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Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There must be a good reason for this

• mschuster91 1y ago
  > Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time. As soon as you take a peek below the surface, no matter what, it begins to reek. Let's just go through the stuff I personally own or have experience in peeking... Samsung does decent hardware, but their modifications to Android, or their "hacks" for powersaving that keep messing up apps, or their "smart" TVs that are buggy and slow as fuck (not to mention riddled with ads!)... Sony makes excellent cameras hardware-wise but the software/firmware side sucks ass - the fact that they require a dedicated software to be used as a webcam instead of just exposing UVC is already braindead enough, but even more so given that they run on Linux and the Linux kernel already ships with UVC gadgets. Nintendo makes excellent games but even the new Switch 2 ships with a chipset that's years old. Mediatek's leaks for BSPs / Android are frightening in terms of code quality. Unfortunately, the competition just isn't there. Chinese companies are even worse penny-pinchers than Korean or Taiwanese, and Western companies outside of Apple and Raspberry Pi just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers or because, like many things in the ham radio scene, get cloned in a matter of months.
  • digisocialnet 1y ago
    What about DJI?
    • mschuster91 1y ago
      Let's just say I'm pissed about the Mini 3 Pro's controller. Has an USB-C host and client port but isn't capable of actually using them for anything relevant, and the built-in wifi is rotten. Zero way of extending the drone's functionality by writing one's own apps/scripts - but the cheaper N1 that just uses a phone, there's hacks for it...
    • cgio 1y ago
      For one their app does not work on a recent pixel but does e.g. on an oppo…Id say GP argument is valid.
  • wjnc 1y ago
    Any thoughts into the Why? Culture, finance, …? I get your point. Also thinking about Sony or Nintendo. Billions more to be made if only those firms where more technically-commercial (make accounts and buying stuff for parents Easy).
    • mschuster91 1y ago
      Cutthroat capitalism is definitely part of the reasons, especially when looking at China and the low end of the market. When there are dozens if not hundreds of factories that have the skilled people to put up a hardware design either from scratch or as a clone of something already existing, "time to market" trumps everything - the earlier you can get the product on Alibaba, Temu or the alphabet-soup sellers on Amazon, the better. As soon as the hardware is ready and the software somewhat stable, out the door it goes - there is no responsibility, no accountability along the chain, so why invest in it? For the "big ticket" brand items, honestly I don't know. If anything I wouldn't blame it on culture (partially because I lack enough knowledge of Asian cultures, partially because blaming systemic issue on culture can quickly devolve into outright racism), but on capitalist incentives once again - the common standard seems to be "as low in terms of quality as you can get away with", there is no market force pushing for better products, and no legal/regulatory pressure either.
    • drob518 1y ago
      IMO, it’s company culture and focus. At Apple, they are focused foremost on designing the customer experience. If you’ve ever unboxed one of their products, you can tell from the first moment that they care about even this part of the product life. It’s only 5 minutes and yet someone has clearly spent time on it. That carries through to the integration of hardware and software in the products. That doesn’t mean Apple is the best at either hardware or software. IMO, there are companies that do just as well or better at either of those things. But Apple does whole product design better than anyone. That is something that is very difficult to add to an organization that doesn’t understand it. IMO, it really started for Apple with Steve Jobs and being the founder, he was able to drive that into the culture. But it wasn’t there even for them at the start. IMO, it really got going when Steve returned the second time and drove products like iMac and iPod.
  • betterThanTexas 1y ago
    > There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time. Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia? I don't get your point. We certainly can't match this quality in the west.
    • mschuster91 1y ago
      > Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia? Yes, but on the back of every MacBook there is the line "Designed by Apple in California" and the software is made in California as well. Asia is just chosen for manufacturing because of the close proximity of supply chain vendors and cheap but reliable labor cost.
      • betterThanTexas 1y ago
        Well then Asia is de-facto doing the hardware. Apple is just paying for it. Apple is famously sitting on a mountain of cash. How easily do you think they could replicate the supply chain of even one of their products without outsourcing it?
