That’s true but that’s probably only so that it wouldn’t have been a subject when Apple Silicon Macs were released because Intel Macs weren’t locked.
In reality, the bootloader isn’t closed (yet) but the hardware is so much undocumented that it’s easy to understand that Apple doesn’t want anything else than their OS on your mac. The « alternative os » situation is actually worse than it used to be with Intel Macs and Apple is paying a lot of attention in never talking about this "feature".
IMO, they will just quietly remove this possibility on new generations when everyone will have forgotten that boot camp used to be a thing.
Like, could they lock down the bootloader? Sure. But that's effort they'd have to put in for minimal benefit at the moment. Opening up their hardware would be a lot more effort for questionable benefits (to Apple).
Like not documenting their hardware? Like making Asahi Linux becoming a multi-year reverse engineering project that may possibly never achieve perfect compatibility?
> They make it easy to run Windows
On apple silicon without virtualisation? Sorry, didn't know that.
Technically Asahi Linux isn’t facing a much different situation than standard Linux distributions as they relate to x86 hardware. There are thousands of PC components that don’t provide any sort of Linux driver where contributors reverse engineer those drivers.
Sure, in the PC world a lot more vendors do voluntarily provide Linux drivers, and Apple will never to that for its hardware, and that specific point is a valid criticism.
As far as assisting in running Windows, my understanding is that the company that makes Parallels and Apple have some kind of relationship. Microsoft officially endorses Parallels.
You can complain about it being virtualization but it’s perfectly fine for desktop apps or even some more intensive apps. And it’s not really a very valid complaint considering that Microsoft doesn’t distribute a general purpose ARM distribution of Windows.
Very very different.
> There are thousands of PC components that don’t provide any sort of Linux driver where contributors reverse engineer those drivers.
Increasingly more rare. Maybe that only happens thèse d'ays on extremely specialized hardware.
They aren't actively hindering that reverse engineering effort. They aren't _helping_ either, but I didn't claim that they were helping. For as long as I can remember, Apple's stance with Mac computers has been "We sell the computers to you in the way we think is best. If you want to tinker, that's on you." and I don't think that has materially changed.
That's totally up to Microsoft… they could done a licensing deal with Apple years ago to enable Windows ARM to run natively on Apple Silicon hardware.
