They don't necessarily have to: there's another, more comprehensive hammer they (or the US for that matter) could use: disallow vertical integration.
Force hardware vendors to only sell hardware. If any software that can be changed remotely or by the user is off limits. Even firmware. Conversely, software vendors can only sell (or freely distribute) software. For vendors from abroad, don't go extra-territorial, just force them to chose: either they only sell hardware in the EU, or they only sell software. Intel and microsoft would have no problem. NVDIA might complain very loudly. Apple would likely have to split itself.
Now the complicated part is how to define a company. We don't want a single company to just split itself into 2 legal entities that work so closely together they might as well be the same company.
Do that, and you'll get much better than device drivers for one free OS. You'll get the necessary specs required to make it work on all OSes. Even better, the user-facing hardware interface will start to matter, and there will be some selection pressure to drive the more complex ones, or the non-standard ones, out of the market. (Won't be ideal, I can see a particular over-complex architecture win out, similar to x86, but at least there won't be that many left, so writing a driver for most devices will actually be possible).
I like this idea because it’s incredibly American. If we’re going to go full on free-market, we might as well live up to those principles.
There is precedent for this idea, in 1948 the Supreme Court forced the film studios to give up exhibition (theaters) with the paramount decision. This enabled the rise of independent film, and audiences benefited from more choice.
If you try to do this legislatively the Apples and the NVidias of the world will hire an army of lobbyists and storm Capitol Hill. But it might be to their benefit. After the breakup of Standard Oil, John Rockefeller became richer because competition forced out the less efficient portions of his old business from the market.
It’s true that it could temporarily degrade the user experience of some people, but that’s a small price to pay. People who give up liberty for safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
There are so many flawed analogies here it’s hard to know where to start. How will it make my everyday experience better as an Apple customer without the integration of software and hardware between my Mac, iPads Watch, Airpods and phone?
Windows laptops are worse in every vector than MacBooks. No consumer is asking for this.
So you want to degrade the user experience for “freedom” by giving the government more power???
> How will it make my everyday experience better as an Apple customer without the integration
Perhaps you should ask the inverse - how good would your experience with Apple be, if there were no open standards paid for by someone else, and fought for by someone else?
You wouldn't even have GPS and navigation. You would not have HTML or the open web. Before we fought for video codecs compatibility you could not even get a video that was recorded on a Device A to reliably play on Device B. The phone would be almost useless.
The people that argue this, they only take from the commons and never give back.
You should go even further and check the video playback experience on apple machines, when divx was all the rage and apple had just a sorrenson video 3. And yeah, full-screen playback was a qt pro feature, paid extra.
Or you can go even further back when Microsoft was caught stealing QT code because they couldn’t do video competently themselves and Apple could (circa 1995).
And every Mac geek knew how to work around it either via free third party software or just using AppleScript
Nah, they didn't, when Jobs said someone has stealing his code, he meant that someone did something similar. Like "stealing his ideas".
Also in 90's, there was no applescript support on macos classic qt, and third party players like vlc didn't exist yet either (not that they ever ran on classic). I know, I was mac user back then and I remember.
I see you don't know how presumption of innocence works. I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but the same applies to them as anyone else.
You can be sued for anything, whether true or not. In the court, it must be proven that you did what you are sued for. So it is either proven, or not, and then the court issues the verdict. If it is not, like in Microsoft's case, they are still innocent. It does not matter whether it was impossible to prove or Apple stopped pursing the case; the court said they are guilty. If you continue say they did it, it is a defamation.
Even without regarding the above, the case was really shaky. Microsoft using the same vendor through a chain (via Intel) as Apple does not mean they are "stealing". That vendor might learn something from working with them, but that does not imply what you said. Nevermind, that Video for Windows had somewhat different scope (video subsystem), than Quicktime (multimedia subsystem). For Apple, it was simply a negotiation card.
Look & feel lawsuit was literally the oh noes, they do similar thing as we do case.
The 1997 settlement was about making peace between these two companies. It had nothing to do with the 1994 lawsuit.
Btw, the result was that "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law].."
If you want to know how it looks when Microsoft did stole something, look at Stacker. Entirely different evidence, entirely different result, including entirely punishment.
I corrected myself; being introduced in 1993 does not mean it was supported by all the Apple utilities since start, at once.
Also, it is not an user friendly solution. Do you know, how it really worked? Mac users were sharing QT pro keys. Most had zero interest in the pro features, except full screen playback.
Well supported? Outside of Apple-only SVQ3 and QDM2, it was deserted wasteland. All the videos you could play on PC, it was pita on a Mac. Even if you eventually had divx codec, you had to convert avis to movs.
But it is already established in this thread by others, that you have your own, RDF-like experience of what happened; no point in trying to discuss any further.
Yes, it’s my “reality” distortion field that AppleScript wasn’t around until 2000 (which you were wrong about), that the Microsoft settlement didn’t involve QT (which you were wrong about), that Job’s sued MS (which you were wrong about) and that it wasn’t well supported by third parties (you were wrong about that too - I used it to do some automation around MS Office by 1995). Since you didn’t even know that AppleScript existed in 1993, how are you suppose to have any credibility about its history?
I actually used it shortly after it was introduced.
So what video were you playing on Windows around the time that QT was introduced?
Do you know what demo was on the QT 3.5 disk that Apple sent out?
Your “facts” are so wrong that you couldn’t have possible been working with Macs when these events occurred.
> * How will it make my everyday experience better as an Apple customer without the integration of software and hardware between my Mac, iPads Watch, Airpods and phone?*
"Open Standards" - There is no reason that your Mac or iPhone should only work with other Apple products through closed and proprietary standards. With adoption of open standards, all devices (irrespective of their manufacturer) can offer a decent integrated experience.
It is a great idea, but with a caveat: communism is a great idea too, and pretty much in the same sense. I can say that about most of the propositions in this thread.
I, as a user (and a vim-user, may I add), would like it very much if all the software and hardware in the world would be fully open, customizable, community-maintained. I, as a manufacturer, am less keen on that idea. So, to make it happen, every manufacturer has to be forced to make that happen. So, literally, we are stepping farther from the open market and killing some personal freedom under a promise of a bright happy future.
And the realness of that promise is as questionable, as the means necessary to achieve the goal. As I've said, personally, I'm very excited about that promise. But it really is just a promise, and if it can be fulfilled is a very, very big question.
Ultimately, nobody really sells hardware or software. Everybody sells user-experience. It is very obvious in Apple's case, but it is always true. It's easy to forget that when you are choosing the cheapest light bulbs on the market, because the user-experience of having electric light in your house has been sold to you so long ago, there are so many basically identical products that the only apparent difference to you is the price. Now you perceive GPUs (or bluetooth, or whatever) as light bulbs. But at some point selling a GPU or a light bulb was quite similar to selling a novel iSomething. The seller had to explain to you, not so much what iSomething is, but how iSomething makes your life better. And if the technology that makes this promise of the user-experience a reality is hardware, software or just exceptional marketing — really is just details.
So, as much as I hate that my fitness-watch is basically a spying device and I don't even own the data it produces (and I mean, I really hate that), I don't feel like forcing Garmin to open-source the firmware is the right thing to do. Maybe I would support some more forceful moves to make the generated data my property, but even here the line is blurry. But forcing them (and better think: you, as a manufacturer) to make something other than you wanted to make — …why the fuck should I? Who decides what is that common standard I don't want in my product, but I have to, to be legally allowed to sell that? I think, I just like the idea of personal freedom a bit too much to support that. I'd much prefer Garmin just losing to competition that chooses open firmware, than legally forcing them to produce anything they didn't want to produce.
> ... literally, we are stepping farther from the open market and killing some personal freedom...
No, we are democratically balancing consumer rights with the rights of entrepreneurs to make money. Consumers need the right to repair and not be limited with closed, proprietary standards. That entrepreneurs may take take a slight hit on their profit due to this is acceptable as protecting the consumer enhances the well being of the overall society that both entrepreneurs and the consumers are part of. (And note that right to repair and open standards can also foster more competition in the "free market" and reduce monopolistic abuses - so it is really a win-win for both sides).
Right. By stepping farther from the open market and killing some personal freedom. (Also, word "democratically" is absolutely meaningless in this context, but that's the usual mode it is used in in western politics.)
> "democratically" is absolutely meaningless in this context
No, it isn't. When a law / regulation / policy is made all stakeholders are consulted and their views sought on it. Consumers are one of the stakeholders in context of what we are talking about. Politicians than work out a compromise that balances everyone's concerns. That's basically democracy at work.
You can seamlessly share standard Bluetooth devices between 5 devices just by pairing it to one like I do with my iPhone, iPad, Watch, MacBook and AppleTV and it automatically switches?
"seamlessly". I've had trouble between just an Apple-branded mobile phone and their branded all-in-one computer when it comes to the Apple-branded wireless headphones. The ping-pong between active sound channel/device had me disable the "seamless" handover, as it were a subpar experience for me. Better to manually decide which device that actively "owns" the channel.
Yeah. Multipoint connection has been a part of the Bluetooth spec since 4.0. Compatible devices will connect to anything available nearby and negotiate audio to whichever device pressed 'play' last. No iCloud mumbo-jumbo required, it was smoother than the Airpods experience when I was using it.
And how many “multipoint” devices support an unlimited number of devices? I currently have 2 AppleTVs, a MacBook, iPad, an iPhone and an Apple Watch all paired to my AirPods .
What’s the pairing process like? Mine is just - sign into iCloud and my AirPods show up.
I have JBL headphones currently paired with Samsung phone, tablet, Intel NUC running Ubuntu and MacBook Pro running macOS. No problem, no cloud login necessary.
And how is he supposed to tell how it will work with your devices? He already said examples of how many devices he has and that it works with, and you did the same for yours. You haven't presented any standard spec and pointed to the part where the spec states the figure that lists the max number of devices. He shared some spec, I am sure you could find some number there.
Apparently 8 with some gotchas? But in principle this should not be gated to a hardware, what is stopping one from making a bluetooth device that muxes all the signals and sends it to the audio device? Is there any reason thats not happening other than greed of the headphone makers to try to upsell "higher models"?
I don't even get the point of these hardcore Apple defenders tbh man. You are not Apple, and you only gain to benefit from if supposedly they have good hardware and software, it also becomes more open for you or others to find better uses for it. You only gain not lose from that. Here on an HN linked article I was reading how Asahi managed to find and fix some audio bug in a macbook model. When multiple people are working on drivers often the foss can end up being superior to the drivers made by the manufacturer.
This website is not a serious place. Intelligent people are not attracted to a platform calling itself "Hacker News" - roleplayers and onlookers get sucked in instead. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs get tricked into thinking that this is problem-solving. DogTV™ gets funded and busts out, destitute shareholders and makers go looking for the next big thing. The cycle continues.
