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I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC. Standardized parts and a well defined f

I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC. Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) is what makes the PC truly special. Moving to a world where you can't install Linux or where every single machine has incompatible firmware would be disastrous, IMHO. Current PCs can last for decades thanks to modern Windows and Linux being able to boot on old machines, without the need of special bootloaders or new firmware, just somewhat generic drivers (see AHCI, Intel HDA sound, etc)

sneak 6y ago
The xbox and the iPhone are the security models I expect on almost all mainstream computing devices soon. I estimate that it will be impossible or near impossible to execute any code that was not approved by the hardware vendor, and obtained by the hardware owner IDing themselves to the code distribution/signing service ("stores"). Anonymous software publishing or use/consumption will be relegated solely to what will, by then, be ancient and slow hardware, and relatively dangerous (for non-experts) OSes. Modifying the signed apps or OS to remove their phone home and spying will be impossible, like iOS is today. There is presently very little stopping large vendors from implementing this across the board, and, indeed, consumer demand for malware-free (but not vendor spyware-free) platforms is driving this in a big way. Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage: https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware/ https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware... I imagine this will happen regardless of ISA; see what happened with the intel ME and related DRM, and Pixelbooks/T2 macs. Most people buying computers don't want flexibility, they want reliability. OS alternatives, software alternatives, and privacy aren't really part of the buying decision outside of a small and mostly commercially irrelevant market segment. The e-waste will be colossal when the vendors just decide to EoL them. You won't be able to reinstall the OS on any current Apple product (phone, tablet, or computer) once Apple's activation servers for those devices go offline in 10-20 years.
- cprecioso 6y ago
  Maybe the iPhone model? But definitely not the Xbox one. In the newest console, every part of the console is designed not to trust each other. IIRC, even the CPU instructions are encrypted. This is in order to assure game developers that their games will not be pirated -- but I suspect it might be paying quite a large performance price. I don't think Microsoft or Apple need that much distrust of their own packages in regular computing.
  - sneak 6y ago
    The anti-piracy drive is the main one, IMO. The money from services far outweighs the money from the sale of the hardware, in the long run for most types of users on most devices. It's my understanding that disabling system integrity protection (SIP) on M1 macs immediately disables its new ability to run iOS apps from the iOS App Store, for precisely this reason. As for the hardware protections, already we have iPhones doing this with their cameras and screens and fingerprint readers and the like, ostensibly for security but who knows if it's just to kill the third party repair market. I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school when I say that Apple would prefer nobody ever buy a formerly-broken, repaired, secondhand iPhone or iPad.
    - PeterisP 6y ago
      "The money from services far outweighs the money from the sale of the hardware, in the long run for most types of users on most devices." I believe that this is true for the USA market but not true for many markets worldwide. From the perspective of the developing world (containing most of the users and most of the devices, but not most of the revenue), the market is very different, much less relevance of iOS/Apple Store, much higher preference for free apps instead of service subscriptions, etc.
- lxgr 6y ago
  > Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage: I was under the impression that activation can be circumvented by setting the secure boot mode to something less than "maximum security", at least on Intel Macs. Is that a different mechanism then?
varispeed 6y ago
I am hoping that given how open some ARM archs are that now it will be within hobbyist reach to create even their own motherboard, send to one of the fabs and assemble then run full-fledged Windows on it. This looks like a dream come true! You could definitely do that now and run Linux, but given that some software doesn't exist on Linux, this is very exciting.
- chalst 6y ago
  Aren't bespoke motherboards going to be rather expensive for hobbyists?
  - varispeed 6y ago
    Yes, this is still relatively expensive, but probably you could do it with less than $2000 including buying necessary tools.
  - numpad0 6y ago
    Yes and there’s going to be tons of noise issues, early breakages, and usability issues.
simias 6y ago
>Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) That was true ~15years ago but less so today. Modern PC EUFI bootloaders are bigger and more bloated than any uboot build in existence, and things like device tree support in linux means that you can support various boards with the same kernel (including boards that don't exist yet). Sure you'll probably still need custom bootloaders for most boards, but it's not like you can swap your motherboard BIOS/UEFI chips and expect them to work either. The PC "platform" with hardcoded physical addresses for your serial ports is nice if you're running DOS but it's not really relevant for modern operating systems which have to employ much more complex hardware discovery mechanisms. It's true that on ARM it's still a bit anarchic and bespoke in practice but that's mainly because there's no reason to push for strong standardization when every vendor is building their own kernels for their own devices anyway. But the tools do exist (on Linux at least, not sure about the other OSs), if desktop ARM becomes mainstream things could settle fairly quickly. It's less of a technical problem and more of a "why bother?" problem.
