They provided and updated Windows drivers for their hardware for more than a decade.

I wrote "Strictly limited to MacOS, no Linux no nothing."

To which you responded "Which, in the history of computing devices, certainly is nothing new. Apple, and others, has been doing this pretty much forever."

So unless you did not articulate yourself clearly, that means exactly that you absolutely cannot do so. Which was false in the past. But for the Apple Neo it is largely true, unless you are talking about developing a solution yourself. There is nothing that works on it other than operating systems from Apple. If I am mistaken, please tell me which alternative OS does work on it.

On the other side, I have a Framework Desktop, simply because that was the only option for buying the Max 395+ on an ITX board, for my custom fanles PC project. I had zero problems installing off the mill Linux distros on it.

Oh man. I began using Linux a little over a year ago by installing Ubuntu (then switching to Mint) on old Macs--a 2011 iMac and a 2015 MacBook Pro. The MacBook had a logic board failure and I decided to grab a super cheap Lenovo IdeaPad from Costco a few months back. Getting a bootable USB for the first Mac was really the only challenge I ever had, otherwise the installs were extremely straightforward (especially when I went to Mint). But for the IdeaPad (which has a CoPilot key on the keyboard and was "optimized for Windows 11"), while there weren't any real gymnastics involved, the process of removing Windows 11 took substantially longer than MacOS and I got the feeling that it was all the "AI" nonsense trying to avoid being deleted. It was clear that this laptop did NOT want something other than Windows on it.

Of course I was successful. And I managed to remap that Copilot key to bring up the Linux Mint menu when I hit it, as an extra layer of dominance.

Indeed, they aren't locked, which is good. However, Apple does also nothing to document a lot of things for 3rd parties which makes it very difficult for them and requires them to do a lot of reverse engineering. Asahi is a great project but progress has been slow, not due to Asahi's fault mind you. So we still have no M3 support and Apple is already moving to the M5.

So saying "hardware support hasn't caught up yet" is putting it a bit mildly. Apple makes it as hard as it can for that to catch on, stopping short of locking it down. But not locking it down is already something and it enabled Asahi in the first place.

There's no reason why you can't design a repairable product with fewer moving parts. Just because I superglued stuff doesn't mean it'll last longer.

Repairable also doesn't mean tool less. It means having published schematics, spare parts available at decent prices as well as using standard tooling (no obsure screw heads or software pairing or DRM or other such fuckery).

Repairable also doesn't mean repairable in the house. It can be repairable by a specialist but that specialist shouldn't be sanctioned by the OEM.

Apple, John Deere, McDonald's etc. all make things that could be repairable with little corporate effort but intentionally make it non repairable.