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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

> The Asahi Linux project is basically free labor that makes the M1 Macs more appealing to consumers.

Nope. The number of people who would buy an M1 Mac solely if they can run Linux on it is tiny. Incredibly so. Apple sells over 20 million of these things a year, they’re not looking at a few thousand people who want native asahi Linux as a product center.

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To validate the point if I'll ever buy something Apple it would be a Mac to run Linux on, but I don't see why I should pay an Apple premium and throw away many of the reasons to pay for it. The Mn processor of the future should be so much faster than anything else (say x10) to leave me no choice. I doubt it will ever happen.

> The number of people who would buy an M1 Mac solely if they can run Linux on it is tiny.

Exactly. One argument that I can see it that Apple want to be able to say: When we're no longer supporting old M1 Macs, you can run Linux, or sell it to a Linux user, rather than throwing it out. Branding it as an environmental benefit.

It's a bit far fetch though.

Apple won't say that though, Apple instead will tell you all about their new recycling robots and incentivize trading in older devices for newer ones.

Pretty sure Apple's answer to environmental issues is recycling, which to be fair they're good at. (...And also to be fair, which is quite possibly strictly inferior to keeping the same hardware going indefinitely)

I agree about the "consumers" angle, but I don't think it's entirely crazy to think that unlocking Linux on Apple Silicon will eventually have a non-negligible impact on Apple's bottom line. Think Linux on PS3.

Even if it's tiny, it's still thounsands of people in the world. It's hundreds of thousands of dollars of margins. Capitalists would hang for less.

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