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I've argued that so far we've been in an era with smart phones that resembles early name brand closed PCs like the Commodore 64, Apple II, TI/99, etc. We may b

by api 6y ago

I've argued that so far we've been in an era with smart phones that resembles early name brand closed PCs like the Commodore 64, Apple II, TI/99, etc. We may be about to enter an era more reminiscent of the PC clone era, which was more boring from an aesthetic point of view but far more exciting in terms of innovation and opportunity. New platforms usually start closed and then open over time. I think a similar transformation is slowly building in the cloud space, but it's very quiet and nowhere near critical mass. I'd keep an eye on cheap bare metal hosts like packet.net and OVH, things that make it really easy to self-host and self-manage K8S clusters, and truly RAIN (redundant array of inexpensive nodes) ready databases like CockroachDB. Pretty soon you'll be able to combine those things and host at roughly 1/10th the cost of AWS or less, with absolutely zero lock-in. At the very least it will kick off a price war in conventional cloud. Alternately if Starlink brings much faster connectivity to the edge while simultaneously kicking terrestrial broadband in the butt to offer competitive offerings, we could see a move of some hosting back to the edge where 99.9%+ uptime is not really needed. That could include batch processing, model training, analytics, and other stuff that doesn't directly power real-time customer API or UI interactions.

jandrese 6y ago
I have been waiting forever for phone manufacturers to finally standardize the booting process, hardware detection, and driver support for phone hardware. It's a decade overdue now. I would have thought the nightmare of supporting dozens of different phone models would push manufacturers to do this, but instead they just said "fuck supporting older models" and let them die young. The old excuse that the hardware was too limited to support that kind of functionality is long since over. There is really no excuse anymore.
- api 6y ago
  It's a problem on the whole ARM architecture and is one reason that ARM servers have not taken off. Every ARM board and chip is a special snowflake with its own weird boot and driver and hardware setup incantations. There's a bit of de-facto standardization but it's rough and not dependable at all.
  - g_p 6y ago
    The lack of proper boot and hardware standardisation is a huge issue. DTB tries to solve the fact different people put different peripherals on different ports, and there's no real hardware enumeration process to get around this. But beneath this, one of the root issues at least in mobile devices is the system on chip nature of the design meaning you're at the mercy of the chipmaker to maintain appropriate drivers. These are invariably very very closed source on phones, as some areas like imaging and camera support were (and are now still, I guess) being bought in as super expensive IP blocks with serious NDAs and restrictions on what can be made available. One reason Android is as fragmented as it was, was that they kept changing the system HAL, and chipset makers weren't providing upgraded drivers to support the new HAL as, from their perspective, the chip was end-of-life, old news, last year's model not making them any more money. I assume it isn't quite as bad on server, but single board computers running mainline Linux without patches, and with all peripheral and SoC component support are very rare, and noteworthy when they are found. Most still have pretty closed GPUs. But when it's all on one chip, and you don't have any hardware discovery process, or even a standard way to boot the CPU, it's hard to see much of a generic future, as much as one would be great!
  - pabs3 6y ago
    There is a standard for ARM servers now, and it is basically UEFI + ACPI like x86 servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...
pvg 6y ago
How were these early PCs any more closed than the IBM PC clones that followed? Some shipped with schematics and ROM listings. Smartphones have now been around longer than the entire pre-IBM PC era with no obvious movement towards any kind of opening outside of hobbyist devices. Game consoles have been around for decades without any such shift either.
- api 6y ago
  > Some shipped with schematics and ROM listings. They were more open than an iPhone, but they were not particularly open to anyone with less than a CE/EE level of computer and electronics expertise. They certainly were not designed to be modular and open like the clone PCs that came later.
  - pvg 6y ago
    I don't think that's accurate, just google up an Apple ][. But even if it were true, it wouldn't be strong evidence for your 'consumer hardware platforms become more open' theory given the reality of the longer-lasting smartphone era we live in now. Both the theory and the example used to support it seem starkly at odds with that reality, to me.
    - mirimir 6y ago
      Game devices and smartphones were carefully designed to remain closed. Although the Pinephone and Librem 5 look like smartphones, and use many of the same components, they are far closer to phone-sized PCs. And so they're open from the start.
- bscphil 6y ago
  In addition to that concern, I would add that we've seen some of the opposite move happen - PCs change to be more like phones. The closed source OSes are all moving towards fenced off app marketplaces, with heavy sandboxing between apps. Even Ubuntu seems interested in this kind of move, with Snaps. We've also seen attempts to close the bootloader to "tampering", a restriction in place since the beginning of smartphones. We've also seen components like memory and batteries soldered into the computer instead of being replaceable. And so on. I'm worried mobile phones are reducing the expectation that the average consumer has of being able to modify, upgrade, and repair their devices, and computer manufacturers are poised to take advantage of this, rather than the other way around.
rozab 6y ago
And what would drive this transition? It won't be consumers, as before.

