> Stuff like this makes me wonder: why does Apple do this? If I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, I can assume that these changes are done for performa

> Stuff like this makes me wonder: why does Apple do this? If I try to give them the benefit of the doubt, I can assume that these changes are done for performance, cost, power-saving, or maybe even security reasons. Otherwise it just seems like Apple does these things in order to make it harder for other OSes to run on their hardware. Which is certainly their prerogative, but it just makes me think less of them. The reason for most of these things is most likely that Apple didn't start from scratch with the M1. M1 Macs in many respects appear to be an exercise in "how can we make our existing iPhone / iPad system architecture into a general purpose computer", and so comes with a surprising amount of legacy idiosyncrasies. For example, Apple started using NVMe-like storage all the way back in the 2015 iPhone 6S, and therefore was 1) very concerned with fitting everything into a small, power efficient package and 2) not very concerned with being standards compliant at all. If Apple started from scratch with the M1, it would have most likely been more standards compliant. Out of Apple's self interest and ease of maintenance, not to help the community. If there's anything Apple has shown - on Macs only - is that they're not really hostile with respect to standards compliance and helping third party OS support. It's just that they don't care _at all_ about supporting that, and prefer supporting their own internal processes every step of the way. (Not an expert on this topic at all, just echoing my impression of the system architecture choices)