Bare metal Apple M1 Debian at 4K 60

- They have doubled down on "build it in China" for everything, including labor practices that are... not ideal, at a minimum. "Dying for an iPhone" details their last decade or so of labor abuses, or at least "looking the other way while China abuses labor for them."

- As a result of that, and their desire to sell into the Chinese market, they have bowed before the CCP regarding data storage, encryption, etc. For a company that has held a hard line regarding privacy of user information, to see them bow to a rather hostile government like that is very concerning.

- The on-device CSAM scanning, similarly, reflects what can most reasonably be described as "bowing to another government." I know the tech news has abandoned that bit of bad news, forgotten, and moved on to satellite phone stuff, but I consider it turning my own device and resources against me in ways I cannot support.

In the past year or so, Apple has demonstrated that they say one thing out one side of their mouth ("Privacy! Your data is your data! Ethical labor!") while doing other things in practice. So, I'm no longer comfortable supporting them, and am trying not to.

I'm aware that most of this can be applied to the bulk of the consumer tech industry at large, which is another problem, and one I'm certainly trying to ponder through. The main conclusion, I think, is that one ought not buy any new/recent hardware, and figure out ways to work with less. I've been moving over to small ARM computers as I try to find less-hostile devices, but the supply chains upstream there are less-known and a bit of a mystery, so I'm not sure I can make strong claims one way or another. However, I know at this point that Apple hasn't gone about really improving things, instead just looking the other way as Foxconn continues the same tricks.

It's perfectly fine to not care about any of that, and prefer the shiny integrated computer, and I've certainly done that for the past 18 years of my life. But I'm no longer OK with that, and am trying to get clear of it.

I have money to spend on computers but I still use a 10 years old laptop running windows and Linux (both supported) and with absolutely no desire to upgrade it as it runs better than when I bought it (after a ssd swap and more memory). There’s nothing that I do on my personal computer that would be improved by purchasing a new machine. Same goes with most people I know.

If only ARM virtualization could do that - it would've made my life much easier when writing the m1n1 hypervisor.

There is no facility for intercepting and trapping unsupported instructions in EL0/1 into EL2. The undefined instruction exception goes straight to the guest. I had to hijack this for early bringup debugging and ended up patching the guest's exception table, but needless to say that isn't terribly nice...

ARM macOS requires a GPU (WindowServer won't run without one), which means supporting Metal. So not only do you need to write a GPU driver, you need to write a GPU driver that supports Metal. Apple support paravirtualized GPUs... by passing through Metal, as I understand it. That's only easy if your host OS is macOS.

As for thermal throttle on the Air, you can spend $10 and 10 minutes installing thermal pads to bridge the CPU and the aluminum backplate. This will cause the backplate to heat up more, but nearly eliminates any thermal throttling even under sustained load.