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Comment by lukeschlather | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like the M1 literally cannot be re-imaged from external media though, because the internal copy of the OS is so locked-down. Which fundamentally seems like a very Apple sort of disregard for providing tools for people to deal with failure modes. It also ensures the people actually solving the problem and the people who have the problem are never in the same room and never talk about what's going on.

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It can[0], it's just that the partition holding 1TR and the second-stage bootloader (which is almost but not quite macOS) isn't overwritten. Just like how PCs that store UEFI variables on the SSD don't overwrite those when wiping the OS (as OS installers are now smart enough not to wipe those).

1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211983 (specifically, "Or use a bootable installer")

> PCs that store UEFI variables on the SSD

Which PCs do that? Where do they store, on the ESP?

I was mistaken, they are stored in NVRAM and just mounted in Linux. (when I read the doc the first time I knew that I must be misunderstanding)

This is incorrect; you can do so with another Mac and Apple Configurator, just like it was an iOS device.

These days a Mac basically is an iOS device.

I suppose the T1, T2 and Touch Bar are, and with the M1 those parts are integrated on the SoC. But the runtime OS is still macOS and like on x86 that is not very iOS. The best description would be 'both', as the embedded platform is added instead of displacing the existing 'computer' platform. On M1 it is closer, and much more integrated, but still very distinct.

The boot and recovery process is very similar to that of iOS.

I don't think iOS has any similarity to booting an x86 CPU by faking an SPI Flash chip, compiling the IBB, ME and BUP code on-the-fly as needed and validating it externally before feeding it to the ROM inside the CPU for loading and microcode installation. But the T1, T2 itself is similar to iOS, as is the initial M1 boot stage.

Again, a very Apple thing to do. ;-) You just need another device from their ecosystem.

As opposed to "you need a special piece of hardware" it's "you need a readily available piece of hardware with the right affordances".

Doesn't sound particularly bad, especially when compared to the situation in other industries (e.g. cars and all the special proprietary OBD stuff they do).

idevicerestore will eventually support doing this from Linux.

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