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  > if desktop ARM becomes mainstream things could settle fairly quickly. It's less of a technical problem and more of a "why bother?" problem. This is exactly right, but I fear the incentives have changed and we'll never again see something like the x86/IBM-compatible/Wintel world of "standard" inter-compatible systems. As you say, it's a "why bother?" problem, and no manufacturer will want to bother: Apple has no interest in making it easy to run other OSes, Microsoft wants to sell you "Windows Surface" devices, not general-purpose computers, corporate buyers want a "secure" locked-down environment with a signed bootloader... Are there any powerful stakeholders who benefit from interoperability?
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    > Are there any powerful stakeholders who benefit from interoperability? All those companies selling motherboards for gamers etc?
    - 6y ago
piokoch 6y ago
"Current PCs can last for decades" this might not sound as an advantage for PC computer producers. Surely they would prefer mobile devices model in which many people switch device every 2 years. I bet there are some higher ups in Dell, HP counting how wonderful it would be to force people to switch to the new model more often. Or maybe even sell hardware subscription. This would be terrible for the environment, but who cares (never heard Tim Cook or Bill Gates going on the stage and saying, hey, we have a new fancy model (i-whatever or Surface), but your 2 years old one is also great, so keep using it, this would be good for the environment).
- pjmlp 6y ago
  This has already happened, outside a few niches, most consumers have moved into laptops, and they are increasingly more integrated.
- simonh 6y ago
  Tim Cook on an earnings call, explaining that reducing the price of battery refurbishment to $29, lead to fewer sales as people held on to devices for longer: >According to Cook, while analysts suggested Apple shouldn't do it, the company "strongly believes it was the right thing to do for [its] customers." https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/29/apple-lower-upgrades-explanation/ https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/29/apple-lower-upgrades-ex... >“We also make sure to design durable products, that last as long as possible,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, said. “That means long-lasting hardware, coupled with our amazing software. Because they last longer, you can keep using them. And keeping using them is the best thing for the planet.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvap85/dont-buy-an-iphone-xs https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvap85/dont-buy-an-iphone-xs
  - 1over137 6y ago
    Greenwashing, pure and simple.
    - simonh 6y ago
      https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-5-greenest-tech-companies-in-2019/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-5-greenest-tech-com... Maybe you have good reasons for disliking Apple. Maybe you have fair criticisms of the company, that's fine. However on environmentalism Greenpeace are the real deal. They put in the hard work of checking the details, and they absolutely know the difference between companies doing low effort environmental PR and those putting in the hard work to actually make a difference. Out of all the mainstream tech companies they rate Apple number one. If environmental concerns are a significant factor in your tech purchases, there is one clear best option and it's not even close. Now if there are other factors that matter to you more, that's fine. Your choice.
macspoofing 6y ago
>I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC That's a 100% inevitability. Every new CPU architecture incorporates an entire set of new restrictions under the guise of security and privacy.
- q-big 6y ago
  > That's a 100% inevitability. Every new CPU architecture incorporates an entire set of new restrictions under the guise of security and privacy. Under the guise of security: for sure. But where are the restrictions under the guise of privacy? In my observation, the trend rather moves away from privacy.
klelatti 6y ago
I hope that any switch to ARM retains a degree of the flexibility available with the PC but it's important to recognise that 1. x86 probably isn't going away anytime soon and 2. the PC world has come with its own set of constraints - notably being locked-in to (to all practical purposes) a duopoly of CPU manufacturers with the resultant impact on pricing and customer choice.
- throwmylifawy 6y ago
  Yeah but the duopoly is at least committed to opensource for most of its components. I can download opensource drivers for the GPUs (provided by Intel and AMD) and network components (Intel) as well as most-if-not all of the components on my current motherboard.
  - klelatti 6y ago
    Good for you and you can continue doing this. In the meantime I'm looking forward to lower prices and more innovation on desktop / laptop / server CPUs as the current duopoly comes to an end.
Abishek_Muthian 6y ago
