It does let you run things as root.

Not exactly.

What is "root" in macOS is more or less a power user role. Apple took away the true ability to operate as root a long time ago with System Integrity Protection which walls off the critical parts of the OS from the user entirely.

Unfortunately, SIP also restricts basic system functions that are trivial in other OSes. Apple made this very difficult, and MS would have loved to do this in Vista had they not received the backlash that they did.

You can disable SIP if you want. You can run whatever you want on your machine. Disabling SIP is indeed a security risk… then again, so is running something as root. Having a Mac w/o SIP is no more a security risk than having a Linux w/o a r/o kernel AFAIK.

The way apple talks about SIP its like a miracle we survived at all pre SIP. Pretty sure I've had SIP disabled for years now when I got nagged for something or whatever and had to disable it.

SIP is a good thing and prevents a lot of (usually PEBKAC) problems. It is also the direction where Linux is going (is now? or maybe they gave up? idk, it’s been a while since I heard about immutable distros).

For tech-aware people, it is probably not necessary indeed. However, given that now “tech-aware” people are running completely random and unvalidated scripts w/o second thoughts (or even first thoughts actually) on their main machine, I’d say the “tech-aware” line is very very high…

I do recall that Fujitsu had a very... unique approach to exposing the Setup option in their firmware. It was just a UEFI boot entry. If that entry was removed, you couldn't get back into the firmware setup; you had to find the name of the setup EFI file and then run that from the EFI console.

What, people don't just recall those from memory? I fall asleep saying -Xmx and -Xms every night

Would love to see the source code for this and the underlying details like Classic or Carbon, and the libraries mentioned on Tinker Different for TLS, HTTP/2, and Unicode

Correct, but they stylized it as "eyePhone" (from MomCorp, the all powerful, caring conglomerate), and that episode is the origin of the famous "Shut up and take my money!" meme.

And something similar still happens if you install more than one drive in your machine with fresh Windows installations. Ugh.

I'd guess some constraint on their end related to the Zero Data Retention (ZDR) mode? Maybe the 1M context has to spill something onto disk and therefore isn't compliant with HIPAA.

How practically could we drop in Apple Intelligence once it's using Gemini as its core for a 100% local AI agent in a box?

IIUC Gemini will run in Apple's cloud infra, not on device. The only "gemini" local model is really old by today's standards, and is not that smart for local inference (newer open source models are better).

That's what I figured. Some day eventually it will be possible. Until then, it's only LM Studio or Ollama as a potential hookup.

I've got some ideas inspired by this project. It's promising.

They did it in the 1990s and it failed so hard that it almost took down the company.

Why can others do it?

Apple's entire success story is their vertical integration. They can't do that and OEM.

As for the PC makers: they don't innovate. Microsoft doesn't care who sells PCs, Intel doesn't care who sells PCs. Every PC maker is essentially an assembly company. If you appreciate Apple's innovation in the laptop space over the past x years, then you don't want Apple to be an OEM.

Who has successfully managed this kind of transition? The obvious case is IBM which is now essentially a consulting company and doesn’t sell PCs anymore.

Maybe a better title would say "Asian nations [independently] roll out 4-day weeks, WFH to solve fuel crisis"?

^ "Some" Asian nations.

It's still 5/6 day workweeks in the office in China, India, SK, Japan, HK, and Singapore. Same in the Gulf.

Well, the gulf probably won't be affected? As they can just be supplied by fuel truck or pipeline instead of ship.

Same for exports as well depending on the country.

For example, India worked with Oman, the UAE, and Iran to build export hubs like Duqm, Fujairah, Sohar, and Chabahar (the US has ignored Indian operated Shahid Beheshti port and is hitting Konarak on the other side of the Chabahar Bay) that aren't blocked by Hormuz.

By making sure Indian SOEs were equity partners in those projects, this meant India got first right of refusal on exports.

China, Japan, and South Korea all implemented similar projects as well.

Other Asian countries could have implemented similar redundancies as well, but they didn't despite this exact situation happening 3-4 years ago during the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.