With some people, I have no idea where they fall on the spectrum of self-serious argumentation. I usually don't even care; pretty much all feedback is valuable on a forum like this. When people preclude good-faith discussion around Apple hardware with weaksauce rhetoric though, it's pretty obvious that they're putting their emotions first. I'll field any discussion around Apple and their altruism, but I won't accept petty greed or speculation as a defense. They're an opaque company that deserves the scrutiny they recieve, regardless of the unofficial rationale people roll out.
This problem isn't specific to Apple hardware, or really the tech industry as a whole. Every field has it's pundits; you can usually identify them when they use weak rhetoric and avoid directly addressing your argument. It's still especially bad with Apple technology though, since so little of it is documented well enough to definitively refute any claim. You can't corroborate behavior on your iPhone with source code, or visit the iCloud datacenters to ensure everything is being handled with white gloves. People who know the platform well usually know that there is no definitive answer, and inflammatory riff-raff discussions float to the top.
What do you gain from it remaining closed? Why are you so defensive about the idea of Apple being forced to open it up? Are you an Apple employee or do you have Apple stocks or is there any other reason? You lose literally nothing and gain lots from them being opened up. I don't care about any "trouble" Apple has with it because I am not Apple. I am a person who thinks of his needs first, just as Apple is an entity that thinks of their needs first. They don't need your help for that. Just like Apple my needs come first, and my needs definitely think its more enjoyable to see Apple (and other hardware makers) opened up because it benefits me. I always advocate for and practice things that benefit me, I don't care if it benefits Apple, if it does, good for them, if it doesn't its not my problem either. And Apple thinks the same of you and me and all is customers.
Next though, you'll tell me that those democratically elected officials aren't "people", and are more profit-motivated than a business. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I suppose.
Again, why do I care why it happens. Your “open” standards leads to a shittier experience.
> Next though, you'll tell me that those democratically elected officials aren't "people", and are more profit-motivated than a business. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I suppose
It’s cute that you think politicians represent “the people” considering how PACs work or that you think they are “democratically” elected considering how gerrymandered most districts are.
Then you got to consider how each state has an equal number of senators regardless of population.
Its not open enough. If it was open enough I could feed it any signal I want into the audio interface, including from any bluetooth device to MUX them how I want.
>How will it make my everyday experience better as an Apple customer without the integration of software and hardware between my Mac, iPads Watch, Airpods and phone?
Perhaps that's the wrong question. Perhaps "making my everyday experience better as a customer" is not the be all end all.
That is your benevolent interpretation of the post you are answering to? Or is this just your hyperbolic example of the black-and-white fallacy to show how not to conduct a civil discussion?
I know, the point you are trying to make is buried beneath somewhere but it is really hard to make out. All I see is pettiness. So sad.
Sure, why not? Except for some religous allegiance to "free market" (as it hasn't produced disasters aplenty itself) or some knee jerk rection to the notion of a committee?
Care to name a laptop with the performance, size, weight, and battery life running x86 chips like the MacBook Air - and that won’t fry my nuts when on my lap or sound like a 747 from the fans running?
The Dell XPS 13 inch series was a great pick, and then there was an Asus series, I think the 'B' series, that weighed less than a macbook air, had much longer battery, and had far more ports. Also could be charged with only a usb c cable, no special adapter.
Why would you doubt there are better options? The whole thing about the PC market is it has a much greater diversity of choices. It's silly to think Apple simply makes the best machine for a price point out of all available PC and Mac models.
In the past, the XPS 13 was a hands-down contender for the best laptop on the market. But the Apple-silicon MacBook has since barrelled onto the scene, and it wipes the floor with most of the ultraportable Windows laptops that cross my desk on a daily basis. This XPS is no exception. Compared to the M2 MacBook Air, battery life is worse. Benchmark performance is worse. Screen, while good, is worse. Port selection is worse.
And the rest.
So anyway, I’ve been using the regular XPS 13 for the past few weeks. And, like, it’s fine. It’s just fine. It’s worse than its 2020 predecessor in some ways and better in others. It continues to bring some of the best build quality in the 13-inch space. The display is fine. The speakers are fine. There’s an off-purple color option! It’s certainly one of the best Windows laptops you can buy, and it also doesn’t come close to the performance or efficiency that today’s MacBooks can provide, which says a thing or two about the current state of the Windows laptop space.
And the resolution is worse
Specifically, you’re limited to a 1920 x 1200 60Hz IPS panel
A similarly configured M2 MacBook Air is currently selling for $1,699, which makes Dell’s pricing attractive — though the performance benefits Apple delivers for that extra price aren’t insignificant, as we’ll soon discuss.
One thing to note about the XPS 13, though — the fans get going very easily. They were audible with a couple Chrome tabs and Slack open
Speaking of things that have improved: battery life. I averaged six hours and 42 minutes of consistent use around
You realize there are multiple XPS laptop models, right? Not to mention you are overexaggerating the alleged negative aspects quite a lot . Are you really that addicted to the Apple kool-aid?
Go look at some of the Asus models than if you think an XPS can't compete. Weighed less than a macbook air, more port including ethernet (via a HDMI port), something like 21 hours of battery life, weight was slightly under a pound IIRC.
There's plenty of other models/companies.
The biggest benefit? It's not Apple locking you into their ridiculous ecosystem. But I suspect you're fine with that. Pretty funny in another comment you talk about governments restricting geeks, yet you advocated for the most locked down nannyed device you can hand over money to buy.
Yeah. I already told you there was an Asus that meets that criteria and has longer battery life.
Again, it's ridiculous to think Apple makes the very best lightweight powerful laptop given how diverse the PC market is. You're really durnk on that Apple kool-aid huh.
I didn't strike out with Dell at all. You found one review of one model and then exaggerated it.
You're the exact type of person that required coining the concept of an apple reality distortion field.
So somewhere there is an Asus, yet you can’t name it, can’t find a review of it and I’m suppose to just believe you based on your recommendation of a shitty Dell?
Again, the Dell wasn't shitty. You went out of your way to overexaggerate any flaws it may have had lol. I didn't even really check out your review because I've done my research in the past and know they have models that compete with macbooks. I told you it was an Asus B series, don't remember the exact model, but go visit their page. They advertise the fact it has more battery life and is lighter, it isn't hard to find.
The problem here is you're addicted to the Apple kool-aid and will bend over backwards to deny any non Apple product could be superior.
So you didn’t read the review because “you did your own research”.
Yet you can’t seem to find the magical XPS 13 and cite a review?
Did your “research” tell you that by every objective measure it’s worse? The resolution is four times worse, the battery is three times worse, it’s loud, it’s slow.
Here is the review of the Asus B series. The newest one I could find. The contemporary MacBook Air at the time which was better in every way came out in late 2020 and was cheaper.
Again from the Verge and it’s the nearest one I could find..
Just make sure you know what you’re getting — because the low-powered processor and deafening fans certainly aren’t ideal for everyone.
but potential buyers should be aware that the processor is mostly suitable for basic office tasks. More on that in a bit.
And it’s even worse than the Dell XPS 13 that you were bragging about.
The Core i7-10510U is a four-core processor that’s significantly lower-powered than the chips you’ll see in the best laptops on the market like the Dell XPS 13. It’s far from a workhorse.
So it’s slower, hotter, louder, with worse graphics and lower battery life.
I skimmed the review, it didn't match up with the models I had seen before, and seeing you basically flat out lie to overexaggerate some of the negative aspects made it easy to basically dismiss it and your reply.
I'm not putting any more effort into replying to you, other than typing in the reply box. Your point is asinine IMO, and I'm not interested in doing research to support what I already know, to someone who would bend over backwards to deny anything presented to them.
And that's the thing. You're going to believe whatever you want to believe, because Apple is the entity you worship religiously.
So which model did you have? You can’t find a review anywhere on the internet? You claim I’m the zealout. But every piece of third party evidence you dismiss?
What exactly did I “lie” about? Were the quotes from the Verge inaccurate? What did I over exaggerate?
You have presented nothing. No websites, no reviews, no model numbers.
You said you “researched” your purchase before you bought the your laptop. What websites did you do your research at?
This is what evidence looks like since you haven’t posted a single link.
Just post a citation. It just needs to start with https://
Or if that’s too much trouble , which Dell XPS 13 do you have that has great battery life, performance, cooling, fanless and a decent screen resolution?
I’ve told you exactly what I have - a MacBook M2 air with 16GB RAM and a 1TB drive.
Yeah, I've already said I'm not bothering to put effort into any reply to you. Yet you keep replying.
You can find models that compete with Macbook air on the vendor homepages.It's truly ridiculous to think Your Mac is the top of the top tier laptops available when it comes to balancing performance and battery. Believe whatever you want to buddy.
It's amazing how many people are just loyal to Apple even when it doesn't make sense.
There was a time when PCs started having vastly better graphics cards, and Adobe started prioritizing development for PCs, but still graphic designers were buying Apple because 'it's what creatives use'.
You see this on the last bastion of people still hoping that Mac Pro desktop makes a proper comeback, instead of a Mac Studio in a bigger case.
Creatives buying Apple has always been mostly a North American phenomen, in Europe Apple only started being market relevant after the NeXT reverse acquisition, with iPod and iMacs rescuing it from insolvency.
Yeah the US has a weird fascination with Apple in particular. Just look at iphone users looking down on Android users because their text messages come as green instead of blue.
I'm in the UK, and working in IT, I can assure you that everyone in my team can afford and iPhone.
Only one does.
The cashier at the supermarket have them, you can see them in the back pockets of folks stacking shelves. It's not a device that requires people to be wealthy to own, just a desire.
And the purpose of a for profit corporation is - to make a profit. Why should Apple care about going after the low end market? Only one Android maker makes any real profit - Samsung. How much of that is due to them also making some of their own components and having differentiated proprietary software that some people must like?
Again, we are getting back to the advantage of an integrated solution.
Most Android aficionados think that the Pixels are the best Android phones - another integrated product
It’s not a “fantastic random fact”. It’s not America that has a weird fascination with Apple products. People with money who can afford to buy a better integrated product - choose to buy one.
The reason Apple products are more popular in the US is partially because people in the US have higher incomes and in the US, because if 0% interest payment plans and carrier subsidies, they are more affordable.
When people can, they buy the integrated product instead of worrying about some theoretical “freedoms” or running Linux on the Apple Pencil
Yeah, it was a random fact. Had no bearing on the point I made or the discussion with the other poster I was having.
Everything you've just said above is nonsense. People in the US have significantly lower incomes on average then most other western countries. You really don't seem to know what you're talking about. At all. Yet you feel the need to insert yourself into every conversation.
I won't be replying to you again, and by gods how I wish HN had a block function for people like you.
You don't have facts, just excessive devotion to Apple.
The US might have the 5th highest income, but I said people in the US don't have higher incomes than other western countries on average.
The US has a crazy skewed income disparity. It's an extreme minority making high incomes, and it certainly doesn't support your rather baseless argument.
