4 ms·

Computers used to be a "commodity of commodities". The motherboard was made by one manufacturer, the memory was made by another one, the CPU by a different one,

by jbob2000 6y ago

Computers used to be a "commodity of commodities". The motherboard was made by one manufacturer, the memory was made by another one, the CPU by a different one, etc. etc. Unless a competitor controls and owns their supply chain like Apple does, I don't see how they can compete; they need those "established norms" otherwise they won't be able to find commodities that work with their final product.

spijdar 6y ago
Computers being "commodities of commodities" is kind of a recent phenomenon. For a while, the norm was to do exactly what Apple is doing. It was much more common to design and market your own custom processor or, at the least, custom chipsets coupled with your own firmware/OS, like most unix workstations, non-IBM-PCs like the Amiga, Atari, Macs... It'll be interesting to see if any other players try to move back to this style in the desktop/laptop PC space.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  Personally I think that could be a good thing if it allows us to once again become experimental with personal computing operating systems, an are that has stagnated significantly in the past 2 decades due in part to the fact that any new contender has to support a ludicrous amount of hardware to be usable on a wide variety of PCs. Then again it could all go horribly wrong and leave us with nothing but highly locked-down terminals suitable only for connection to our glorious cloud masters.
  - spideymans 6y ago
    Also innovation in the PC space has pretty much been limited by whatever Intel is willing to accommodate. I'm happy we're beginning to move away from this.
  - ryukafalz 6y ago
    The flip side to that is that OSes that are built for specific hardware are only useful so long as that hardware continues to be produced. I don't think we'd have Linux as a useful contender today if it had been locked to a specific company's hardware; there's a reason we're not still using BeOS today for example (Haiku aside). I'm more excited about things like rump kernels for hardware support across disparate OSes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel
    - spijdar 6y ago
      > there's a reason we're not still using BeOS today for example (Haiku aside). You're blaming BeOS's failure on the BeBox? Every release of BeOS that was marked as a "full release" (as opposed to a developer preview or a "preview release") could run on Intel hardware, and the BeBox itself was discontinued long before then. This is a tangent, but I don't understand people who think BeOS was the heir-apparent to consumer/home/personal OSes. It had super half baked networking support and absolutely no concept of multi-user or privilege separation. Similar home OSes didn't enforce privilege separation or multiple users, but at least had the framework -- BeOS essentially just runs everything as root. It had some neat tricks, but was a pretty underdeveloped OS in some key areas. The fact it never took off isn't that surprising to me, and it's not just because Be was a small company or that it's hard for an underdog to get market share in a crowded space (both of which are also true). It just wasn't really well suited for "general purpose computing" in the same way that e.g. Linux, WinNT, or Darwin are.
      - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
        > This is a tangent, but I don't understand people who think BeOS was the heir-apparent to consumer/home/personal OSes. It had super half baked networking support and absolutely no concept of multi-user or privilege separation. What need does a personal computer OS have for multi-user support? The median number of users on a personal computer at any given time is 1. Even in the rare case that two or more people want to use the same computer at separate times and desire to protect eachother's files from eachother, they can use encryption rather than fake OS enforced security. Privilege separation, in order to keep malicious applications from compromising the user's files, has become significantly more important but it wasn't that important back then.
        spijdar 6y ago
        Malicious applications and internet malware weren't raging problems in the late 90s, but they were known and predicted dangers. You really don't need "user accounts" per se, but a way to restrict process privileges, of which user accounts is just a decent abstraction. On WinNT, user accounts and groups are just abstractions for providing SIDs for your access token -- there are SIDs like NT SYSTEM which don't have a correlated user account. The important bit is you can create a process that can't accidentally fandango on core and overwrite all the system files. You have to elevate privileges -- even if there's no prompt for the user, the application dev still has to intentionally request admin rights to touch sensitive files. All that aside, though, it's a lot easier to fake "no user accounts" like Windows did and just have no password, than to genuinely have no privilege separation and try to retrofit it on later. If you're trying to market a brand new OS with new APIs that has no compatibility with anything, even in the 90s, I'd expect some kind of plan for at least optional security. Anything at all!
- spideymans 6y ago
  >It'll be interesting to see if any other players try to move back to this style in the desktop/laptop PC space. It's possible. I wouldn't necessarily bet on it, but it's possible. Qualcomm is just licensing ARM's standard core designs. If I were a PC OEM, designing your own custom silicon around the ARM core might be tempting, if it allows you to better differentiate your product.
  - kelnos 6y ago
    > If I were a PC OEM, designing your own custom silicon around the ARM core might be tempting, if it allows you to better differentiate your product. There's a problem there, though (that Apple doesn't have): a random PC OEM doesn't control the OS. So that means they have to beg Microsoft to add support for their custom architecture, which MS may not want to do, and instead say "we're standardizing on what Qualcomm does, so do that or get bent".
Blikkentrekker 6y ago
Is that not still the case? My machines aren't that old, and I'm fairly certain that is the case in both of them. In fact, I'm thinking about upgrading my working memory on one of them looking at the 50% indicator at my screen right now for what is only having 12 tabs open in a web browser and not doing much other heavy lifting.