>I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC I think that ship has long sailed as we failed to treat smartphones as handheld computers and subject the smartphone/OS manufacturers to the same scrutiny as computer/OS manufacturers. This is a missed opportunity especially to those countries where smartphones are the first computer to majority of the population, now their computing can be held hostage by couple of companies just like their data. Now computers with only manufacturer approved OS, only manufacturer approved software (even content?), arbitrary security updates/ OS upgrade cycle is already becoming a reality.
- bluedays 6y ago
  I see this sorta argument frequently but there was a time when only IBM was capable of making PCs. It seems whoever is first to market ends up not having an open platform, which later is superseded by a more open platform.* See the variety of open operating systems for devices. Ie sailfish, postmarketOS, librephone, etc.
  - offtop5 6y ago
    If anything I see computers being more open now. You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer. Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ? Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good idea for the typical user though
    - karottenreibe 6y ago
      I don't follow the argument that a closed ecosystem leads to less Nullpointer exceptions than an open one. The two seem entirely unrelated to me.
    - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
      >You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer. Except that decent RaspberyPI configs that could replace PCs cost around $60-70(In EU) and once you add a display, peripherals and a decent microSD card(which is still smaller, slower and less reliable than even a budget SSD) and you're looking at over $100 and for that kind of cash, a second hand X86 notebook(old beaten up Dell/Lenovo with an i5, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD) gives you way more power and flexibility with what you can boot, install and do with it, it's not even a competition. Not to mention it comes with a built in battery so you can carry it to school unlike a PI, and before someone sniggers and shows me a link with a Raspberry PI based notebook just to contradict me, ask yourselves if you would actually use that as a productivity daily driver for work and play vs a X86 laptop. Sorry, even in developing nations, second hand notebooks/PCs are a way better deal in every way as a personal computer than a PI which is why PIs have never taken off as PCs and are still stuck in the hacker, tinkerer, learning, embedded, automation niches. >Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ? Why do they need to be closed? Having closed source software is no guarantee of quality nor security. >Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good idea for the typical user though By wanting more openness we don't mean reinventing the wheel and coding open source dialers from scratch, we mean we need Apple and Google to not lock their hardware to their appstores so we(companies, users, banks, developers and even governments) don't become prisoners to their walled gardens which is basically the current situation.
bluescrn 6y ago
Sadly it seems that these days any new architecture will be used as an excuse to further lock down the platform and tie it to a monopolistic App Store
n1xbuffoon 6y ago
Wait so a standardized system is more flexible? Experimenting with new ideas would be too rigid? That seems entirely contradictory.
- emteycz 6y ago
  It is definitely possible to standardize flexibility
- Closi 6y ago
  It’s more flexible because more components can fit together. It’s flexibility at the system level rather than the component level.
als0 6y ago
> Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) UEFI comes with some ARM SoCs and uptake is increasing. U-boot will still be popular on the embedded SoCs. With standards like SBSA and SBBR, you can run a generic unmodified arm64 operating system.
zelon88 6y ago
All of those things developed out of necessity by people who either needed the functionality, or didn't want to pay someone else for it. The demand was strong for open standards because the supply for software couldn't keep pace with demand. Open source didn't really eat away at large software companies for a long time because those customers were never going to buy that product to begin with. Now that computing has been commoditized to the point where just executing code is a commodity itself it would appear that the supply of software has outpaced the demand for software. Open-source is now eating away at somebody's lunch, and will be dealt with in a competitive nature instead of a passive one. Buckle up.
GoblinSlayer 6y ago
We can only hope. The first Arm version, Windows 10 S was Apple style concentration camp.
- oaiey 6y ago
  This phrasing is really misplaced and hurts many many people. Please fix. And no, I am not talking about the Apple fanboys.
  - GoblinSlayer 6y ago
    Yeah, it would be good if Apple fixed it, I'm as hurt as you.
brundolf 6y ago
As far as I know, ARM as a technology has little to say one way or another about closed vs open systems. As for the broader trend towards closed: open standards naturally flourished in a world where one company wasn't huge enough to do everything themselves (except maybe IBM, but they dropped the ball to everyone else's benefit). Companies were forced to cooperate if they wanted to succeed. That's no longer the case, and that's why open standards are dying. Just one of the many ramifications of corporate consolidation. Just one more reason for megacorps to be broken-up.
higerordermap 6y ago
Same here. The people saying hobbyists can still buy open hardware are missing the point - that most become hobbyists precisely because they can tinker with the commodity hardware.
jdc 6y ago
Sounds good motivation for more better device documentation and open-source firmware.

