Posted by scrlk 21 hours ago
Ah, so this wasn't a decision Apple freely made based on technical merits. Instead it sounds more like big government and a fancy stock manipulation scheme.
My guess, Apple drags their feet for a couple years and bails after Trump leaves office(or is significantly weakened after the midterms).
What's wrong with US gov caring about supply chain and manufacturing capability of the most needed technology right there - on American soil?
It is in US' interest to be able to produce such complex tech locally
A compromised supply chain is a huge intelligence/national security risk, not just for military platforms but everything from government and commercial datacenters to personal devices used by both public and private sector individuals.
This wouldn't be Apple's first rodeo with Intel. They know how prior partnerships soured. Could a sufficiently powerful shareholder, like the US government, help mitigate Apple's concerns about the outcome of a new partnership? I.e. that Intel would be pressured to honor certain strategic obligations, even if the leadership at Intel isn't so keen?
Was the concern in the past that Intel wasn't honoring strategic obligations or was it that Apple realized their tech sucked and TSMC was the only viable path to deliver world-leading products?
Your comment is dismissive without evidence. The linked article claims there was political pressure. Do you have evidence to the contrary?
Sure, supply chain redundancy is good, but that wasn't enough to get AAPL interested before.
Arm-based windows support via Parallels does work, but AFAICT there's no official way to buy a Windows license due to a Microsoft/Qualcomm partnership.
Microsoft is pretty justified not wanting to support that, versus UEFI on OG Bootcamp. The majority of Linux distros don't ship image support for iBoot either.
Did Apple ever support UEFI? I thought it was only ever EFI; no U.
In any case, EFI is still well-supported by OS installers. iBoot is not.