5 ms·

This is a fair comment, but its a bit out of context. The article is addressing the increasing power that software (tech) companies have in the manufacture and

by fergie 6y ago

This is a fair comment, but its a bit out of context. The article is addressing the increasing power that software (tech) companies have in the manufacture and control of hardware.

Guthur 6y ago
But why is this a problem. In the past it was Intel and occasionally AMD or some of older x86 that fell by the wayside. PowerPC was there as well I suppose for awhile. In many ways it's actually way more diverse now than it's ever been, just that some of these players are not making their innovations generally available but rather keeping them inhouse. I feel the barrier has been high for quite some time, Intel was/is a monster that is occassionally caught napping. Maybe they'll wake up again and pull something big out of the hat, turn into a IAAS company as well maybe. To be honest all of this seems like a reasonably decent competive market compared to the old days, we seem to have collectively forgotten the decades of wintel.
- varispeed 6y ago
  Problem is that when your M1 cpu goes bad, you cannot buy the chip from Apple to replace it (tools to do that are fairly inexpensive now and within hobbyist reach). Something like this should be regulated - companies should be required to provide spare parts for x period of time after product phase out. Companies should be forbidden from telling suppliers to not sell spare parts to 3rd parties. We need regulation for the right to repair.
  - Guthur 6y ago
    Sure, but why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it, having the government mandate and tell you what's good for you helps no one in the long run. The big companies have no real problem complying with the regulations, it's quite clear that consumers don't actually give a damn. All you've now succeeded in doing is making sure any startup has a tonne of bureaucratic nonsense to wade through to get it right. What you need to do is identify where a transaction has not been made between two parties for fair recompense. One potential area is to say that without adequate repair cover you are now forced to dispose of your electronics and pay for the safety disposal so that it does not pollute the environment for everyone else. Then a consumer might see the need for repair rights and make an informed value decision. Assuming that top down legislation will not have some unforeseen interaction that drives terrible outcomes is the fallacy of big government, it just consistently fails at it, I've seen it so many times over my life time that it's farcical. As an anecdotal example; circa 2011 the australian goverment brought in legislation to make portable A/C units more efficient. Great, right? Wrong, the government in it's infinite ineptitude managed to word so that it only effected dual vent portable A/C units and left single vent A/C units unaffected. Instead of making dual vents more energy efficient the companies pulled all dual vents from the market and now you can only get single vents which are woefully inefficient. This is not the companies faults, they did exactly what you would expect them to do. The government fixed the legislation 11 months ago but unfortunately we can still not get dual vent A/C at all in Australia.
    - free_rms 6y ago
      Because eventually all other values besides profit for 5 companies will be sacrificed if you go down that road. Why do consumers need the government to enforce child labor laws? FDA regulation? OSHA? These lessons are written in blood. Yes, you might need to work on the regulation in order to get it just right but "who cares, whatever" is not acceptable unless we want to live in an effectively-communist world with a few vertically-integrated corporations setting all the rules.
      - throwaway2048 6y ago
        It would be great if every conversation about regulation on HN wasn't dominated by posts re-litigating if the concept of regulations should exist in the first place.
      - cordellwren 6y ago
        Agree with everything you said except for the fact that you seem to be using "communist" to mean "authoritarian/fascist."
    - varispeed 6y ago
      Are you saying that being able to repair something independently for a consumer doesn't have value? If free market cannot solve the problem, then regulation is needed. You can see that market is moving towards non repairable single use devices or that they can be only repaired at a extortionate price by authorised repair shops. If there is no regulation, all companies will be moving into that direction chasing that extra profit and consumer will not be able to vote with their wallet if everyone does it. Your example is comparing apples to oranges. I am not saying that regulation should influence product design, but rather the producers should give access to spare parts and schematics. I agree that regulation like for A/C example isn't great.
      - jyrkesh 6y ago
        He's saying that when consumers routinely buy products that need to be serviced by first parties, over devices that can be opened and repaired by the end user, the market is voicing its opinion on whether reparability has value to them. I personally prefer the latter, but I also don't think that people loving Macbooks or integrated ARM SoCs is going to change whether I can get a Thinkpad where I can upgrade the RAM with a Philips head. Sure, it might cost a little more further down the line, maybe Intel won't be the behemoth it's been for the last 25 years, but if most people are willing to pay for their black box to get repaired, why does that mean the government needs to step in? It's been happening in the car market too: even entry-level sedans are becoming black boxes more and more, but people snatch 'em up. I should also say I'm very much in favor of the "right to repair", but more in the vein of "you can't legally forbid me to repair my John Deere tractor" than in the vein of "Apple shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to any repair shop that demands them".
  - tannhaeuser 6y ago
    A regulation to this effect has already been voted for in EU parliament just last week [1]. [1]: https://repair.eu/ https://repair.eu/
    - samoa42 6y ago
      fwiw not quite but we are on the right track "The vote means that the European Commission now has the full support of the Parliament in moving forward with the development of laws [...]"
dalbasal 6y ago
Interestingly enough, these contexts form (imo) an single example set. Chip-OS dyads like wintel. Platforms duopolies & oligopolies. Neutrality & commodification vs lock-in dynamics. Public or free standards as an alternative to platforms. etc. A lot of these dynamics have recognisably repeating in the computing industry (also telecom & media) for 4 decade. OTOH, scale is a quality unto itself, and as this article suggests... Vertically integrated computing is very much a megacorp endeavour. I think the difference here is the scale of these companies.

by fergie 6y ago

This is a fair comment, but its a bit out of context. The article is addressing the increasing power that software (tech) companies have in the manufacture and control of hardware.

