If successful it is be major blow for US, as it sets China one small step away to destroy myth of fake Apollo lunar missions.

And this step can be required during next stage of economic war to almost kill morale in US.

Some years ago (around 7 years ago) it was Apple who invented new tech - now all the boards and screens must be broken/destroyed by any company that gets them for utilization. 2-3 years from this "innovation" Apple demand video fixation of this process and also usually have their own inspectors on large firms doing this.

Goal of this thing is to reduce number of notebooks and smartphones that could be restored by non official services for cheap. Destroying main boards helped. As well as going to soldered CPUs and later to soldered CPU+hubs.

In the years to follow lot of other firms joined Apple, now around 98% of perfectly good GPU complex boards or computer motherboards that have minor issue (like faulty DC-DC converter or hub issue on MB) will be intentionally broken (by drilling or chopping large piece).

Interesting thing is that green ecology guys have amazing smell for such things, few guys I talked perfectly understood that their health and income are in danger if they'll start talking loudly about this. So they prefer to protect snakes in the Amazon delta.

In last 2-3 years companies went further. They started to add "privacy and protection" or, in real life, serialization of each major component to prevent any replacements, including large chips or screens or sensors (including camera sensors in all latest iPhones). At the same time, simple device firmware protection level reaches top government works, now almost all CPUs and lot of hubs have secret embedded CPU cores with their own memory and secret firmware that are doing some stuff (but no one is perfectly sure that exactly). And this secret parts also helps in preventing any repairs (hence - helping increase new machines sales).

Apple M1 fully closed system is just one more step in the same anti social direction. As company hopes to move serialization and total encrypted hell from smartphones and tablets into notebooks. Finally killing any repairability after they totally killed any modularity and upgradability. And it is very naive and false assumption that this guys stop here. As they already started to talk openly that they have right to look at all your apps installed on laptop, as well as files (as they say - it can be dangerous things among them!) and censor anything they won't like. All they will do is rent you notebook for total time of usage with additional fee for active usage and special fee for any application launch and work in it. You will need to remember to use BF deals to be able to afford creating long documents, as it'll be also special extra fee for keyboard typists.

Competition won't allow this to happen? Don't be naive. It is just few monopolies left and they are closing their ecosystems with staggering speeds.

Apple on Thursday in a letter addressed to nonprofits, including Human Rights Watch and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, saying it doesn't hoover up detailed user data to sell to third parties. Facebook takes a "very different approach," Apple said.

"Not only do they allow the grouping of users into smaller segments, they use detailed data about online browsing activity to target ads," Apple's Senior Director of Global Privacy Jane Hovarth wrote in the letter.

"Facebook executives have made clear their intent is to collect as much data as possible across both first and third party products to develop and monetize detailed profiles of their users, and this disregard for user privacy continues to expand to include more of their products."

Facebook hit back hard in a statement sent to Business Insider, accusing Apple of abusing its dominance to benefit itself.

It also told that Apple sent the letter as a "distraction" from privacy concerns that emerged last week after a series of Mac computers had difficulties opening apps.

"The truth is Apple has expanded its business into advertising and through its upcoming iOS 14 changes is trying to move the free internet into paid apps and services where they profit," Facebook said.

"As a result, they are using their dominant market position to self-preference their own data collection while making it nearly impossible for their competitors to use the same data. They claim it's about privacy, but it's about profit," the statement read.

"This is all part of a transformation of Apple's business away from innovative hardware products to data-driven software and media."