I think that ship has long sailed as we failed to treat smartphones as handheld computers and subject the smartphone/OS manufacturers to the same scrutiny as computer/OS manufacturers.

This is a missed opportunity especially to those countries where smartphones are the first computer to majority of the population, now their computing can be held hostage by couple of companies just like their data.

Now computers with only manufacturer approved OS, only manufacturer approved software (even content?), arbitrary security updates/ OS upgrade cycle is already becoming a reality.

Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations? Given that the general public is largely unaware of DRM and the like, it was likely for lack of other features. There's no inherent reason why a more open phone OS couldn't succeed in the market. After all, Android devices are generally more open than iOS devices and they've got the vast majority of the smartphone market.

Obviously other considerations.

Where there is only a small handful of options within a class of product, any statement about "what the market wants" should be limited to very broad strokes. The consumer doesn't select from the entire possibility space, they buy from the available options.

Any "correlation is causation" statement about minor details when there are dozens of other larger distinguishing feature are the words of a lying huckster. Giving them the benefit of the doubt isn't that they're not-lying, the benefit of the doubt is that they're lying to themselves too. That's how wrong it is to make those inferences.

Rather rude, don't you think?

My point was that openness didn't outweigh other considerations in the eyes of people purchasing them.

Windows Mobile smartphones were actually dominant in the market until the iPhone was introduced. IIRC from the industry data I had access to, there were over 100 different models in a variety of form factors from a couple dozen OEMs concurrently being sold at its peak. So it was at least ahead of all the alternatives before that point, which weakens the argument that it was "other considerations" that were the main culprit.

A major factor of the iPhone's early US success was forcing a major US carrier (AT&T) to stop doing consumer hostile things and just let the device connect to the network as intended.

So, in part, it was improved openness that drove iPhone/Android's success. It just was network openness instead of device openness.

Back in 2005, an open source Linux based phone was a hippie pipe dream, and carriers were FIRMLY against allowing anything open source on their networks. Android blew all of that wide open, and now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS. This is what we were all dreaming about back then. I feel like this is an incredibly underappreciated fact.

Yes, some carriers lock down their Android phones, because it's an open platform, so carriers can do what they want with it, but since the dawn of Android there have always been high end Android phones that were trivial to put into developer mode and install whatever wacky OS mods you want.

Oh, and let's not forget that while Android itself is open source, the Android on your phone right now is full of binary blobs for even the basic shit. Camera driver? Image processor? Fast charging? LTE modem? Fingerprint sensor? OLED calibration? most of them are binary blobs specific either to the chip/sensor manufacturer or the OEM who designed the phone as they consider this stuff proprietary IP they wish to keep secret from the other Android OEM competitors. Move to LineageOS and you risk loosing a lot of your phone's fancy features because of that.

I love my Androids but it's still a mess and the openness is slowly going away(since Android 9 we lost call recording capability which was a huge blow for my use case). At least we still have f-droid.

The fact that it uses Linux kernel and related features is an implementation detail, only visible to Google and OEMs.

What regular developers see is a Java/Kotlin based userland, with a native layer having a set of predefined stable APIs, which includes ISO C, ISO C++ standard libraries, a POSIX subset, GL/Vulkan and a couple of Android specific ones.

Tomorrow Android can be another Fucshia subsystem, and again, only Google and OEMs will notice the change.

That's an interesting comment, because it really calls attention to how us nerds often perceive things differently from how the rest of the world does. I am guessing that most consumers would not recognize something that just used vanilla AOSP as an Android phone. Google's closed-source add-ons are a huge part of what people think of when they think, "Android."

The topic is the control that the user has over a phone they purchased, not source code availability for the OS, so yes, I am. Windows CE smartphones provided access about the same as Windows 98/NT in terms of the freedom to run apps and providing apps unfettered access to OS level APIs. The same can't be said for Android and Apple's sandbox + walled garden model.

The only Linux smartphone I can think of from that era that offered similar access and control was the (I think?) Nokia N900 and interest in those was IIRC negligible.

Power users and developers have always had the ability to circumvent the Android sandbox on their own devices.

Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems.

N900s were pretty rad little toys, but anything you could do with them you could also always do on Android. The base Android OS doesn't have a built in package manager, but you can easily run a more classic Linux distro in a chroot or something.

Linux Deploy has been around for almost a decade now.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.meefik.linu...

I'm just describing the way things happened to be back in that era.

> "Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems."

Yes, and? That's just as true of early PalmOS and the other early mobile OSes. Security against malicious apps just wasn't a consideration at that time on smartphones/PDAs precisely because there was no app store and no significant quantity of malicious apps.

I don't think we ended up in a place much better off from a freedom perspective.

Android is a little better because parts of it are open. Google has been steadily moving things into play services though, which is not open. There is now an open source replacement for play services - I don't think it's very compatible yet though.

This is a good thing, they've been de-googling the base OS and making it as stripped down and bare-bones as possible.

This is a huge win for security, privacy, and freedom in general, and exactly what they should be doing. Android should be a small, secure Linux based operating system with an API that makes it easy to build services on top of it. The Google ecosystem should be completely decoupled from the OS.

It's also an effective way of building the walls around the garden.

