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This is incredibly impressive. I've always hoped that a powerful ARM-based BSD laptop would be a reality one day, but never thought it would happen.

Having a standard platform with support/documentation from the vendor could mean that Snapdragon Elite X could be a solid choice that is easy to support from an OS maintainer point of view.

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Technically you just described an M-series MacBook. Even if you don’t like the BSD-derived genuine certified UNIX that is macOS, they are also supported by OpenBSD and NetBSD. Work is also underway to add support for FreeBSD.

https://www.openbsd.org/arm64.html

https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/apple/

https://wiki.freebsd.org/AppleSilicon

I don't think Apple in any official capacity helps these efforts. Lenovo on the other hand seems to support alternative OSes to some degree.

> BSD-derived genuine certified UNIX

To be fair, that never really mattered.

Arm is aiming for ~50% of the PC market in 5 years. Mediatek's Arm laptop SoC should be released next year. AMD and Nvidia are also rumored to be working on Arm laptop SoCs.

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