spijdar 6y ago

Computers being "commodities of commodities" is kind of a recent phenomenon. For a while, the norm was to do exactly what Apple is doing. It was much more common to design and market your own custom processor or, at the least, custom chipsets coupled with your own firmware/OS, like most unix workstations, non-IBM-PCs like the Amiga, Atari, Macs... It'll be interesting to see if any other players try to move back to this style in the desktop/laptop PC space.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
Personally I think that could be a good thing if it allows us to once again become experimental with personal computing operating systems, an are that has stagnated significantly in the past 2 decades due in part to the fact that any new contender has to support a ludicrous amount of hardware to be usable on a wide variety of PCs. Then again it could all go horribly wrong and leave us with nothing but highly locked-down terminals suitable only for connection to our glorious cloud masters.
- spideymans 6y ago
  Also innovation in the PC space has pretty much been limited by whatever Intel is willing to accommodate. I'm happy we're beginning to move away from this.
- ryukafalz 6y ago
  The flip side to that is that OSes that are built for specific hardware are only useful so long as that hardware continues to be produced. I don't think we'd have Linux as a useful contender today if it had been locked to a specific company's hardware; there's a reason we're not still using BeOS today for example (Haiku aside). I'm more excited about things like rump kernels for hardware support across disparate OSes: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rump_kernel
  - spijdar 6y ago
    > there's a reason we're not still using BeOS today for example (Haiku aside). You're blaming BeOS's failure on the BeBox? Every release of BeOS that was marked as a "full release" (as opposed to a developer preview or a "preview release") could run on Intel hardware, and the BeBox itself was discontinued long before then. This is a tangent, but I don't understand people who think BeOS was the heir-apparent to consumer/home/personal OSes. It had super half baked networking support and absolutely no concept of multi-user or privilege separation. Similar home OSes didn't enforce privilege separation or multiple users, but at least had the framework -- BeOS essentially just runs everything as root. It had some neat tricks, but was a pretty underdeveloped OS in some key areas. The fact it never took off isn't that surprising to me, and it's not just because Be was a small company or that it's hard for an underdog to get market share in a crowded space (both of which are also true). It just wasn't really well suited for "general purpose computing" in the same way that e.g. Linux, WinNT, or Darwin are.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
      > This is a tangent, but I don't understand people who think BeOS was the heir-apparent to consumer/home/personal OSes. It had super half baked networking support and absolutely no concept of multi-user or privilege separation. What need does a personal computer OS have for multi-user support? The median number of users on a personal computer at any given time is 1. Even in the rare case that two or more people want to use the same computer at separate times and desire to protect eachother's files from eachother, they can use encryption rather than fake OS enforced security. Privilege separation, in order to keep malicious applications from compromising the user's files, has become significantly more important but it wasn't that important back then.
      - spijdar 6y ago
        Malicious applications and internet malware weren't raging problems in the late 90s, but they were known and predicted dangers. You really don't need "user accounts" per se, but a way to restrict process privileges, of which user accounts is just a decent abstraction. On WinNT, user accounts and groups are just abstractions for providing SIDs for your access token -- there are SIDs like NT SYSTEM which don't have a correlated user account. The important bit is you can create a process that can't accidentally fandango on core and overwrite all the system files. You have to elevate privileges -- even if there's no prompt for the user, the application dev still has to intentionally request admin rights to touch sensitive files. All that aside, though, it's a lot easier to fake "no user accounts" like Windows did and just have no password, than to genuinely have no privilege separation and try to retrofit it on later. If you're trying to market a brand new OS with new APIs that has no compatibility with anything, even in the 90s, I'd expect some kind of plan for at least optional security. Anything at all!
spideymans 6y ago
>It'll be interesting to see if any other players try to move back to this style in the desktop/laptop PC space. It's possible. I wouldn't necessarily bet on it, but it's possible. Qualcomm is just licensing ARM's standard core designs. If I were a PC OEM, designing your own custom silicon around the ARM core might be tempting, if it allows you to better differentiate your product.
- kelnos 6y ago
  > If I were a PC OEM, designing your own custom silicon around the ARM core might be tempting, if it allows you to better differentiate your product. There's a problem there, though (that Apple doesn't have): a random PC OEM doesn't control the OS. So that means they have to beg Microsoft to add support for their custom architecture, which MS may not want to do, and instead say "we're standardizing on what Qualcomm does, so do that or get bent".

Blikkentrekker 6y ago

Is that not still the case? My machines aren't that old, and I'm fairly certain that is the case in both of them. In fact, I'm thinking about upgrading my working memory on one of them looking at the 50% indicator at my screen right now for what is only having 12 tabs open in a web browser and not doing much other heavy lifting.