> when they can just share a pdf.

I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.

The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.

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.

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afpx 41 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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raphinou an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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oblio an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> 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.

	▲	smith7018 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Sure but that's not really their point. They're not saying that Linux is a joke nor that it's useless; they're saying that the amount of people installing Linux on their Macs is so small that it wouldn't make financial sense for Apple to support them. Knowing how much an engineer gets paid, even staffing a small team to supporting Linux would cost Apple a couple million each year. That's not even taking support into account.

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izacus 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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.

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GeekyBear an hour ago | parent | next [-]

In the beginning, Bootcamp had a real job.

It allowed a machine running Intel's EFI firmware (as Intel Macs have always done) to boot an OS that only understood the older BIOS standard.

Once Microsoft and the various PC vendors started supporting UEFI directly, Bootcamp was just a bundle of existing Windows drivers from the component vendors.

If you put a specific Broadcom Wi-Fi chip in the Mac, Bootcamp included Broadcom's Windows driver that was best suited for that chip.

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biorach 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.

The person you're replying to didn't say that. Please don't misrepresent and please keep it respectful

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bel8 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple is laughable at best. Even more so when Apple used to release such docs in the past when it was much less financially capable.

They just don't care.

	▲	smith7018 an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Bootcamp on Intel Macs was a different story because Apple's hardware was mostly an assortment of other vendors' hardware (with some custom components and set up). That means they could bundle drivers for Intel, AMD, Nvidia, Broadcom, Realtek, Marvell, Synaptics, etc plus a couple of their own (the camera, the touchpad, the mouse, etc) and call it a day. Since the hardware was x86-64 it mostly just worked. That's an immensely different world from their custom hardware. They would need to write Linux drivers for all of their networking chips, each of their processors, their GPUs, work around Linux/Windows' 16KB memory page issues, their neural engines, the SEP, their DCP, the interrupt controller, IOMMU, their custom storage drivers, etc. You're vastly underselling or misunderstanding the size of the situation. They were also in a different place back when they made Bootcamp. They were fighting a "Mac vs PC" battle head on and trying to convert other OS users to macOS. Now they don't really seem to care about that because their strategy is converting iPhone users into ecosystem members.
	▲	biorach 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Regardless, saying it would be too much effort for Apple That's not what they said. Please don't misrepresent > is laughabe And this disparaging language about commenters is not OK. Please stop.