Torvalds was actually asked in an interview by Jeremy Andrews who was the CEO of Drupal outfit Tag1 if he was going to be an early adopter of Apple’s ARM64 chip when it boots Linux and invited him to praise Apple’s chip.

Much to Andrews surprise, Torvalds failed to praise the new chip to the skies or talk about how wonderful the Apple's MacBook was.

In fact, Torvalds said while the early support will likely be merged into 5.13 of the Kernel it was a long way before Apple hardware was useful with Linux.

He said that it was not the ARM64 part that was the problem, but all the drivers for the hardware around it - the SSD and GPU in particular.

“The early work so far gets some of the really low-level stuff working, but doesn't result in anything useful outside of early hardware enablement. It will take some time for it to be a real option for people to try out”, Torvalds said.

He said that the infrastructure for ARM64, in general, has grown up a lot, and the cores have gone from "Meh" to be much more competitive in the server space.

“ The ARM64 server space was pretty sad not that long ago, but Amazon's Graviton2 and Ampere's Altra processors - both based on the much-improved ARM Neoverse IP - are much better than what the offerings were a few years ago", Torvalds said.

However, he pointed out that he had been waiting to have a usable ARM machine for over a decade by now, and it's not there yet, but it's clearly much closer than it used to be.

To be fair he wanted an Acorn Archimedes, but availability and price made him go with a Sinclair QL (M68008 processor) and then obviously a few years later an i386 PC instead. So Apple was never on his game plan.

That has not stopped the Tame Apple Press from writing stories where Torvalds is going to convert to the over-priced out of date closed source technology Apple peddles.