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.