Comment by momokoko
5 years ago
I think this is an important reminder about what an extraordinary accident PCs were in their standardization and openness.
It’s possible we took that for granted and assumed that openness was a given in personal computing.
The reality is that most devices, from cars to refrigerators, to video games, to cameras, etc are closed and proprietary ecosystems. PCs, due to a few happy accidents, were one of the rare things that enabled a vibrant, free from restriction, 3rd party ecosystem in both hardware and software.
Apple may be inadvertently teaching us all a lesson about not taking the things we currently enjoy for granted as they are often not guarantees in the future
I used to hate microsoft for locking us into shitty software for decades.
But looking back I see that they gave us all an enormous windfall in the form of comoditized hardware with decades of hardware growth. (hardware is the complement of OS software, so drive hardware costs down and OS sales go up)
You would think Apple as a hardware company would open up software to increase hardware sales, but instead it seems to try to control everything so it is fighting a battle on multiple fronts.
> You would think Apple as a hardware company would open up software to increase hardware sales, but instead it seems to try to control everything so it is fighting a battle on multiple fronts.
Purely on the business perspective, Apple has seen tremendous benefit with their locked ecosystem and vertical integration. Bringing that strategy to the PC market was bound to happen and it's likely going to work extraordinarily well for their share holders if performance/productivity benefits (from Apple Silicon) at low-mid end forces traditional PC consumers to Mac.
On the consumer perspective, Would we accept a $1000 PC couple of years back with no means to install other Operating System (Officially), Only 3-5 years of updates(if lucky), Use only manufacturer approved apps, Repair only at their approved centres?
Then why did we accept it to be a norm for >$1000 smartphones?
We made them smell money with our consumer decisions to trade 'freedom in computation' in smartphones and it's now coming to haunt us with personal computers. The line between Smartphones and PCs have been blurred with Apple Silicon, Google will do it with their Chromebooks(which was already happening even without their custom silicon [Update cycle, Locked boot-loaders etc.]) and Microsoft with their Surface line up.
There’s never been more diverse software, more readily and easily available, than there is today (mainly due to the web and app stores). Software has never been easier to write, to distribute, or to monetize.
Users don’t care about if the platform is “open” or if they can install Linux. In fact, in many cases, the things are a massive source of pain to end users that want devices that just work, which the iPhone and iPad largely do.
It’s also, by the way, never been easier to build your own hardware from ready-made components and platforms.
I don’t know why we should lament users choosing devices that are easy, fun and reliable to use, and that provide them with single tap access to massive software libraries and entice them to pay for that software. Seems like an absolute win to me.
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> with our consumer decisions to trade 'freedom in computation' in smartphones
TBF, the first few iPhone releases were arguably better and more open than anything before them. Apple refused to bow to carriers and provided a standard development platform for the first time. Then the Appstore, again bypassing carriers, increased developer access to mobile platforms by 1000x or more.
Sadly, both consumers and developers then failed to push for even more open alternatives, to the point where Apple and Google managed to entrench themselves too deeply to address this problem through simple market mechanisms. It's time for authorities to step in, hopefully we're seeing that (slowly) happening.
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I have an 8 year old MacBook Air. Still getting updates, still working perfectly well. Best 1000$ ever spent on a PC. Zero seconds invested in configuring or setting up anything.
At the end of the day, buying a Computer is a tradeoff. A lot of people would very happily tradeoff freedom for other values if the value proposition is good.
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Apple started out open. The Apple II has 7 extension slots and loads of peripherals available. It was also user serviceable. This is what Steve Wozniak wanted, and it worked, it was a smashing success. Steve Jobs, on the other hand, had another vision for the company, where Apple would control the user experience. The Macintosh Plus had just two extension slots, and users couldn't open the case, you needed a special extra long screwdriver.
