Certainly they know about it. There is no way they don't.

Public information seems to describe the M4 GPU as mostly a performance-oriented refresh of the one from M3. M5 has brought bigger changes, not least neural/tensor accelerators on chip.

For me lack of thunderbolt is a showstopper, when it’s supported a lot of needed peripherals will be supported automatically. They have apparently been working on tb support since the m1 was released 4 years ago.

But we have still the power of choice: moving consumers away from such closed platforms would affect their business.

And that's with Apple deliberately leaving the bootloader open on Macs. If they had kept it closed like all of their other products then it would be even more of a struggle, and there's always the possibility that they do arbitrarily decide to lock it down on future models.

Thankfully, hardware progress is relatively slow in a way that makes the m1 still a perfectly capable machine. Maybe we’ll have a future of “flagship community devices” where only one of every X is chosen as the supported option.

M1 and M2 hardware isn't going anywhere. They're still great machines. And progress will be faster once the projects finishes getting their code merged into the existing Linux kernel and distro. They have a first alpha of M3 ready, they're just refraining from releasing it because they're so busy with everything else they're doing - a key difference compared with when they first came out with alpha support for the M1.

Most of my software development career was spent working at a small company that sold a product that emulated the operating system developed and sold by a much, much larger company. The work was interesting and when you had a breakthrough or a small victory, it sure felt good. The challenge of keeping up was exhilarating and kept folks motivated to keep pressing forward.

But eventually it wears you down. It's nearly impossible to keep up in the long-term. Normal product evolution, the sheer size of the behemoth and sometimes even malice on their part to thwart the little guy make it really tough to stay current.

Think of Wine vis-a-vis Windows. They will never catch up.

What do you expect when you nerds keep buying their closed systems?