similarities. As for me, I’d rather use a real Linux machine. All of my PCs and servers run some flavor of Ubuntu (I prefer KDE). My company-provided Macbook doesn’t have all the keys that PC keyboards have (Home, End, PgUp, PgDn, the entire 10-key pad). The “year of the Linux desktop” arrived back in about 2016 but no one seemed to notice.
Anyhow, Apple has held a commanding lead in the market share for developers. I’m more of a “devops” guy but all of my nodes run Linux so my boss makes sure we all get Macbooks. All was well until the company swapped out my x86-based machine for one of the new and shiny M1-based machines.
As was pointed out on Reddit a few years back, these arm64 M-chips that Apple makes will effectively kill off the Macbook as a developer platform. If you read the Reddit post, you’ll see the concern is immediately refuted by “Apple would never be so dumb…” Well, they are that dumb. One can no longer by a Macbook with an x86 CPU.
Steve Jobs is gone so I guess it’s time to go to give up market share, just like Apple did after they fired him way back in the day. He came back and saved the company, but they’re on their own now.
So what’s so bad about the aarch64 M1/2/3 CPUs? The fact that they cannot execute code written for the rest of the computers in the world is pretty bad. This is OK for low-resource devices like Raspberry Pis, but a real computer deserves – and demands – better. The Reddit author’s predictions came true. VirtualBox is now useless. UTM offers a workaround called Rosetta but it’s only compatible with Apple Virtualization (a rather unstable hypervisor) that supposedly translates x86 code into arm64…. usually. It didn’t work with my VPN software so that was a no-go.
Maybe Apple hopes people will start making more aarch64-compatible software. Meanwhile, I’ll keep working on cobbling together some workarounds as I’m forced to tolerate this aarch64 nonsense. In a perfect world, the company would send me a Lenovo with Linux and I’d send back the Mac. I’ll keep praying for that unlikely day to come.
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