sneak 6y ago

The xbox and the iPhone are the security models I expect on almost all mainstream computing devices soon. I estimate that it will be impossible or near impossible to execute any code that was not approved by the hardware vendor, and obtained by the hardware owner IDing themselves to the code distribution/signing service ("stores"). Anonymous software publishing or use/consumption will be relegated solely to what will, by then, be ancient and slow hardware, and relatively dangerous (for non-experts) OSes. Modifying the signed apps or OS to remove their phone home and spying will be impossible, like iOS is today. There is presently very little stopping large vendors from implementing this across the board, and, indeed, consumer demand for malware-free (but not vendor spyware-free) platforms is driving this in a big way. Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage: https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware/ https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware... I imagine this will happen regardless of ISA; see what happened with the intel ME and related DRM, and Pixelbooks/T2 macs. Most people buying computers don't want flexibility, they want reliability. OS alternatives, software alternatives, and privacy aren't really part of the buying decision outside of a small and mostly commercially irrelevant market segment. The e-waste will be colossal when the vendors just decide to EoL them. You won't be able to reinstall the OS on any current Apple product (phone, tablet, or computer) once Apple's activation servers for those devices go offline in 10-20 years.

cprecioso 6y ago
Maybe the iPhone model? But definitely not the Xbox one. In the newest console, every part of the console is designed not to trust each other. IIRC, even the CPU instructions are encrypted. This is in order to assure game developers that their games will not be pirated -- but I suspect it might be paying quite a large performance price. I don't think Microsoft or Apple need that much distrust of their own packages in regular computing.
- sneak 6y ago
  The anti-piracy drive is the main one, IMO. The money from services far outweighs the money from the sale of the hardware, in the long run for most types of users on most devices. It's my understanding that disabling system integrity protection (SIP) on M1 macs immediately disables its new ability to run iOS apps from the iOS App Store, for precisely this reason. As for the hardware protections, already we have iPhones doing this with their cameras and screens and fingerprint readers and the like, ostensibly for security but who knows if it's just to kill the third party repair market. I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school when I say that Apple would prefer nobody ever buy a formerly-broken, repaired, secondhand iPhone or iPad.
  - PeterisP 6y ago
    "The money from services far outweighs the money from the sale of the hardware, in the long run for most types of users on most devices." I believe that this is true for the USA market but not true for many markets worldwide. From the perspective of the developing world (containing most of the users and most of the devices, but not most of the revenue), the market is very different, much less relevance of iOS/Apple Store, much higher preference for free apps instead of service subscriptions, etc.
lxgr 6y ago
> Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage: I was under the impression that activation can be circumvented by setting the secure boot mode to something less than "maximum security", at least on Intel Macs. Is that a different mechanism then?

varispeed 6y ago

I am hoping that given how open some ARM archs are that now it will be within hobbyist reach to create even their own motherboard, send to one of the fabs and assemble then run full-fledged Windows on it. This looks like a dream come true! You could definitely do that now and run Linux, but given that some software doesn't exist on Linux, this is very exciting.

chalst 6y ago
Aren't bespoke motherboards going to be rather expensive for hobbyists?
- varispeed 6y ago
  Yes, this is still relatively expensive, but probably you could do it with less than $2000 including buying necessary tools.
- numpad0 6y ago
  Yes and there’s going to be tons of noise issues, early breakages, and usability issues.

simias 6y ago

>Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) That was true ~15years ago but less so today. Modern PC EUFI bootloaders are bigger and more bloated than any uboot build in existence, and things like device tree support in linux means that you can support various boards with the same kernel (including boards that don't exist yet). Sure you'll probably still need custom bootloaders for most boards, but it's not like you can swap your motherboard BIOS/UEFI chips and expect them to work either. The PC "platform" with hardcoded physical addresses for your serial ports is nice if you're running DOS but it's not really relevant for modern operating systems which have to employ much more complex hardware discovery mechanisms. It's true that on ARM it's still a bit anarchic and bespoke in practice but that's mainly because there's no reason to push for strong standardization when every vendor is building their own kernels for their own devices anyway. But the tools do exist (on Linux at least, not sure about the other OSs), if desktop ARM becomes mainstream things could settle fairly quickly. It's less of a technical problem and more of a "why bother?" problem.

