Is anyone else ever saddened when they think about the man hours spent on projects like this (reversing software or hardware to accomplish what should be a simple goal) when all it would take is the teensiest bit of cooperation to not waste all those hours? I use waste in the sense of like trying to assemble something complicated with the instructions just out of arms reach, not in the sense of doing something pointl…
It's cheaper to not make it work for anything else. While this is commonly said about PC and Windows, Microsoft actually publishes pretty clear standards that Linux even reuses, because they do not control the hw vendors. Apple has both hardware and software in one house. On one side, this means that they can escape the trap that cripples performance of competing mobile SoCs (as they don't have to deal with price com…
If I understand correctly, seeing the rest of the comment, your point is that it's cheaper to not have it adhere to some fixed standard.
While I fully understand this position, and think that it's actually something that can help a vertically integrated company such as Apple, I think that the situation isn't an either or.
Rather, things could be shades of grey. The way I see it, Apple could keep on doing their specific things because it's better for them. But once a given system (which can be as restrictive as a given combination of laptop size, generation and spec-level) is out to mass manufacturing, it becomes its own standard of sorts. As in each and every "late 2020 MBA 13" 8 GB RAM 256 GB SSD rev 1" or whatever are exactly the same. I suppose this has to be, since macOS has to know how to handle them.
If I'm not mistaken this is what DSDT patching was/is about in the Hackintosh community: make the hardware present a "known" interface, such as MBP 15 13,1 so that macOS knows what quirks to load.
So instead of Apple adhering to some "fixed" standard for all of their models for several years, they could just publish the "quirks" of each model.
You want to run Linux on your MBA? This is how it works. You're on your own adapting Linux to this, mind, but this is how it works. And of course, you want next year's model? Better get busy adapting again.
I think that would still be immensely better than the current situation and would help prevent the waste GP was talking about. I always concur with the claim that this would probably not lose Apple money. They don't make money any more through selling macOS itself and people looking to run Linux are probably not the biggest spenders on the mac app store either. But they could probably sell more macs.