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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

Imagine seeing an article on how to boot a modern Dell/Lenovo/HP laptop off an external disk.

You definitely would, if those manufacturers released hardware that was so different from what they shipped before. Hey, you can even google them for current hardware. Examples:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/726938/how-to-boot-from-a-us...

https://www.ubackup.com/articles/lenovo-boot-from-usb-window...

From someone who uses a newest gen xps for work (and an mba privately): that's just comparing apples and oranges at this point. Apple is not in the "Laptop" game, Apple is playing their own game. And good on them, because a lot of the amazing advantages that come with macbooks wouldn't be possible otherwise.

This may seem frustrating from a hackers perspective, but it is what it is.

No gun to any head, you can choose between crappy ten kilo legtop pc with 30 min battery life and in built skin toaster that lets you easily dual boot and a closed down system that works as it should for 95% of people its intended for.

Not saying Apple has to do it the way it's doing everything to also innovate things like M1, but whatever happened to capitalistic society?

You have probably not used a recent laptop pc for a while.

Apple does like to hide things very well, I remember a long time ago (but after they had switched to x86, and all the news about Hackintoshing had me believe they were just branded PCs) I was asked to do some basic troubleshooting on a Macbook and spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out the key to enter the BIOS setup utility, only to find out later that there was none.

Meanwhile, my no-name Chinese mobo exclaims "Press F10 for BOOT MENU!!" (the uppercase and exclamation marks are verbatim) on its BIOS post screen, and nearly all the other PCs I've used have similar if less exciting messages. But with Apple, all you get is an Apple logo, and if you need to do anything other than normal boot, you had better have looked it up because it won't tell you.

Apple just didn't adapt the old IBM PC legacy BIOS after switching to Intel in 2005. [1] Instead, they adapted Intel's EFI [2] which is meant to replace the legacy BIOS. Now you could argue why Apple didn't provide legacy BIOS support like other motherboard manufacturers do today. [3] But I think it conforms to Apple's thinking to not adapt old or unnecessary technology in the first place, and fairly quickly dropping support for older technology. This can be seen in Apple's hardware decisions by being one of the first companies to use USB in the first iMac in the late 90s, dropping disk drives and other ports, etc. and in their software decisions by dropping old APIs or 32-bit fairly quickly.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectu...

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

3: Well, they added BIOS compatibility later, to allow booting OSes like Windows, but what's missing is some fancy GUI around it - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93Intel_architectu...

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