No, the reason people in the US have much more of an Apple fixation than other countries is because Apple is seen as an elite/luxury item, and due to cultural reasons everyone wants to be seen as being able to afford/own that, even when there is no truth to it. Same reason some people pay ridiculous amounts for Balenciaga t-shirts.
So you do you disagree with the link I posted that the median income in the US is the fifth highest.
Again, you were wrong unless you can find a better citation. Because as of now, you have provided…nothing
> No, the reason people in the US have much more of an Apple fixation than other countries is because Apple is seen as an elite/luxury item,
Geeks just can’t stand the fact that when given the choice and have the ability, choose Apple devices and don’t care about running Linux on the Apple Pencil.
Can you name one country where higher income individuals don’t overwhelmingly by iPhones? It’s definitely true in China - the largest country in the world
I have a silent fanless MacBook Air running an Apple designed chip, with an Apple written OS where I can move my cursor between it and my iPad sitting right besides it and my keyboard and mouse can control both seanlessly. It also gets 16 hours of battery life.
And then I have a Windows laptop with piss poor battery life, sounds like a 747 at idle and runs hot enough that if I actually put it in my lap , it would endure that I don’t ever have any little Scarface’s
On the phone side, the day that Apple releases a new version of iOS, it’s immediately available worldwide for every iPhone that was introduced in the last four years. Is the same true for Android devices?
The main reason Windows sucks is that Windows sucks. No specialized hardware can change that. The second reason is that hardware manufacturers make shitty drivers; because it shouldn't be their job in the first place.
And why is OS X so good? They scrapped the original MacOS, and started fresh with a fork of BSD. None of that has anything to do with monopolizing hardware.
It's also absurd to compare Apple's limited selection of exclusively flagship devices against every existing Android device. Compare them with their direct competition, and your point is moot.
If Apple's hardware division was broken off into a separate company, Apple's software division would be able to do everything they do today as a customer of that hardware company. The only difference would be that everyone else could too.
So none of the fact that my MacBook Air runs quiet and fast running Apple designed processors, using an Apple designed OS, and integrating with other Apple hardware has anything to do with Apple being integrated?
And it shouldn’t be the company’s responsibility that made the hardware to make drivers and they should depend on who to do it then?
Whoever writes the OS is in a much better position to write drivers. This is the reason Linux drivers are (usually) very good.
This is also why the current vertically integrated Apple is able to write good drivers: it isn't an isolated hardware manufacturer writing a driver. Because it's all one company, the OS team can be involved with driver development.
The solution for everyone would be to simply publish the hardware spec such that Apple, Microsoft, and Linux devs are able to write their own drivers.
The notion that hardware specs must be kept secret (because driver development is integrated with hardware development) is harming everyone, except the select few who have their own seats in the backroom.
Vertical integration is creating the very problem that you see Apple solving with vertical integration. Unfortunately, Apple is solving it exclusively for Apple, while hanging everyone else out to dry.
This situation is not unique to Apple, which is why we have shitty NVidia drivers in Linux, and why Android hardware support ends.
> Whoever writes the OS is in a much better position to write drivers. This is the reason Linux drivers are (usually) very good.
You really think that Linux developers would know how to squeeze better performance out of Nvidia hardware than the Nvidia even with the design specs? Nvidia has the foremost experts in designing GPUs and software around it (Cuda).
The software and the hardware teams know the intricacies of their hardware better than anyone and they work in concert to design a better product.
How long would it take the hypothetical Apple Hardware company to release products that the hypothetical Apple Software company wrote drivers for if they were split up?
Could the new Apple hardware company say release the AirPods that paired seamlessly with multiple products just by pairing with one device signed into your account and release a new version of MacOS, iOS, TvOS, etc at the same time? Apple, Google and even AWS (in the server space) design hardware and processors in tandem with their software teams. They don’t just throw designs over the fence with documentation.
> This situation is not unique to Apple, which is why we have shitty NVidia drivers in Linux, and why Android hardware support ends.
That’s a poor excuse. The fact is that Google is just a shitty platform caretaker. Microsoft has the same business model where they make the OS and license it to OEMs yet they support hardware for years if not decades.
Google doesn’t support its own phones as long as Apple. There is no excuse.
> You really think that Linux developers would know how to squeeze better performance out of Nvidia hardware than the Nvidia even with the design specs?
Yes. Even more importantly, they would be able to keep it stable alongside Mesa and Wayland/Xorg updates.
> Nvidia has the foremost experts in designing GPUs and software around it (Cuda).
And breaking up the company wouldn't make those people disappear! On the contrary, it would liberate their work. They would suddenly be free to start making CUDA compatible with AMDGPU! It would be wonderful.
Even if those people kept their work closed-source, just having an open hardware spec would do wonders for nouveau development. Last I checked, nouveau can't even set the GPU clock speed!
> Google doesn’t support its own phones as long as Apple. There is no excuse.
And that's my entire point! Google is bad at handling this responsibility, so let's take it off their hands! The reality is that Google doesn't want us to, because long term support is bad for their bottom-line!
> And breaking up the company wouldn't make those people disappear! On the contrary, it would liberate their work. They would suddenly be free to start making CUDA compatible with AMDGPU! It would be wonderful.
The chip designers at NVidia work alongside the software people iteratively. They don’t just design the perfect chip and throw it over the fence.
Cuda isn’t just great (I’m not in that space, it might suck. I honestly don’t know) software that could be ported to any architecture. Cuda is written to work on a specific architecture both the hardware and the software inform each other.
Well that world would suck immensely, with horrible integration between hardware and software like exists right now outside of the Apple world. Case in point: can you copy text on your phone, and paste in your computer (and vice versa), seamlessly as if it were the same device, without any configuration, hacks or programs needed? Things like that are amazing and I'd never give up. And I'm sure most people wouldn't want to give this up either just because Linux fanboys want to.
> Well that world would suck immensely, with horrible integration between hardware and software like exists right now outside of the Apple world.
Why? The hardware people at companies like NVIDIA or Apple already have to write detailed documentation for their stuff anyway so that the software people can do their side.
Assuming they do a good enough job at writing documentation and testing their hardware, it should not be a problem for Linux developers to write appropriate drivers. Hell there are a very few select people able to write high quality drivers even with zero documentation (see Asahi Linux).
The only ones in trouble would be the vendors of crap SoCs who ship extremely buggy hardware and make up for the lack of QA in software quirks instead.
1. Hardware companies need some software to test their product, so this will be wasting their effort.
2. Good documentation and testing is probably not as common as you think.
3. It takes a huge amount of effort to write high quality drivers by reverse engineering. The thing about Asahi Linux is that the hardware does not have many variants, but there are a lot more different hardware for PCs.
> 1. Hardware companies need some software to test their product, so this will be wasting their effort.
They can also open source their testing bench code. The only ones who have to be afraid are those who don't care about quality. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" also applies here - I'd really like to be able as a consumer to choose the product that demonstrates the better engineering!
> 2. Good documentation and testing is probably not as common as you think.
Oh, I'm aware of that, and the consequences of that are becoming more and more dire as electronic waste from defunct companies or unsupported and unsecure devices piles up, together with hacked IoT devices causing mayhem on the wide Internet in botnets.
It's high time for that to stop.
> 3. It takes a huge amount of effort to write high quality drivers by reverse engineering. The thing about Asahi Linux is that the hardware does not have many variants, but there are a lot more different hardware for PCs.
So what? Ordinary PC hardware at its core still conforms to decades old standards that can be used as a fallback. Given a sufficient supply of beers, coffee and pizza, every CS student worth their money can throw up a basic graphical OS that runs on any mainstream (i.e. non-embedded) x86 system. Input, output (video, serial, audio, keyboard, mice, accessories) and storage all have standardized interfaces - the only thing that does not is networking.
There is no reason at all to say that the ARM world can't standardize on basic components or at least interfaces. Apple can - their UART implementation, according to rumors, dates back to the early iPod/iPhone days, while Samsung has something like five or six completely different implementation, and Mediatek and all the other SoC vendors run their completely own stuff.
> 2. Good documentation and testing is probably not as common as you think.
Not to mention that documentation != the actual behavior of the card. both nvidia and AMD release a ton of day-one driver fixes for new games being released that provide stability and sometimes double-digit performance gains over a pre-patched driver. The only way this works in a disintegrated ecosystem is if game devs become pros at creating driver bug workarounds.
> The only way this works in a disintegrated ecosystem is if game devs become pros at creating driver bug workarounds.
They already are, they have to because that is the reality on mobile games. IIRC the devs of Real Racing (or another Android car race game) made a blog post on that.
Every year, Apple releases new hardware and software in tandem. How long does it take Android manufacturers and Windows manufacturers to take advantage of the latest OS features?
How are those Android updates working out compared to iPhones?
Way way too long, but to be fair a huge part of the issue are carriers and their insistence to pack the phones full of bloatware that needs to be tested against each update.
> and Windows manufacturers to take advantage of the latest OS features?
Windows device manufacturers tend to do what Microsoft demands of them.
> How are those Android updates working out compared to iPhones?
Samsung is fairly decent, although I'd be happier if they'd ... consolidate their lineup a bit and instead offer longer availability for spare parts.
And guess why? Because ~3-ish years used to be what the SoC vendors provided as BSP support timeframe, and there was no mandate that they open up their specifications. Most don't even care about following the legal minimum aka provide the kernel and bootloader source code, especially not all these fly-by-night gongkai "brands".
No, it's what happens when there is no competition in the SoC vendor area. Apple and Samsung don't sell to external customers, NVIDIA doesn't do much with Tegra outside of the Switch and automotive, Broadcom doesn't do much in mobile SoCs (and from what the Raspberry Pi community learned hard, their chips are utter dogshit which is how RPi got started after all - they used surplus crap that Broadcom wasn't able to sell), which leaves Qualcomm as a sole supplier for the "high end" and Mediatek/Rockchip for bottom-of-the-barrel crap. There used to be Annapurna Labs as well, QNAP used their SoCs for a while, but I think they stopped selling to externals as well as they were bought up by Amazon and now only do Graviton which are Amazon exclusives.
> And yet Apple uses Qualcomm chips and manages to update 10 year old phones.
For modems, yes, but only because there's even less competition in that area (which is why they bought Intel's mobile modem business, but failed to produce a viable design in all the years since).
They've been running their own SoC designs since the iPhone 4 era in 2010.
Apple has an interest in keeping their devices alive, since they can make money of the store and services. Android manufactures want you to throw the phone away and buy a new one.
Since manufacturers didn't demand long support, Qualcomm didn't provide updates for their SoCs. This meant Fairphone couldn't support their phones even if they wanted to, which is why they used am automotive chip in their new phone — which is nearly the same as a phone chip except the 13 years of updates.
The problem with an unregulated free market is that eventually one or two companies get so dominant that it is virtually impossible to challenge them as a competition, especially in fields that require immense amounts of money to break into. One might even argue that the end game of capitalism is to acquire a monopoly, which one can then use to extract rents as one feels free to do, or just keep milking locked-in customers (like IBM and Oracle are).
