Would you be willing to fund a Linux port to Apple Silicon?

That sounds a tad presumptive.

> The lock feature is implemented via iCloud and the "Find My Mac" page, which is able to remotely shut the soft fuses via BIOS/EFI, and in return physically bricks the hardware. Anybody that has control over your iCloud account (e.g. a malicious third party) can potentially do this. See [1], this happened to a lot of companies (customers) that had problems with malicious third-parties getting access to their network.

So a security feature? Hardly Apple acting maliciously, is it. Regarding iCloud being compromised, this is inarguably down to lack security policy on the part of business or the end user. iCloud now enforces 2fa by default as a result, largely because (and I'm speaking from experience here) most businesses can't be trusted to do this themselves.

> How come that they could only prove that by having more than 18% of devices that were sent to be trashed with active GPS antennas, and active remote iCloud software tracking? [2] Also, recycle is defined as re-cycling, not re-abandoning. The definition of recycling among the population seems to be a different perception than yours.

Had Apple sold the lots to the company, you'd be right, but that's not what happened. Apple paid the company to destroy, recover and recycle. The company acted in bad faith and against the terms of the contract they had with Apple. With regards to you claim that Apple tracked active devices - when a business has any kind of electronic equipment destroyed, they are required, by law, to record certain information about the devices like serial numbers, etc. Unsurprisingly, some of the devices turned up at Apple stores for repair. The article that you linked to has the following from Apple: “Products sent for recycling are no longer adequate to sell to consumers and if they are rebuilt with counterfeit parts they could cause serious safety issues, including electrical or battery defects...”. Devices that can and meet the requisant standards to be refurbished and resold are.

> Literally a couple months after PayPal and other payment providers were banned by removing the headphone jack in the 8th gen iPhone, Apple Pay was introduced. You're making it sound like 2 or 3 tiny low-voltage wires are harder to implement than a Bluetooth antenna wiring... c'mon, really?

This is noting more than a conspiracy theory! Do you really believe that they removed the headphone jack to fuck with Paypal? This is utterly ridiculous. I'm not, by the way, suggesting that wires are are a pain in the ass from an engineering perspective, rather a user perspective.

> You're making it sound as if bash was only inside macOS for a short time. bash, for the sake of argument, has been in use since macOS 10.2 which was released in 2002 [3], whereas 10.0 was a public beta and 10.1 was released the same year in 2001. The argument of a tcsh being in use for 9 months, and bash being in use for over 19 years is quite the opposite way around than you seem to perceive it.

Your link shows that bash was included with 10.2 (it was included with 10.0/10.1 and NeXTStep too), not the default. tsch was still the default until OS X 10.3 (bash-2.05a-release) - not 9 months, 2.5 years. bash 4.0 was formally released in 2009, with a change to GPLv3. Apple had updated bash to 3.2 and stuck with that as it was licensed in a way that was acceptable to them for distribution. I know this to be the case because I actually used these OS's on a daily basis. As I said originally, Apple should have switched to a different shell at this point. The wornderfull thing about UNIX shells is that the user can change the default and use what they want, including updating the pre installed one, so suggesting this as Apple being user hostile is well wide of the mark.

> Again, my arguments were to counteract the argument that "Apple is acting in good faith for the people", because I do not think that anything innovative can happen on a crippled platform.

That's your opinion, and a perfectly fine and valid one to have, but...

> Apple actively shuts down innovation, every time it could be seen as an alternative to their own product, which they will release only once market adaption has been done by pioneers. This was happening a lot of times with hardware, and a lot of times with software.

...is simply not accurate in the way you are framing it.

> I personally would choose repairability over anything, always, because I've learned my lessons the hard way with financial burdens.

That's fine. Others wouldn't. I'd suggest convenience is top of the list for the majority of people that use Apple products. It's the same argument that goes against the customisation camp.

Thanks for the context. I know the GPU isn't going to become a fully compliant implementation on par with the e.g. Radeon drivers with only one person working on in in months.

That said, are you talking about a full graphics stack, or just the GPU-specific bits? Modern Linux graphics heavily emphasize code reuse across architectures, both on the kernel side and userspace side, which is completely different from how vendors typically do things.

The goalposts are quite different between having a fully compliant implementation that can deal with software that uses the GPU intensively (and hits all the corner cases properly), which is what Apple has to build, and being a usable desktop experience for Linux - having the whole stack be open source makes debugging things a lot easier too. Getting to full Vulkan compliance is definitely not going to be a one-person job. But we've seen fairly fast progress on GPU drivers going from triangles on the screen to simple game ports in some cases, with only one or two developers involved. I obviously don't have any yardstick for how the Apple GPU compares to everything else, but a priori, my hope is to be able to push things past the initial cliff to where the GPU starts being useful, and then of course other contributors can help improve support. In my experience, the initial hurdle in building a community project is often the hardest part, as a lot of people have no idea where to start supporting undocumented hardware (and I'm particularly good at doing black-box reverse engineering of this kind of stuff; I can claim a good 15 years+ of experience there myself). For example, once e.g. the shader ISA is documented and a PoC backend implemented, I expect people with more shader optimization experience than me to want to pitch in and make it faster.

Re firmware, I would expect to use Apple's (at least initially).

FWIW, it is because we read articles like this one, and because we are constantly told that Apple has exclusive deals for good touch screens from Samsung (who happens to also make the one other good line of competing phones, and which you explicitly stated was a place where people are wrong).

https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/21/apple-locks-its-riva...

> How Apple locks its rivals out of the tablet market with exclusive sourcing deals

Care to explain how we are wrong instead of just claiming we are dumb? I promise that if you educate me (somewhat a bit famous in the "hating on Apple" space) I will help educate others. (Though, FWIW, I do know that a lot of Apple's hardware is semi-custom design, and so if the argument is that I know but find it irrelevant for this comment thread. I am focusing on the belief that Apple makes it hard for others to source parts, which has a lot of history to it.)

Sure, but that's only because if it's your own code, you don't have to follow any rules at all. You can do whatever the heck you want, up to and including making the whole thing closed source.