Exactly; Steve Jobs envisioned a closed architecture for the Mac. Thankfully for Mac users who wanted a more open experience, Apple released the Macintosh II in 1987, which was styled similarly to PCs and had six NuBus expansion slots. From then until the release of the cylindrical Mac Pro in 2013, Apple always had Macs with expansion slots in its lineup. From 2013 to 2019 Apple didn’t sell Macs with internal expansion slots, but Apple resumed selling internally expandable Macs once the current “cheese grater” Mac Pro was released, albeit at a significantly higher price point compared to the 2006-12 cheese grater Mac Pro.
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Another way to look at it:
Microsoft forced PC buyers to use their software by making deals with OEMs to preinstall it on every PC, hiding the cost of the software from the consumer. Most consumers did not purchase a PC with no software installed, and then purchase a license to Windows separately; the software and license came with the computer.
There are probably more similarities between Apple and Microsoft than there are differences, however tempting it may be to focus on the differences.
People love to criticise the RPi. It has its flaws and shortcomings. Nevertheless, it is a rare example of a computer that does not come with an "OS" preinstalled. Buyers can choose from a variety of OS and make their own bootable SD cards.
The raspberry pi does have an OS preinstalled that users cant remove, which is why its so hard to get full support for the basic linux stack on there. The GPU has a proprietary low level OS/firmware blob that handles basic system functions and loading linux and starting the CPU once all that is done and is required for the board to start. This is a big part of why Armbian/Ubuntu dont have full support yet for example. Its not impossible but its weird and complex for OS developers and one of the strengths of the alternative boards, which can generally boot and run a full linux stack with hardware support for everything on the board.
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It was not Microsoft, it was IBM that “gave us” commoditized hardware.
It was MS who forced it big; they wanted standardisation on both professional and 'home computers'; IBM PC (clones) and MSX[0] respectively, both running MS software. MSX failed, but the idea was the same; a hardware standard everyone would adhere to and MS would have the software for. MS was a huge factor in making that happen; no-one knows what would've happened if they would not have done that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
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I agree that IBM gave us the PC with the BIOS listing and open hardware specifications.
(and they tried to close the barn door with the ps/2, microchannel and os/2 but failed pretty miserably)
Meanwhile Microsoft with its non-exclusive software agreement courted hardware vendors and made MS-DOS and soon windows work with a multitude of hardware products. It fostered hardware competition and drove down the price.
No, IBM would have gladly prevented, they even tried to fix Compaq's success by releasing the PS/2 with MCA architecture, they just failed to turn the market around.
Apple's marketing approach is primarily to view hardware and software as inseparable parts of the same product. Their main differentiator in the market is their ability to control the end-user experience to a greater degree than their competitors.
They are probably of the opinion that opening up software would decrease their target customer satisfaction and subsequently decrease sales.
> Apple as a hardware company
Apple is now (primarily) a software-service company, and from that point of view, a locked-up platform makes a lot of business sense (unfortunately). Selling hardware is only the first step in locking customers into their service-ecosystem. In this new Apple world, app-developers are essentially Uber/Lyft-style gig-workers, not independent businesses.
> Apple is now (primarily) a software-service company
They like to tell everyone that, but it's still very much a lie. More than 50% of their revenues come straight from iPhone hardware sales. Services are barely under 18%, and that includes absolutely everything they can throw in there (icloud, appstore, etc). Everything else is hardware.
Apple is a hardware company that is desperately trying to ensure their future when, inevitably, they'll get a few iPhones wrong and consumers will move on. It's a bit like Persian Gulf countries investing in airlines and anything else to ensure they'll have a future when oil runs out.
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IBM did that by licensing the PC "clone" design, not Microsoft. Microsoft added the lockdown layer on top.
They did not license anything, Compaq stole it from them.
Business is conservative. If it stops making bucketloads of money with the current formula then they will change. Otherwise expect the same for as long as it works for them.
Nobody who actually understands Apple's business and how it works "would think" this.
