Or they learn to enable developer mode, unlock the bootloader, and install Linux, or use the officially supported Crostini, or so on. There's like 3 different ways to run Linux desktop apps on a modern Chromebook.
The Macbooks don't let have an officially supported path to unlocking the bootloader (edit: yes, I'm aware of asahi linux, which lives on the edge of what apple allows) and install your own OS. The Chromebooks do. I don't think that comparison plays as favorably as you think.
Honestly I’m pretty convinced that this « open » bootloader was just there to avoid criticism and bad press from specialized outlets when they presented the M1 because, for once, they needed specialized outlet to benchmark the M1 performance and not have anything bad to say about anything else.
They constantly break everything year after year without documenting any change which effectively makes Asahi unusable in anything recent.
I’m betting that they are just patiently waiting for Asahi to die by being too late of several years (which is already the case) to announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader when nobody and especially the press will care anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Asahi and I even have it installed on my M2 Air, the project is doing incredible quality work. But I don’t believe it will last long. Hope I’m wrong, though.
But at the time there was nothing, because Apple Silicon wasn't a platform anyone but them was targeting, because they had just created it.
So they built the infrastructure, and then waited for someone to actually start taking advantage of it, before bothering to acknowledge it.
And because that "someone" isn't a bigcorp (i.e. Microsoft) wanting to do a co-marketing push, but just FOSS people gradually building something but never quite "launching" a 1.0 of it — Apple just "acknowledged" it quietly, at developer conferences, exposing it only via developer-centric CLI tooling, rather than with the sort of polished UI experience they would need if Microsoft was trying to convince Joe Excel User to dual-boot Windows on their Apple Silicon MBP.
> announce « The most secure Mac ever » silently releasing with closed bootloader
That's extremely unlikely to happen, as Apple's hardware and OS developers build Macs and macOS (and all the other hardware + OSes) using Macs and macOS. And those engineers (and engineers working at Apple's hardware and accessory manufacturing partners) will always need to be able to diddle around with the kernel and extensions "in anger" without needing to go through a three-day-turnaround code-signing process.
There's a whole proprietary, distributed kernel development and QC flow for macOS, that looks a lot like the Linux one (i.e. with all the same bigcorps involved making sure their stuff works), but all happening behind closed doors. But all the same stuff still needs to happen regardless, to ensure that buggy drivers don't ship. Thus macOS kernel development mode being just one reboot-and-toggle away.
That doesn't mean that the engineeers will necessarily ship something more flexible than what the PMs asked for. Often not.
But sometimes they will.
Is that gonna be before or after the iphone with no usb port?
Though let's be realistic, here: $600 is much more than the typical school-assigned Chromebook.
These use the A series chip, and even supporting new M chip revisions has been enough of an undertaking that I wouldn't really expect this to get Asahi linux anytime soon....
And apple can lock down the bootloader to be closer to the iPad/iPhone at any time with no notice, and based on their past actions, it would be quite in-line with their character to do so.
The terminal app is not iterm. But Apple's own Terminal.app
And no there's no package manager but there's brew and macports.
But we know there’s lots of other models that they’re already working on. We don’t know how similar or different it is from an OS perspective.
Reverse engineering needs a lot of time and hard work, which may not be worthwhile.
Sometimes someone does this work, and everyone may benefit from it, but you should never count on this happening, unless you do the work yourself.
And macOS frankly provides a far better Unix experience than ChromeOS, in my experience, having actually used both (including for development, though only for a short time on ChromeOS because it was horrible).
What would have been a trivial porting work with documentation, becomes extremely time-consuming and hard work without documentation.
That is why Asahi Linux lags by several years with the support for Apple computers, and it is unlikely that this lag time will ever be reduced. Even for the old Apple computers the hardware support is only partial, so such computers are never as useful for running Linux as AMD/Intel based computers.
Oh so all our hypothetical child has to do to discover what computers can actually do is completely rebuild one's software from scratch with no prior knowledge.
Next you'll tell me F1 drivers in their teens just have to LS swap a Saturn SC2 and book time at a track.
5 seconds of googling will get you an answer to "install blender on a Chromebook"