OpenGL 3.1 on Asahi Linux

This is great work and I commend it. But in other threads people are acting like Asahi Linux hardware support is 100% complete. My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS. To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion.

I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

I don't think it's hostile, I think they're just hands-off; they throw the hardware over the fence and say, "if you wanna make use of it, here's our software; if you don't like our software, sorry no docs but you're free to write your own". Which is exactly what's happening.

I mean it would be nice if Apple had released more documentation, but I totally understand if they don't want the burden of supporting it.

> I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability

You'd temporarily lose some hardware support (documented) while it's being worked on. But I'm not sure why you expect losing performance? This is running native code. Same binary will run the same on both systems (+/- the llvm version differences).

A car with one seat seems 100% complete if your use cases only involve you driving it alone. Asahi Linux is absolutely in that kind of spot right now. For some people there is 0 reason to wait, for others it's not even worth booting. If you have fear it's not fully complete enough, I'd say trust those feelings. At least right now.

There's a line somewhere, and I think it's different for every person. For a lot of people, the pricing itself is just outright hostile. 8gb of RAM in a base model Mac is not future-proofed in an age of local AI models, and paying to upgrade it gets expensive, fast. For others the OS is hostile when it unceremoniously drops support for $THING they use, or because it has the gall to show them ads. For others yet, the hardware is hostile because it's basically a black box that Apple withholds documenting to maintain a monopoly on fixing them.

Apple is one of the few companies smart enough to deliberately do this. It is both a testament to ability to do brilliant things, and akin to being trapped in a room with a lion that has twice your SAT score. The "golden handcuffs", as they say.

Specifically GPU drivers, which can dramatically impact performance. Especially if I am attempting to run any kind of ML workload from Linux. I'm assuming it's basically a non-starter at this point and one is forced to use Mac OS.

E.g. the performance you can get out of the GPU at the moment is a subset of what you can get out of the hardware. Or as another more generic example, until this latest release CPU boost states weren't enabled due to lack of proper cpuidle driver which resulted in regressed single thread performance.

There is nothing inherent about running Linux that will require it be slower, in some cases it will/is even faster, but the lack of everything being fully supported does actually impact performance right now. It has been getting better with time.

Yes. I put that in the capability rather than performance basket though. As in, you can't access the compute shaders yet, rather than: you can and they're slower.

First, personally I don't care what hardware or software people use, if they are happy with the tools that they using then that's good.

That said, Apple has been very hostile to hackers over the years imo. Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked.

As far as I am aware, progress Apple as made has been in response to public image issues or changes in consumer laws within the EU.

Plus Apple software is heavily indebted to Open Source software so they very easily could be releasing drivers for their hardware instead of relying on community to do backwards engineering.

Does the CPU run at similar frequencies between Mac OS and Linux (since they're writing their own drivers this isn't guaranteed)? Is the scheduling done similarly? Are there any special hardware modes you have to activate with e.g. binary blobs?

There are a bunch of factors that could affect performance even under the same OS (try underclocking your CPU or play around with schedulers). Given the mostly non-existent documentation from Apple I'd strongly suspect that average-case performance will stay worse on the Linux side for a long time.

Even with the regressed performance it beat osx in a ton of workloads.

You don't create a new bootloader that allows users the freedom to run an unsigned third party OS without having it degrade the system's security if and when they boot the native OS because you are "hostile to developers and hackers".

Well overall if you sum up what even a basic m1 mb air packs, be it the panel, quality peripherals and soc itself its rather reasonable and within reach for almost anyone contemplating of buying a new computer. When you factor in that they were the first ones with an actual capable desktop arm offer I'd even say its cheap.

At least this is how I felt 2 years ago back when I bought it and more or less even to this day. I'm wondering how is the market as of now, two years later, and how the $1k arm laptops coming out today compare.

CPU wise at least its been on par if not better from its first days. At least this is what the various benchmarks at the time showed.

Makes you wonder about how the rest of the system components will compare when they're finished.

There have been multiple reports of the last couple years that Apple has been informally internally helping the Asahi Linux team to make it run well on their hardware. Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course, but they are aware of the interest and are helping make it happen, in an unofficial capacity.

> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

As opposed to what company besides those tiny ones? Almost all of them are closed-source only and drivers have been painstakingly reversed engineered over decades.