It's such an easy way to run the mobile race compared to start ing from scratch.

The iPhone had 60 fps smooth animations, a built-in iPod, a huge capacitive touchscreen, and most importantly none of the baggage of being associated with balding managers in their 40s. It was sexy. It was a fashion statement.

There wasn’t even an AppStore on iOS initially.

While true, I wouldn't say that's a burn because it was exactly those people who could afford smartphones and justify paying the painfully high bandwidth charges of that era. Remember, those phones cost as much as a iPhone today but in 2005 dollars (ouch). The ubiquitous Blackberry, a.k.a. the "Crackberry", and Palm devices were also aimed at the same business and professional market.

These early devices paved the way to the current smartphone market.

Ouch, burn. Though oldschool cubicles sound better than the current open office chicken farms I've seen.

But it's ok, they give you a ping pong and foosball table. /s

I owned two of these devices as a personal information manager (contacts calendar ...). They were not comfortable and the data plans then were so prohibitive expensive that modern usage was far away.

Regards the argument: if you do not win this audience (predominantly female) you are doomed.

For the records: I do not want to attribute any positive or negative characteristics to any of the audiences.

See the variety of open operating systems for devices. Ie sailfish, postmarketOS, librephone, etc.

They may have been the only one's that could use the term "Personal Computer" for a short time, but they were not the only ones making PCs. You had Commodore, Amiga, HP, Wang, Apple, etc. Even still, IBM's PCs were not locked down and were, for the most part, based on an open architecture allowing you to freely upgrade parts. Later down the line (specifically the original IBM PC) when the technology allowed for it, you could even install other operating systems like CP/M-86, UCSD p-System, and MS-DOS.

There were even some products, like the "Apple II PC Transporter" that made your Apple II compatible with a PC. That meant an IBM PC.

You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer.

Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ?

Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good idea for the typical user though

Except that decent RaspberyPI configs that could replace PCs cost around $60-70(In EU) and once you add a display, peripherals and a decent microSD card(which is still smaller, slower and less reliable than even a budget SSD) and you're looking at over $100 and for that kind of cash, a second hand X86 notebook(old beaten up Dell/Lenovo with an i5, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD) gives you way more power and flexibility with what you can boot, install and do with it, it's not even a competition. Not to mention it comes with a built in battery so you can carry it to school unlike a PI, and before someone sniggers and shows me a link with a Raspberry PI based notebook just to contradict me, ask yourselves if you would actually use that as a productivity daily driver for work and play vs a X86 laptop.

Sorry, even in developing nations, second hand notebooks/PCs are a way better deal in every way as a personal computer than a PI which is why PIs have never taken off as PCs and are still stuck in the hacker, tinkerer, learning, embedded, automation niches.

>Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ?

Why do they need to be closed? Having closed source software is no guarantee of quality nor security.

>Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good idea for the typical user though

By wanting more openness we don't mean reinventing the wheel and coding open source dialers from scratch, we mean we need Apple and Google to not lock their hardware to their appstores so we(companies, users, banks, developers and even governments) don't become prisoners to their walled gardens which is basically the current situation.

I believe the basic idea of the Raspberry Pi is that everyone already has the display (a television), so the only peripherals you need are the power supply, keyboard, mouse, and HDMI cable, which together should be around USD 15 or even less (from a quick search for local prices here then converting to USD).

It's definitely a thing here in Germany and Austria, and a relatively expensive one at that for just possessing a TV, and I'll bet my hat it's a thing in most EU countries.

I have lived half of my life in Germany and still find it strange having GEZ, or whatever replaced it now, instead of everyone pays approach that most countries on the continent do.

What is that? Is there something in the EU that doesn't have a special tax or required paperwork?

This is somewhat of a 'compare and contrast' to the US Model, where either stations are funded by advertisements, or the public broadcasting stations that rely primarily on grants, as well as what they can get from the government; but in the case of the US, technically 'everyone' is paying into PBS whether they have a TV or not.

Entertainment is a multi billion dollar industry. Companies like Disney are making record profits. Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?

Well, it's a question of which devil you want.

In the case of Disney, much of their profits are driven by an entire lifestyle that they are selling. There's the Media itself, but then all the toys, the amusement parks, etc. And all of the advertising that goes with those, and all of the social impacts it has as a result (see next point for more)

If you go for an advertising based model, You wind up with 2nd or 3rd order social impacts. Even in the 80s, the decade of 'greed is good', the FTC put limitations on advertising in children's programming due to the psychological impacts it had. (I'd be curious to see another good look taken today, but regulators are even more toothless now than they were then.)

In both cases, however, you are at the end of the day going to be beholden to either your advertisers, or your corporate overlords for your content. And if they don't like that content, it will not see the light of day in any meaningful form, regardless of the public interest.

I feel all approaches have their place, but perhaps the advertising model could use a bit more modernization in it's regulation, with what we now understand about behavioral psychology.

Because why bother when you get money from free by law through taxes?

Count your blessings, as at least the BBC produces world class content viewed worldwide(former Top Gear, Dr. Who, etc) so you get your money's worth but in Germany, ARF and ZDF receive nearly as much money as the BBC but produce almost nothing worth watching by the Germans, let alone abroad, because why would they give a fuck when than sweet taxpayer money keeps rolling in no strings attached regardless.

