Apple is a digital services company that happens to sell hardware. Their big money maker is their app store, and no Linux user is ever going to buy apps from the app store.

They still have the Darwin kernel open,but more and more of the open core is moving to closed components, a recipe for what Google started doing to Android. Now that they're no longer the hipster underdog, I don't think they care much about the brand marketing. You already believe they make the best laptops by far, what more marketing do they need?

Because Apple is not just a hardware company anymore. They track users and they sell ads. Sure, they are not at the same level as Meta and Google, but their ad platform is not insignificant anymore. Also that same software platform allows to get more money out of their users via their App Store.

Selling hardware with the software that helps them track means more revenue than the same hardware with the software.

Food for thought: Apple’s services make more revenue than Macs and iPads combined, and they do so at a higher profit margin. There’s your answer.

I don’t agree that Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. Not anymore, many alternatives are closing the gap. This is aided by the fact that Apple hasn’t touched the MacBook Pro chassis in 5 years, making it quite dated especially with the underutilized, oversized notch and the horrendous menu bar software implementation that plagues the notch as a real problem for me and something that doesn’t just “disappear into the background.” The software solution is to just disappear menu bar items that don’t fit, making them unusable.

Apple is still the gold standard, don’t get me wrong. But I’ve got my Framework 13 Pro preorder in, and the list of compromises compared to a Mac is very short. My existing Framework 13 is already close enough and the Pro appears to fix 100% of the gripes I have with my system.

CNC machined chassis? Check. Haptic trackpad? Check. Graphics performance? Better than the M5 (non-Pro). Battery life? 20 hours of video playback.

And I’ll be getting numerous advantages over a MacBook: cross-compatible modular hardware, upgradable RAM and storage, customizable I/O, low cost DIY repairs, 3:2 screen ratio ideal for coding.

But this is just one laptop. If you explore the windows laptop space, there are a lot of great machines these days. Windows is really the weakest part of the equation, and you can just get rid of that.

I’ve myself eyed the Zephyrus G14 or G16 as a gaming and general purpose system in a MacBook Pro-sized form factor. It’s refined, it feels premium, the OLED display is gorgeous. Apple’s best chips can’t touch the graphics performance of a dedicated Nvidia GPU, so long as a huge amount of VRAM isn’t a requirement for you.

There are also laptops in the Lenovo Yoga line that are extremely compelling against a MacBook Air.

My father purchased a new MacBook just in time to avoid the recent price increase. It wasn't because his old one didn't work anymore; it was because Apple wouldn't support it on more recent macOS versions, and some applications he runs daily (like Teams) don't work anymore on the latest supported macOS for that MacBook. Apple is an hardware company, and forcing you to upgrade your hardware gives them revenue. Admittedly, his MacBook lasted longer than many other laptops would have. But, if it wasn't for the outdated OS, he would have been happy to keep using it because the hardware was still fine for office use.

They've been like this long before they were a digital services company. 25 years ago Yellow Dog Linux (another RPM based distro) had the same challenges working with PowerPC. The scientific community was clamoring for an open platform to use their native Linux software with the PowerPC, YDL filled that niche, and Apple watched their struggles supporting Linux on their platform with detached amusement.

Apple open-sourced their container tooling and they also support Linux in their Virtualization framework. Anyone can run any compatible Linux now in a VM, with bare-metal speed but limited to virtio devices. To me it's baffling that more people don't run Linux this way.

I read somewhere that Apple even uses Linux kernels to bring up new hardware but I don't know if it's actually/still true.

Their amazing laptop hardware pushes you into their ecosystem. Once you're on macOS, might as well get iphone rather than Android and benefit from the synergy, same for airpods or the apple watch.

The only reason I'd see support for Asahi making sense for Apple is a Firefox situation, keeping the project alive to prove to regulators that there are alternatives.

Or they could just make their schematics available and save 99% of the reverse engineering the Asahi team has to do.

1000s of hours of work for what is just sitting in a drawer in Cupertino. But they won’t.

Why do you think that Apple doesn’t have developers internally that develops Linux for their own chips?

They obviously have a ton of people developing with linux and even asahi, else they wouldn’t been able to make adjustments in their uefi to shape the support of 3rd party OSes exactly how they wanted.

As apple no longer develop their own servers (OS), they even run some internal ”production” system on Linux, on their own hardware.

It’s less a question of people and more one of "Why doesn't a hardware company want to give away their IP design documentation?"

Are you really baffled as you say?

Every dollar Apple would spend on Linux support, they could instead spend on other improvements which makes their products better for much more important customer groups.

Goodwill among Linux people have very low value, since this is a group who doesn't want to pay for stuff. Such goodwill might even have negative value.

And Apple has aggressively been making new offers for these customer groups. Such as their Creator Studio, which is probably hated among Linux people, but a great offer for normal people who need and want to get real stuff done on the computer.

Nobody gets promoted for building open-source software at corpos. It is allowed, at best, not condoned. So what manager is going to go for this? Let's dedicate our limited resources to gratuitous goodwill work. Carrer suicide, I expect. Unfortunately.

> It is baffling to me that Apple, ostensibly a hardware company (that happens to be pursuing services revenue the way a crackhead pursues crack), ridiculously flush with cash, doesn’t throw 2 or 3 of their thousands of FTEs on this.

Why should they when they have macOS already?

> Linux people LOVE laptops, and Apple makes the best laptops by a parsec. It seems like 10x ROI would be a conservative estimate.

How many people who buy Apple silicon laptops do it to run Linux on it? less than 10,000 or 20,000 people?

You should not expect Apple to care about what Linux users want. The closest you are getting from them is being able to boot a custom OS or kernel.

Everything else from the drivers to the secure enclave they do not care.

see homebrew, they could have made this an official thing but no, they prefer to let people work do their work for them and sleep on their mattress of cash

despicable business practices really