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by dingaling 1979 days ago
> "we'd love to see what you'll do with it"

...without the documentation that would help you.

When Broadcom act like this they're considered villains and we're recommended to stay away from their hardware. But when Apple do it, they're being benevolent?

And that's ignoring the fact that I could actually get Broadcom documentation in exchange for dollars and NDA.

2 comments

Broadcom is selling hardware with the intention to run Linux on it, I guess that is the main difference.
Apple unlocked the bootloader which is certainly signaling intent.
Maybe. Certainly people within Apple would have thought about Linux for this. But Apple would need to provide some form of mechanism for unlocked bootloaders anyway to facilitate kernel/driver developers and security researchers, so I'm pretty sure other OSes is not the main reason they do this.

It does work out for Apple in the end. Their current standard 10 years' support will look quite short now Moore's law is dead and their hardware has barely any moving parts. But they'll shush some complaints if up to date third party OSes are available in 2030.

> ...without the documentation that would help you.

Well, it's not really worse than their usual documentation on products they officially support: https://www.caseyliss.com/2020/11/10/on-apples-pisspoor-docu...