In any case, you're right, most of Europe has TV licenses of some kind or other [1]

Thought notably in the UK, you can certainly own a TV without paying TV license [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...

What you probably mean by usable computer is either an embedded system or some ssh server but what most people actually do with computers is access the web and the modern web is so bloated that without fast hardware and proper software it becomes a pain to do anything remotely productive or fun.

That's why the PI is not yet a good mainstream PC. It's too slow sometimes and has too many gotchas that the users who are not tinkerers won't put up with.

Unless the hardware powers datacenters or mobile/IoT devices, HW manufacturers don't even bother supporting linux with drivers.

Put into them a custom closed OEM distribution, or the Windows for the Pi, and there is no issue playing YouTube with proper hardware acceleration.

That was true ~15years ago but less so today. Modern PC EUFI bootloaders are bigger and more bloated than any uboot build in existence, and things like device tree support in linux means that you can support various boards with the same kernel (including boards that don't exist yet). Sure you'll probably still need custom bootloaders for most boards, but it's not like you can swap your motherboard BIOS/UEFI chips and expect them to work either. The PC "platform" with hardcoded physical addresses for your serial ports is nice if you're running DOS but it's not really relevant for modern operating systems which have to employ much more complex hardware discovery mechanisms.

It's true that on ARM it's still a bit anarchic and bespoke in practice but that's mainly because there's no reason to push for strong standardization when every vendor is building their own kernels for their own devices anyway.

But the tools do exist (on Linux at least, not sure about the other OSs), if desktop ARM becomes mainstream things could settle fairly quickly. It's less of a technical problem and more of a "why bother?" problem.

This feels like, at best, getting back to where PCs already were, at least as a user. If a device tree can be embedded in firmware and fed to the booting system, then that's fine, it's just a minor implementation detail. If you need to go get a file and put it on your boot media, then that's extra friction. Likewise, I don't really care what the hardware's boot firmware looks like, but if I need a different bootloader per-device then that's a problem - can you imagine if Dell laptops and HP laptops needed different GRUB builds to work?

The reason you don't need to mess with GRUB or you BIOS when you change your hardware is that modern hardware interfaces have built-in discovery and resource allocation features. Before that you had to deal with pesky low level details like IRQ allocations and the like (which was a thing on PC not that long ago).

That's not really a feature of "PC" per se, it's a feature of USB, PCI etc... That stuff works exactly the same on ARM or anywhere else.

The things that need to be described in the device tree are generally internal components of the SoC and motherboard, things like IO expanders, SPI interfaces, serial interfaces, and of course the USB/PCI/... controllers themselves.

I think there maybe some confusion because of the term "bootloader". It's true that both u-boot and GRUB are bootloaders, but bootloaders in the ARM world have a lot more to do than PC bootloaders, they're effectively the equivalent of UEFI + GRUB, not just GRUB. You can write a simplistic boot sector loader for PC in a few hundred ASM opcodes, that would be a lot more difficult for the average ARM bootloader because there's a lot more to do before you can just call into Linux. In general you won't even have RAM or caches available when u-boot begins executing.

And I think it's actually a better design, because it means that proprietary built-in firmware crap is usually kept to a minimum on ARM: the BOOTROM usually just initializes the bare minimum to be able to load u-boot (or some other loader) into on-chip SRAM and then it's over. Of course that means that the loader is significantly more complex, but that complexity has to be some place or an other.

This is exactly the point OP's getting at though, and the exact "discovery" features you handwave away. If I write an OS (or bootloader) on x86 w/ BIOS/uEFI, I can easily query available memory and start using it. Meanwhile u-boot has to be told via an external resource how much RAM is available before it begins initializing. This is fine for embedded/bespoke development (since you'll know the hardware you're developing for and can make assumptions), but a pain for general OS development where you have to inform the bootloader/OS of every devices capabilities.

The consortium of like-minded manufacturers later went to help develop develop all the subsequent variants that persist to this day (PCI and ATX form-factor etc). The standardization benefited them greatly.

Now that ARM Holdings is owned by NVidia I hope Jensen Huang sees that if ARM is to take over the desktop it makes sense to bring that same level of standardization that allowed the PC industry (and NVidia) to dominate.

I think ARM Holdings needs to be the one to spearhead the initiative. It will help industry-wide adoption of ARM (for desktops, laptops and servers) which will benefit them greatly.

This is exactly right, but I fear the incentives have changed and we'll never again see something like the x86/IBM-compatible/Wintel world of "standard" inter-compatible systems.

As you say, it's a "why bother?" problem, and no manufacturer will want to bother: Apple has no interest in making it easy to run other OSes, Microsoft wants to sell you "Windows Surface" devices, not general-purpose computers, corporate buyers want a "secure" locked-down environment with a signed bootloader...

Are there any powerful stakeholders who benefit from interoperability?

I'm not convinced that this is necessarily true. They advertised running Linux VMs during their presentation, they made a tool specifically for installing Windows on Macs and they even recently stated how Windows on ARM Macs is really up to Microsoft. If you could run Windows on an M1 Mac, it'd really turn it into a powerful and power-efficient "do-it-all" machine, since you could still boot into Windows and run that niche Windows software that you need from time to time.