That's not true for Macs. Apple allowed and worked with MS to allow windows to work on Intel macs. That's pretty insane from allowing people to do what they want with their hardware.

>My fear is that if I were to go this route and purchase the hardware I'd be seeing fraction of the performance and capability I would in Mac OS.

The performance is there, it has been running stuff much faster than the vast majority of Intel/AMD laptops for over a year.

Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do you plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of gaming/multimedia setup?

>To be honest this blog post seems like the project has a long ways to go, not that it is nearly completion.

It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver for ages.

>I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

Then don't?

No offense but that's not even contextually the same thing so I'm not really sure what you're trying to say.

> Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked

You can only have so many flexibility in design with modern hardware — they are not fitting things into 5 cm “thin” chassics anymore. How exactly are such a thin device be repairable? Similarly to how old car motors could be tweaked with, you need special tools to touch anything in a modern engine. This is not against the customers, these are trade offs.

But even this way, apple devices have by far the longest lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners easily - so is it really fair to call them out, or is it just baseless emotional reaction?

Also, what you heard about locked down components resulted in better security, a much lower risk of theft, and a much more clean second-hand market (where you won’t be sold a phone with a cheap chinese shittier screen for example).

There is literally no other laptop on the market that would be anywhere close to an M1 air in terms of performance-battery life combo. And it is definitely not even on the upper end in price for that, tiny windows laptops are ridiculously expensive!

So, are they really expensive?

> Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course

Why?

You claim Apples Mac line of products is adversarial to hackers. Which I dispute with the example they help alternative OS to run on the Mac. First with Windows and now Asahi.

I don't see why it is unreasonable to desire Apple to provide documentation and open up their hardware. Honestly I'd ask the same as any other hardware vendor. Intel for example provides very detailed technical documents on their new GPUs (A770).

> But even this way, apple devices have by far the longest lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners easily - so is it really fair to call them out, or is it just baseless emotional reaction?

I would dispute this claim, e.g. Apple settles iPhone slowdown case for $500m[1], just the first link I found looking for "planned obsolescence apple" on DuckDuckGo. This is not exclusive to their iPhones as one can find with a quick search.

[1][https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-51706635]

Yeah, I'm not gonna run out and buy a new Macbook just to wipe it. But these M1 machines are going to be things you just have lying around sometime soon. If my wife upgrades, for example, I know exactly what I'm doing with her M1 Air. :D

Which was about a very stupidly communicated, but genuinely good intentioned misshap. Iphones older devices with old batteries had cases where they no longer could provide sufficient voltage to the phone and thus it would reboot randomly for people. To fix the issue, they decreased CPU frequency so that it would no longer drain so high peak power.

But they should have made it an option (it is one now on these devices) instead, they might have even come out good from it (as an android manufacturer wouldn’t even care about such an old device at the time).

“I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked.”

They are very much still doing that

"But even this way, apple devices have by far the longest lifetimes, macs, iphones will have 2-3 owners easily - so is it really fair to call them out, or is it just baseless emotional reaction?"

Why reply that criticism of Apple must be purely an emotional one? Kind of diminishes your argument here.

Immediate search result for repairable phones:

https://www.androidcentral.com/best-sustainable-repairable-p...

https://shop.fairphone.com/en/buy-fairphone-4

Here's a laptop that you can upgrade:

https://frame.work/

Lifetime for Apple isn't as long as you make it out to be when batteries need replaced and software support for hardware ends:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/macos-sonoma-drops-s...

"Also, what you heard about locked down components resulted in better security, a much lower risk of theft, and a much more clean second-hand market (where you won’t be sold a phone with a cheap chinese shittier screen for example)."

Apple could just release stuff that didn't break so easily too so no need to risk changing out a screen if it ain't broke. There are plenty of ways to increase security of the device without making it less consumer friendly.

Additionally since the context here is whether Apple has been hacker friendly or not, why shouldn't you be allowed to upgrade and change the hardware of YOUR device? As in, you want to put in more storage or change the screen to one that's better in some manner (maybe it's just cost) then you ought to be able to.

That is it should be the device owners choice whether or not to replace their screen with one from Apple or a cheaper one.

It's not unreasonable, it's just not gonna happen any time soon.

