Their only incentive is to make as much money as possible.
I think this is simplifying things a bit. Of course they are about making money, but they also have certain ideology/vision that they have been following fairly closely for the last two decades.
So again, that begs the question, why do you think they added an unlocked bootloader? What was the financial incentive there? Arguably there is none. On the other hand there *is* incentive to remove it and lock down the OS the same as iOS.
Why does it have to be about a financial incentive? Unlocked bootloader is a powerful message "no, we are not locking the Mac", which directly counters skeptics. And I completely disagree that locking down the Mac will be beneficial from Apple. They are not stupid. They know this would mean immediate and massive exodus of users and ultimately abandonment of their entire ecosystem. Open Mac is a vital part of Apple's garden.
That way they can patch the true hole in their false argument (as pointed out by Epic) that Macs are unlocked and can run software distributed by third parties whereas iPhones cannot. Wouldn't it be terribly convenient to also (eventually) lock down Macs the same way they lock down iPhones?
What false argument? Did I miss something?
I'm saying I no longer have confidence that Apple will commit to keeping the unlocked bootloader around; perhaps they'll find some BS excuse to remove it for "security purposes."
The entire system is designed to be secure, bootloader doesn't change this. Apple doesn't do things randomly.
This is not true, Macs have been very popular with people in IT and other tech fields, and the people that choose to run Linux natively often do so on Macs. I can't imagine that would be any different with M1 Macs than with Intel Macs, once both are equally capable of running it.
Well, I am one of those "people in tech fields", and I do run Linux on my MacBook Pro — in a virtual machine or docker containers, as the overwhelming majority of people do. But natively booting it? There is just no significant interest, outside of a very small passionate group. It's like running Linux on PS4 — technically possible and has been achieved, but it will never become a common thing.
Don't get me wrong, I applaud the Linux hackers for their efforts, they do amazing and important work, providing us with technical information and prying things apart, but I don't think it will ever go beyond it. Linux desktop is already a marginal thing, and running it on reverse-engineered hardware is going to lack the ergonomy of the "real thing".
Once there's a Linux GPU driver, porting it to Windows would be well within the capabilities of a systems team at Microsoft. Given that people have ported Windows on ARM to Raspberry Pi, I don't think it's as massive an undertaking as you think, and there will always be interest.
The work that Alyssa and Dougal did on reverse-engineering the Appel GPU is nothing but incredibly impressive, I didn't expect anyone to get so far in such a short time. But even with all the information, delivering a high-performance, production quality driver is a lot of work. Not to mention the scope itself. Microsoft would need to implement a maintain a DX12 driver, a DX11 driver, an Vulkan driver and an OpenGL/OpenCL driver in order to the implementation to be useable. It requires massive resource investment.
And sure, there is interest, however the vast majority of that is satisfied via virtual machines. Even the officially unsupported insider builds effectively have native-level performance when running on M1 Macs. Why spend millions of $ on rebuilding a driver if a practical solution is just in front on one's nose?