It took Apple, flush with cash from iPhones and iPods, a decade worth of work to create a SoC able to throw punches at eye level with Intel and AMD, which themselves grew to the unholy duopoly over decades. Chipmakers have it even worse: TSMC has all the cards, Samsung and Intel have completely fallen behind with no chance in sight that they'll match TSMC any time soon. All the other competition has gone bankrupt or stopped at lesser nodes because they couldn't keep up the pace.
There's no disrupting that, not even if you are an actual nation state.
Agreed. Google has gone down the drains just as well on all fronts... the thing is, once again, there is no viable competition left since Microsoft gave up. The various Linux phone projects are extremely niche stuff, Blackberry and Symbian are long gone, and Google seems to be happy coasting along on mediocrity and billions of dollars in Play Store revenue.
That wouldn't change at all. The newly separated software company would get appropriate hardware specs and prototypes during the same timeline they do today (as a vertically integrated branch of Apple).
So instead of working together , the software team would work in isolation and then when they are finished they deliver to the hardware company and keep going back and forth? Yeah that’s going to work out real well. Let’s just look how well it work for Android.
I am saying that Apple has a software and hardware division that work in concert.
Chris Lattner, the inventor of the Swift programming language and the open source LLVM was once interviewed on the Accidental Tech Podcast and he was asked whether bytecode could be used to allow Apple to switch architectures without forcing them to require developers to recompile and still have native compilation. He made up some half truth about whether that would be possible.
Years later when the S chips in the Apple Watch became 64 bit, he admitted that at the time of the interview, he knew that the 64 bit S chip was on the roadmap internally and he designed the LLVM with that in mind.
That’s what happens when you have software and hardware teams working together. The same is true with Nvidia and the their software developers who design Cuda and Intel and the compiler makers.
There were also reports that the software team responsible for the JS engine in WebKit worked with the processor team and the processor team did some design work around Apple’s ARM variants to make JS pre compilation faster.
This is also the whole idea of VLIW architectures where the processor manufacture depends on a team of compiler makers to ring out efficiencies and they work closely together.
Heck even back in the Apple // days, Woz a developer, designed hardware and software together.
Have you wrote drivers? Writing a driver off documentation is: a) very hard, how do you debug anything without JTAG ports and simulators? and b) not correct on principle because the documentation is not the hardware, there are errata in the hardware so what documentation says is not always what the hardware does and there are mistakes in the documentation for the same outcome.
>The only ones in trouble would be the vendors of crap SoCs who ship extremely buggy hardware and make up for the lack of QA in software quirks instead.
I.e. the every single vendor currently on the market...
> Writing a driver off documentation is: a) very hard, how do you debug anything without JTAG ports and simulators? and b) not correct on principle because the documentation is not the hardware, there are errata in the hardware so what documentation says is not always what the hardware does and there are mistakes in the documentation for the same outcome.
I agree with you, no system (particularly not something as complex as an entire SoC) is free of bugs.
> I.e. the every single vendor currently on the market...
And yet, we have Apple, whose hardware quality alone is good enough for a dedicated team to reverse engineer and write drivers for, with almost zero documentation available.
The problem, as I expanded below, is the complete lack of competition in the SoC space. Everyone gets away with mediocrity because the largest players in town (Apple and Samsung) refuse to sell their chips to externals. The result is that the mobile ecosystem as a whole suffers, because that is what happens in markets where entities get too large.
>And yet, we have Apple, whose hardware quality alone is good enough for a dedicated team to reverse engineer and write drivers for, with almost zero documentation available.
Apple own software is pretty janky, my current MacBook cannot bring up GPU after sleep about once a month and needs a reboot to begin drawing GUI correctly again, used to be dying completely waking up before it was fixed couple OS updates back. My previous MacBook could not stay on WiFi for more than a couple hours straight, never had been fixed.
Also, reversing an existing working driver is different from writing a driver from scratch. In one case you just need to repeat the functionality, produce the same outputs for the same inputs, the quality of hardware is orthogonal here since it's already worked around in the existing driver. It's orders of magnitude easier than writing the thing from scratch.
Documenting this in detail is neigh impossible. Ashai Linux has the benefit of having working code to RE - this wouldn't work for silicon or board bring up.
> Case in point: can you copy text on your phone, and paste in your computer (and vice versa), seamlessly as if it were the same device, without any configuration, hacks or programs needed?
I am guessing that AirDrop, Sidecar, etc have absolutely nothing to do with hardware-software integration, and have ≥ Layer 3 implementations. KDE Connect and Microsoft My Phone are competitors.
Exactly. Apple could have made this work across other platforms (Windows, Android, Linux), but chose not to. KDE Connect, for example, runs on quite a few platform, including all popular ones. https://kdeconnect.kde.org/download.html
I generally think any company with a >10 billion (2023 US) dollar valuation should be forced to do things that may not directly benefit them but benefit society. Having to publish open specifications for all their proprietary integrations is a pretty easy, relatively low-cost example.
How to make this work in practice is a really interesting question. Community and employee representatives on the board would be a good start. But I think just having the requirement that open specifications be made available, and writing that into legislation, would be great.
If a company doesn't want at least some element of that, the solution is very simple: drop below a USD $10B valuation by spinning off parts of the company. Note that I said TEN BILLION DOLLARS. A "decacorn". That is an unfathomable amount of money. If you've created a company worth that much you've won at capitalism.
If governments had a good track record I'd advocate for that. No need for strawmen like five year plans, I think competition is a wonderful thing.
My underlying, strong belief is that corporations are legal fictions created primarily to benefit society, Milton Friedman's philosophy notwithstanding.
It’s not hard core capitalism. It’s that geeks hate when people make their own choices without government interference because normal people don’t care that they can’t run Linux on the Apple Pencil.
It’s also naiveté to think that government power isn’t the most dangerous kind of power imaginable even though almost every law proposed by the government with regards to tech is roundly criticized by the same people.
> It’s also naiveté to think that government power isn’t the most dangerous kind of power imaginable
That's only true if the market isn't free. If private businesses are not kept in check, they can (and have) overthrown government power. Ask me how I know!
We have seen plenty of third party companies that have found 0 day vulnerabilities in both iOS and Android and sold the capability to nation states and law enforcement.
Why do you think that the NSA needs Apple and Google’s help?
But isn’t that a reason to be more concerned about government power and not try to give the government power?
Google spies on you and targets ads. The government has the power to arrest you and send you to black sites and cause you all sorts of harm if you go against its interest. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a publicized fact that the government went after MLK for upsetting the status quo and did wiretaps.
> Why do you think that the NSA needs Apple and Google’s help?
Because leaked NSA documents have implicated them since 2010.
> But isn’t that a reason to be more concerned about government power and not try to give the government power?
I mean, not when private interests are compelled to manufacture them. If anything, it's a reason to demand all software be Open-Source and let the malware-manufacturing cocksuckers suffer the consequences.
The suggestion was simply that companies that make more than 10 billion should be forced to give back to society. That's it. To be against that is indeed hard core capitalism, bordering on religious fervor.
They do give back to society - they provide jobs, pay taxes, and mobile has created millions of jobs and put computers in billions of people’s pockets.
I’m hard core don’t trust giving the government more power. Corporations don’t have guns and the right to drag you to jail and take your stuff without a trial (civil forfeiture).
You want to see what government can do with power - look no further than Desantis or this…
Requiring megacorps to give back to society (which, no, selling their products and providing jobs is NOT what was being talked about when giving back to society was mentioned, what a ridiculous take) doesn't require government overreach, just regulation which other countries manage fine, other countries that are nowhere near the illiterate uneven class disaster the US has become.
Government overreach is a legitimate concern in some cases, but not here. Regulating megacorps is something the US needs, and society would be all the better for it.
It’s a conspiracy theory that the government abuses power? Civil forfeiture, the links I gave you where there is a documented abuse of power, Desantis - a presidential candidate punished a private corporation for speaking out against a policy and running a campaign on fighting the free speech rights of anyone who doesn’t agree with him in Florida (where I live). Those are all figments of my imagination?
Do you like any of the previous laws the government has passed or tried to pass with relationship to tech?
And the EU isn’t exactly a role model for innovation and success in the tech industry.
Design-by-committee doesn't sound half-bad if it can standardize a single serial cable that doesn't have licensing fees. Doesn't resemble an unreasonable use of government power at all.
I don’t think that’s the argument you think it is. Thought experiment, grab a random USB C cable, now tell me:
1. What speed can you transfer data through it?
2. How much power can it deliver?
3. Can it support video over USB C?
4. Say a random device comes with a USB-A cable on one side and a USB-c on the other. Now take a standard usb c/usb c cable, will it always charge the device?
Also when that same government first wanted to “standardize”. They wanted to standardize on micro-USB.
> Thought experiment, grab a random USB C cable, now tell me
Oh, easy. Apple already solved this one; if it has the Thunderbolt logo, it's maxed out. If it's anything else, you're usually getting at least 5w charging and USB 2.0 speeds. In other words, the worst-case scenario is usually slightly better than Lightning.
I travel with a portable monitor that gets power and video from one USB-c cable. It works with both my personal MacBook Air and my work Windows laptop.
> So your solution to making sure that you get the most compatibility is to buy Apple cables for Apple devices…meet the new boss.
I was hoping you'd bite the hook, but not like this...
Intel actually designed the spec, drivers and IC controllers for Thunderbolt. Apple consulted on it with USB-IF, but they don't own the spec like they do with Lightning. They're less of a new boss, and more subsuming their rightful position as a valued consultant on a shared standard. It's a good (albeit old) example of Apple doing the right thing through the right channels.
And then if the standards body doesn’t accept their solution because low end Android manufacturers don’t want to spend an extra 20 cents on a build of materials?
That’s why PC OEMs didn’t support FireWire before USB 3 came out except for Sony and Dell on some of their high end offerings.
If you don’t like Apple’s offerings you are free to choose Android/Windows
KDEConnect lets you sync your phone keyboard, even with Windows. And Apple could let you sync your clipboard to non-iOS devices too, they just block arbitrary features unless you buy into their entire ecosystem.
Is the implicit "… not written by the original OS vendor" at the end of your sentence intentional? There is obviously a program and/or configuration, just done by Apple. Nothing precludes building such a system in other systems.
Yes, the whole discussion is about vertical integration, achieved best so far by Apple. I'm sure it can be done in other systems, but for whatever reason other systems haven't made it as simple and seamless. I wonder why. Could it have something to do with the lack of vertical integration maybe?
But this does not really support your statement no? What you described seems to me SW only functionality no? And if in requires any special HW (BT? I have no idea how it works under the hood), why does it need tight integration? I do not see a technical reason why Android and Windows could not provide the same feature out of the box, despite neither the Google nor Microsoft making the HW.