> Regarding the capabilities not sure which one you miss. Do you plan to use it for development, or you want some kind of gaming/multimedia setup?

> It's the other way around. It has been usable as a daily driver for ages.

Honest questions since I haven't been paying attention to Asahi for some time now:

- Does hardware accelerated video decoding work? Including in Firefox?

- Does sleep work properly or do I get significant battery drain after leaving it sleeping during the night time? Also, does it wake up from sleep reliably? Like if you open/close the lid 100 times in a row would it crash?

- How is wifi? Does it work as fast and reliably on Linux as the Intel cards? Supports latest WiFi standard and 6ghz?

This would be my most basic questions to buy MacBook as a daily-driver Linux laptop.

So the only option has 1/10th the hardware of an older iphone with shittier camera than that.. for me that’s not a good deal. Framework laptops are insanely expensive for again, worse hardware. Isn’t the point of linux to run on anything?

Also, every device needs battery replacements, like this is just the physics/chemistry of batteries and it has an absolutely doable price for any apple device.

What breaks easily on an iphone? They are quite sturdy phones with metal casing. They wouldn’t get sold after 5-7 years of active use if they weren’t sturdy. And glass will still be breaking when it meets with big enough force - I again don’t see your point.

> re hacker friendliness

The RAM has different architecture on the M series, so it can’t be replaced even theoretically. Also, every moving part is one more point of potential breaking, plus it takes up space. This is not a rasppi, different design goals/constraints.

You can put in a worse screen but one will be able to see that in the settings so they can’t be scammed.

> Framework laptops are insanely expensive for again, worse hardware.

1199 EUR is not insanely expensive, specially considering that I can put up-to 64GB of RAM in a Framework laptop with a reasonable amount of money, while I would need to pay almost the price of a full Framework laptop to do the same in a Macbook Pro [1]. This is IMO, insanely expensive.

And yes, I can definitely use those amount of memory during mass rebuilds that I sometime like to do in NixOS. I don't even try to do those same workloads in my macOS because they start to become hugely slow once you hit the swap.

[1]: by the way, this get even worse considering that I also need to upgrade from an M2 Pro to M2 Max to have the option to do so. I just did a quote for the cheapest Macbook Pro with 64GB of RAM, and I got a 4000EUR quote for 512GB of storage that is laughable low for something that expensive. At that price, I can get 2 of the most expensive Framework AMD and I would still have sufficient money to get another one of the older Intel ones as a spare.

Mind you, the two kinds of RAM are not directly comparable.

>Apple cannot come out and officially support another operating system of course

Apple officially supported running Windows on Macs for many years.

Asahi is designed to be dual-booted right now (in fact you have to go off the beaten path to not do that), and it even uses the native Apple boot UI to let you pick your OS

Sure, I never said so. It doesn't mean that there isn't workloads that benefit from more RAM (even if it is slower) or that the Apple's RAM prices are insane.

My laptop can use TPM and a hardware key with my keys and free software. Where is the degraded security?

Not to mention I can't find anything on them having ECC capabilities but I could be wrong.

Going with the first link. The "best" phone is not globally available. The second "best" comes with three years of OS updates. I stopped reading there; three years is a much, much shorter lifespan than you get with iOS or MacOS.

Also, say you have one of these phones, and are in a major city, then break it. How will you get the parts you need to repair it? How many hours will you be without a phone?

With Apple phones, it's typically same day service to get it repaired. Worst case, you can get a new phone with your data mostly transferred, again, same day.

The Ars article you link is pointing out that Apple is dropping software support for laptops that are 6 years old. That's better than pretty much any other vendor.

As far as laptop repairs go, frame.work is probably the best non-apple option, but they don't have a fixed policy for how long replacement parts will be available. The story is similar for Apple:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624

says they provide parts for up to 7 years, and battery swaps for up to 10 (subject to part availability). I hope frame.work will be able to do better, but I challenge you to find any laptop company significantly better than this.

(Other than soldered ram and disk, I honestly don't care about third party parts. It's not like Apple replacement part markups are insane or there are significantly better parts available. I've definitely never used third party parts for other brands of laptops, even when they were available. However, I've been repeatedly screwed over getting other brands of laptops repaired, especially under warranty.)

Anyway, I get why Apple has a bad reputation for support and repairability. There objectively bad. However, that doesn't mean they're not simultaneously also the best option (or close to being the best).

