This goes for every hardware platform doesn't it? The Raspberry Pi foundation could decide to have Raspberry Pi systems boot only Windows 10 IOT only starting t

This goes for every hardware platform doesn't it? The Raspberry Pi foundation could decide to have Raspberry Pi systems boot only Windows 10 IOT only starting tomorrow. But they don't have any interest to do so. Apple went out of their way to add support for third party OSes to Macs. They actively made tools to allow the Asahi Linux folks and others to boot unsigned OSes on M1 Macs. They would have had much less work - both in terms of making and maintaining the tools as well as customer support work - if they kept the boot system more similar to the iPad boot system it derives from. In general really Apple doesn't seem to be interested in closing down the Mac at this level. Hence why you can (attempt to) run third party OSes on virtually all Macintoshes going back to 1987 [1]. I for one am happy with that. If I buy an Apple Silicon Mac, I won't be running Linux on it - at least not on bare metal. But I might do that in 10 years after Apple's support has ended. [1]: NetBSD claims to still support the Mac II, a Motorola 68030 based Mac release in March 1987: https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/