[yellowapple]

> The example given in the blog post supposes that the community team and Pine Store employees were firmly intent on removing SPI on the PinePhone Pro and coerced not to ship Tow-Boot.

I don't see where in Martijn's blog post that "coercion" was "supposed" at all. What he actually wrote:

> Negotiating this solution was hell. Manjaro is incentivized not to agree to this, since it cedes their sole control over the bootloader, and PINE64 listens to Manjaro before anyone else. Furthermore, PINE64 does not actually want to add SPI flash chips to their hardware. Apparently, there has been some issues with people using SPI flash as RW storage on the A64-LTS boards, which would be a support issue.

> After months of discussions between the community, Manjaro, and PINE64 leadership, we finally were able to convince them to ship the PinePhone Pro with an SPI flash chip with Tow-Boot installed on it.

He doesn't even claim that Manjaro objected at all to the idea of adding an SPI chip and preloading Tow-Boot on it; only that they have a possible vested interest in resisting it, and that PINE64 therefore also does for as long as it considers Manjaro the preferred OS for PinePhones.