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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 grant
by momokoko 6y 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
- soperj 6y agoIt's interesting to think that if Apple had won the PC wars how closed everything would be.
- gnarbarian 6y agoIt's actually /why/ they never had a chance of winning.
- nojvek 6y agoWell they are winning with iPhones aren’t they?
- gnarbarian 6y agoNope. Android has more market share despite apple having the head start.
- agumonkey 6y agoIt's somehow easier to be a follower here, Apple set the trends for years, Android only had to replicate and sell cheaper.
- mattnewton 6y agoI don't think apple is looking to beat android in marketshare, but instead in profits. They are mostly not interested in selling cheaper commodities, and instead work hard for premium differentiation (and maximal value capture of the whole ecosystem around premium smartphones with services and peripherals). Besides, if they did win smartphone marketshare too hard, they risk regulation on the amount of control they enjoy of their platforms, which might harm their profits.
- danilocesar 6y agoAre they? Last time I've heard Android still runs in the vast majority of phones, worldwide.
- oarsinsync 6y agoWorldwide stats are a lot less important than addressable market stats.
- Bud 6y agoApple is winning in terms of making virtually all the profit available to those selling phones, and Android's market share advantage is not nearly as big as you think, at least not in areas where people have a lot of disposable income, like in the US, where it's basically 50/50 between Android and iOS.
- aptwebapps 6y agoWhy is that the more important metric given the subject?
- tachyonbeam 6y agoIt's not. Google had android users using Google Software, and seeing Google Ads. Having more users on android gives you more value when it comes to data collection and selling things to people.
- est31 6y agoBut aren't apple customers some of the best targets for ads because of their higher spending power?
- izacus 6y agoIt's an important metric because it makes post writers favorite company win.
- mattnewton 6y agoIt's a question of what winning means I think. In terms of profits, they might be winning. If it's market share though, they are not winning, and that means there is still an opening for open standards.
- sooheon 6y agoIf it was your company, would you rather have 99% market share and 1% of profits, or 1% market share and 99% of profits?
- Zarel 6y ago99% of profits, obviously, but you've forgotten what thread we're in. This is a thread about Linux and software freedom. For that, market share is way more important than profit share.
- ecnahc515 6y agoIf I was making 99% of the profit off of 1% the market, I’d be terrified someone could just undercut me and take either my 1% or a big portion of the remaining market, that I’m trying to also get. Owning the profit is great, but owning the market means longevity.
- ogre_codes 6y agoApple 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)
- krooj 6y agoThis is spot on - pre-G3 & G4 PowerPC macs (think 601, 603/e, 604/e/v), were dogshit-slow and ran a legitimately inferior OS and 68k macs were possibly worse. I do admire how experimental Apple was with their hardware back in those days, though: built in TV tuners, NUBUS, audio interfaces, not to mention the very progressive laptop designs (Duo, 2400c) and Newton! Part of me really misses how fun an inventive hardware was between the 90s and mid-2000s. Things feel very stale these days and maybe M1 is the push that this industry needs to get innovating on new platforms again? edit: if Dell or Lenovo would do an ARM variant of the XPS13 or X1C that was capable of running Linux, I'd buy the hell out of it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- pjmlp 6y agoPC 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.
- rsfinn 6y agoVirtually 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? ;-)
- njanirudh 6y agoFirst 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/ https://www.androidauthority.com/lg-prada-1080646/
- m463 6y agoI 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.
- Bud 6y agoNobody who actually understands Apple's business and how it works "would think" this.
- m463 6y agoYeah, 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.
- dang 6y agoOk, 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/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html (a recent longer explanation of this principle, for anyone who cares, is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956)
- Bud 6y agoYou're right. Again.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoApple 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.
- bredren 6y agoIt 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.
- solarengineer 6y agoIt 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.
- bredren 6y agoThere 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.”
- hedora 6y agoYou 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.
- rowanG077 6y agoThis 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.
- WolfRazu 6y agoBut Linux can run on arm just fine? I used to run my website and a bunch of other stuff on an arm64 VPS.
- rowanG077 6y agoYes 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.
- hedora 6y agoArm standardized on dtb’s. It’s a static file that describes all the information ACPI lets you probe dynamically at boot. Edit: and also uboot, which bootstraps the kernel, and hands it a dtb.
- rowanG077 6y agoThat's the entire problem. A dtb file is unique for every different soc and that also means every single device requires a kernel update or a at the very least a patches kernel.
- tenebrisalietum 6y agoIf manufacturers would just make good datasheets available for their devices like they used to it wouldn't matter.
- SllX 6y agoI 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.
- dboreham 6y agoPdp-11 and VAX were also open.
- dredmorbius 6y agoNot exactly mass consumer devices.
- _def 6y agoI 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
- Yajirobe 6y agoYes, we should all have access to the US Gold Codes
- goatinaboat 6y agothink 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.
- grishka 6y agoI 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.