> Non-obvious is a requirement for patent protection that literally means your invention is not obvious to someone who is in the same industry. A new invention needs to be unexpected or surprising and cannot be anticipated by looking at the existing technology or prior art.
Really your example serves as disproving your point, without the hardware walled garden there could be nothing to prevent apple to distribute the software to copy-paste from-to multiple devices
Ah just forgot to add to the point, its possible to copy paste from mobile/desktop with kconnect that is open source, its not that bit of a deal that requires special hardware
KDE Connect is a project that enables all your devices to communicate with each other. Here are a few things KDE Connect can do:
Receive your phone notifications on your desktop computer and reply to messages
Control music playing on your desktop from your phone
Use your phone as a remote control for your desktop
Run predefined commands on your PC from connected devices. See the list of example commands for more details.
Check your phones battery level from the desktop
Ring your phone to help finding it
Share files and links between devices
Browse your phone from the desktop
Control the desktop's volume from the phone
Also you can read and reply to messages on your Android phone by navigating to messages.google.com without installing anything
Firefox and I presume chrome let you push tabs from one machine to the other or with forefox simply pull up a list of tabs currently open on the other device.
Unified remote also gives you a great remote for our multimedia pc.
Basically every email service abd chat app has good integration between desktop and phone.
Mpd and mafa lets me easily listen to my music
Calibre and calibre companion let's me easily sync my books
I doubt one person making these things would make them better
KDE Connect requires both devices to be connected to the same network, which means you have to connect your devices to the same VPN if you're on a wifi network with client isolation (most public wifi). If you're away from wifi, you'll have to configure one of the devices to be an access point and join everything else to that device.
Apple's clipboard/handoff/continuity automatically works as long as the devices are within wifi/bluetooth range.
This is a good point and a good reason to propose an improvement to KDE Connect but users point was that integration would be awful if not done by the same party and it seems to my eyes to be pretty good despite one being created by a party with literally a billionth of the resources of the other.
It doesn't seem to be enabled by default though. I'm not totally familiar with the situation, but I'd assume it's a problem with multi-device handling and switching to the best backend. For most people/situations, the Wifi Direct option will be faster and lower-latency.
It also wont magically stop working 30 feet away if you want to use the multimedia remote functionality. Graceful degradation seems like a useful feature but if you aren't careful the result might be flaky
> Case in point: can you copy text on your phone, and paste in your computer (and vice versa), seamlessly as if it were the same device, without any configuration, hacks or programs needed?
Circumstantially, yes. I am a KDE user though, on GNOME you do have to install a little app for it.
Yes, that works if I want it to, e.g by running KDE Connect (which works outside of KDE). Works on Linux, Android, Windows and even on Apple-things in case you need to escape the walled garden...
Sounds like it needs a special program and configuration, which is not needed on Apple devices. Also, KDE Connect needs both devices to be in the same network - which is not needed for Apple devices. My phone can be on 5G, and my Mac can be on wifi. Or they don't have to connected to a network at all.
> Sounds like it needs a special program and configuration, which is not needed on Apple devices
How else would it work across different devices? Apple devices can not connect to e.g. Android devices without a 'special program and configuration' nor can they do so with Linux or Windows or whatever other devices.
> Also, KDE Connect needs both devices to be in the same network - which is not needed for Apple devices
KDE Connect and other similar tools work fine over a VPN which is the preferred solution for such setups. You can choose which VPN you want to use, OpenVPN and Wireguard are two popular choices. Here again that VPN can be used to connect disparate devices - Linux, Windows, Android, Apple-things, whatever. Apple devices only talk to other Apple devices which is far more restrictive.
If you are a happy camper in the walled garden then things are good for you. I prefer the freedom of camping in the wild even if that means I may have to build my own fire and cook my own food since it enables me to go where I please without being held back by that wall and without having to pay the ferryman. To each his own I guess?
> How else would it work across different devices? Apple devices can not connect to e.g. Android devices
I was talking about Mac and iPhone having seamless integration - something I have not noticed of any other ecosystem. I have not been able to share clipboards with an android and a PC (Win and Linux) without installing an app, or doing some other hacky things. The integration, while possible, doesn't exist by default. It's not seamless. It doesn't _just work_.
> KDE Connect and other similar tools work fine over a VPN
I don't want to use a VPN? I want to use my regular home wifi or phone network, like a normal person.
> I have not been able to share clipboards with an android and a PC (Win and Linux) without installing an app, or doing some other hacky things
How else would this type of interchange work between disparate systems other than by equipping all systems with a piece of software to bridge the gap? In what way is this a problem and what makes it 'hacky'? When you want to use your Apple-device to interact with something non-Apple you install a piece of software to enable this interaction - that was the premise of a 'smart phone' after all, a device which' functionality can be extended by installing software? This in contrast to a 'feature phone' where all functionality has been baked in by the manufacturer/distributor. You seem to be using your Apple devices more in the way of the latter - using only manufacturer-provided functionality.
> I don't want to use a VPN? I want to use my regular home wifi or phone network, like a normal person.
I do not want to use 'the cloud' and Bluetooth in ways I do not have control over [1] - as I said, to each his own?
Not only copy/paste, but have notifications shared both ways, use your computer as a phone laptop, use the phone as a trackpad/mouse, and much more. It just works.
It obviously uses "a program, a hack, or configuration" (taking these from the original reply), just that they are written and pre-installed by Apple, and work seamlessly.
But from the end-user perspective it doesn't really. Nobody consciously sets the universal clipboard up, it comes as part of the cohesive whole of the Apple ecosystem. That's my point. Whether or not you want to dive deep into nerdland of if it's a program or not is besides the point, because for the end-user none of it matters, and that's why the vertical integration is nice.
Probably true. The whole vertical integration does rub me the wrong way though, it's just uncomfortable to have one company own so much of my personal computing infrastructure, especially one that is so unfriendly to "tinkerers" like me.
Then don’t buy a device that doesn’t meet your needs? I don’t go shopping in the big and tall store expecting to find something that meets my needs when I am five foot five.
Literally never needed to copy text from smartphone to pc (or viceversa). At best anyone needs to sync between photos, docs or stuff like that. For that you just need a sync on the cloud like Dropbox, Drive, Box, and so on (also never heard of bluetooth for small files?)
moreover, apple's software is generally very buggy.
I never felt like syncing my devices besides steam cloud saves. Too much convenience makes me uncomfortable. Especially if it means mixing corporate and personal stuff.
Yeah, can also view email on both phone and computer since forever ago - this is not even remotely similar to the shared clipboard of an iPhone and Mac, where you don't need to open any links or programs, install anything, configure anything - you just copy on phone/computer and then instantly are able to paste on phone/computer.
Have you ever wanted to copy anything from A->B that wasn't a 2fa text, a password, or a url? I certainly haven't. An android phone out of the box supports syncing tabs and passwords and provides a trivial way to copy 2FA codes with a built in feature.
So your argument is that because the things to copy are few, this feature doesn't matter? Or what? I fail to see how what you say contributes to the discussion of vertical integration in any way.
Not few none. People need to share files, tabs, messages, mails. If you can share the things people actually want shared then sharing the clipboard itself has zero value.
Your response is completely irrelevant to the discussion of vertical integration. Whether or not you find use in it is up to you, and I don't really care.
This is completely impossible with any hardware made in the last 20 years or so.
The problem is that you cannot make a hard distinction between hardware and software. An Intel CPU simply isn't going to run without microcode, and having to get rid of microcode would easily set back chip design by a decade.
Even something as trivial as a USB cable isn't pure hardware anymore. It has a programmable eMarker in order to advertise its capabilities, so it is also a combination of hardware and software. Everything but completely trivial chips has some kind of computation embedded in it, requiring some firmware.
Chips are complicated and weird. Pretty much nobody writes code which directly interacts with hardware. Even people who write code for embedded microprocessors will use an SDK provided by the chip manufacturer to smooth out the nastiest details. How's that supposed to work when the hardware vendor can no longer provide any software?
And then there's the question of what exactly constitutes "firmware". Is code in a separate programmable flash chip okay if they hardwire the Write Protect pin? What if the exact same code is stored in programmable space in the MCU itself? Is it fine to place that code in One-Time-Programmable memory? Bake it into the chip during wafer manufacturing? If anything, being able to update the firmware in the field is better for the consumer when it comes to fixing bugs.
> The problem is that you cannot make a hard distinction between hardware and software. An Intel CPU simply isn't going to run without microcode, and having to get rid of microcode would easily set back chip design by a decade.
Simply put, if the microcode can be updated by the user or remotely by Intel, then it count as "software", and Intel should stop shipping it. But if those update are either impossible or require a factory recall, then it's "hardware", and Intel can happily continue to ship it.
The same logic applies to the USB cable, and even FPGA: if the bitstream is locked into the NVCM, that's hardware. If it's merely written in the rewritable SPI flash, that's software. It's not a property of the bitstream itself, it's a property of how it is stored.
Obviously the cost of micro-code bugs will sharply increase. That's kind of a feature though: now hardware vendors must be really careful.
Can you imagine the nightmare alternate universe of waking up to hear that Rowhammer is raging uncontrolled in the world, and the only way to fix it is to either return a data center full of affected products to the manufacturer or pay a specialist (who would probably be booked out for a long time to come) to come onsite?
Last I checked Rowhammer is raging uncontrolled in the world, and the only way to fix it is to swap the RAM with something that actually works. I’m not aware of any configurable firmware residing on RAM chips.
Yikes, lol. Way to put my foot in my mouth. For some reason I was thinking it was fixed with software, but that was just a taxing mitigation that only lowered the chance of success. I stand corrected, we do in fact live in that nightmare world.
> Force hardware vendors to only sell hardware. If any software that can be changed remotely or by the user is off limits. Even firmware. Conversely, software vendors can only sell (or freely distribute) software.
So, I would go buy a smartphone at a shop, and then buy an OS to run on it at another shop? Or would it be allowed for a third party to integrate the two and sell me a working phone?
Also, would “any software that can be changed remotely or by the user is off limits” mean Intel/Samsung/… couldn’t sell CPUs with microcode installed, or even write microcode? It may be hard to legally define where the border between “software that’s part of the hardware” and “software.” lies.
> You'll get the necessary specs required to make it work on all OSes
I don’t see how that follows. Software company C could pay hardware company H to build hardware according to specs they give, with the specs under NDA, possibly even forbidding H to sell that hardware design to others than C.
I think banning trade secrets (https://www.wipo.int/tradesecrets/en/tradesecrets_faqs.html) on the interface between software and hardware, rather than splitting companies into hardware and software parts is the way to achieve your goals.
> So, I would go buy a smartphone at a shop, and then buy an OS to run on it at another shop?
Good point, by default you would. Perhaps allowing some third party to bundle the two could be a nice convenience, but then we must make absolutely sure that they never sell the bundle for less than the separate parts, that would be anti-competitive.
Also, I'm sick of paying for a Windows copy I never use. I'd very much like to see the OEM deals Microsoft make with laptop vendors just die.