Notably the PC standard meant things were interchangeable, not "interlayerable". You picked a CPU, you picked an OS, you did not have to emulate or virtualize whatever you wanted on top of what was imposed on you. Imagine that 30 years ago someone pitched a PC that only runs a specific OS and the only way to run anything else is on top of that like an app. You'd think "ridiculous".

Today having a device that runs as sealed monolith both HW and SW wise, and all you can do is run stuff on top of that without the ability to replace anything is considered a good sign. Tells you where we're going.

Your answer is dismissive and misses the point because you nitpicked on one particular word I used that doesn't fulfill one particular and currently irrelevant scenario: Windows in Bootcamp. What about every other scenario?

Saying that "Apple will never allow you to replace macOS" is just plain wrong when they've been allowing you to do that for the past 14 years.

You might as well argue how Bootcamp doesn't run on iPads.

You'd still have to develop all the device drivers required for this custom SoC. After all, Linux doesn't need a license but without extensive documentation and support from Apple it's like saying you're free to challenge your boss openly, it's pedantically true, but it is impossibly impractical for most.

Unless Apple provides extensible documentation for 3rd party drivers to be developed for their SoCs it's just cheap talk from their side.

This isn't much of a "gotcha" - I do think it's outrageous that Apple gets away with selling these gimped iOS devices that only run Apple-approved software.

Would consumers stand for this with any other devices? A stapler where you had to buy staples from the manufacturer? A car that only drives on manufacturer-approved roads? A dishwasher that will only wash approved plates?

If Microsoft however succeed with their Surfaces like Apples does .. than maybe we are screwed. Luckily, they do not.

All those companies selling motherboards for gamers etc?

1. x86 probably isn't going away anytime soon and

2. the PC world has come with its own set of constraints - notably being locked-in to (to all practical purposes) a duopoly of CPU manufacturers with the resultant impact on pricing and customer choice.

In the meantime I'm looking forward to lower prices and more innovation on desktop / laptop / server CPUs as the current duopoly comes to an end.

As for the broader trend towards closed: open standards naturally flourished in a world where one company wasn't huge enough to do everything themselves (except maybe IBM, but they dropped the ball to everyone else's benefit). Companies were forced to cooperate if they wanted to succeed.

That's no longer the case, and that's why open standards are dying. Just one of the many ramifications of corporate consolidation. Just one more reason for megacorps to be broken-up.

Now that computing has been commoditized to the point where just executing code is a commodity itself it would appear that the supply of software has outpaced the demand for software. Open-source is now eating away at somebody's lunch, and will be dealt with in a competitive nature instead of a passive one.

Buckle up.

Anonymous software publishing or use/consumption will be relegated solely to what will, by then, be ancient and slow hardware, and relatively dangerous (for non-experts) OSes.

Modifying the signed apps or OS to remove their phone home and spying will be impossible, like iOS is today.

There is presently very little stopping large vendors from implementing this across the board, and, indeed, consumer demand for malware-free (but not vendor spyware-free) platforms is driving this in a big way.

Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage:

https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware...

I imagine this will happen regardless of ISA; see what happened with the intel ME and related DRM, and Pixelbooks/T2 macs.

Most people buying computers don't want flexibility, they want reliability. OS alternatives, software alternatives, and privacy aren't really part of the buying decision outside of a small and mostly commercially irrelevant market segment.

The e-waste will be colossal when the vendors just decide to EoL them. You won't be able to reinstall the OS on any current Apple product (phone, tablet, or computer) once Apple's activation servers for those devices go offline in 10-20 years.

I think this is a correct statement, for the reason that what was once a enthusiast activity (using computers) becomes a necessity, and tolerance of problems reduces drastically when your life/salary depends on it working flawlessly.

Imagine saying these things about a dishwasher? Who’d care if the circuitry driving the buttons controlling the pumps etc is proprietary and e waste when it’s dead.

That's why the war on general purpose computing is so upsetting: it seeks to turn general purpose tools into appliances.

It isn’t this change that made them into appliances, it was their natural change in usage - as noted by a previous poster.

But this will affect the future programmers and tinkerers, too. It's as if they are no longer wanted. "But, " you could argue, "hobbyists and enthusiasts can buy specialized hardware". Well, many if not most of the generation of enthusiasts that made the computing world of today possible started with general purpose hardware, not special hardware. They took the common hardware of their day and built stuff with it, doing things that were often not entirely foreseen by the makers of said hardware. And they didn't ask for permission.

If the world of tomorrow consists of most people using gadgets like iphones and ipads, and in order to tinker you need special-purpose hardware, I think we're shooting future kids in their collective feet.

The thing is, you can eat your cake and have it too. Various distributions (e.g. Ubuntu and Fedora) already use secure boot to verify the bootloader - kernel - module chain. There is no reason that this couldn't be extended to e.g. only running signed Flatpaks too. And yet, at the same time, you can boot these distributions without secure boot, load unsigned kernel modules, etc.

It is true that a combination of code signing and sandboxing provides a lot of additional protections. But a less consumer-hostile flavor could be where by default the system is restrictive, but the user always has the power to disable certain or all security mechanisms.

