Until 2019 Apple sold 13 inch MBPs without the touchbar, and these models did not have a T2 chip. They are still miserable computers to run Linux on, although I think the original 2016 touchbar-less MBP performs better than all the rest, albeit (IIRC) no working audio, very poor suspend/resume functionality, and until pretty recently no keyboard/trackpad functionality.

Oh, and Apple's NVMe interface is non-compliant. This is widely reported as Apple locking Linux out with the T2 chip, but that's not really true. The T2 chip will by default prevent unsigned kernels from reading/writing to the SSD, but this can be disabled.

Even if it's disabled, the controller is not standards compliant, and Linux won't see the underlying block device. I saw some diffs floating around on github a few years ago that fixed it, but I don't think it was ever mainlined.

Basically, post-2016, Apple seems to have incorporated even more custom (and undocumented) hardware that running alternative OSes on them is basically impossible. Windows works because of the Apple-provided HAL + drivers for WinNT.