> Also, would “any software that can be changed remotely or by the user is off limits” mean Intel/Samsung/… couldn’t sell CPUs with microcode installed, or even write microcode?
Depends whether that microcode can be changed by the user or remotely, or if doing so basically means returning the CPU to the factory. If it can conveniently be changed, that's software, and the actual interface to the CPU is not the final ISA, but how to encode that micro-code to make the final ISA. If however the microcode is etched or locked, then it's part of the hardware.
Another example would be an FPGA implementation of a RISC-V core: if the bitstream is locked into the NVCM it can no longer be modified, and thus counts as hardware. But if it's in the easily rewritable SPI flash, then it's software, and it can't be bundled with the FPGA itself.
While I'm not absolutely certain my border is the right one, I believe it's at least one that can be fairly easily delimited.
> Software company C could pay hardware company H to build hardware according to specs they give, with the specs under NDA, possibly even forbidding H to sell that hardware design to others than C.
Correct, some trade secrets need to be banned. Even further, I would void all ISA related patents and copyright. Specifically, cloning the functionality of any piece of hardware should be allowed, similar to how the IBM PC was cloned.
Note thought that splitting the activities is still worth it: when software is bundled with the hardware, we still need exploitable specs. Banning trade secrets doesn't force vendors to disclose them, and even if they do disclose them, nothing forces them to make especially readable beyond regulatory mandate, and nothing forces them to simplify their hardware interfaces. Exposing hardware interfaces to the competition however may provide very strong incentive to improve not only the hardware, but it's programming interfaces as well.
I really like this. Other than an upvote I would very much like to express my support for this idea and I hope someone with connections to the halls of power passes it on, there is a lot of merit to this. It would immediately result in hardware manufacturers having to document each and every input and output of their hardware if they expect any sales at all and it would also do an end run around various monopolies.
Check out the idiocy around Broadcomm's WiFi/Bluetooth drivers on the Mac, it's absolute insanity, there are so many of them that to install Linux on one of the machines with such a chipset you need to copy your drivers from the Mac operating system (if you still have it installed...) in order to give Linux the ability to load firmware onto the devices so that they can work. Three different files iirc.
rather than "disallow vertical integration", start with "disallow lock-out". By all means, vertically integrate as much as you want but it should not be illegal for someone to take your hardware and use it for another purpose that you have no say in, or write and run software using your hardware without you having a say in that.
It would be more prudent indeed to just force hardware vendors to release the specs, and it would be even more prudent still to just disallow lock-out. I would start there like you suggest.
I do suspect however that we'd miss out on many benefits if we don't go all the way the way to disallowing vertical integration eventually. It's also something I rarely see spoken of.
Yeah, someone on that Reddit thread said it right - force the companies to publish documentation for the interfaces. Let the hackers write the drivers without painful, slow and error-prone reverse engineering.
I wouldn't even go that far: by all means, don't publish your interfaces, but if someone reverse engineers them: legalize that. And don't offer tax cuts to companies that don't publish their schematics and interfaces.
people buy apple products precisely because of how integrated they are. this idealism and desire to force companies to support everything (as much as i want gaming on mac/linux and drivers for things supported) is the single most dangerous idea that would completely ruin the user experience for millions.
> this idealism and desire to force companies to support everything
I'm sorry, where did I proposed we do that? As far as I am aware my proposal would only force Apples to split itself in 2: a hardware company that sells top notch hardware (so top notch in fact that even the hardware interfaces are as clean and slick as an iPad's case), and a software company that sells a top-notch integrated software suite on whatever hardware they chose to support (and no other hardware).
This idea that Apple's hardware is somehow better because they don't publish their spec sounds incoherent to be honest. As is the idea that their software is better because it runs on company hardware. If there's still a company selling good hardware, one can still write good software for that particular hardware.
So… forcing hardware companies to support all software? Nope, though publishing their spec does automatically provide some level of support for arbitrary software. Forcing software companies to support all hardware? No more than they do now, possibly even less: hardware vendors will be incentivised to harmonise their respective interfaces to appeal to a maximum number of software vendors, so software vendors will be incentivised to support a relatively limited set of interfaces.
I'm not proposing that we split companies. I proposing that no company that sells hardware be allowed to distribute software, and no company that distributes software be allowed to sell hardware. The Apple split is only a consequence of that. As would be the likely end of locked down game consoles, now that I think of it.
What I'm hoping to accomplish with this is: reduced or eliminated vendor lock-in, harmonisation and simplification of ISAs, the ability to support any hardware in any OS, and maybe even the the ability to actually write new OSes and see some real competition in this space.
Note one important component I haven't mentioned: ISA patents should be rendered null and void. Anyone should be allowed to design, make, and sell an ARM or x86 CPU without asking anyone's permission. Or a GPU clone, or a network card clone, etc. Without that we'll just strengthen monopolies, or maybe allow new ones to arise.
This is a rather amazing comment, I'm astonished by the bald-faced lie that you open your first paragraph with:
> I'm not proposing that we split companies.
Also you, only a couple comments up:
> As far as I am aware my proposal would only force Apples to split itself in 2: a hardware company that sells top notch hardware (so top notch in fact that even the hardware interfaces are as clean and slick as an iPad's case), and a software company that sells a top-notch integrated software suite on whatever hardware they chose to support (and no other hardware).
Which is it, split companies or don't split companies? You can't have it both ways. If you aren't proposing that we split companies then you can't propose we split Apple unless you want to be a pedantic twit and point out that that's just one company and not companies.
Listen to any pro-gun advocate: the goal is not to kill the bad guy, the goal is to stop the bad guy… though unfortunately sometimes this means reducing their blood pressure to zero.
The law as I propose it would not legally force Apple to split. They would have 3 alternatives: stop selling software, stop selling hardware, or split. They could fire half the company, but we all know what they would actually do. Same deals with banks: enforcing the separation between deposit and investment wouldn't force the banks to split, but we all know that in practice they would.
Understand here that splitting Apple is not my goal. My goal is to separate the activities, in the hope of fostering more competition and personal freedom.
Actually no that would defeat the point. There are a couple thing we need to do beyond separating hardware and software: the first is forbidding NDAs around hardware interfaces. If you sell hardware to someone, you cannot force them not to publish the manual.
The second is an interoperability mandate: reproducing the functionality of existing hardware (a CPU ISA, a GPU clone…) must be authorized, and all relevant copyright and patents ignored.
This doesn’t mean that we would end all partnerships. The hardware company can still send prototypes to the software company, so driver development can begin before the hardware gets production-ready. That kind of workflow is common today.
People used to buy cocaine toothache drops and give them to children to get them to shut up. People used to send babies by post. Just because people like something doesn't mean it doesn't have terrible effects. [1]
> single most dangerous idea
I mean, sure after guns, drugs, superbugs, global nuclear war, climate change, super-plague produced by synthetic biology...
the second is in reference to technology and customer experience, don’t be obtuse.
comparing apple’s integrated approach to cocaine drops for kids tells me all i need to know about your bias; consumers like apple products, they are privacy focused more then any commercial competitor and their chips and OS are better than anything else precisely because of their integration.
I get you in principle, but the company should still be allowed to sell hardware with some default software installed, because if I had to search for someone on the internet that wrote software for my specific smart TV, washing machine or whatever this becomes much more painful.
I would rather see a 'right to repair' extended to software bundled. Any device or software that can connect to a network or can be interfaced with in any way is prone to security (or any other) bugs, which the customer should have the right to fix themselves, because they bought it, and in order to do so, the company needs to hand out the source code and documentation for all their devices.
Also about vendor writing Linux drivers, you probably don't want them too, there are already vendor board support packages (BSP) out there that enabled their hardware on Linux, but those are overwhelmingly abysmal in quality.
What you rather want is for vendors to upstream their driver into the kernel, so that it is properly integrated, doesn't break the hardware of others and has a high quality, but that process is not something you can regulate and force.
I still don't get how that would solve the issue of having no linux drivers.
Lets say I create a new GPU IP core, i give it to a third-party chip manifactorer to produce it, then that delivers it to a fourth-party to burn a privat key into the fuses, then a fifth party signs its firmware with that key, which contains checks that Windows is running in secure boot mode with Microsoft keys. And then it is sold to the end user via a distributor, which did't do any other work on it.
How would preventing a 'vertical' integration forbid that?
I would rather just regulate that users should be given the full specs and possibility to use their own keys, to allow them to run their own software on/with it without any feature gates to the hardware. This can be argued for as a right to repair or as giving devices a second life and thus reducing electronic waste.
Your rule would likely make the work of smaller companies and startups more difficult, if they have to hire a third-party to write the software. A solo dev might has to create two companies in order to create one product, that seems painful. I guess a lot of OSH projects would not be possible with that rule.
I'm willing to sacrifice the business model of game consoles.
I hate OEM deals, it just propagates the current monopolies and oligopolies. I'm okay with forcing everyone to buy their phone or laptop separately from the OS.
It is a useful ability, and I’m still willing to sacrifice it. I’m afraid that allowing updatable firmware to be part of the hardware will just allow hardware companies to get sloppy, not to mention the freedom we could lose if that firmware is proprietary. If hardware is (by law) immutable, then it’s pretty clear it’d better work from day one. No last minute patch, it has to work, or it won’t sell.
This will drive up the costs, as well as the selling price, but if it means hardware will work out of the box more often than it does now I’m willing to pay that cost.
So your saying apple would have to stop making operating systems?
Or are you saying Qualcomm would be required to not provide drivers?
This is a super dumb take, like beyond stupid, and I get that it’s directed at apple.
Here’s the thing: since day 1 apple has been a hardware company, and what makes hardware good or bad is often the software that drives runs it. That goes for every product apple makes.
The idea that you can remove one half of that from the other is beyond stupid.
The same people who are currently working on hardware for Apple would be working for a new company that makes hardware, and the new Apple Software Co. would continue to work with those people just as closely as they always have.
The only difference is that Microsoft Windows, Linux kernel devs, etc. would also be able to work with that hardware company to get their OS working on that hardware.
The hardware company would not be allowed to keep secrets between itself and Apple.
This would be terrible for specialized hardware, such as assistive technology. Open source software doesn’t really exist for it because there is simply no interest.
You can't really sell software for running a braille display on its own, for example. As for interest going up, I doubt that very much, as linux is still lacking good vision accessibility, such as a screen reader that doesn't brake with every update to the gnome desktop. windows and macOS figured that one out years ago, and the only decent open source screen reader is windows only.
Braille displays were precisely on my mind: there is a sizeable community of blind programmers out there. And realistically: how hard could it be to operate such a device? The thing is basically a super-low resolution screen with an abysmal refresh rate. A sufficient design could be a serial interface where you send all the pixels in a single packet. Or perhaps we could go fancy with modifying single characters or shifting the display left or right… done right, writing a driver for this thing is nearly trivial, to the point of being possible in user-space.
