Here’s a Wayback Machine for that tweet: https://web.archive.org/web/20220102153759/https://twitter.c...
But I have to say I don’t understand how what Saagar is saying is supporting your (our?) point. Apple has ability to do a whole lot of things that will never make it to end-users — just because some flavor of Linux is being used in the CPU bringup process doesn’t mean anything for the final products.
As evidenced by the fact that M1 is far from the first chip they brought up in-house - and even then only on Macs, not on iPads which use the same chip.
I hear they even have some non-Apple hardware running macOS in data centers, the absolute horror ;P
I mean, you're kind of glossing over my second point from my comment:
> I'm pretty sure I've also seen it mentioned on HN itself that Linux is still used within Apple for certain aspects of hardware development, so Apple themselves need it to work to a certain degree.
Anyway, I went and dug around and found the HN discussion of that Marcan tweet that's been deleted - you can browse it below if you missed it or are curious:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578
Notably, this comment from Saagarjha who I trust on Apple-related matters is what I was referring to regarding Apple using Linux internally for some of their work:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29599889
All this to say, if the people who have some level of vested expert knowledge in this domain - like Marcan or Saagarjha - don't buy the conspiracy theory angle, then I'm inclined to side with them.