Comment by dasil003

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but focusing on the number of people that want to run Linux on a Mac and the tangible short-term benefits misses the larger dynamics that could play out over time.

The bigger opportunity is expanding the footprint and flexibility of Apple Silicon in general. As a developer the new MacBook Pros performance characteristics were too juicy to ignore, the main pain points are virtualization and architecture shift. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the low level details to have a fully formed idea of impact of these pain points yet—maybe Apple Silicon and ARM support are equivalent in practice when it comes to development/deployment—but it certainly makes me feel more comfortable paying the Apple premium the more diverse and open the supported use cases are.