:)
Apple uses EFI, to my knowledge. This is not the same as UEFI. UEFI and EFI are pretty good ideas in theory, but the control MS exerts over them is not good.
Of course, I built my own machine, and don't deal with secure boot or any such nonsense. Kitted out to an extreme that I always wanted, and could never afford (free top-end cpu courtesy of intel); I suspect it will last me ten years with minimal upgrades, which is also something that nobody could say about their machines before focus shifted to perf/watt and multi-threaded perf instead of single-threaded perf.
At work, I use a macbook, which converted me in about three days. I might care about the hardware specs of my hulking desktop, but as long as my laptop is reasonably fast, I don't care whether it's 10% faster or 10% slower - especially since I use it to remote into bigger, meaner machines for my hardware development work - but I do care a lot about things like the machine not deciding to break, both physically and software-wise. My previous laptop was a white box, custom built hulking beast; I am surprised it lasted for 5+ years (and is still alive); it has great specs but it's a shitty machine in every sense of the word except for a fast cpu clock speed.
Since I worked at intel and have seen the company from the inside, I don't really have any worries about the future of linux on consumer machines. Intel has no interest in being beholden to a single operating system, even if most of their client (non-mobile, non-server) machines do run windows. Intel is also a bigger swinging dick - sure, MS is about 2-2.5x larger as far as market cap goes, but the control Intel exerts over the hardware ecosystem is much larger. They play nicely with partners, but they always have fallbacks if partners stop playing nicely - for example, EFI versus UEFI. And since they provide reference designs for every new generation of motherboard, well, you see where I'm going with this.
There are two points I'd like to bring into this back-and-forth, which, by the way, I am enjoying. Polite debate is nice.
One: I'm a hardware-nee-software guy. I see a lot of the stack, top to bottom, bottom to top. I am fairly certain that despite every other vendor trying to enforce lock-out and lock-in, it simply won't happen; there are always companies selling unlocked whatever, there are always organizations providing unlocked whatever for free, and there are always people like us breaking stupid restrictions and publishing them.
Two: Trusting trust. Have you heard this, read this? It's almost a pre-requisite for a conversation like this.