> 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.