I was patiently waiting for the M1 16in MacBook Pro to come out. After reading all these revelations, I am now considering not buying the new MacBook Pro and instead, just stick with Linux.
I'm 99.999% percent positive there's nothing to worry about, but imagenet did have CSAM in it, so you can't be too careful. Really excited to build my own expansion cards. There's really affordable full SMD assembly these days from places like easyeda.
If anyone has experience with developing for iOS/MacOS on hackintosh, please let me know your experience.
If you plan to use it for work then buy a Mac. It’s a tool for a job.
There might be other build services for different languages.
How would going to a hackintosh and loading on the Apple software you are skeptical of help you?
With a Hackintosh, ask yourself if you really value your time. Couple hundred bucks for an M1 Mini feels very cheap in comparison.
You can run Linux as a host, macOS as a guest[1] under QEMU, buy a second GPU that is supported by Apple (e.g., Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Pulse 4GB) and pass that GPU in its entirety to the guest macOS. The same for one of the USB controllers on your motherboard. Effectively, you get native macOS performance under Linux. A bonus: you can use the iptables firewall with the FORWARD ruleset to control guest macOS network access. The overall setup process is involving, but nothing that an intermediate Linux user would not be able to handle. Please note that it might be actually illegal (?) in some (?) countries to run macOS software on non-Apple hardware.
But unfortunately, there is nothing out there that "just works". And how can anything exist if Apple has the size of a small nation.
It runs well if you have the time, patience and expertise. There's no fundamental technical barriers. It's purely a matter of enough development resources being committed to the project. I think Apples recent moves would motivate more developers to work on it.