One of the problems with replicating this with more modern Apple hardware is that Apple have increasingly moved away from the "traditional" PC hardware platform

One of the problems with replicating this with more modern Apple hardware is that Apple have increasingly moved away from the "traditional" PC hardware platform, and their more modern laptops have adopted various design patterns that were traditionally associated with more embedded devices (such as using SPI for their input devices). This is a completely reasonable set of design choices on Apple's part, but it means there's now a pretty long lag between a new generation of Apple devices and it being possible to run native Linux on them in a reasonable way.