I'm not sure what you're talking about. Their bootloader explicitly supports other OSes. They make it easy to run Windows (even through a built-in app that helps you set it up). There are plenty of reasons to criticize Apple, but they literally don't do anything to prevent you from running another OS.
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.
Eh, you may be right, but there's a big difference between "they are going to forbid other OSes by placing a software restriction where they explicitly permit things now" and "they already effectively forbid other OSes by not publishing developer documentation for proprietary hardware"--that's a tall order, and not a bar that many other hardware manufacturers meet either.
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).
> they literally don't do anything to prevent you from running another OS.
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.
The point is that Apple could have easily locked down the bootloader and made it not possible at all to install something else. In designing the M1 hardware they explicitly went out of their way to make sure other operating systems could be installed and they’ve said as much. They took their smartphone SoCs and bootloader that never allowed alternate operating systems and added that feature in actively.
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.
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.
Because computers don't boot the way they used to in the commodity BIOS era. The boot loader has to cryptographically check that it's valid operating system it's attempting to boot.
Well, Apple could follow industry standards, too. The argument was Apple approves alternate operating systems as evidenced by boot camp. That's demonstrably not true anymore.
