marcan addressed this early on in the project, arguing that Intel platforms including some of those advocated for by the FSF are less open and more at risk of upstream abuse in some very significant ways.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684585

For example intel systems (and Android) run resident supervisor code you can't get rid of, and that can do remotely initiated updates you have no control over. That's not so on Apple silicon.

>In fact I'm much more sure about that than I would be with the laptops the FSF peddles as "respects your freedom"; last time I looked at the schematics for one of those, it had over a half dozen chips running secret blobs, and at least two or three of them had full access to all system RAM via a DMA capable bus. You'd have to be insane to trust that over an M1, which is designed to sandbox all coprocessors from the main CPU and RAM via IOMMUs, such that even if all firmware is backdoored it can't take over your main CPU.

Also these comments are worth considering.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307836

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29307377

These efforts will also save a lot of old macbooks from the landfill in the future.

What do you mean? You mean not on Apple hardware? That exists, that's basically every other Linux distro in existence.

These people are singlehandedly saving _millions_ of laptops from going to the landfill one day. That's a valiant effort and they're doing it wonderfully. Regardless, one of the points of Linux is to install it on as much hardware as possible. Do you think people that managed to get it installed on iPods, PS5s, Wiis, Chromebooks, routers, Nintendo Switches, etc. should all stop just because they're doing something unsupported? Most of those cases were met with friction by the original OEM. If anything, Apple has been pretty laissez faire about the whole thing compared to Nintendo and Sony who will ban your console if you hack it.

Yeah should they design their own computer chips? And do literally everything need for such a platform. That is literally 10000x the effort. There is no change the same group of people could create such an open solution. Hardware is just much harder in so many ways and no comparable OpenPlatform exists.