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Comment by bredren | Hacker News Reader

Its not about being die hard or for the sake of an Apple logo alone.

Apple just often does stuff in such an elegant way that it defines entire product categories. In most cases, Apple products are qualitatively and quantitative better.

Apple Silicon-based laptops, XDR Pro Display, Apple TV, Airpods, etc.

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Better for who? People locked-in to the Apple ecosystem. Their laptops aren’t qualitatively better because the CPU is fanless, I can’t run Linux on them without the help of someone cracking the problem for me. That’s qualitatively worse. You can name any set of features that are better and I can name reasons the product is worse, because it’s objective to your personal beliefs about hardware usage.

You can run linux (https://asahilinux.org/) on them, and it actually works pretty well. Apple has also helped out Asahi Linux to some small degree to get it to work (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578).

So we agree that…

> without the help of someone cracking the problem for me

Apple had no plans to support such an endeavor and still don’t regardless of how many pieces of the puzzle they hand the Asahi team. The Asahi effort is marginally above a Hackintosh in terms of Apple sanctioned device usage.

Ehh... you can't use an NVIDIA card without someone cracking the problem for you. Having started using Linux in the late 90's, you couldn't run linux on most systems without someone cracking the problem for you. I certainly can't run FreeBSD on most laptops, regardless of vendor because no one has cracked the problem for me. This is the nature of open source OS's. You absolutely can run Linux on it, because Apple worked with the Asahi linux team to make it possible.

You think Microsoft had any plans to support Linux on a Surface Pro? You think IBM ever planned to support linux on Thinkpads before users did it on their own? This isn't the example of anticompetitive behaviour that you think it is.

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