That phrase gets tossed around from time to time and this is why. The only reason we don't have warrantless searches and other intensely invasive government surveillance right now is it's specifically banned in the US Constitution. But of course the founding fathers knew nothing of cell phones, so this one is fair game.

Unfortunately for us, the Constitution, which the founding fathers envisioned as a "living document", one that was periodically updated to address new developments, only very rarely gets updated anymore. And all this modern tech that WOULD be in the constitution (like personal electronic devices, online privacy, etc) if they'd have known about it when it was written isn't, so it all just gets trampled on.

The concept of the Constitution as a "living document" is basically dead, and that's unfortunate for all of us. What we really need right now is a "Technology Bill of Rights". That would breathe some life into this important document, and bring us closer to what the founding fathers envisioned a free people to be protected by.

Mostly w/ you here, unless I need to take a picture w/ my phone and then ask questions about it, in which case the phone is more convenient to use

But only in that case

For the latter one, just keep it offline, if you are using it for software that only exists for it, while doing other work on a newer M-series Mac

FreeBSD is not GPL at all: what you seem to be suggesting is installing Linux i.e. replacing the FreeBSD in it, if one wants to use Unix utilities like sed

I thought that under the hood, Apple keeps current the FreeBSD versions - the CLI w/o the X/XLibre or the DEs. Why wouldn't they?

Actually, that may well have been their final transition had Motorola/IBM been capable of showing Steve a roadmap of decreasing power consumption accompanying acceptable performance. They couldn't, but Intel at the time could. Which is why the only 64-bit PowerMac that Apple had was the G5, which was a space heater a tad less than the Itanic.

Since Apple later on purchased PA Semi, I just wonder whether they couldn't have just purchased Motorola? Also, PA Semi was initially a designer of PowerPC CPUs: I just wonder why after their acquisition, they switched to Arm?

Wow I guess someone had to miss him; I thought he was ridiculously overrated myself and didn't care for a lot of his design work over the years.

If you need Ive back in your life, you could check out the new Ferrari ... most of the internet hates it, but maybe its for you.

Maybe not a Raspberry Pi, but maybe if one could have a Framework computer w/ a Snapdragon Elite motherboard, then it should be possible to create a Hackintosh on that platform

They dropped the Roman numerals after X - you had 11 to 15. Starting this year, they changed the numbering to be the year, so it's 26

In the beginning, it used to be something like 11 or 12

Except that Linux too now has this habit of dropping support for older hardware. You're probably best off putting NetBSD on those if you have one

I just wonder: since macOS sits on top of FreeBSD, can't one just go to the terminal and work from there? Incidentally, is XNU still the underlying kernel, or has Apple fully gone w/ FreeBSD? If one upgraded the FreeBSD to version 15, wouldn't that make it reasonably current, including plugging any potential security holes? Or would one have to get rid of Aqua altogether? Also, the file system is HFS+, but if one is wiping it, is it possible to replace it w/ OpenZFS? Or would one have to wipe the storage completely and reinstall FreeBSD from scratch?

Another option, as I mentioned above, is installing a hypervisor like Proxmox, and then, on top of that, have whichever x86 OS one likes - Linux, BSD, OS/2,.....

For macOS? No, b'cos Apple makes much of the software, and even other software vendors who make things for Macs do it on Apple's development platforms. Not just that, since NEXTSTEP, Apple has been making their software platforms highly portable, and they now have experience doing it 4 times - Motorola 68k to PowerPC to Intel to Arm. They don't have the Wintel problem of tons of legacy software that won't run, say, on Windows-on-Arm

x86 is only far more widely supported if one adds all the legacy OSs and software written for it - not just Windows, but also Linux, BSD, KolibriOS, OS/2, QNX, Minix,et all on the OS side. And for Wintel apps, not just MS Office, but also from other companies like Borland, Lotus, Symantec, and other software makers. Some, but not all, who also supported System 7 back in the day. But Apple doesn't try to make ancient System 7 software run on their hardware of today like AMD/Intel do by supporting backward compatibility so that one could run DOS on a 64-bit, multi-core PC of today

Icing on the cake: Rosetta - Apple's translation layer - does a better job translating x86 to M1 than DEC did back in the day w/ FX!32 translation software for NT on the Alpha. And that too was just a temporary stopgap solution while Apple's ISV partners ported their titles to the M1

Except that it did. Every benchmark I have seen of even M1 vs Intels has Apple heavily outpacing their Intel counterparts. On both performance and power consumption. Previously, in CPUs, performance or power consumption usually came at the expense of the other

Main reason for this is that Apple made their M-series an SOC, leveraging the experience from the A-series in the iPads and optimizing every parameter wherever it mattered. That's why every Mac or iPad made using Apple silicon has left not just Intel & AMD, but even Qualcomm in the dust. That's just one more reason for Apple to not support x86 based Macs any more

In other words, just install the FreeBSD+XNU? Incidentally, does Apple still stick w/ XNU, or have they dropped that and gone all FreeBSD?

Think he's talking about operating systems, such as System 7, System 8 and System 9