        • drob518 1y ago
          Apple is designing the hardware in the USA, not Asia. Asia designs the manufacturing process, which they are quite good at.
          • mschuster91 1y ago
            > Asia designs the manufacturing process, which they are quite good at. Not even that, for some parts like the aluminium cases ("unibody") or the laser-bored microholes in their old magsafe connector for the LEDs, Apple designed the whole process.
  • mbreese 1y ago
    I don’t think there is a need to limit this geographically. As a rule hardware companies are bad at software. It doesn’t really matter where they are from. If you’re including things like TVs that spy on you, don’t forget Visio. They are one of the poster children for making TVs with content tracking and/were they are based in California. The exceptions I see include Apple and Raspberry Pi. And even then, there are missteps. It’s not intentional… it’s just that companies rarely have integration as one of their core strengths. If you’re a hardware company, you are good at making hardware. The skills necessary for that are very different than the skills needed for software. To get both, you need management that values both and can build the separate teams. Especially true when you can argue that you’re working with the “community” to build out software and fix bugs. If you’re still selling enough hardware, how can you say these companies are wrong? That’s honestly a hard thing to do unless that is your competitive advantage. And for Apple and Raspberry Pi, I’d argue that is their competitive advantage in their markets. For a long time they were the small fish in big ponds. So they needed to have some trait that allowed them to command higher margins. Integration of hardware and software was it.
  • bgnn 1y ago
    This is slightly racist and totally wrong on many many points. Are American hardware companies better at software? Dell? HP? Vizio? Intel? AMD? Or European companies: Philips, Siemens? It's all the same. Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW..
    • mschuster91 1y ago
      > Are American hardware companies better at software? Dell? HP? Vizio? Intel? AMD? Depends. If you're looking for consumer goods, they're just as dogshit as everyone else. Products intended for large commercial customers, particularly where support contracts are involved, tend to be actually decent. > Or European companies: Philips, Siemens? Never had an issue with Hue, never had an issue with Bosch-Siemens "white goods". > Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW.. iOS certainly is not an abomination. I'm using both Android and iOS, and the latter is much more polished.
  • markvdb 1y ago
    s/from Asia//
  • numpad0 1y ago
    There is no single company from Asia that market electronic physical experience. Other than Nintendo. IOW there's Nintendo. East Asian companies hasn't shifted into maximizing perceived values over functions. I think it just feels fake and wrong to many. Another factor that I think might exist is, it might be simply hard to inflate values and sell experiences as East Asian company entities without good connections and/or cultural understanding to sell to developed Western markets. East Asian engineers don't share the pain points as Western audiences. People don't use webcams - less sympathies exist for the urge to see faces. People don't use Linux on laptop - Windows is normal and fine. Don't recognize annoyances as annoying as often - it's considered signs of weakness. (Not sure about Nintendo complaints - people everywhere happily pay $80 for another Mario remakes on top of $500 console. Isn't that what you're asking for?). Kids aren't as interested in ROM cooking or piracy or software freedom in general - way more interested in enforcing IP rights themselves than demanding something from IP holders. Or, widespread "just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers" could be another reason. East Asian nations each has its own internal markets with massive surplus production capacities. Western companies had progressively moved into value engineering for survival, as Swiss watch industry famously did. The costs of East Asian physical products never represented its cost in the first place, only utility in context of economy at export destinations, and that might have affected how companies at the destinations have come to be.
• ZiiS 1y ago
  To a certain extent if your reviewers can just turn it on they spend their time benchmarking.
  • geerlingguy 1y ago
    Some of us try out every possible interface... but it turns into quite a slog, as usually only about half the advertised features work by the time the board ships to the public. Things like GPIO, display interfaces, NPUs, etc usually require a lot of tweaks if they work at all. The O6 was better in that regard than many boards, but the bar is not very high.