ForHackernews 6y ago
> if desktop ARM becomes mainstream things could settle fairly quickly. It's less of a technical problem and more of a "why bother?" problem. This is exactly right, but I fear the incentives have changed and we'll never again see something like the x86/IBM-compatible/Wintel world of "standard" inter-compatible systems. As you say, it's a "why bother?" problem, and no manufacturer will want to bother: Apple has no interest in making it easy to run other OSes, Microsoft wants to sell you "Windows Surface" devices, not general-purpose computers, corporate buyers want a "secure" locked-down environment with a signed bootloader... Are there any powerful stakeholders who benefit from interoperability?
- ithkuil 6y ago
  > Are there any powerful stakeholders who benefit from interoperability? All those companies selling motherboards for gamers etc?
  - 6y ago

piokoch 6y ago

"Current PCs can last for decades" this might not sound as an advantage for PC computer producers. Surely they would prefer mobile devices model in which many people switch device every 2 years. I bet there are some higher ups in Dell, HP counting how wonderful it would be to force people to switch to the new model more often. Or maybe even sell hardware subscription. This would be terrible for the environment, but who cares (never heard Tim Cook or Bill Gates going on the stage and saying, hey, we have a new fancy model (i-whatever or Surface), but your 2 years old one is also great, so keep using it, this would be good for the environment).

pjmlp 6y ago
This has already happened, outside a few niches, most consumers have moved into laptops, and they are increasingly more integrated.
simonh 6y ago
Tim Cook on an earnings call, explaining that reducing the price of battery refurbishment to $29, lead to fewer sales as people held on to devices for longer: >According to Cook, while analysts suggested Apple shouldn't do it, the company "strongly believes it was the right thing to do for [its] customers." https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/29/apple-lower-upgrades-explanation/ https://www.macrumors.com/2019/01/29/apple-lower-upgrades-ex... >“We also make sure to design durable products, that last as long as possible,” Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, said. “That means long-lasting hardware, coupled with our amazing software. Because they last longer, you can keep using them. And keeping using them is the best thing for the planet.” https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvap85/dont-buy-an-iphone-xs https://www.vice.com/en/article/qvap85/dont-buy-an-iphone-xs
- 1over137 6y ago
  Greenwashing, pure and simple.
  - simonh 6y ago
    https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-5-greenest-tech-companies-in-2019/ https://www.techrepublic.com/article/the-5-greenest-tech-com... Maybe you have good reasons for disliking Apple. Maybe you have fair criticisms of the company, that's fine. However on environmentalism Greenpeace are the real deal. They put in the hard work of checking the details, and they absolutely know the difference between companies doing low effort environmental PR and those putting in the hard work to actually make a difference. Out of all the mainstream tech companies they rate Apple number one. If environmental concerns are a significant factor in your tech purchases, there is one clear best option and it's not even close. Now if there are other factors that matter to you more, that's fine. Your choice.

macspoofing 6y ago

>I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC That's a 100% inevitability. Every new CPU architecture incorporates an entire set of new restrictions under the guise of security and privacy.

q-big 6y ago
> That's a 100% inevitability. Every new CPU architecture incorporates an entire set of new restrictions under the guise of security and privacy. Under the guise of security: for sure. But where are the restrictions under the guise of privacy? In my observation, the trend rather moves away from privacy.

klelatti 6y ago

I hope that any switch to ARM retains a degree of the flexibility available with the PC but it's important to recognise that 1. x86 probably isn't going away anytime soon and 2. the PC world has come with its own set of constraints - notably being locked-in to (to all practical purposes) a duopoly of CPU manufacturers with the resultant impact on pricing and customer choice.

throwmylifawy 6y ago
Yeah but the duopoly is at least committed to opensource for most of its components. I can download opensource drivers for the GPUs (provided by Intel and AMD) and network components (Intel) as well as most-if-not all of the components on my current motherboard.
- klelatti 6y ago
  Good for you and you can continue doing this. In the meantime I'm looking forward to lower prices and more innovation on desktop / laptop / server CPUs as the current duopoly comes to an end.

