Imagine how big Apple would/could be if they embraced open hardware. They do have a moat here. macOS is so bloated, I hate it, but the hardware is just so much better than anything else.

Somewhat relevant:

https://gravitylinux.org/

Asahi fork for M4 (and in time later) Apple Silicon Macs.

I think it's better to improve standard (x86-64) or open hardware (RISC-V)

These bring-up debugging writeups read like detective novels. Impressive how much gets reverse engineered from a handful of weird symptoms.

Not related to this but the other day I was searching for a good external trackpad that would work with macOS and there are very few (and not good) and every discussion was about how nothing comes close to Apple magic trackpad. The question is why can't other companies create such a good trackpad for macOS, it turns out they can't because the whole protocol for touchpad/gestures etc are proprietary and closed on macOS side so essentially any 3rd party trackpad has to emulate a mouse device. Thats what you get when a company makes computer and its OS and also its accessories and also software services, the whole stack, you either use their whole thing or not.

The debug_putc moment resonated with me. I once spent two days on an ARM board where early boot died silently, and the fix turned out to be a single misconfigured UART pin mux. Bisecting with one 'a' character at a time looks silly but is the only thing that works when nothing works, and the WFI register-zeroing chicken bit is the kind of hardware behavior that would be genuinely maddening to hit without docs.

TLDR: the WFI (wait for interrupt) instruction used to preserve registers but you could configure it to delete register values, saving power.

Since M4 it always deletes register values and the configuration is gone, which made Linux assume they were preserved, but they are not.

Weird to buy machine with company actively hostile to anything open to run open stuff

I wonder if AI could make this work? Have there been any attempts to have AI do the work needed?