I very much doubt the math for the PR-to-cost ratio works out to justify hiring them, but presumably the reason would be so that Apple wouldn't have to see articles like this or to have the top comment on tech threads be "this is a huge embarrassment for Apple".
Similar reason as to why companies have bug bounties; they want to incentivize hackers to report bugs through official channels early enough in development that they can get patched before release and before tech journalists write articles about them. They don't want to find out that their products have bugs via social media. Even if that process happens out in the open via a Github issue, getting giant problems like this caught before release and quickly escalated internally through official channels would go a long way towards mitigating article titles like this.
Having said that, does Apple care about the Register or HN? Probably not? And assuming that Apple did care about bad PR among extreme power-users, would Asahi Linux want to be paid by Apple to do testing on their releases? That's also not necessarily a given, the team would have to decide if they wanted to have a more official relationship with the company or not.
Similar reason as to why companies have bug bounties; they want to incentivize hackers to report bugs through official channels early enough in development that they can get patched before release and before tech journalists write articles about them. They don't want to find out that their products have bugs via social media. Even if that process happens out in the open via a Github issue, getting giant problems like this caught before release and quickly escalated internally through official channels would go a long way towards mitigating article titles like this.
Having said that, does Apple care about the Register or HN? Probably not? And assuming that Apple did care about bad PR among extreme power-users, would Asahi Linux want to be paid by Apple to do testing on their releases? That's also not necessarily a given, the team would have to decide if they wanted to have a more official relationship with the company or not.