> Hardware manufacturers in the 90s were incentivized to support Linux to expand their customer base.
Outside of some server niches (though even then, mostly not til the noughties), not really. You generally weren't looking at much first-party support at all in the 90s.
> Unsupported hardware in the 90s typically had a much larger customer base and group of hackers willing to spend time adding supporting for it.
This... is really not the case. The M1/2 Macs are _close_ to being one platform with something on the order of a hundred million units out there. Hardware in the 90s was pretty diverse; if you wanted support for your video card, say, there might be twenty chipsets out there, with maybe fifty manufacturers. Later on, there was a fair bit of consolidation, with virtually every computer, say, ending up with pretty much the same sound card chipset, but not in the 90s.
> Apple can decide at any point to make their hardware much more difficult to support. Newer models or firmware updates might break things.
Yeah, again, that _very_ much happened in the 90s.
I wasn't making a historical claim, but a philosophical one. Hardware manufacturers in the 90s had that incentive, if they wanted to pursue it. To Apple, a trillion dollar corporation, selling a negligible amount of laptops to a niche crowd of tech enthusiasts who will never become part of their software ecosystem is just not worth the effort to even pursue.
> This... is really not the case. The M1/2 Macs are _close_ to being one platform with something on the order of a hundred million units out there.
Right. And how many of those buyers are also Linux hackers willing to dedicate their time to work on projects like Asahi? How many of those would even be willing to run Linux instead of macOS? We're talking about an extremely small community of users compared even to the small Linux community in the 90s.
> Yeah, again, that _very_ much happened in the 90s.
Never said it didn't. Except that Apple is known for locking down their products, so the good faith they're showing now with leaving Macs relatively open can disappear at any moment.