Abishek_Muthian 6y ago

>I hope that the possibility of an industry-wide switch to ARM doesn't take away the flexibility we now have with the PC I think that ship has long sailed as we failed to treat smartphones as handheld computers and subject the smartphone/OS manufacturers to the same scrutiny as computer/OS manufacturers. This is a missed opportunity especially to those countries where smartphones are the first computer to majority of the population, now their computing can be held hostage by couple of companies just like their data. Now computers with only manufacturer approved OS, only manufacturer approved software (even content?), arbitrary security updates/ OS upgrade cycle is already becoming a reality.

bluedays 6y ago
I see this sorta argument frequently but there was a time when only IBM was capable of making PCs. It seems whoever is first to market ends up not having an open platform, which later is superseded by a more open platform.* See the variety of open operating systems for devices. Ie sailfish, postmarketOS, librephone, etc.
- offtop5 6y ago
  If anything I see computers being more open now. You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer. Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ? Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good idea for the typical user though
  - karottenreibe 6y ago
    I don't follow the argument that a closed ecosystem leads to less Nullpointer exceptions than an open one. The two seem entirely unrelated to me.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    >You can buy a Raspberry pi for 30$,and run whatever you want on it. For those in lower income nations this is an absolute game changer. Except that decent RaspberyPI configs that could replace PCs cost around $60-70(In EU) and once you add a display, peripherals and a decent microSD card(which is still smaller, slower and less reliable than even a budget SSD) and you're looking at over $100 and for that kind of cash, a second hand X86 notebook(old beaten up Dell/Lenovo with an i5, 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD) gives you way more power and flexibility with what you can boot, install and do with it, it's not even a competition. Not to mention it comes with a built in battery so you can carry it to school unlike a PI, and before someone sniggers and shows me a link with a Raspberry PI based notebook just to contradict me, ask yourselves if you would actually use that as a productivity daily driver for work and play vs a X86 laptop. Sorry, even in developing nations, second hand notebooks/PCs are a way better deal in every way as a personal computer than a PI which is why PIs have never taken off as PCs and are still stuck in the hacker, tinkerer, learning, embedded, automation niches. >Phones need to sorta be closed, who wants a null pointer exception to lock the dialer UI in an emergency ? Why do they need to be closed? Having closed source software is no guarantee of quality nor security. >Of course if you really want to, you can buy one of those open phones and program your own dialer from scratch, not a very good idea for the typical user though By wanting more openness we don't mean reinventing the wheel and coding open source dialers from scratch, we mean we need Apple and Google to not lock their hardware to their appstores so we(companies, users, banks, developers and even governments) don't become prisoners to their walled gardens which is basically the current situation.

bluescrn 6y ago

Sadly it seems that these days any new architecture will be used as an excuse to further lock down the platform and tie it to a monopolistic App Store

n1xbuffoon 6y ago

Wait so a standardized system is more flexible? Experimenting with new ideas would be too rigid? That seems entirely contradictory.

emteycz 6y ago
It is definitely possible to standardize flexibility
Closi 6y ago
It’s more flexible because more components can fit together. It’s flexibility at the system level rather than the component level.

als0 6y ago

> Standardized parts and a well defined firmware interface (and thus "standard" bootloaders instead of a multitude like on ARM) UEFI comes with some ARM SoCs and uptake is increasing. U-boot will still be popular on the embedded SoCs. With standards like SBSA and SBBR, you can run a generic unmodified arm64 operating system.

zelon88 6y ago

All of those things developed out of necessity by people who either needed the functionality, or didn't want to pay someone else for it. The demand was strong for open standards because the supply for software couldn't keep pace with demand. Open source didn't really eat away at large software companies for a long time because those customers were never going to buy that product to begin with. Now that computing has been commoditized to the point where just executing code is a commodity itself it would appear that the supply of software has outpaced the demand for software. Open-source is now eating away at somebody's lunch, and will be dealt with in a competitive nature instead of a passive one. Buckle up.

GoblinSlayer 6y ago

We can only hope. The first Arm version, Windows 10 S was Apple style concentration camp.

oaiey 6y ago
This phrasing is really misplaced and hurts many many people. Please fix. And no, I am not talking about the Apple fanboys.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago
  Yeah, it would be good if Apple fixed it, I'm as hurt as you.

brundolf 6y ago

As far as I know, ARM as a technology has little to say one way or another about closed vs open systems. As for the broader trend towards closed: open standards naturally flourished in a world where one company wasn't huge enough to do everything themselves (except maybe IBM, but they dropped the ball to everyone else's benefit). Companies were forced to cooperate if they wanted to succeed. That's no longer the case, and that's why open standards are dying. Just one of the many ramifications of corporate consolidation. Just one more reason for megacorps to be broken-up.

higerordermap 6y ago

Same here. The people saying hobbyists can still buy open hardware are missing the point - that most become hobbyists precisely because they can tinker with the commodity hardware.

jdc 6y ago

Sounds good motivation for more better device documentation and open-source firmware.