The problem is that it is not only about security and protecting against malware for these vendors. It's also about funneling applications and subscriptions through their app stores, so that they can take their 30% cuts. They don't just want to profit from the initial sale, but also the continued use of a system. The security argument is just used to trap users in their app store ecosystems.

What makes this more unfortunate is that a large contingent of the Linux community is opposed to better security measures by default. This is why many Linux distributions are still stuck in a 90ies threat model where gaining UID 0 access is what one should protect against, while applications can freely roam in users' home directories. Consequently, there are only few Linux distributions that are competitive to iOS or macOS when it comes to desktop security.

There is a massive practical upside of this. It makes thefts worthless, or almost worthless as the only value is spare parts.

It worked like a charm for phones. Thefts of smarphones were rising very rapidly but then diminished as they become worthless to steal.

However it would be nice to be able to disable this for allowing usage in offline environment.

Did it really? In absence of official statistics, I think it just got normalized. When everyone has a monthly contract with insurance, it's not a tragedy if the phone gets stolen: you make a call, they send you a new phone, life goes on.

In the UK at least, phones do get stolen all over the place, it's just not reported anymore because it's simply a fact of life.

” Cell phone robberies and thefts from persons went down 50 percent in the first two years after the kill switch became mandatory on phones. In the past two years they fell again by another 8 percent, to a total of 1,754 last year.” 2018

Not only that. Perhaps most importantly it curbed the growth rate.

Except if you are the OS maker bending over to a dictatorship like we already have today.

At least with open source eyeballs are allowed to investigate and change without breaking some nonsense ToS.

I hope initiatives like puri.sm thrive.

It's my understanding that disabling system integrity protection (SIP) on M1 macs immediately disables its new ability to run iOS apps from the iOS App Store, for precisely this reason.

As for the hardware protections, already we have iPhones doing this with their cameras and screens and fingerprint readers and the like, ostensibly for security but who knows if it's just to kill the third party repair market.

I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school when I say that Apple would prefer nobody ever buy a formerly-broken, repaired, secondhand iPhone or iPad.

I believe that this is true for the USA market but not true for many markets worldwide. From the perspective of the developing world (containing most of the users and most of the devices, but not most of the revenue), the market is very different, much less relevance of iOS/Apple Store, much higher preference for free apps instead of service subscriptions, etc.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-qua...

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

What OS does the main CPU run? Usually the one from Microsoft, the vendor with specific state-of-the-art expertise in locking down the platforms on which they operate stores (xbox).

Apple is simply ahead of the curve here; Microsoft (and the entirety of the PC market they run on) will get there soon enough.

I hope you're right and I'm totally wrong, but everything I see with regards to platform stores, DRM, and "cryptographic integrity of software" as it's termed leads me to believe that in a relatively short period of time (10 years, +/-5) basically nothing cheap and performant off the shelf will run open OSes or common software without significant difficulty.

I was under the impression that activation can be circumvented by setting the secure boot mode to something less than "maximum security", at least on Intel Macs. Is that a different mechanism then?

The T2/M1 still needs activation data before it will do anything (like let you use the touchbar or touchid or secure enclave or even talk to the SSD) after a disk wipe.

This [online activation] is done after the recovery kernel has already booted from the USB install media. Signed boot and T2/M1 activation are different things entirely.

Ancient greeks knew this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

Perhaps these sort of closed systems are crushing to you, as you have correctly assumed that they are to me. They aren't to most people: the iPhone is wildly popular. Many people will be very happy to get new M1 macs, xboxes, and iPhones this christmas.

Most people prefer the conveniences of central management, having never personally experienced the terrifying and violent failure modes of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship.

If you want it to be different, you have to ignore them and get people jazzed about a more open future. Eventually one of us will either become famous enough for us to do something about it, or inspire someone else.

When all systems available follow only these cryptographically enforced rules, your tools will make it impossible for you to do basic human life tasks without being censored and surveilled.

I encourage you to study what happens to societies that go through that.

Android phones largely out number iOS devices and phone home far more than iOS devices.

This illusion of caring about "security" or "privacy rights" that hackernews expresses never ever passes the sniff test.

And I think your point just goes to show how easily Apple could turn around the public perception of this issue if they just allowed sideloading.

No, but like many here they couldn't stop bleeting about Apple.

Making sure that Apple is represented in an equal and positive light should be a small concern compared to these consumer device privacy issues that affect all vendors.

That's a 100% inevitability. Every new CPU architecture incorporates an entire set of new restrictions under the guise of security and privacy.

Under the guise of security: for sure. But where are the restrictions under the guise of privacy? In my observation, the trend rather moves away from privacy.

UEFI comes with some ARM SoCs and uptake is increasing. U-boot will still be popular on the embedded SoCs. With standards like SBSA and SBBR, you can run a generic unmodified arm64 operating system.

>According to Cook, while analysts suggested Apple shouldn't do it, the company "strongly believes it was the right thing to do for [its] customers."

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/29/apple-lower-upgrades-ex...