Ok, but instead of putting down someone who knows less, please share some of what you know so the rest of us can learn something.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956)
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Yeah, maybe. They are driving the price of software to zero which helps ios and macos device sales. But I think if they work hard to close things they might end up with a bigger part of a smaller pie. I don't know, maybe they don't need help from people on the outside and can do it all themselves.
Apple is in the business of selling systems that work to end users. Unfortunately, the only way that they can provide that assurance is total control over both the hardware and the software. In fact I suspect that within ten or so years, Apple will eliminate the final dependency -- on NVIDIA -- and migrate the Mac (and everything else) to a custom ISA.
I don't think apple depends on very many companies at all anymore. Not intel, nvidia (or arm), or amd.
I would say they have transitioned to depend more on folks like samsung and tsmc.
I don’t think you’ve been paying attention.
Apple just released their first laptops with custom silicon cpu/gpu, declaring their independence from Intel.
They dropped Nvidia ten years ago.
What dependency on Nvidia do Apple have?
From memory, Apple haven't used Nvidia in any of their products in years due to bad Nvidia behaviour ages ago.
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I really think the reality is more boring than openness vs closed-ness as kinds of existential threats to each other.
Given large enough and open enough markets, there’s niches for multiple approaches, whether that was the DOS/Windows approach of proprietary software and commoditized hardware, the Apple approach of proprietary hardware and software that uses open standards (which was also more or less the Unix workstation approach), the Amazon approach of commoditized compute and storage, or the FOSS approach of commoditized software on commoditized hardware which has further subdivisions that gave rise to Linux, GNU/Linux and multiple BSDs. Even MINIX and L4 have niches that they can and do fill, and isn’t QNX used in a bunch of cars?
The economy, American, Global, European, wherever you want to draw your lines, supports all of these approaches simultaneously because they all have benefits and drawbacks. Not the most exciting statement to make, so as an idea I feel like it just gets overlooked. People will use what they will wherever it makes sense and others will look at them funny and wish they did something different.
Still, it’s something to behold that the same decade that saw Apple make more money while locking down and shedding supplier relationships and most of the open standards they used to support also saw Raspberry Pis, Android replace at least three major mobile OSs, the web become more closed off (compared to the prior decades), RISC-V, Microsoft buying GitHub, and Raptor Computing Systems selling open POWER9 workstations. I don’t pay them much mind but I hear System 76 is doing well for itself selling good Linux PCs.
I wouldn’t worry about computers becoming more locked down. Even second and third rate machines in their class are pretty good these days.
It's interesting to think that if Apple had won the PC wars how closed everything would be.
It's actually /why/ they never had a chance of winning.
Apple opened up to third party licensees for some time. It only hurt the their profitability while gaining Mac OS very little market share.
Apple "lost" the PC war because they were trying to sell slow computers for more money than the fastest available PCs. People bitch about the Apple tax now, but the premium for modern Macs is nowhere near as bad as it used to be. (And from the early signs, bang for the buck the M1 Macs are ahead of the PC industry)
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Well they are winning with iPhones aren’t they?
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PC clones only happened to the reverse engineering success from Compaq and IBM being unable to prevent it in court.
All other 16 bit platforms were just like the Macs back then.
Virtually every desktop computer today uses a bitmapped display and a pointing device... like the Macintosh.
Virtually every mobile device today uses a touch-sensitive display (and a Unix-derived OS)... like the iPhone.
Apple Inc. is the most valuable company in human history.
Tell me again how Apple lost the PC wars? ;-)
First capacitive touch screen phone was LG Prada [1]
There were many valuable companies in the past but they are not anymore. Apple must not push its customers limits too much or it may backfire.
[1] https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/
This is one of the things that really, really make me mad internally. Phones are exactly like you describe locked down proprietary pieces of hardware. The computing world could be so much better if it everything was open.
