Apple ships extra stickers with their logo in the box with a lot of their products, maybe slap one on your computer and see how far it gets you in court?

Which is why they changed the wording from "Apple-labeled" to "Apple-branded" around the time of Snow Leopard IIRC.

How much could a branding iron cost?

This place [0] sells custom design branding irons starting at $93.

0: https://brandingirons.com/products/basic-fire-heated-brandin...

It's cooler to use liquid nitrogen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeze_brand

I don't think that works as well on computers.

I used a Hackintosh for a number of years and Apple could have easily shut down the entire community with enough cease and desists. In fact there were engineers that helped provide valuable information.

They don't mind what people do for personal use. Just don't try and turn it into a commercial product.

Any source or further information for what makes you say there were engineers that that provided information? I always suspected some of the people in these communities were engineers but never discovered anything for my thoughts to make it past just being suspicions.

They have shut that down by moving into their own CPUs.

As long as they support Intel Macs, they did not

I give it two years tops, for the last macOS release with x86 support.

As a long time hackintosher (since Leopard) who converted to Apple Silicon recently - not looking back :)

Nothing unless they can know for sure your machine is not a mac running Linux.

Sounds like that would allow a Linux VM running on a macbook