1) The article states they are focusing on the phone model that they guess will require the least work to become totally free. This may make the project useless, but it does give it some hope of finishing.
2) The hope is that the M2-M5 won’t be that different from the M1 models - after all, Apple doesn’t want to spend their money reinventing the wheel without compelling reason. I think that is less likely with phones from different manufacturers, though Android phones typically share a lot of single source components.
They're aiming to perfect their support for M1/M2 prior to working on the M3 and later models. Seems like a sensible choice, given that even a baseline M1 or M2 Mac is still a highly compelling device for a vast majority of uses. And Asahi will become more relevant as these devices cease to be supported by newer releases of macOS.
>a baseline M1 or M2 Mac is still a highly compelling device for a vast majority of uses.
Maybe in 2020. Lenovo released an ARM chromebook this summer which has benchmark performance of M1/M2 chips and is perfectly supported by Linux (ChromeOS) out of the box.
2) The hope is that the M2-M5 won’t be that different from the M1 models - after all, Apple doesn’t want to spend their money reinventing the wheel without compelling reason. I think that is less likely with phones from different manufacturers, though Android phones typically share a lot of single source components.