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Comment by iasay | Hacker News Reader

It's difficult to have an opinion here as I've seen both sides. While compatibility is nice, if you start kicking out reference hardware documentation you instantly open up several additional cans of worms from upstream IP licensing to crappy clone repair parts appearing on the market.

But realistically with Apple you don't know what's going to happen. They could be silent forever. They could suddenly dump a whole pack of documentation out tomorrow. An official position would be nice.

Switching it round though, 99.99% of customers are buying a toaster. I put bread in. It makes toast. I eat toast. Does it make commercial sense to support the 0.01% use case? That's their equivalent model of supporting the iPhone 5's market share for example.

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> But realistically with Apple you don't know what's going to happen. They could be silent forever. They could suddenly dump a whole pack of documentation out tomorrow. An official position would be nice.

Apple implementing things like they have here is about as official a position they can make without making commitments to having to respond to requests from developers as to how to do this.

It's similar with their stance to Hackintosh, but more legal.

It was a violation of their terms of service, but they didn't prosecute people that didn't try to make money with it.

It's like saying "we'll leave this tiny window open. Suit yourselves"

> Switching it round though, 99.99% of customers are buying a toaster. I put bread in. It makes toast. I eat toast. Does it make commercial sense to support the 0.01% use case?

Fair enough. I think most toaster manufacturers will at least test what happens when you put a bagel inside, though. If said bagel causes an electrical fire or doesn't toast as well as the previous model did, it doesn't matter if ~1% of users will encounter it; it probably needs to get fixed before it ships.

I think this fully extends to Apple Silicon as well. Apple's "contributions" to Asahi mostly amount to adding a feature that pre-existed on x86 machines, and probably intended for Bootcamp/Windows rather than Linux. Hell, there's compelling evidence that Apple simply uses that functionality to flash testing firmware onto Macbooks, and the Linux compatibility is just a nice side-effect. Much like you said though, with Apple you never know. Until they release an official statement on the matter, it can only be assumed it's a coincidence.

> Apple's "contributions" to Asahi mostly amount to adding a feature that pre-existed on x86 machines

Nope.

Apple tossed out the UEFI used by Intel Macs and replaced it with a system that allows you to control the security settings per partition, so you can have a single machine with full security enabled on your Mac partition while allowing for the installation of an unsigned OS on the same disk.

It's a complete replacement of the boot system that preexisted on x86 machines.

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