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> And of course, with their own ARM processors they can further dumb down macOS and lock it down

Anything to back this up? There was nothing preventing them from ‘locking down’ an intel based macOS, and I haven’t seen any evidence of a money grab with M1 based macOS either…

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> There was nothing preventing them from ‘locking down’ an intel based macOS

On Intel Macs, you can install Linux and Windows if you are unhappy with macOS. So they couldn't really lock it down. With their own custom ARM processors, they can prevent the installation of other OSes. Thus, like with iPhone or iPad, you will be stuck with the OS they provide. With the M1, so far you can only run other OSes on VM.

Ok, but they’ve done the opposite- helping linux projects get linux on M1 macs..

The whole M1 mac and its architecture is so closed, without Apple providing any useful system literature for it, or even closed source drivers, that developers are experimenting and trying to reverse engineer it to successfully install and run Linux on it. And they are still struggling because Apple is the least interested in helping their effort.

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