It's important to support hardware that supports software freedom and security. UEFI secure "restricted" boot, from 2011, was one of the first potential issues, certainly not the last.
nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqklkk3vrzme455yh9rl2jshq7rc8dpegj3ndf82c3ks2sk40dxt7qq7hjgu We need our own hardware for multiple reasons. Being able to leverage it to get early access isn't one of the reasons we're talking about it here. It wouldn't give us early access direction, although being partnered with an OEM with early access could likely be used to get it ourselves. The main reason we need our own hardware is so we have a 2nd hardware platform meeting our requirements instead of only having a single option.
Discussion
Maybe it's completely irrelevant but I wonder about your stance on core vs knots issue.
I haven't looked into the issue in depth. There are many great engineers working on both, however something feels misguided or confused.
It's great to see more support for different distributions and implementations. From my work on a Bitcoin implementation, we discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in the process, of which we collaborated with Core to resolve. 😄