>“We also make sure to design durable products, that last as long as possible,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, said. “That means long-lasting hardware, coupled with our amazing software. Because they last longer, you can keep using them. And keeping using them is the best thing for the planet.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvap85/dont-buy-an-iphone-xs

Maybe you have good reasons for disliking Apple. Maybe you have fair criticisms of the company, that's fine. However on environmentalism Greenpeace are the real deal. They put in the hard work of checking the details, and they absolutely know the difference between companies doing low effort environmental PR and those putting in the hard work to actually make a difference. Out of all the mainstream tech companies they rate Apple number one. If environmental concerns are a significant factor in your tech purchases, there is one clear best option and it's not even close. Now if there are other factors that matter to you more, that's fine. Your choice.

Experimenting with new ideas would be too rigid?

That seems entirely contradictory.

It’s flexibility at the system level rather than the component level.

We are seeing the classic Innovator's Dilemma pattern whereby the lesser technology slowly overtakes the more brittle incumbent tech. x86 did the same with minicomputers, and then mainframe type workloads.

How exactly did you achieve such a dramatic reduction in cost? The graviton instances aren't faster than the Intel/AMD options, so you need at least the same number of instances unless something else changed.

1. Innovator's dilemma: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma

ARM in this case is the underdog, attacking the incumbent x86. It is the lesser tech because it started from "below" (lower value niches not taken by the incumbent which prefers higher profit margins).

2. RISC vs CISC has never been settled. Until Apple (and Amazon super recently) produced their super recent architectures based on ARM, x86 was considered superior. Yes, RISC was theoretically better in the 80s and later 90s, but x86 has been reinvented successfully 2 times (micro-ops and x86_64) and scaled from 0.2MHz to 5Ghz. It's also a mix of CISC and RISC, it's not pure CISC now. Same for ARM, they've added various instructions which bring it closer to CISC.

As far as I can see the only real difference these days is the constant length of instructions for ARM: https://erik-engheim.medium.com/why-is-apples-m1-chip-so-fas...

M1 actually also implements the X86 memory model too in HW. It’s only usable for the rosetta applications and comes with perhaps 20% perf penalty. But it’s still way better than emulating it with barriers.

In C++ terms it pretty much means X86 is always seq_cst. With ARM one can actually get benefit of the different memory model options. As an example one can do an atomic access without having to flush the whole store buffer out, which is impossible in X86.

Due to the instruction coding and memory model for multicore I don’t really see X86 dominating anymore in the upcoming decades.

And as the modern OoO cores are so similar internally it’s not even a big deal in the end. AMD shouldn’t have any issues with producing a Zen arm core. Switch the inst decoder and that’s pretty much it (ton of design work for sure). Keep the X86 mem model optional for emulation and binary translation can be almost thought as just making X86 instructions into fixed width ahead of time.

I had always assumed that the looser memory model must have a performance benefit. But this comment from last week argues that it doesn't really buy that much, and that a bigger buffer can eliminate most of the difference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25263461

If TSO forces flushing of store buffers for every atomic access, that seems like a substantial disadvantage for x86.

Without that the store buffers can be kept unflushed to, as an example, see if one can get a full cacheline or whatnot and only flush then.

The comment is correct that an X86 with heavy reordering backend will beat arm without one. However arm with one does handily beat X86 with one. Case in point: M1

Is the 20% perf hit of TSO mode that you cite an ARM vs. ARM comparison? If so, that would be pretty damning.

Is there an easy way to flip the M1 into TSO mode for benchmarking? I would love to observe this 20% for myself.

I haven’t verified the exact numbers myself. And it will depend on the exact thing you’re running. It’s just on the order of low tens of percents.

TSO cannot be enabled outside of rosetta as it’s not exactly a good arm extension. Perhaps you could do some trickery but Apple likely prevents that.

However you can test it by making something where you know rosetta generates comparable arm assembly from the X86 one and just run comparison that way. Some sort of parallel lockfree algorithm would be the best candidate.

One couldn’t do X86 version of M1, mostly because there is no way of making an instruction decoder that wide for it.

And the performance penalty of M1 when working in TSO mode strongly implies that yes the weaker memory model indeed plays a major role. Not the biggest, but definitely not insignificant. Tens of percents here and tens of percents there combined become a ridiculous perf boost.

x86 was itself a kind of underdog in that space, losing out in sheer performance and bandwidth to the high-end RISC market, but making up for it by, you know, being cheap enough that "regular people" could go and buy a family computer with an x86 processor.

Intel managed to slowly improve the various deficiencies over time, and produced a processor not only affordable, but also superior to the incumbent RISC chips in all but niche areas.

I think more than the ISA, Apple's M1 manages to be so good at its job for similar reasons to the old RISC chips -- it's built from the ground-up with a pretty specific target application, rather unlike x86, which has to be all things to all people, with legacy support and scaling from laptops to quad socket 3U servers.

It’s a bit silly to think of x86 and ARM as being so different these days. Most x86 code looks a lot like it was produced for a RISC chip and ARM has been gaining some more complex instructions and addressing modes. Academics may have felt that RISC was better than CISC for a long time but I don’t think they were predicting the world of today so much as they were incorrectly predicting the near past. If RISC were so much better then we’d have lots of workstations running on modern Alpha or PA-RISC systems. But we don’t see that.

