For them to call it Bootcamp 2 (a "product" per se), they'd have had to have another OS they could actually demo installing. Otherwise "Bootcamp 2" is just a mysterious empty chooser window.

But at the time there was nothing, because Apple Silicon wasn't a platform anyone but them was targeting, because they had just created it.

So they built the infrastructure, and then waited for someone to actually start taking advantage of it, before bothering to acknowledge it.

And because that "someone" isn't a bigcorp (i.e. Microsoft) wanting to do a co-marketing push, but just FOSS people gradually building something but never quite "launching" a 1.0 of it — Apple just "acknowledged" it quietly, at developer conferences, exposing it only via developer-centric CLI tooling, rather than with the sort of polished UI experience they would need if Microsoft was trying to convince Joe Excel User to dual-boot Windows on their Apple Silicon MBP.

> announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader

That's extremely unlikely to happen, as Apple's hardware and OS developers build Macs and macOS (and all the other hardware + OSes) using Macs and macOS. And those engineers (and engineers working at Apple's hardware and accessory manufacturing partners) will always need to be able to diddle around with the kernel and extensions "in anger" without needing to go through a three-day-turnaround code-signing process.

There's a whole proprietary, distributed kernel development and QC flow for macOS, that looks a lot like the Linux one (i.e. with all the same bigcorps involved making sure their stuff works), but all happening behind closed doors. But all the same stuff still needs to happen regardless, to ensure that buggy drivers don't ship. Thus macOS kernel development mode being just one reboot-and-toggle away.

> announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader

Is that gonna be before or after the iphone with no usb port?

Apple's legal department will kill it once someone tells them the project is a handy tool for patent trolls to mine for infringements.

To be clear, "Apple" is a group, not a unified thing with one will.

That doesn't mean that the engineeers will necessarily ship something more flexible than what the PMs asked for. Often not.

But sometimes they will.

It’s $500 for a kid, a full time student.

Yes

The Asahi folks have also demonstrated M3 support, though without GPU-accelerated graphics (the M3 GPU is very different from the M1 or M2). Much of the effort is currently on getting the existing components upstream.

By “past actions”, do you mean doing extra work to make the bootloader support other operating systems? https://asahilinux.org/docs/platform/introduction/

I see no reason they couldn’t.

But we know there’s lots of other models that they’re already working on. We don’t know how similar or different it is from an OS perspective.

Maybe some of these agentic AI superstars can point their 100x engineering chops at this. This would impress me but not going to hold my breath for that.

The default Mac terminal environment is the Weetabix of UNIX-likes. You need GNU coreutils to do pretty much anything.

I used to be the cool tech guy in school because I memorized the tutorial to jailbreak iPhone or to cheat in games with a memory editor. You know, stuff like "when you see this screen, click that icon", "find row 5 and change the second value to 0", or "open terminal, copy paste this command and hit enter". I don't think I learned anything useful from those.

And these days, you can ask your favourite LLM for step by step advice, and you can even give it shaky phone camera shots of the error message on your screen.

> It's really not that hard.

Of course not. I could do it in a coma. I've also been using computers since 2004, and you're probably similar.