If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.

Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.

I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.

You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.

> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.

Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.

Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.

> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.

Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.

What is the purpose here? You are still stuck with a full blown MacOS running the system no? That is what Asahi tries to replace, not the other way around.

This misses the point entirely. What happens when apple inevitably discontinues support for this hardware.

I don't think you understand what Asahi Linux is.

This isn't about running VMs.

Apple made some changes specifically for Asahi Linux to make it more robust.

I believe it was Hector Martin who discussed it on Mastodon a while ago.

The FCC? I guess you mean their wifi chips or cellular modems or something? I can’t see the FCC having jurisdiction over anything else that Apple does. Maybe you meant the FTC?

> They want control on the walled garden.

It would have been trivial for them to lock out other operating systems entirely.

Even the Asahi team has been much more appreciative of Apple leaving this open.

The sad part is that it's known that Apple internally maintains Linux ports to their SoCs

> https://talents.vaia.com/companies/apple-inc/software-engine...

I don't think Linus Torvalds has any sway on what Apple does. Or do you mean John Ternus, the new CEO?

> every few years of course

That sounds like a you thing; I've kept my macs for at least 5 years. My M1 is still going strong and I haven't felt any pressure to upgrade.

> past their intended lifespan

Thanks to the community, you can install macOS 15 (or older) on unsupported macs (as old as 18 years)

https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

https://github.com/dortania/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher

> past their intended lifespan

This bullshit needs to die. The products are designed to last.

When Intel-based Macs debuted they touted their support for dual-booting Windows (Bootcamp).

Apple makes money selling hardware.

Yep, I suspect the goal is to reduce support footprint/burden to the absolute minimum possible, which is also why they don't maintain their legacy virtualization/translation layers indefinitely (Classic mode, Rosetta 1 (PPC → x86), Rosetta 2 (x86 → ARM)). The benefit is being able to make major changes, refactors, etc with relatively little delay and encumbrance.

This applies on both the software and hardware layers. In the past, CPU suppliers dragging their feet and/or being unable to deliver on promises were the chief motivation for switching architectures, and now that they're their own supplier they can banish that issue entirely so long as they're not beholden to any kind of external behavioral contracts or expectations.

If the OS teams need some new capability or discover substantial benefit from redesigning some part of the SoC, the SoC/hardware team can just implement it and not have to care about breaking anything. That's a major competitive advantage that practically nobody else in the computer or mobile device industries has.

> they used to let you run Windows!

They let you run Windows when they were losing in the market and needed a path to migration for users of the winning platform. Once they started winning, they stopped.

Conversely, Microsoft refused to interoperate with Linux. Until Linux became the clear winner in the datacenter space. Now they have WSL and actually work pretty well as a cross-platform development environment.

Apple silicon is winning in performance and power consumption. It's not quite the same as the old Intel based generation, where they were more like premium/well built machines with good screens and hardware.

Now some people would like to use that top of the line Apple silicon but without MacOS that comes with it. I doubt this is a huge threat to apple but it's also not a huge market for them. From what I understand they are not actively impeding it but not actively helping it either.

I actually won a M2 laptop a while ago. I resold it, new in box still shrink wrapped because I did not care for MacOS, just a personal preference. People like me are a minority though.

How does providing the specs to run Linux on a MacBook open them them up to competition from junky used eBay laptops?