> Academics may have felt that RISC was better than CISC for a long time but I don’t think they were predicting the world of today so much as they were incorrectly predicting the near past.

Plus you know, academics have been known to be wrong. That's why there's even a saying for it: science advances, one funeral at a time. People are emotional and get attached to their pet theories. There are many examples of this.

It's going to be interesting to see how CPU/GPU tech advances the next few years.

Well yes I don't think the x86 BCD instructions are still being used liberally, or AAA, or CONS/SCAS etc

And how specifically are these instructions complex? Do they produce an unusually high number of micro-ops when decided?

Today the most used x86 instructions are not that much different from ARM ones, and in a good number of cases actually even simpler. The simplest way to compare is to simply look at the assembly an optimizing native compiler emits, and lookup for what the emitted instructions are doing.

The micro-ops of processor are actually quite dependent on the ISA. You could do neutral micro-ops, but I doubt this would be very efficient. So you can't really compare the complexity of ISA by the number of micro-ops issued, because among different arch and microarch the micro-ops are themselves more complex on some point and less on others, with tons of similarities with (core instruction set of) the ISAs they implement.

Complex instruction for backward compat, special, or intrinsically difficult operations, are transformed to a potentially very high number of micro-ops, often looked-up in a ROM.

It's not. It's microcoded. Like VAX. Which RISC is a response to.

Most chips are "microcoded", at least here and there. The term does not define a whole micro-architecture, esp in modern complex ones, but I'm not really sure how you would implement old school CISC chips without microcode concepts. The 8086 was microcoded: https://www.reenigne.org/blog/8086-microcode-disassembled/. It basically means that "you" program some low level internal details of a chip, e.g. the muxes connecting various buses to execution units. Most of the time the "you" is only the chip designers, and it is stored mostly in a ROM. Sometimes microcoding is accessible by actual software programmers, but it is quite rare.

And modern u-ops are not necessarily like what was done at the time of old-school microcode.

(It's split for things like development, now that the M1 is here. Personally I get my development done with 8-core 4+ Ghz x86 chips in Windows/WSL2/Docker, but others are getting development done with Apple Silicon M1 ARM chips!)

Over time the "lesser" technology can become the greater technology for more use cases.

If so, as soon as someone (Apple) makes an ARM chip with sufficient PCIe lanes, then it's only a matter of drivers...

It's a combination of things:

* Apple has not indicated that they'll allow for third-party GPUs

* Apple has not pushed for widespread gaming compatibility

* Game developers prefer to reach the widest audience

Apple would need the M1 successors superior in gaming computation and capable of marrying up to high-performance GPUs, write the drivers necessary AND get broad adoption of Apple gaming to factor into game publishing.

This is all theoretically possible, but it didn't happen while Apple was using roughly the same high-end hardware available to PC gamers, so it's questionable (in my mind) that it'll happen when they are locking down their hardware further, and trying to use all their own hardware for gaming.

That's not the case anymore, but the stereotype will persist for a while.

One of the reasons this new chip is so performant is the "headroom" that this approach has given them.

Apple are the survivors of the vertical integrated home computers, and they only managed to survive by reverse acquisition of NeXT, and diversifying outside of the desktop market.

I don’t think ARM and graphics will long be known for poor performance.

As a fan of AMD, I hope they see the writing on the wall and are planning accordingly. It would not be surprising to see the successors to the PS5 and Xbox Series running on ARM.

First Apple and now Microsoft. Do they license the patents from Intel or did they expire? Or are they working around that somehow?

Important to note that this doesn't really apply to Apple Silicon. Rosetta II isn't X86 emulation, it's a translation layer - big technical difference.

But it can be different. Depends on the magic formulas you use for your claims, and whether you are actually permitted to patent software in the first place (with or without other magic formulas usually stating that said software is executed by some hardware).

And in places where it is not supposed to be possible to patent software, patent offices are usually nevertheless accepting them, because it gives them money so why not? :P

TLDR it is a mess. Depends on an insane nmuber of contextual factors, and as unpredictable as the outcome of Oracle vs. Google before the verdict. Or maybe even more unpredictable.

https://www.infoq.com/news/2020/11/rosetta-2-translation/

I think you're thinking of copyright? Where reverse engineering is allowed for interoperability.

Wait a second, one of us is behind the times. I thought Brexit happened earlier this year?

>The United Kingdom (UK) left the European Union (EU) on 31 January 2020. A transition period is now in place until 31 December 2020.

As far as I can tell from my distant vantage point on the west coast of North America, there is very little doubt left. Brexit has already happened and most of the fallout will be settled by the end of this month. I supposed you could say that it's still in a constant state of happening, but it's well past the point of "not happening" as far as I can tell.

[0]: https://www.government.nl/topics/brexit/brexit-where-do-we-s...

That's my expectation at least. They may feel the full pain of a full exit on Dec 31, I doubt they'll want to continue in that state for very long.

There's also the possibility of yet another extension on the transition period.

The UK ceased being in the EU in January, and transitioned into a temporary EEA membership, subject to most EU law. That comes to an end in a few days; at that point what happens next depends on the outcome of negotiations. There's certainly a world in which EU patent rules continue to apply to the UK; in fact, that would probably have been the default assumption until the British government went off the deep end.

