alt Hacker News> when they can just share a pdf.
I assume your question was in good faith, but the information needed to support an entire platform like this is not as simple as sharing a PDF. I’ve spent parts of my career working on much simpler platforms than an entire Apple laptop where we would have to work through 10,000 page PDFs documenting registers and even that was not enough to get the full picture of the system. You have to work through provided code samples and then eventually get the vendor’s engineers to look into problems that couldn’t be resolved through the documentation, where they would go look into the other teams and their sources to discover the answer.
The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny. The honest answer is that it’s not worth the huge effort investment needed to document an entire platform for public consumption.
I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
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If you’ve ever tried to lock down a mac and dealt with the 100s of system services, you’d know why. I like the hardware and base os, but I have no idea what those services are doing.
Many are undocumented. A lot can’t be disabled, even with SIP disabled. And, they’re chatty and persistent in trying to communicate out. You can kind of disable communication of TCP/IP but they’ll find alternatives - like low power bluetooth or even lower in the network stack.
I only use my mac for development. I’m a simple man and don’t need all the bloat and hidden behavior. Plus, I always feel like I’m one automatic update away from it becoming unusable.
> The market for people who want to install Linux on a Mac laptop is very tiny.
Right now, yes. But Linux support is like freedom of speech in a dictatorship.
Everyone makes fun of it and says it's useless but fundamentally the powers that be are deathly afraid of it ever turning the tide.
> I don’t think many people realize how easily Apple could have locked down the laptop to be able to not run any alternate OS at all and the number of lost sales would be so negligibly small as to not matter. They chose to leave it open.
Oh please - Apple provided a full suite of Bootcamp drivers for their hardware just a couple of years ago, not locking you out is not a big heroic move you're trying to picture here.
You describe an exhaustive documention, but some documentation would already be better than none. Perfect is enemy of good, as your comment illustrates.