by api 6y ago

jandrese 6y ago

I have been waiting forever for phone manufacturers to finally standardize the booting process, hardware detection, and driver support for phone hardware. It's a decade overdue now. I would have thought the nightmare of supporting dozens of different phone models would push manufacturers to do this, but instead they just said "fuck supporting older models" and let them die young. The old excuse that the hardware was too limited to support that kind of functionality is long since over. There is really no excuse anymore.

api 6y ago
It's a problem on the whole ARM architecture and is one reason that ARM servers have not taken off. Every ARM board and chip is a special snowflake with its own weird boot and driver and hardware setup incantations. There's a bit of de-facto standardization but it's rough and not dependable at all.
- g_p 6y ago
  The lack of proper boot and hardware standardisation is a huge issue. DTB tries to solve the fact different people put different peripherals on different ports, and there's no real hardware enumeration process to get around this. But beneath this, one of the root issues at least in mobile devices is the system on chip nature of the design meaning you're at the mercy of the chipmaker to maintain appropriate drivers. These are invariably very very closed source on phones, as some areas like imaging and camera support were (and are now still, I guess) being bought in as super expensive IP blocks with serious NDAs and restrictions on what can be made available. One reason Android is as fragmented as it was, was that they kept changing the system HAL, and chipset makers weren't providing upgraded drivers to support the new HAL as, from their perspective, the chip was end-of-life, old news, last year's model not making them any more money. I assume it isn't quite as bad on server, but single board computers running mainline Linux without patches, and with all peripheral and SoC component support are very rare, and noteworthy when they are found. Most still have pretty closed GPUs. But when it's all on one chip, and you don't have any hardware discovery process, or even a standard way to boot the CPU, it's hard to see much of a generic future, as much as one would be great!
- pabs3 6y ago
  There is a standard for ARM servers now, and it is basically UEFI + ACPI like x86 servers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Base_System_Architectur...

pvg 6y ago

How were these early PCs any more closed than the IBM PC clones that followed? Some shipped with schematics and ROM listings. Smartphones have now been around longer than the entire pre-IBM PC era with no obvious movement towards any kind of opening outside of hobbyist devices. Game consoles have been around for decades without any such shift either.

api 6y ago
> Some shipped with schematics and ROM listings. They were more open than an iPhone, but they were not particularly open to anyone with less than a CE/EE level of computer and electronics expertise. They certainly were not designed to be modular and open like the clone PCs that came later.
- pvg 6y ago
  I don't think that's accurate, just google up an Apple ][. But even if it were true, it wouldn't be strong evidence for your 'consumer hardware platforms become more open' theory given the reality of the longer-lasting smartphone era we live in now. Both the theory and the example used to support it seem starkly at odds with that reality, to me.
  - mirimir 6y ago
    Game devices and smartphones were carefully designed to remain closed. Although the Pinephone and Librem 5 look like smartphones, and use many of the same components, they are far closer to phone-sized PCs. And so they're open from the start.
bscphil 6y ago
In addition to that concern, I would add that we've seen some of the opposite move happen - PCs change to be more like phones. The closed source OSes are all moving towards fenced off app marketplaces, with heavy sandboxing between apps. Even Ubuntu seems interested in this kind of move, with Snaps. We've also seen attempts to close the bootloader to "tampering", a restriction in place since the beginning of smartphones. We've also seen components like memory and batteries soldered into the computer instead of being replaceable. And so on. I'm worried mobile phones are reducing the expectation that the average consumer has of being able to modify, upgrade, and repair their devices, and computer manufacturers are poised to take advantage of this, rather than the other way around.

rozab 6y ago

And what would drive this transition? It won't be consumers, as before.