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Comment by ThePowerOfFuet | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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