macOS 27 Beta breaks the ability to boot Asahi Linux

I don't know about Intel ME but AMD PSP is basically the equivalent of Apple's Secure Enclave, so there's that.

Yes, more weird than that. x86 PCs have fairly standardised boot and autoconfiguration (UEFI and ACPI). ARM based systems, including the Apple M series, don't. You just have to know what's there (device trees), and Apple isn't going to tell you. Hence why it's difficult to make another OS run on it, because you first need to find out what hardware's even there, and how to talk to it. It's initialised by Apple before iBoot runs, sure, but you don't even know what it is, so good luck writing a driver for it.

The Intel ME / AMD PSP are creepy, and probably a security risk to the device owner, but they're not weird, you can run an OS without even knowing they're there, and they like it that way.

>More weird than the opaque Management Engines on Intel or AMD chips that can take full control of your system at any time that you have no control over?

Considering they're pretty much fully undocumented (officially, that is) and could contain any number of IME equivalents since we know that they already have independent processors like the secure enclave running its own OS: yeah, probably more weird. Just because Asahi did not find one doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Because it was a featureset they supported without trouble on prior Macs?

The onus is on Apple to not make iBoot suck, they don't get a free pass for Microsoft-level boot volume ignorance.

Nothing is perfectly secure on its own. No system designed or checked by humans ever will be. After all, the Xbox One was indeed pwned, relatively recently. However, because the juice wasn't worth the squeeze for so long, it got pwned years after it was a relevant, money making console.

Novel jailbreaks for ancient iPhones are not worth much. But attention on current, brand new devices means increasing the danger that a mistake gets found, which increases the odds that that mistake is found by someone who wants to sell it for the most money. Also, from Apple's perspective a zero-day in the bootloader on macOS also means a zero-day in the bootloader in all of the billions of iOS devices out there too. They do not want to give anyone anymore reason than what already exists to try and pwn LLB or iBoot. Given a happy path, all of that hacker energy for "put Linux on my M1 Macbook" is put towards device drivers and support, rather than "how the hell do we get an alternative kernel booting on this thing".

Fewer bullets pinging off the armor. Fewer cracks in the fuselage forming. Fewer knives to dodge. All of it means Apple's boot process for their current devices are less likely to be pwned before they turn into e-waste (whenever that is, not making a comment on Apple's perhaps accelerated or otherwise practices in obsolescence).

Just like a jetliner will eventually succumb to entropy and become dangerous to fly, so too will a lot of "secure" software. You only need to actively maintain a jetliner while it is flying passengers or cargo. Once it is retired, it can rot, people can break into the husk of it at the junkyard and fornicate and smoke crack and smash windows and steal parts of the fuselage. At that point, who cares?

macOS and Windows are both such a chore for development, though. WSL was the closest I got to an "it just works" dev environment, but it exposes just how bad native toolchains like Cygwin and git bash are. macOS is hardly any better, and once you manage to install all of the GNU utilities it just feels like a poorly-supported Linux distro. It's a bunch of wasted effort to imitate a fraction of Linux's power.

So what are we supposed to use? ReactOS? SerenityOS? The entire mainstream is a "you have to..." OS, I fear the day when I have to abandon GNOME for a desktop that treats developers like chopped liver. Your general preference is fine, but I'm surprised that it aligns with the OEMs that want to put advertisements all over your desktop.