I fear everyday that the arm "revolution" will make open computing a thing of the past. Look at the arm laptops that are released. Not a single one can run Linux.
The pine book pro runs linux. Also, the bootloader can be unlocked on the new mac arm laptops.
It isn't the locked bootloader that is the issue with porting Linux to new ARM Macs, it's that ARM SoCs require vendor support for Linux in varying degrees, and Apple has made it clear that they won't support other OSes on ARM Macs outside of virtualization.
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But Linux can run on arm just fine? I used to run my website and a bunch of other stuff on an arm64 VPS.
It isn't that the CPU architecture that's the problem, because that's well supported, it's the rest of the hardware configuration that isn't standardized and is almost always unique between ARM SoCs.
ARM servers use UEFI, and have enumerable buses for hardware detection, while most ARM SoCs require a custom bootloader or a forked open source one, and can't enumerate over hardware, thus requiring something like the DeviceTree in Linux.
Here's an idea of what kind of work ARM SoCs need for Linux to run on them[1].
[1] https://elinux.org/images/a/ad/Arm-soc-checklist.pdf
Yes but the instruction set is only a tiny part of conpatibility. Intel and amd have generally standardized on ACPI for hardware discovery for example. But ARM has not. This means there is no Generic way to know what the capabilities of arm system are. That's Just one of the issues though.
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> Not a single one can run Linux.
My ARM Chromebook which boots into Linux would beg to differ.
Then stuff has changed recently. The last time I looked this up it was custom stuff and I couldn't just download Ubuntu or some other distro and press install.
Can you put stock Debian on it as easily as I can on a PC?
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>Look at the arm laptops that are released. Not a single one can run Linux.
Some of the earliest ARM laptops ran Chrome OS, which is an image based Linux distro (vs package based).
People have been running more recognizable distros on some of these models for a long time, with varying degrees of success.
Take it easy on the hyperbole. There are definitely options.
The vast majority of ARM SoCs' Linux support amounts to Linux forks, and not mainline Linux support. Forks eventually stop being maintained, and quickly become outdated.
Now that I look at it, it looks like this is the case for some[1] ARM Chromebooks, too, in that they are stuck having to use the specific ChromeOS kernels that ship with images for their Chromebook models.
[1] https://github.com/RaumZeit/LinuxOnAcerCB5-311
think this is an important reminder about what an extraordinary accident PCs were in their standardization and openness.
You have it backwards. Around the time, everything was open and well documented and hackable. PC, Amiga, ST, Archimedes... It was Macintosh that was uniquely closed.
I think having the ability to use products, any products, for a purpose that wasn't intended by their designers, is important to help overall progress of the humanity.
I don't know if that really happened by accident. I rather think it's the true nature of information to be open, and therefore for the platforms too
Yes, we should all have access to the US Gold Codes
Pdp-11 and VAX were also open.
Not exactly mass consumer devices.
It was cool back then, I played commander keen and lemmings on a gateway 2k. Lots of power, reactively cheap for a “ibm clone.”
But the reality is things are different now. The threat model is different.
You can’t just copy a “cdrom” full of 200 shareware titles you got in the mail and let your kids randomly run executables.
It was risky then too. MS DOS did have viruses, TSR programs and others could use TCP stacks ( like WatTCP ), data exfiltration via data files was a thing ( eg an infected wordstar that would save other files into a word star document being sent for printing).
I used to sell anti virus, and the threat models for some of the clients were Eye opening.
There was non-zero risk but it wasn’t remotely similar.
These machines dialed up bbs. No internet, no volumes of personal data like hd video and photos.
You didn’t have bank websites or online payment tools you could use people’s data to defraud.
My point is there no fitting the days of pc clones over today and having some direct comparison around “openness.”
You can on a raspberry pi. I recently confirmed keen runs as well on a rpi4 as it did on my old gw2k.
Win 3.1 audio drivers under dosbox are a bit beyond my current capacity for tinkering though.