> New devices = New components = New Firmware = The updates have to stop sometime
So how does microsoft do it? My PC is about the same age yet it is still supported. And not even barely, but without a hitch.
> Apple is an OEM for most parts on their board, if upstream support ends for the components on the board then its game over as far as firmware updates goes.
But this is not an issue with a chip's firmware. Do you believe apple can't compile code for their 10 year old hardware or how do you think this happens?
>And its certainly NOT economical to keep stuff running forever. Look at OpenBSD and Theo famously begging for money to keep his basement of antique equipment running at enormous expense !
If OpenBSD can do it on a budget that's pocket change for Apple, with much more diverse hardware which they have no control over, then Apple definitely can do it.
Is it really bullshit? Lenovo manages hundreds of laptop models via fwupd, and those work just fine after they lose OEM support. I've got a Thinkpad from 2009 that still gets modern Linux patches (to say nothing of my 2006 PowerBook running Arch/Plasma 5).
Compared to what Apple makes off hardware and service revenue, the cost of opening iBoot and providing basic firmware support would be almost nothing. It's so economical that the volunteers at Asahi were capable of replacing the missing bits via black-box reverse engineering. You want to tell me that Apple is incapable of releasing that firmware themselves? On a technical forum?
> Compared to what Apple makes off hardware and service revenue
Really I wish people would wake up and stop with this bullshit.
Do the other manufacturers do anywhere near as much R&D as Apple does ? NO ! (2023: Lenovo 2bn vs Apple 29bn).
Do the other manufacturers maintain their own OS across multiple hardware platforms ? NO !
Its easy to sit in your armchair and spout crap about "well, Lenovo does it !". Well, the OS on your Lenovo is Windows or Linux. And the parts in your plastic Lenovo are almost certainly 100% off-the-shelf commodity parts.
Meanwhile Apple's R&D is what brings you, for example, the unmatched Apple Silicon chips, which everyone except the die-hard Apple bashers agree are genuinely industry leading.
Really, you've just proven my point. If Lenovo can support their hundreds/thousands of devices on a shoestring budget, Apple can support their few dozen devices easily. They've already written the device drivers and documented their non-commodity hardware, there's no technical reason it won't run other OSes.
I almost feel like you don't actually know what you're arguing against. An optionally-open bootloader is practically free to implement, and releasing driver code (or at least hardware docs) would mostly be an IP-related decision, not an effort-gated one. As-is, it feels like you're defending Apple's right to enforce petty limitations and be lazy with their trillion-dollar IP. It should be obvious why we (former Apple customers, some of us) disagree.
Lmao Apple R&D. Don't know what they're spending it on since they almost always adopt technologies that have already been developed + proven in the market.
So Apple Spends 29bn R&D every year, over many years and ends up developing...a really good version of (if not currently the best, sure) version of an ARM chip, a pre-existing architecture with which they are already intensely familiar? Wow, they're sure being real efficient with those funds.
I believe a lot of their performance gains pretty much just come down to larger die size than most ARM CPUs, making an SoC and colocating memory etc all on the same die, wrangling some of TMSC's newest most transistor dense and power efficient nodes. M1 Ultra=114b, 64 core graviton3=55b, hell people are even building stuff like https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/everything-ive-learne....
Apple went for a bunch of easy wins tbh. Why doesn't every other computer manufacturer do it? Well Apple is a $1T company; they control so many aspects of their products, OS, software etc so very easy for them to offer this. It would require a concerted effort on the part of so many companies involved in the ecosystems of non-Apple products to make a transition the same way Apple did.