• jrmg 1y ago
  With the dearth of drivers as described, how do the manufacturers even know that all the hardware works? That there are no flaws in how it’s all wired together? How do they test everything?
  • Palomides 1y ago
    the chip manufacturer usually craps out a hacked up android build
    • dijit 1y ago
      ok, but, naively... Android is Linux with a userland- so the drivers must exist in some form.
      • kanwisher 1y ago
        Android has some ability to have binary drivers that aren't easily reusable for normal linux branches
        • notpushkin 1y ago
          Yup. There’s libhybris/Halium which wraps Android drivers for glibc-based Linux distros, but I think it’s more of a hack / stopgap solution.
• rjsw 1y ago
  ARM themself have an open rec right now for someone to work on GPU drivers, the one in this SoC isn't supported by panthor.
• arghwhat 1y ago
  From the perspective of drivers Radxa is not the hardware manufacturer. They combine off the shelf hardware according to its documentation to create a product. Sometimes the original suppliers will have drivers, sometimes they just ship documentation and let it be up to the customers to write it, sometimes someone else contributed upstream support. When you get "drivers" from e.g. Lenovo, they didn't write them - they're just sending what they got along. Nothing would work if there weren't drivers in general, the issue is that hardware can be configured in multiple ways and it's not all going to have have proper support or be well tested. In Linux land, this stuff sorts itself out as people get their hands on the hardware, pretty similar to how e.g. laptop support comes to be.
• buyucu 1y ago
  It looks like they are trying to mainline the code to Linux: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/20250220084020.628704-1-peter.chen@cixtech.com/ https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-arm-kernel/cover/... My guess is that they wanted the board to be available to devs early to get feedback. I might buy this board in a few months, when it will likely work out of the mainline kernel.
• jauntywundrkind 1y ago
  ARM has such a mess. They don't actually make chips. And they don't make a sizable % of the design that goes into chips. There's all kinds of other IP, from power management to USB controllers, all manners of things they don't do. So then the task falls to the chip makers. Who each are trying to figure out what to do themselves. These folks don't usually want to do that or have the chops. There's usually one or many different folks taking off the shelf open source and porting it to this particular platform. These folks have a strong strong anti-incentive to do the right thing to upstream support: no one's gonna keep buying sdk's from these software vendors if they upstream support. And it is a pain to upstream support, to spend possibly years figuring out the long term way to do something. (Notably some good players who focus on mainlining have emerged: Bootlin, Collabora.) It's all so terrible. Theres some attempts to mature the platform, to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe (SystemReady and an array of neighboring acronyms). But man, it's so bad, your question is so searing, so obvious. This whole world systematically seems unable to do the right obvious good thing for itself, has resolutely remained a shitty backwater for 3+ decades versus x86.
  • ChocolateGod 1y ago
    > to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe There's still no incentive to do this outside of server hardware (Red Hat doesn't support rebuilds of RHEL). Why bother making a firmware stack that allows anything to boot when you can just modify the Linux kernel to work on your non-standard hardware and work around any bugs, publish an Ubuntu image that you'll only update a few times and then call it a day. Then, maybe, just maybe, support for your SBC will be upstreamed a few years later, but long after it's actually useful. Look how messed up and fragmented Android is still, even Windows Phone had a UEFI stack that in theory could allow all Windows phones of a certain architecture to have a shared image (although I don't believe this was fully achieved). Imagine if Windows or Fedora for x64 had to be repacked for every single motherboard/CPU combination, it'd be insane, yet somehow it's fine for ARM, what a joke it's been allowed to become. I think electronic waste regulation is going to be needed to sort it out.
    • mappu 1y ago
• wmf 1y ago
  Drivers are extremely expensive to develop (like 10x more than the hardware) and mostly interchangeable so every company is trying to free-ride on someone else to develop the drivers.
  • sitkack 1y ago
    That is why the hardware should be more capable/intelligent. Drivers are the problem so drivers can’t be the solution. You can’t turn chicken soup back into a chicken.