evanosaurus

(I work at Epic on Team Online, aka the team that this whole PM is about.)

And we do indeed take advantage of reserved instances. We’re also looking at other options along these lines.

It's interesting, then, that they explicitly showed the Touch Bar being used for alerts in the design video (when the user received a FaceTime call).

What you could do, however, is read the bits off of the firmware and make sure they're identical to the bits you make from source. Reproducible builds, and all that.

Basebands aside, the rest of the device is somewhat feasible to see being open.

The Secure Enclave is essentially a hardware security module, in more general terms. The only thing that leaves its boundaries are the results of crypto operations, not the parameters that went into calculating them.

Despite the openness of Android/AOSP, there are still, unfortunately, things like binary blobs for certain graphics chips and closed-source firmware for things like Wi-Fi chipsets. Given what we've seen agencies like NSA are capable of (intercepting hardware in transit to apply backdoors, paying off RSA to make Dual EC the default pRNG in their crypto libraries, etc.), them compelling a manufacturer of a component to include a backdoor in their closed-source blobs is no stretch of the imagination.

Apple even has this problem: basebands in cellular modems are notorious for being the source of exploits in otherwise-secure phones.

THIS. It was both amusing and sad to watch this happen time and time again. My favorite is what happened (or, rather, didn't happen) around CoW filesystems and how they decided to just use a FUSE-based one instead.