@iska It's been over for a while now, depending on what hardware you're buying and what you're looking for. But these Ryzen 6xxx machines with Pluton seem to be the first mass market x86 machines which ship without the ability to run anything except Windows by design.

@allison @iska
According to AMD the Ryzen 6000 series has full Linux support by default

@dushman @iska I wouldn't doubt it. But I was talking about OEMs and their decisions, not AMD necessarily. (not that I have the kindest opinion of AMD these days for... other reasons)

@allison @iska @coyote
And pluton seems like a hard glowing backdoor more than anything

@dushman @iska @coyote Still kinda fucks me up that Apple currently has the freest mass market hardware from a surveillance/hardware backdoor perspective.

@allison @iska @coyote @dushman >M1 (at least) Macs all don't come with coprocessors and the M1 Secure Enclave isn't any more exploitable than a regular TPM
>Absolutely no upgradability or repairability, if an engineer's oopsie sends 16V to your NAND chips, your computer is dead
>And they've done that before so they'll do it again

@idiot @allison @iska@mstdn.starnix.network @coyote @dushman Do Apple's customers really need upgradability and repairability in 2022? In 99% the laptop will die in 5 years anyway and get replaced with the new one, so why bother?
There is System 76, Purism, Pine64 and the Spanish whats-its-name laptop maker… Hell, even HP sells models like Dev One
There are literally dozens of options, but people still want to buy hardware from companies with bad reputation, expect it to be open and whine about it? I don't get it!

@m0xee @idiot @iska @coyote @dushman Sure they do. At least to the extent of like, being able to replace SSDs if they fail (which sure, I can buy the performance arguments for soldered RAM, but there's no justification for the SSD thing besides extorting customers)

@allison @iska@mstdn.starnix.network @coyote @dushman @idiot You can see a good example of such a justification on the attached image 😂
The absolute most of Apple's customers don't have a slightest clue about thermal design. They will buy storage options that overheat A LOT and it is a huge issue with the tight cases we have nowadays.
This was a non-issue ten years ago and they were user-replaceable at the time. When they started the MacBook Air line and later MBP Retina the all-glued-in approach came up.

@m0xee @iska @coyote @dushman @idiot I'm talking about on desktops (mainly the 2020 Mini comes to mind here as an example of hardware that is effectively blacklisted for me due to this which would otherwise be damn near ideal for my purposes)

@allison @iska@mstdn.starnix.network @coyote @dushman @idiot I gave up on Apple and stopped keeping track on the new models, so I can only speculate why they did this. It might be easier for them to follow the same hardware design principle everywhere and since it's soldered-in on the laptops, it's the same on the Mini. It might also be more efficient supply chain wise to use similar parts in desktops 🤷

@m0xee @iska @coyote @dushman @idiot Probably. Either way, I'll just keep doing the Optiplex secret strat until I can no longer get away with it, then, idk, retire to a monastery or something

@allison Why Apple then, still like the OS (OS X? macOS? Whatever it is called now)?
There is a wide selection of PCs on the market in the vein of Mac Mini. System76 has it, Purism has it, a few lesser-known brands have them, ARM-based too.
Some can accommodate both SATA and M2 drives at the same time, up to 64 gigs of RAM, newest CPUs — you can't have a decent GPU in it, but otherwise a real powerhouse in a small box!

@m0xee Yeah, software reasons. Also I don't think any other ARM64 computers are capable of driving a 144hz monitor in any sort of performant way

@allison @m0xee
I mean even my phone would be capable of driving a 144hz monitor without lag. It has a 1.8 TFLOP GPU. The display is only 90hz tho.