So, if you use 'Brexit' to mean purely the legalistic act of leaving the EU, then yes, it's happened. However, effectively none of the _effects_ of Brexit have happened yet.

Right now, ARM Macs are going to just be lost for any kind of gaming (except Catalyst versions of mobile games). This is probably ridiculous, but my dream is that the M-series chips become so compelling over the other options that the NEXT nextgen consoles would adopt it. Then we could get back to having at least a few of the biggies getting ported to Macs. But I can't even get my hands on the current new-gen PS, so this is a looong way off, even in the best case.

Every game I've tried with a Mac port runs great on the M1 under Rosetta. I've sunk many hours into Factorio and Offworld Trading Company on my M1 mini, and if I gave you the same game running side by side on an Intel mac, I'd bet you could't tell which was which without quitting and checking the system profiler.

If you meant triple-A gaming, then yeah, without a sizable increase in mac marketshare, it's probably lost for the foreseeable future.

On top of that, there's a lack of raw mouse which Apple hasn't fixed despite over a decade of people begging. This really fubar's FPS games where absolute control over sensitivity, acceleration curves are crucial for mechanics (e.g. countering recoil and flick shots in Counter-Strike)

Obviously no hardcore gamer is going to be happy with this, but in general I'm very happy with the trade-offs Apple has chosen for portable macs and when I do replace this with an Apple Silicon machine, I will be slightly disappointed at losing the ability to play the occasional triple-A game, but not enough so to seriously consider other options.

That said, I'm not sure if Unity will have an advantage here because of its reliance on C# compared to UE's C++ (but I'm not sure how common it is to use C++ compared to UnrealScript). Then again, if you can trigger the X86 consistency mode on the M1 (or if it's always on?) for ARM instructions (if that makes sense), then maybe it's as simple as a compile/release for that target from each of those platforms since the memory model will be the same for the C++ code.

Note: I'm not a game developer, and have only looked at/used minimally at those engines/suites, so there's a lot of assumptions in the above based on how I understand stuff to work, not how I know it to work from experience.

I wonder how much of an improvement you could get by having TSMC make a high-end 5nm x86 SoC.

Then you get to start working on making the software work.

They are in a weird situation. They depend on AMD/Intel to deliver. This is a massive dependency for Microsoft. Are there other large corporations have this big of a dependency?

I understand that Microsoft's revenue is shifting towards cloud, services, etc. But I think Windows is still "the" key to a lot of those offerings. Take a massive chunk of market share from Windows and I'm pretty much sure all those services will have a hit too.

What are their options?

I think Microsoft have 5 or 6 different lines of business that bring in billions or more of revenue: windows, cloud, gaming, office/productivity and surface. They are the most diversified of the big players.

> Businesses above a certain size overwhelmingly use pcs unless they are in specific arty sectors. M1 won't change that, or at least not rapidly.

Besides the fact, which many HN users working for FAANGS or startups don't encounter, that big enterprises are both rigid and also quite locked into the Microsoft/Windows/Office mono culture, big companies tend to have very elaborate purchasing processes.

Things with just 1 vendor tend to be completely ignored, if they're meant to be used throughout the company. There is a certain irony with my previous paragraph, but Microsoft stuff is usually grandfathered in, the rules for new acquisitions don't apply to them. On top of that Microsoft has super solid backwards/forwards compatibility, migration paths and an amazing history of working with enterprises, as much as they are hated especially by the Open Source community for other things.

So you can expect ARM Macs to be adopted and used, but most likely frowned upon by IT departments and CIOs if too many people want them. With Intel they can have a bidding process or at least a product comparison between Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. With Apple it's... just Apple. Also Apple's B2B side is super underpowered and their history is very chequered due to their frequent breaking changes.

Funnily enough, both times I saw this happen (at a large bank and later at a utility company) the only thing we needed from IT was network access and a Windows VM license so that we could run the god awful company payroll app that required IE11 to work. Once a week dozens of very highly paid devs and SREs would boot up a Windows SOE VM, login to the domain, start the payroll app, enter in five rows of data and shutdown. What a waste of time and money.

If you want a Linux workstation, IT will provision you a Windows VM. It has email, Office, and our payroll app. With most stuff on Teams you can ignore it most of the time and get on with your work. IT's happy, we're happy.

Dell may actually be the PC provider closest to what Apple does, since I believe they source components for their own hardware in some cases (or use white label in others, but with their own firmware as I noted).

That said, I think the only thing that prevents Apple from competing in this space is desire and experience providing that service to enterprises at scale. It's not like they don't have the money or manufacturing pipeline, and lack of experience solves itself after a while.

This ignores the operating system from the equation. Basically there is no effective replacement for Windows or macOS (or Linux). Whichever platform you pick you are stuck with due to legacy/having to retrain hundreds (if not thousands) of workers if you want to switch.

It’s true that large enterprise is slow and cumbersome. But they really don’t care too much if they’re buying you a MacBook, or a surface, or a Dell. Their main concern is whether they can properly manage all their devices, which isn’t too hard to do these days. Whether a large enterprise has MacBooks or not depends a lot more on whether or not they’ve figured out how to use JAMF than it does anything else.