Microsoft is doing the same thing with their Surface tablets (https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface) and no one bats an eye.

The nearest thing I can think of in the modern world is game consoles and smartphones. Except they are locked down much much more than an M1 Mac.

Those are mostly AMD SoCs with relatively mainstream x86 cores and AMD discrete graphics cards with some changes on the same die.

The most exotic thing about them is usually the unified memory controller.

Non-Apple smartphones mostly run Android, with a GPLv2 Linux kernel. I guess this already is more open than Apple, because OEMs need to open source their downstream kernel.

I don’t think it really makes that big a difference.

Apple already open sources their kernel.

The issue is mostly device drivers, which even on Android tend to be external binary blobs.

It kind of leaves you in the same place in my opinion

I think it does make a difference: there are tons of Android ROMs (or even Linux distros like PostmarketOS) that run on many different Android smartphones. But I don't see the equivalent for iPhones.

Isn't that because iPhones are more closed somehow? Maybe there is another reason, I don't know to be honest.

That’s down to different reasons:

1. You can still reuse the binary blobs that make up the drivers.

2. Android has unlockable bootloaders whereas iPhones do not.

However the binary blobs are not always legally redistributable or even reusable.

They don’t also help if you need to support any version of the kernel other than what shipped in case there’s any ABI differences

Thanks for the insights!

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