One reason for the blight of the blind here is the ludicrous complexity of the software, much of it comes from the ludicrous complexity and diversity of hardware interfaces, such that there is no competition and everything is terrible.
Most people however sharply underestimate the mountain of avoidable complexity we've accreted over the decades. I would situate it between 99% and 99.9% for personal computing. No silver bullet perhaps, but I know almost for a fact that there's enough silver dust around to gather 2 or 3 bullets.
What if we allow hardware manufacturers to create software to run their hardware but open the schematics and make the hardware hackable such that others can run software they want? That seems like a decent compromise because there’s very little margin in hardware alone and if you force hardware makers to go that route pretty soon there won’t be any because they’ll all have gone out of business.
Hardware manufacturers can’t all go out of business. We need hardware at some point. Some might, but what I’m proposing would drive up costs for everyone. Most likely, prices will just go up a little bit.
Allowing hardware manufacturers to ship their own software, even if that software must be free, even if the hardware specs must be released, will still allow them to ship crappy hardware interfaces and compensate that with bloated software. I’m also afraid some manufacturer would try to game the system, with, say, tweaking the instruction set of every new GPU so third party drivers can’t really keep up.
But if it’s open installing your own, open, on-bloatware software would be easy. That’s not the case now … but it could be.
Hardware vendors then that install the vanilla, non-bloatware software will be seen as a feature. You can see this now: Google ships vanilla Android whereas some of the Android phone manufacturers ship it with their own crapware. Or on the other end of the spectrum Apple ships MacOS without advertising garbage but vanilla Windows ships games and ads in the start menu.
Yeah, the part about gaming the system may not actually apply.
Now, bloated software is still bloated software, even if it's open. I guess that with the sources the community can make it better, but there's still a limit to how well they can do: the hardware interface itself. It's a long tradition in hardware design to ship crappy interfaces and just say the software folks will make it nice. But if all you ship is the hardware, the interfaces have to be nice, else it will be harder to program for, and that definitely influences the ultimate success of the platform. See game consoles, I believe those who have a reputation of being hard to program tend to sell less (because they have fewer or worse games).
All sorts of modern tax schemes would have truck-sized loopholes without a rigorous definition of Common Control. It's already in the tax code of every industrialized country (possibly under a different name). All you have to do is reference it. The necessary definitions have been in the tax codes since the 1980s.
I'm kind of annoyed at how often this "but but but two companies with overlapping owners yadda yadda" comes up. Go ahead try that on the IRS and see how it works out for you.
An alternate paradigm? 20 years ago I mused over a law called the "Operating System Fairness Act", designed to level the playing field, mostly for smaller OS's. It's nowhere as revolutionary as separating hw development from sw development, but may thus be more realistic. One clause (of maybe six) concerned "Forced licensing of must-have drivers, algorithms, codecs, file formats, etc. to any viable OS, and for a price that market can bear".
At the time I was thinking of technologies like the Unisys GIF patent, Flash, various audio and video codecs, and peripheral drivers. If not having a technology makes an OS vitally less useful and appealing to a user then there's potentially a path to developer documentation. Who decides? I think the current system for DMCA exemptions works pretty well (noting that I despise the DMCA), so maybe a branch of the US Copyright Office or another government's similar branch? A viable OS is one with a notable following and which can use the technology. If I write RadiumOS for myself, that doesn't count. Likewise Widevine for the Atari 800 is out. But Linux anything would, the BSD family, and Amiga, BeOS/Haiku, etc. would have a fair shot. Making a free, public developers kit is always better, but offering an NDA to a developer representing each OS family would likely be common. No, it wouldn't be an instantaneous process, yes, there would be paperwork and maybe a lawyer involved, but the burden has to be bearable for each OS/developer. If you're Apple wanting the MS Office file formats, MS is allowed to charge a not insignificant amount, but if you're a free, open source OS, then the cost would be either free or nearly so. Not every vendor in a field would be cracked open. If AMD is very friendly to developers, then Nvidia could keep their video drivers proprietary. With all the OSS available today vs. 20 years ago, something like this is maybe a bit less useful, but IMHO still a significant step forward, and a hedge against companies suddenly taking their specs private.
In practice, what fines would hardware manufacturers be held liable for for any bugs in their specifications? How do we conclude that, yes, a hardware manufacturer hasn’t lived up to the regulation? Perhaps the operating system is “using it wrong”. Do governments have entire departments running tests on these devices?
That's in part why I didn't propose that we force manufacturers to specify their products, but simply make sure that if they don't, nobody would want to use their product. Who would buy a CPU they don't know the ISA of?
Forcing the separation between software and hardware companies may be more stringent, but it may be simpler to enforce, and likely even more effective at making sure the hardware is humanely specified than direct regulation would be.
It's a cool idea, but where do you draw the line? Where do you place something like microcode? Depending on how you design a computer, you can have software almost all the way down.
I draw the line at "can it be updated without returning to the factory?"
If microcode can be updated by the user (or remotely by Intel), it’s software. If it’s immutable then its hardware. If an FPGA bitstream (say a RISC-V soft core) is locked into the FPGA’s NVCM, then it can no longer be modified, and it counts as hardware. If however it is merely stored in the SPI flash and can be modified, then it’s software.
I know no other way to say this. But this idea is just dumb. The entire value proposition would be worse for everyone. Software and hardware integration is what makes a product better.
I suppose I should say forced integration; ex. see the recent nonsense with Hue deciding you need an account to control your local lightbulbs, which isn't a problem with third party apps. I'm generally skeptical of vertical integration because of lock in, but if it's not forced it's less obviously bad.
Yes because choosing which light bulb to use is analogous to lynching.
You realize it was the government that enforced Jim Crow laws, against miscegenation, and “sodomy” (ie non heterosexual sex).
Not to mention the “War on Drugs”, civil forfeiture and using eminent domain to take away private property to give to another company.
I can much easier choose which corporation to use than the government.
And looking at some of the ideas on this submission, I damn sure don’t want some internet geeks deciding what products I can use and how they are made.
You realize that said lynching was very often institutionalized and encouraged by local authorities? Do you think corporations were the ones doing the lynching?
Even in the context of the extreme hyperbole of this entire comment chain, your analogy is pretty extreme and does not make sense. Jim Crow laws weren't stopped by regulation, they were stopped by dismantling government enforced rules.
And yes, it might sound crazy but individuals can actually decide what light bulb to buy or what computer to buy. And thinking so isn't even remotely libertarian or hyper capitalist. We aren't talking about labor rights or healthcare or other very asymmetric power imbalances. People just like to buy computers and devices that nerds and euh, let's say, activists dislike or ideologically disagree with. It doesn't make them sheep, or stupid, or ignorant.
Yes, and I'd also like hardware and software companies to not have access to my data. E.g. Google should be split into hardware, software, and data companies.
You'd have to define "hardware" in a rather interesting way for that to have any hope of working.
Consider any sort of user-facing device (say, an electronic toy, or a music performance device, or for that matter, even a phone). These are all aggregates of hardware made by other companies. Yet they are also hardware. Being unable to develop such devices along with the firmware that runs them would make it more or less impossible to develop them at all. So where does "hardware" stop and "device" start?
Let's say one wants to make hardware made of 3 pieces of hardware that talk to each other. They may need to write firmware to do that. At a first approximation, I would say one of the following should apply:
Either the firmware can be modified by the user, or remotely, in which case it should not be shipped.
Or it is an implementation detail of the communication between the 3 pieces of hardware, not reasonably modifiable without returning the whole thing to the factory, in which case that firmware is actually part of the 3-piece hardware, and can be shipped.
But it is often both. Just because it is essential for proper operation and therefore an implementation detail, doesn't mean it cannot be updated.
Even a device as trivial as a keyboard, mouse, or SSD drive has firmware which can be updated. Shipping them without firmware would be completely ludicrous, and you'd basically buy a fancy brick. Hell, you need to flash firmware onto it in the factory to make future updates by the user possible!
The prudent manufacturer makes sure that some of the firmware is truly immutable, to prevent bricking the device if some firmware version is botched enough.
I'm not proposing that no hardware ships with firmware. I'm proposing the hardware manufacturer choses: enable updates and don't ship the parts that can be updated, or disable updates entirely.
interesting premise, but i ultimately think this would be worse for the tech by forcing them to play in a limited playing field that doesn't have parallel in other businesses, does it?
Oh but it does have parallel in other businesses. Splitting oil companies being one of the oldest examples. Rockefeller reportedly became richer as a result, so it wasn't even a socialist move.
Another feature of forbidding vertical integration is that is prevents companies from competing with their own customers.
but i immediately disagreed with myself after posting because i don't think hospitals can make their own drugs. or rather, if a drug manufacturer owned a hospital and a health insurance company this might be considered a conflict of interest
i still don't think its a great example given this one comes from an ethical basis but this is more apt
I have yet to really flesh out my proposal, but ethics does come into play. Walled gardens for instance, are in part enabled by hardware/software bundles.
The hope is that hardware interfaces harmonise to the point where writing a new OS becomes actually possible. Right now it's not, there simply is too much diversity, and that's before we talk about all the quirks in hardware APIs vendors currently hide under the software rug. Then maybe, just maybe, we could start some real competition on the OS space.
Even if that doesn't happen I would be happy with the end of vendor lock-in.
More likely they would require companies to publish specs suitable for driver authors. I’ve always thought that companies treating their register configuration and I/O offsets as a trade secret is ridiculous.
This. Linked post is a misconception of how EU actually work. They will never "hardcode" something like "linux drivers" into the law. But, in theory, they could write a law like "If you want to sell your device in the EU, you must publish a freely available technical spec with enough level of detail to write a functioning driver".
That was largely hardware issues. In particular without a way to negotiate between drivers conflicts were doomed to happen regardless of who was writing the driver, especially with the relatively small number of resources to pull from.
Yeah, PC clones were a right mess. The ISA bus was extremely primitive, even by the standards of the day. There is a reason the PCI bus was such a breath of fresh air.
How well did that work in the past when for profit companies had a motivation to write good drivers? You think it’s going to be a seamless mass market experience this time?
I don't see the connection. Two things appear to be true: 1. In the past, it was common to publish actual specs for talking to hardware. 2. In the past, drivers often sucked. You appear to be claiming that the first thing caused the second, but I can't see any reason for that to follow. It's not like hardware manufacturers couldn't, or indeed didn't, write their own official drivers, and on the other hand there's no reason to believe that a 3rd-party driver written using proper hardware docs wouldn't work well. In fact, it's quite reasonable to suggest that the improvement in quality is entirely tied to overall architecture improvements, mostly (as cousin comments point out) device enumeration standards and possibly OS improvements (preemptive multitasking and memory protection).
And how slow was the evolution of both Windows and the entire ecosystem compared to Apple that could release an OS, the hardware and the drivers simultaneously? When Apple releases new hardware it can upgrade everything in tandem. It’s especially apparent now that everything Apple sells runs some variant of the same processor from the AirPods, Watches, tablets, TV set top boxes, phones and even monitors?
