I get being upset at Apple for e.g. 30% take on in-app purchases. But what exactly would they be trying to do by making it complex to control their speakers?
Making it harder for alternative OSes to use their hardware without accidentally damaging it, further cementing macOS' position as the only OS to be trusted.
It's similar to their war against third-party repair shops by deliberately making it difficult to replace parts, even with genuine ones --- see my second link about the iPhone 12 camera.
This is the automotive equivalent of adding sensors and ECU firmware that detects if the engine is using the manufacturer's proprietary oil, and subtly changing the parameters to decrease power and fuel economy, increase emissions, and/or shorten the life of the engine if it isn't. Then blaming third-party repair shops when customers complain.
They make and sell more speakers than any other company on earth and are routinely praised for their quality to size ratio.
If apple wanted to kill asahi linux, they wouldn't have had to lift a finger. Its the opposite - Apple engineers have needed to do several small things to keep the door open to easily run 3rd party operating systems on their computers. Remember, a modern mac has essentially identical hardware as an ipad. Apple has locked down the entire boot process and uses digital signatures all through the boot chain. They actively changed how macs boot to make sure things like asahi linux can run on their computers at all.
I don't think they deserve special praise for that. But it does make it a stretch to claim their speakers were intentionally designed hurt linux-on-mac. If they wanted to stop asahi linux, they had plenty of much easier, much more effective ways to do so.
Sometimes I wonder if it really makes sense to spend so much time to do the work Apple should have done in the first place & with no guarantee it will even work after a firmware upgrade or on the next model.
Spending the same effort on more open platforms or open hardware efforts might be wiser in the long term.
On the other hand, I adore the security and cross-application sandboxing that iOS brings. I wish Linux had more ways to sandbox applications from one another - since it’s clear that “trust all computer programs” is an insanely idiotic policy in 2024. And “implicitly trust all code” is de facto how Linux, npm, cargo, etc all run today.
My comment was in response to the idea that the speakers are maliciously designed to hurt asahi Linux, which just seems obviously wrong given how much power Apple has over their devices. They could completely kill asahi Linux with a flick of the wrist if they ever want to. There’s no way that’s the reason for their complex speaker setup.
If they killed off asahi Linux, they would face far more backlash than if they just made it harder for them (with ostensible reasons why), while keeping it strictly worse than macOS.