If you like the hardware or software that you use then I am happy for you.

"This is not a rasppi, different design goals/constraints."

That we can agree on.

Apple is a business with specific goals and so far as a business in terms of profits they have been successful.

All I wanted to point out was that Apple is not hacker friendly in my opinion, and I have listed good reasons that you don't want to accept. There's no amount of going in circles here that will change either point of view I fear.

Have a blessed day!

In fairness, most instances of them doing that actually significantly increase the cost of evil maid hardware tampering attacks.

If I could, I'd configure grub or whatever to serial-lock my Linux install to my desktop hardware (and keep a recovery key that would unlock it at another location).

I am sorry but you're missing the point here.

I'm not arguing over better hardware (performance) or price. I am arguing over hack-ability; that's it. I hope you can understand that.

I could trick you into adding a hardware key, then install a tampered version of Windows with it.

(Also, the last time I looked, TPM keys could be grabbed with ~ $100 of hardware, but I think that's fixed by some newer standard.)

But, yeah, it's not a big tradeoff in practice. I think their point was that Apple had to expend effort to enable the use case, which isn't "hostile" toward the use case.

The currently top-rated top-level HN comment goes into those details. This release significantly improves CPU power management, to the point where it should be similar to MacOS.

Some of this stuff is handled by binary blobs that get installed/upgraded by MacOS, and are running by the time Linux boots.

With the previous release, power per watt and absolute performance were already better than high-end x86 laptops, so if your question is "is this faster and more power efficient than my other Linux laptop?", the answer is probably yes.

If you're asking if it will beat MacOS's perf/watt in all scenarios, the answer will be no for a long time. However, it is probably already beating MacOS in many practical scenarios.

Has anyone tried Steam under Linux? It's quite bad under MacOS (2016 casual games stutter, and there is no 32 bit support).

I know rosetta doesn't exist under Linux, but I don't see any options to run steam / proton under rosetta either.

> That said, Apple has been very hostile to hackers over the years imo. Hardware being hard to repair, access, upgrade, etc. I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked.

That came partially out of the desire to reduce the lure for thieves and robbers. It was really bad during the first generations that regularly had jailbreaks and ways to bypass "Find My..." or whatever, then the first tightening reduced resale values of stolen iPhones by a good amount (as they were only good enough to slaughter for parts once reported stolen), and the latest round made it even worse for criminals.

Personally though, I'd preferred they simply provided "unlock codes" with a phone that could be used to remove the association between a part's SN and the IMEI/SN of the phone. That way, buyers of iPhone have something similar to a certificate of authenticity.

You can still do so with VMs, officially endorsed. But Bootcamp is RIP. Asahi Linux is not a VM, so not a fair comparison.

> I could trick you into adding a hardware key, then install a tampered version of Windows with it.

There are other issues as well.

For instance, on a PC the security settings are applied per machine and not per partition, so you can't mix an unsigned OS on one partition with full security on another partition.

Also:

> On Wednesday, researchers at security firm ESET presented a deep-dive analysis of the world’s first in-the-wild UEFI bootkit that bypasses Secure Boot on fully updated UEFI systems running fully updated versions of Windows 10 and 11.

Despite Microsoft releasing new patched software, the vulnerable signed binaries have yet to be added to the UEFI revocation list that flags boot files that should no longer be trusted.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/unkil...

I wasn't comparing. I was refuting your assertion.

What has changed that prevents Apple from officially endorsing another OS nowadays when it clearly was able to do so in the past?

The issue is that Apple isn’t giving anyone access to the tools to pair the parts, unless you give them all the information in advance, buy them at possibly inflated prices through their self repair program if they’re even available, and then have Apple remotely approve it afterwards (and this process only really works for individuals, 3rd party repair is more important as most people don’t have the skill)

Yeah that's nonsense. They already have bootcamp.

> Has anyone tried Steam under Linux?

Through FEX, yes https://vt.social/@lina/110068264684987710

> I know rosetta doesn't exist under Linux

It does these days! https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...

You seem unfamiliar with the Alder Lake compromise.

> I just can't justify buying hardware from a company that is so hostile to developers and hackers as nice as it may be.

While I understand what you’re saying, the developers of Asahi have said before that Apple appears to be going out of their way to leave things open for them.

