I was patiently waiting for the M1 16in MacBook Pro to come out. After reading all these revelations, I am now considering not buying the new MacBook Pro and instead, just stick with Linux.
I am an app developer who was thinking of upgrading to the next M1 Mac mini coming out later this year. For my work, I pretty much need an Apple hardware. However after this whole privacy debacle, I have started looking into Hackintosh and whether I can build one to for building my apps.
If anyone has experience with developing for iOS/MacOS on hackintosh, please let me know your experience.
You can run Linux as a host, macOS as a guest[1] under QEMU, buy a second GPU that is supported by Apple (e.g., Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Pulse 4GB) and pass that GPU in its entirety to the guest macOS. The same for one of the USB controllers on your motherboard. Effectively, you get native macOS performance under Linux. A bonus: you can use the iptables firewall with the FORWARD ruleset to control guest macOS network access. The overall setup process is involving, but nothing that an intermediate Linux user would not be able to handle. Please note that it might be actually illegal (?) in some (?) countries to run macOS software on non-Apple hardware.