Elsewhere on HN today is a story about a teen who sold his kidney to get an iPhone, and is now bedridden for life because of it. A monoculture in nature, or in

Elsewhere on HN today is a story about a teen who sold his kidney to get an iPhone, and is now bedridden for life because of it. A monoculture in nature, or in technology, is almost never good. I remember PowerPC days, when I had bought a whole bunch of software for professional use (incl. Adobe Creative Suite). Then they switched from PowerPC. Now all of a sudden most of my software either wouldn't run, or ran very slow. M1 will be the same thing if it is only built by Apple. I expect Mac prices to soar for the next revision, in an attempt by Apple to recoup the cost of M1 development. x86 isn't a monoculture, though it's not far off, because there are three manufacturers of x86 chips (Intel, Via, and AMD). If Apple had continued with the trend of excellence that existed while Steve Jobs was alive (no comments about the man personally, but he was extremely demanding about product quality), then I might be more inclined to see this as a good thing. But with what I perceive as falling quality in product and falling quality in design decisions, I can't see the M1 transition being handled well. I also see it as a scary precursor to a possible new trend: each of the big corps making hardware and software (Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple) comes out with their own proprietary chips, with the vendor lock in that implies when people buy their new software.