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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

That doesn't make it technically impossible to implement booting from that port.

Sure, but it also doesn't make it necessary or useful to implement booting from that port - booting from a port IMHO is not a feature that Apple wants to offer to its target audience at all, so it's sufficient if some repair technician can do that according to a manual which says which port to use in which scenario.

The firmware is based on iPhone boot process from my understanding, and simply does not have space in ROM to implement boot from external storage.

The rest of the code necessary to boot from external sources is located on main flash

Yes, but the decision to use this firmware was made by Apple.

This is like saying my software did not work because it was based on an incompatible version of some library. Maybe so, but that is a bad excuse. Implementing systems is hard, and like the rest of us, Apple should not get away with bad excuses. And this is even more true because they control more of the stack.

OTOH, the current implementation works and is sufficient so Apple could easily decide that it’s not worth modifying firmware that already works to solve an inexistant issue.

That's how you end up with a UX that works only for programmers (see e.g. Linux in the 90s).

We are talking about booting from USB. On a Mac M2. That’s literally the most power user feature of a MacBook.

The 3 users of this feature on this planet are already happy that it’s even possible at all. The only thing Apple could do is to document this clearly like adding a text in the boot drive selector.

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