Apple’s boot security is enough they could easily prevent anyone from ever running a non-Apple blessed OS. But Apple made it fully supported to boot directly into a non-Apple OS as your primary OS.

They’re not helping by giving code or documentation, but they’re not putting up roadblocks. Apple seems to be happy with a stance of benevolent indifference.

It’s not official support. But a number of PC vendors don’t give official support either.

> I'm not arguing over better hardware (performance) or price

Neither was the comment you replied to.

They were arguing that Apple provides excellent hardware support (in terms of repairs and how long they take) and lifetime (in terms of how long updates are provided for the device).

Hackability is irrelevant. Apple clearly doesn’t target that market and hadn’t since the Apple II days.

Would you buy a Lamborghini and complain it makes a terrible truck?

That’s not something Apple designs their products for, and their users are either fine with that or willing to make the trade off for the other things Apple does prioritize.

> Intel for example provides very detailed technical documents on their new GPUs

Intel sells parts to other people, and those buyers expect that kind of documentation. And when it comes to GPUs they’re in 3rd place for high end GPUs and are incentivized to give people as much info as possible to optimize for their hardware.

Apple doesn’t sell their computer hardware to any other OEMs, or hsve a 3rd party making their OS, so they don’t need to produce documentation for anyone.

I agree it would be nice if it was documented. But absent a law forcing them I don’t see it happening.

Right. Everything I’ve seen implies they’re both using the hardware the same way (no “limp mode” or such).

Linux tends to be faster because the kernel is just far better optimized than Apple’s appears to be. Massive sums of money (and person hours) have been spent speeding up Linux networking, file systems, scheduling, etc. and it was all sent back to mainline.

Apple’s kernel team can’t possibly compete based on resources alone. They do their best but MS, Google, Amazon, Redhat, and so many others are constantly improving Linux to squeeze out every last drop of performance.

So in many ways Linux is better optimized. I remember one of the developers posting a few weeks ago about just how much faster code compilation was under Linux, because the file system layer is so much better. It was like 6x or something. Sort of an accidental ideal benchmark for stressing that.

But you won’t be disappointed.

My assumption would be support.

Boot Camp was officially supported. It gave them an advantage because it helped people move over to a Mac from windows because they could still run some of their software.

If Apple was to help Asahi officially, I think they would be worried that they would be on the hook either for continuing to support it or for damage done to the hardware by other peoples changes to the code.

Basically I think it’s a combination of not wanting to spend the money and being worried about the potential downsides of doing it.

The upside, in terms of additional sales, is likely very small.

That’s incorrect. Bootcamp has not existed for a while now.

Macbooks are really cheap for what they are, not sure what are you on friend. I would never buy one though, still, they are very impressive and its a shame that they are not free.

> If I could, I'd configure grub or whatever to serial-lock my Linux install to my desktop hardware (and keep a recovery key that would unlock it at another location).

This is the general idea behind TPM/Secure Boot, but as you present it, it just sounds like a headache for performing system recovery, at no obvious benefit for security.

What's your threat model? In the 99.(9)% case it's a crook snatching the laptop, wiping the HD, and selling the whole thing and/or the parts. Evil maid is a real threat, but only practical (in terms of sophistication/cost vs benefit) for high-value targets, like C-levels, devs holding company secret keys, etc.

Indeed. Care to give a link? Quick DuckDuckGo search returned nothing.

> For instance, on a PC the security settings are applied per machine and not per partition, so you can't mix an unsigned OS on one partition with full security on another partition.

This wasn't true for a low-end Acer I bought a while ago, and it's not true on an Asus motherboard I use. You can add keys to the bios, and then it'll let you run with either key. That lets you use the grub shim key. On the Acer, you can even tell it to screw PKI, and just check that the hash of the bootloader hasn't changed.

I don't really care if the desktop gets snatched. I'm more worried about old tax returns, the credentials stored in its password manager, etc. Breaking in twice (once to install a bump in the wire key logger, and once to walk away with the machine) would lead to at least 10x more payout for a burglar.

Also, ignoring what it is worth to the attacker, having to roll over all my credentials, freeze accounts, etc, etc, because my desktop was stolen would cost way more of my time than buying a new desktop (happily, the drive is encrypted).

