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Ouch, that's really horrible - and presumably signing makes it impossible to replace the MacOS recovery with a linux kernel + initramfs to act as recovery UI?

Ouch, that's really horrible - and presumably signing makes it impossible to replace the MacOS recovery with a linux kernel + initramfs to act as recovery UI? Thanks for clarifying. Looks like that's another route to a clean, fast arm64 machine to cross off the list. :( Is one of these machines completely bricked if you wipe the entire SSD including recovery partition, or is the recovery in a separate write-protected flash area that you can't wipe even if you try?

my123 4y ago
Those machines have a boot ROM recovery mode. If you wipe off those essential partitions then it becomes visible as a USB device when attached to a Mac or PC. On Linux, you can then use idevicerestore to recover. Or you can use Configurator from a Mac. macOS Recovery is an essential part of the security model. It is the environment that you can do security downgrades from (to disable Secure Boot for your OS install notably). macOS on Apple Silicon uses per-OS security policies instead of a global machine one, allowing to have an unsecured install and a secured one at the same time, with just a reboot needed. As such, macOS Recovery cannot be modified.