Tag

Apple Silicon

6 stories

Mac.apk runs Android apps as native Mac processes, with no emulator or VM (github.com)

Mac.apk implements the Android app environment directly on Apple Silicon macOS. Apps appear in the Dock with their own windows and draw through the GPU. It is alpha: 10 of 66 tested apps only partly work and 4 don't run.

The README warns that saved data lives inside each app's bundle, so trashing the app erases it. A commenter says the newest release moves it to Application Support.

Not just a headline — the discussion unpacked

The top HN threads: facts from the discussions, both sides, insider voices. Email, Telegram, or RSS.

Command and Conquer Generals ported natively to iPhone, iPad and Apple Silicon (github.com)

Ammaar Reshi took EA's GPL v3 Generals source, built on the GeneralsX macOS/Linux port, and shipped native ARM64 iOS and iPadOS builds of Zero Hour with RTS touch controls.

The engine is unmodified; rendering runs DirectX 8 to DXVK to Vulkan to MoltenVK to Metal, five layers deep. No assets ship; you supply your own Steam copy.

The 'using Fable' credit drew fire: one game dev counted just 19 of 2000 commits from the model and called the headline clickbait.

Asahi Linux 7.1 brings M3 audio and custom video-decode firmware (asahilinux.org)

On M3 machines, the speakers and headphone jack now play through I2S controllers unchanged since the M1, and CPU frequency switching with big.LITTLE scheduling finally places work on the right cores.

Rather than extract Apple's video-decode blob, the team wrote custom AVD firmware, giving a V4L2 driver that decodes 10-bit AVC up to 4K.

One developer warns the custom-firmware bet could collapse the day Apple decides to sign firmware blobs in hardware.

Apple skips the high-end M6 entirely, betting the Mac on an AI-tuned M7 (bloomberg.com)

Apple plans a base M6 for entry Macs this year but is dropping the Pro, Max, and Ultra tiers of that generation — a first — to launch M7 Pro, Max, and Ultra instead, per Gurman. The high-end variants land as late as 2027 and 2028.

The catch an investor flagged: the base M7 targets 240GB/s of memory bandwidth. An Nvidia RTX 6000 already does roughly 1,600. The whole 'AI Mac' pitch rides on whether a future Ultra closes that gap for local inference.

Linux jumps to 7.1 — and starts deleting code just to dodge AI bug reports (lore.kernel.org)

Linux 7.1 ships a rewritten in-kernel NTFS driver with real write performance, an Apple SMC battery driver for Asahi MacBooks, and early Intel Nova Lake and AMD graphics enablement. It also deletes over 140,000 lines: ISDN, PCMCIA controllers, i486-era subarchitectures.

The motive for some of those removals is new: AI-assisted bug reporting was generating noise against drivers for obsolete hardware, so the maintainers simply removed the targets.

He hit 72 tokens/sec coding locally on a MacBook. The thread asked: why not just use Ollama? (ikyle.me)

The guide wires up an offline coding agent on a 64GB M1 Max: llama.cpp built with Metal, Gemma 4 in Q4, and a Multi-Token Prediction draft model that lifts generation from 58 to 72 tokens/sec.

The thread's sharpest critique wasn't the setup but the metric: every local-AI post benchmarks tokens per second, none benchmark answer quality. 'Quickly serving me slop doesn't make it more useful.'