And the ability to use such a driver. Hell, even the spec wouldn't be such a strong requirement as people can reverse them. The issue is usually the firmware and signature checks.
This sounds much more reasonable to me. Banning unnecessary hardware DRM and requiring specs to get published would be a much more effective way to stimulate the market. Forcing manufacturers to publish Linux drivers would probably just end up in low-effort support on either side. The last person I want writing my Linux drivers is someone who doesn't care.
Yeah, you know it would end up with the manufacturers just releasing a binary driver for exactly one point release of the kernel and calling that box checked. Might even just be some NDIS thing where they wrap the Windows driver to get it mostly working.
This would be my expectation too. Though I’d think you’d need to go one further - hardware manuals AND a license to redistribute any necessary firmware binaries - the latter has been an issue with Nouveau for example.
In fact I think manuals are probably better in a lot of cases, OEM drivers are routinely terrible.
Intel publish datasheets which describe their network interface cards to this level. It's fantastic, literally anybody can write a driver for an Intel NIC for any OS. You can also debug existing drivers when you get strange hardware issues, which is part of my job. No other networking vendor does this.
A much more EU style directive would be to force all operating systems to ask on every boot: Do you consent for this OS to store files on your hard drive?
No, the EU version of that would be requiring OSs to ask before using a disk, and certain proprietary OSs deciding to spam the user with requests on every boot until they consent - at which point suddenly the OS can magically remember that preference - and then pretending that the law forced them to do that even though it said no such thing.
> Could EU force hardware manufacturers to make working drivers for Linux?
> Why are these companies like intel, Razer, nvidia or AMD..
The question makes no sense. As one of the Reddit comment says: Intel and AMD are among the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel.
The real-world is pretty much powered by millions of Linux machines running on Intel or AMD hardware (for the most part). Try replacing that with Windows servers and their "working drivers" and then we talk.
What could work well is forcing manufacturers to release hardware documentation that is sufficiently detailed to allow developing drivers without reverse engineering.
Perhaps forcing them to do so a couple of years after hardware release, so that it does not interfere too much with trade secrets.
This would avoid perfectly functional hardware to go to the landfill because of no further software support, and it would also prevent incredibly time-consuming reverse engineering efforts.
Remember how old electrical appliances used to come with full circuit diagrams to help repair them? That's one way to go about this is - force hardware manufacturers to provide complete device and technical specification (e.g. https://datasheets.raspberrypi.com/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.p... (PDF)) for every hardware they manufacture. This should enable any competent system developers to create the drivers for it, for any software system. (After all, realistically, we cannot force hardware manufacturers to create drivers for every OS in the world).
One major objection we can expect is that sometimes hardware manufacturers deliberately cripple their products through their drivers. This enables them to sell a cheaper version, that is crippled, and a costlier one that isn't. One example of this is Intel and AMD manufacturing a quad-core processor, but selling the same processor as dual-core and quad-core (remember how AMD allowed you to "unlock" extra cores on their processors?). I think NVIDIA also limits some of their graphic card with their drivers, to sell the same hardware at different prices.
Drivers… I don’t know if I could sign on for that for the following reasons:
1. The burden it would put on smaller manufacturers and companies (every little regulation adds up), especially difficult considering the comparative lack of qualified developers
2. Drivers != Quality, Upstreamable Drivers. Making the judgements of Linux maintainers legally binding is a bad idea. Case in point: Apple has Linux drivers internally, they’re just not complete or upstreamable. You would be forced to fight the Linux maintainers (and the power trips they already have!) in order to legally sell your product.
3. If we can force companies to support Linux, why not force all websites to support Firefox? Why not force all desktop programs like Adobe to support Linux? Etc…
4. What about poor FreeBSD? Serenity OS? That guy who still loves OS/2?
> 3. If we can force companies to support Linux, why not force all websites to support Firefox? Why not force all desktop programs like Adobe to support Linux? Etc…
...Although I agree that there are questions about required effort and breadth of support and burden to smaller companies, every one of those sound like wonderful outcomes to me.
As others have pointed out why single out linux? Why not BSD? And second which linux? 4.14? 5.10? 6.2? Can they release it for linux 2.7 and call it a day afterwards? Supporting linux requires effort and money. How would you go about defining "reasonable effort" at supporting linux. If it breaks every month? every year? Enforcing this simply would turn out to become a nightmare. I think a better approach would look like what jandrese said in this thread. Force them to publish the specs so other companies or individuals can write open source drivers for the hardware.
> being forced to make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS
That is almost a recipe for drivers built on hardware abstraction layers (HALs), so vendors can use literally the same code on every platform. That, of course, results in a bunch of unnecessary HAL code being added -- unnecessary from the OS point of view, which already has perfectly good hooks for all the stuff a driver needs. That's the reason Linux does not accept HALs into the mainline kernel.
What often happens on Linux is vendors will then move their HAL and drivers into userspace, interfacing with the kernel via a shim instead. This has the side effect of no longer needing to open-source the driver code at all, since it's not linked into the kernel. Look how that works out!
In case of Android, it was literally Google that did the HAL/shim work, giving vendors a pass on open sourcing or mainlining their drivers.
> What often happens on Linux is vendors will then move their HAL and drivers into userspace, interfacing with the kernel via a shim instead. This has the side effect of no longer needing to open-source the driver code at all, since it's not linked into the kernel. Look how that works out!
It doesn't stop anyone else from writing better drivers (i.e. the thing they already do) but decouples things so that people can at least update their kernel while keeping their drivers. So, win-win.
I've swung over the last few years from thinking it's manufacturers' fault to realising that most of the fault here lies with the linux project itself. They're the ones who have normalised constant churn and thus needing to keep drivers for hardware, sometimes many years old, up to date year after year or even month after month. After seeing the churn mentality affect everything mainly spreading from web dev circles to the rest of the ecosystem, it's hard not to identify that trend as having been the norm in the kernel for decades.
I've only come to realise that blaming manufacturers for failing to keep up to date with a constantly moving target was totally unfair.
> I've only come to realise that blaming manufacturers for failing to keep up to date with a constantly moving target was totally unfair.
The intention of keeping the kernel moving and unstable at the inner layer is intentional: it is a negative incentive to make people at least publish documentation, if not outright publish driver source code, in the open.
The userspace-facing layer of Linux has remained very VERY stable over the decades, no matter the consequences [1].
> They're the ones who have normalised constant churn and thus needing to keep drivers for hardware, sometimes many years old, up to date year after year or even month after month.
That's exactly why you should mainline your code. Then people refactoring other subsystems will fix your code for you.
Sorry but your claim is that Linux is the driver of churn?! That’s a wild thought.
Hard for me to imagine how Linux could be more responsible that the incentives of capitalism, eg planned obsolescence, the race to the bottom, and consumer demand for more and better cameras, storage, etc.
I didn't claim that it birthed it but that the same issue I see in the unsustainability in software today is literally the norm in the kernel. If it's bad in one domain, perhaps it's reasonable to question its value in the other.
Any "vendor lock in" practices should be considered as monopoly practices. And anti-monopoly laws are already here in EU. Just a matter of interpretation of what falls to monopoly.
All these people don't understand the dangers of socialism. History is bound to repeat itself.
The cost of the EU forcing everyone to adopt a standard is that next time a new manufacturer need to enter the market, it will have to cater to the need of the 1% (of which I am part, I'd love to have drivers for linux for everything).
Who is going to benefit from this regulation? The existing players who can afford to support linux: it will be peanuts for them and it will make or break a new broke manufacturer.
I actually agree with your argument, but what does any of this have to do with who owns the means of production? Because that's everything socialism is about.
I can get behind this. It'd definitely be great to see VoiceOver, the screen reader on Mac, get some competition. Maybe then blind Mac users could do their work on Mac, even in Salesforce and Google Docs and Sheets and such, and not hear "Safari not responding" at the slightest sign of overused JavaScript. There's a reason most blind people either use Windows, or don't use a desktop or laptop at all.
Whoever asked this have not considered for one second what would it mean in a way that can be put into legislation to "make drivers that work equally in linux, windows and even macOS". This is an incredibly, incredibly difficult topic. How would you phrase and likely measure "equality" here? I have no clue how to answer this even in layman terms. Perhaps someone would need to create and maintain a test suite covering all class of peripherals covered by the legislation and mandate this test suite passes. But even that would not cover performance. Much good does it to you if the video card tests pass unaccelerated.
And then the way this question is put forward also shows this person is not at all familiar with how the EU works. The EU does not have laws in the very first place. It does not. But that aside, the amount of study and coordination that goes into creating or amending an existing directive is just monumental. You would need a strong, compelling need to go through a multi year process, costing many millions of euros. In this case, the need was crystal clear: "these new obligations will lead to more re-use of chargers and will help consumers save up to 250 million euro a year on unnecessary charger purchases. Disposed of and unused chargers account for about 11 000 tonnes of e-waste annually in the EU". How many EU consumers are even affected? Because mobile phone chargers, these days, affect everyone (above the age of three or some such).
Here's a quote from the relevant USB C legislation:
Stakeholder consultations
The following consultation activities were conducted between May 2019 and April 2021 in order to assess potential areas for revision and the impacts of the suggested policy option in various areas:
– an inception impact assessment (2018-2019) targeted citizens, consumer
associations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers;
– a public consultation (2019) targeted member states, citizens, consumer associations, NGOs, manufacturers’ associations, and individual manufacturers;
– two consumer surveys (2019 and 2021) targeted citizens;
– a stakeholders survey (2020-2021) targeted Member States, citizens, consumer
associations, and manufacturers;
If the hardware is not too insanely complex, until there is a maintained and properly written open source driver with public hardware programming documentation for some OS, a working linux driver will probably follow if this hardware has a pertinent meaning.
I'd rather they force them to release documentation instead, documentation which they certainly already have, and which hardware manufacturers used to freely provide.
If they're worried about IP, that's what the patent system is for.
Force hardware vendors to only sell hardware. If any software that can be changed remotely or by the user is off limits. Even firmware. Conversely, software vendors can only sell (or freely distribute) software. For vendors from abroad, don't go extra-territorial, just force them to chose: either they only sell hardware in the EU, or they only sell software. Intel and microsoft would have no problem. NVDIA might complain very loudly. Apple would likely have to split itself.
Now the complicated part is how to define a company. We don't want a single company to just split itself into 2 legal entities that work so closely together they might as well be the same company.
Do that, and you'll get much better than device drivers for one free OS. You'll get the necessary specs required to make it work on all OSes. Even better, the user-facing hardware interface will start to matter, and there will be some selection pressure to drive the more complex ones, or the non-standard ones, out of the market. (Won't be ideal, I can see a particular over-complex architecture win out, similar to x86, but at least there won't be that many left, so writing a driver for most devices will actually be possible).