Guthur 6y ago

But why is this a problem. In the past it was Intel and occasionally AMD or some of older x86 that fell by the wayside. PowerPC was there as well I suppose for awhile. In many ways it's actually way more diverse now than it's ever been, just that some of these players are not making their innovations generally available but rather keeping them inhouse. I feel the barrier has been high for quite some time, Intel was/is a monster that is occassionally caught napping. Maybe they'll wake up again and pull something big out of the hat, turn into a IAAS company as well maybe. To be honest all of this seems like a reasonably decent competive market compared to the old days, we seem to have collectively forgotten the decades of wintel.

varispeed 6y ago
Problem is that when your M1 cpu goes bad, you cannot buy the chip from Apple to replace it (tools to do that are fairly inexpensive now and within hobbyist reach). Something like this should be regulated - companies should be required to provide spare parts for x period of time after product phase out. Companies should be forbidden from telling suppliers to not sell spare parts to 3rd parties. We need regulation for the right to repair.
- Guthur 6y ago
  Sure, but why do consumers need the government to tell them this is a valuable aspect of the technology they've purchased. It they don't value it they don't value it, having the government mandate and tell you what's good for you helps no one in the long run. The big companies have no real problem complying with the regulations, it's quite clear that consumers don't actually give a damn. All you've now succeeded in doing is making sure any startup has a tonne of bureaucratic nonsense to wade through to get it right. What you need to do is identify where a transaction has not been made between two parties for fair recompense. One potential area is to say that without adequate repair cover you are now forced to dispose of your electronics and pay for the safety disposal so that it does not pollute the environment for everyone else. Then a consumer might see the need for repair rights and make an informed value decision. Assuming that top down legislation will not have some unforeseen interaction that drives terrible outcomes is the fallacy of big government, it just consistently fails at it, I've seen it so many times over my life time that it's farcical. As an anecdotal example; circa 2011 the australian goverment brought in legislation to make portable A/C units more efficient. Great, right? Wrong, the government in it's infinite ineptitude managed to word so that it only effected dual vent portable A/C units and left single vent A/C units unaffected. Instead of making dual vents more energy efficient the companies pulled all dual vents from the market and now you can only get single vents which are woefully inefficient. This is not the companies faults, they did exactly what you would expect them to do. The government fixed the legislation 11 months ago but unfortunately we can still not get dual vent A/C at all in Australia.
  - free_rms 6y ago
    Because eventually all other values besides profit for 5 companies will be sacrificed if you go down that road. Why do consumers need the government to enforce child labor laws? FDA regulation? OSHA? These lessons are written in blood. Yes, you might need to work on the regulation in order to get it just right but "who cares, whatever" is not acceptable unless we want to live in an effectively-communist world with a few vertically-integrated corporations setting all the rules.
    - throwaway2048 6y ago
      It would be great if every conversation about regulation on HN wasn't dominated by posts re-litigating if the concept of regulations should exist in the first place.
    - cordellwren 6y ago
      Agree with everything you said except for the fact that you seem to be using "communist" to mean "authoritarian/fascist."
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Are you saying that being able to repair something independently for a consumer doesn't have value? If free market cannot solve the problem, then regulation is needed. You can see that market is moving towards non repairable single use devices or that they can be only repaired at a extortionate price by authorised repair shops. If there is no regulation, all companies will be moving into that direction chasing that extra profit and consumer will not be able to vote with their wallet if everyone does it. Your example is comparing apples to oranges. I am not saying that regulation should influence product design, but rather the producers should give access to spare parts and schematics. I agree that regulation like for A/C example isn't great.
    - jyrkesh 6y ago
      He's saying that when consumers routinely buy products that need to be serviced by first parties, over devices that can be opened and repaired by the end user, the market is voicing its opinion on whether reparability has value to them. I personally prefer the latter, but I also don't think that people loving Macbooks or integrated ARM SoCs is going to change whether I can get a Thinkpad where I can upgrade the RAM with a Philips head. Sure, it might cost a little more further down the line, maybe Intel won't be the behemoth it's been for the last 25 years, but if most people are willing to pay for their black box to get repaired, why does that mean the government needs to step in? It's been happening in the car market too: even entry-level sedans are becoming black boxes more and more, but people snatch 'em up. I should also say I'm very much in favor of the "right to repair", but more in the vein of "you can't legally forbid me to repair my John Deere tractor" than in the vein of "Apple shall hand over detailed schematics and replacement parts to any repair shop that demands them".
- tannhaeuser 6y ago
  A regulation to this effect has already been voted for in EU parliament just last week [1]. [1]: https://repair.eu/ https://repair.eu/
  - samoa42 6y ago
    fwiw not quite but we are on the right track "The vote means that the European Commission now has the full support of the Parliament in moving forward with the development of laws [...]"

dalbasal 6y ago

Interestingly enough, these contexts form (imo) an single example set. Chip-OS dyads like wintel. Platforms duopolies & oligopolies. Neutrality & commodification vs lock-in dynamics. Public or free standards as an alternative to platforms. etc. A lot of these dynamics have recognisably repeating in the computing industry (also telecom & media) for 4 decade. OTOH, scale is a quality unto itself, and as this article suggests... Vertically integrated computing is very much a megacorp endeavour. I think the difference here is the scale of these companies.