If I was running a third-party unauthorized repair shop, then I'd care. However, I just don't see why I should care, as a customer. Also, I have trouble wrapping my head around the standpoint that people want to pay the Apple "it always sort of works" tax, then spend lots of extra time trying to save $50 on a repair.

When I mess around with hobby hardware, it's esoteric stuff, not readily-available laptops that are being built by the millions. For that, sometimes you need a volt-ohm meter, or diagnostic rigs.

Every few years I even bring some piece of a Linux box to a repair shop, to narrow down some fault.

However, Macs are all identical, so repairs boil down to "yank component, throw in the recycling shredder box, and (if you just replaced the mainboard) restore from iCloud Backup". Apple hardware switched over to being livestock, not pets a long time ago, so I'm not seeing the point in spending lots of effort on custom repairs (vs. replacing + recycling the bad components).

None of the machines on that list are more hackable than a Mac though.

Some are more "hackable" than an iPhone, but only in some strange symbolic way, since once you de-googled android is somehow more user-hostile than iOS and completely unhackable in practice (in the sense that I can't make it do what I want and also be usable as a daily driver that lets me do stuff like pay for stuff, use public transit, charge my car, park, or take an uber/lyft).

I'm a happy owner of a pine book pro, and a pc engines router; I get it. However, I don't think there are any viable Linux laptops or phones that compare favorably to the linux laptop + phone I had a decade ago.

Looks like it still exists, they just never ported it to the ARM chips, presumably because nobody wants ARM Windows.

In any case that's really irrelevant to the main point which is that Apple appears to have no objection to other OSes running on their laptops.

Though I wouldn't be surprised if they don't go out of their way to help and make it de facto impossible through secure boot systems.

Sure: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/05/leak-...

The gaggle of moving parts that are involved in the PC world make security and privacy substantially more challenging because of nonsense like this - a vendor with rubbish security (not even an HSM for critical signing keys!) compromising the broader world.

Thanks. It seems this confirms that my own keys are more secure, because with them such problem couldn't occur.

Because as a customer you should have the choice to get a repair from whoever you want. Even if you only go to Apple, competition will force their prices down somewhat.

"pay the Apple"

It's not just Apple doing this

"then spend lots of extra time trying to save $50 on a repair."

What if you're trying to save precious data? Apple don't make much effort to do data recovery because they don't care; you can fund 3rd party repairers who absolutely do. What if you got the device second hand? What if it's not $50, but $1000+? I've seen a video where Apple tells a journalist they have to buy a new Mac, and a 3rd party repair shop fixes it for free because it was such a small issue that Apple didn't even check for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2_SZ4tfLns

"Macs are all identical, so repairs boil down"

This is the problem; Apple is pairing parts to devices, so if you use a 100% genuine part from a new device it still won't work

> What if you're trying to save precious data? Apple don't make much effort to do data recovery because they don't care; you can fund 3rd party repairers who absolutely do

I keep backups, both in iCloud and elsewhere. Apple makes it a headache to avoid doing this, and they apparently finally added proper E2E encryption support.

I guess I think of Apple computers more like generic corporate fleet vehicles, and Linux boxes more like classic cars.

I really don’t think anyone cares if a ford dealer irreparably destroys 1% of the bottom trim white F-150s they maintain, and also forbids the people that bought the service contract from opening the hood.

None of that applies to a mustang shelby, but that’s a different part of the market.

Maybe some people really like their macs / phones, and don’t just use them like interchangeable boring tools.

> I think at one point they were making it virtually impossible to replace components because they were serial locked.

That seems like an obvious reaction to the fact that criminals (once they were prevented by activation lock from selling stolen iPhones) started parting out stolen iPhones and selling the parts to repair shops.

I think a better approach would be for Apple to only block the replacement part if that part has a serial associated with an activation-locked phone, but I'm sure it's easier to just block everything except for the replacements shipped directly from Apple.

Sounds like paranoia.

Scratches head at how framework laptop is less 'hackable' than a Mac but okay.

"(in the sense that I can't make it do what I want and also be usable as a daily driver that lets me do stuff like pay for stuff, use public transit, charge my car, park, or take an uber/lyft)."

So either the hardware you bought isn't letting you do what you want with it (this includes iPhone too!) Or you become a better hacker and get it to work yourself.