Do you care that Nvidia isn't open with their Linux driver or that Broadcom didn't to my knowledge ship an open source driver for many of their wifi cards? It is really common for GPU vendors to keep their hardware details proprietary because they're all trying to one up each other on benchmarks and games every year. Just because Intel and AMD do open source drivers doesn't mean that what Apple is doing is unique.

yes. we all do care.

majority of linux users buy AMD because of drivers alone. avoid broadcom like the plage etc.

asahi linux is weird. theres no good reason to explain its existence other than there are too many people willing to give money to apple for no good reason.

"no good reason", except the performance, battery life & build quality?

Different people have different needs, preferences & ideological beliefs to you. If you measure the actions of others, based on your viewpoint alone, you will never understand the rest of humanity.

The biggest lesson that owning a Macbook has taught me is that my world view as a power user is a minority and worthless one that should be relegated to /dev/null under most circumstances.

Fucking nobody cares about the gripes I would have with it, and I've even come around to appreciate the fact that Apple sells goods engineered to the desires of people who aren't me (read: the majority): I can't deny the speakers on my Macbook are fucking amazing, and most people would care about that rather than whether something is FOSS.

Ok, but apart from the performance, the novel hardware architecture, the battery life, the build quality, the recyclability, and the documentation and tooling for developing custom kernels, what has Apple ever done for us?

Apple being more open would improve performance in certain applications, though.

I would love to have some examples, have you got any? Or is it just a feeling you have, that justifies your personal preferences?

What do you mean, it is pretty obvious that having more low level control would allow developers improve aspects of their software in certain cases. I am using software for some very time sensitive applications, and in this case linux > windows > macos just because apple's documentation and implementation is not dev friendly while linux with open source amd drivers have the best performance of all. Being closed and not dev-friendly has its costs, too.

Well, actually some people do care, for different reasons. If apple was more open then it would appeal much more to these people.

Sometimes it is even just a practical issue: having as low level control as possible can increase performance in certain aspects, for example in latency related tasks, that can be important in certain applications. This does not make everything else useless, but there are definitely tasks for which I choose an AMD gpu over an NVIDIA gpu (or apple silicon) just because of the open source drivers in linux.

A lot of this control and insight into the µarch is gleaned by the public not from the hardware company's released drivers or docs but through exactly this sort of reversing. See Ager's website as an example.

You could also take this to the extreme, as Stallman used to do with his OLPC where he deleted the wifi blob to only use lan because it wasn't free enough. If you have to wait for hardware company's to build free and open drivers and open hardware docs and open firmwares to use linux well im afraid your options are basically some X220 with a Open rom bios reimage.

For now, Apple's arm64 silicon is the most compelling option for anyone that wants to develop on the architecture locally. It's the same way as how i386 was the most compelling option for anyone that wanted to run a free unix at home in 1991. It just does not matter that Apple hasn't done a dump of all their drivers and hardware docs because it is all we have and the hardware is damn good at that too.

Apple has gotten some praise for minor stuff like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33290233

i.e making the linux port possible even if not supporting it publicly.