8 ms·

Huawei launches first laptops using home-grown HarmonyOS

57 points by overflowcat 1y ago

echelon 1y ago
We should have known that if we limited China from accessing our tech, they'd just grow their own. The game is afoot, and China knew to de-risk and decouple. I don't think that it can be stopped at this point. HarmonyOS, RISC-V, DeepSeek, domestic EUV, etc. China is standing up its own tech pillars. So I suppose American lawmakers see this as a game of slowing down the competition rather than fully impeding it. China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge, or if that edge will even matter. In the meantime, we're holding up our own tech giants up to antirust scrutiny (and rightly so). But does that also hinder America's lead on China? And, if so, what will that mean for the tech/AI race? Europe is also hell-bent on slowing down American tech. Again, rightly so - data sovereignty is important, and anti-competitive, monopolistic behaviors have long stifled domestic industry and talent. American giants shouldn't be allowed to behave that way as guests in other peoples' homes.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  I hope Europe figures it out too
- snapcaster 1y ago
  Won't claim to be an expert but there were many high profile stories of china breaking up or otherwise limiting their biggest tech companies. Why would the US not propping theirs up hinder america's lead?
  - andrekandre 1y ago
    what a lot of people don't get about china is their tech sector is build on intense internal competition; its a specific goal of the industrial policy....
- Teever 1y ago
  > We should have known that if we limited China from accessing our tech, they'd just grow their own. It was known and was accounted for. The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology on our terms instead of their own. They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost.
  - Qem 1y ago
    > They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost. It will pay itself and offset those costs once they reach breakeven and start selling their equal or better tech in the international market, displacing the incumbents.
    - Teever 1y ago
      If that was the case then they would have done this work without impetus from external policy.
      - zamadatix 1y ago
        Not necessarily. That would imply competing with the multinational incumbents during the first trillion dollars of investment is just as easy and profitable as having the market cleared out for you because the US placed tech export bans, caps, or pricing pressures to parts of the world market (not just China alone). Of course this doesn't automatically mean China wouldn't eventually pull ahead without the external pressure either. I'm just not as convinced it was so clearly a forced opportunity cost loss as much as something which provided a washed mix of both friction and acceleration despite assuredly preventing the US from making more money while its tech was farther ahead.
  - echelon 1y ago
    > opportunity cost What was the opportunity cost in this equation? A substantially smaller bailout for their commercial real estate market? > [The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology] on our terms (emphasis added) What terms did we dictate? Timelines? Trade? How does America or the West emerge ahead here?
- Havoc 1y ago
  Big part of anti trust is because it crushes healthy competition so don’t think that is necessarily incompatible with winning tech races. > China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge I’d say the lead is so slim it’s basically already gone. At least in the practical sense. If you were to isolate both right now. Cut them both off from the outside. One would be able to produce a modern cellphone the other would not. Any sort of residual technical lead in the pure IP/knowledge sense is good for 3 years max I reckon.
- h4kunamata 1y ago
  When you prevent somebody from accessing what is out there, they release their own. The problem with that?? Well, only they mastered it since it was developed with local tech, by the time the goods are sent worldwide, you are blindfolded. Still, I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.
  - phantompeace 1y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
  - supermatt 1y ago
    > I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you. There is no public evidence that Chinese consumer tech has ever been used to spy for the Chinese government. None. Meanwhile, the USA has been caught running mass surveillance programmes like PRISM and tapping the phones of its own allies. That is confirmed. And yet it is the USA making the most noise, spreading fear about Chinese tech. People only seem to worry when the device doesn’t have a US brand on it. You can be a patriot, but don’t be naïve. Believing unproven claims while ignoring confirmed facts is not critical thinking.
    - the_third_wave 1y ago
      O you sweet summer child, think of why there is no public evidence on Chinese espionage while you can easily rattle off a laundry list of Western espionage programs and you'll realise your mistake: China is a closed society without public inquiry while most of the West hangs its dirty laundry out for all to see and comment upon. Look under the cover of that Xiongmai camera, that Huawei base station or those Chinese inverters and you'll find plenty of remote access and control facilities which no doubt were left there purely by accident.
      - supermatt 1y ago
        That sounds clever, but it dodges the core issue. You're treating suspicion as proof. Yes, China is less open, but that doesn't justify assuming guilt without evidence. Both Western and Chinese tech have had security flaws - whether truly accidental or not is up for debate. As you mentioned, Xiongmai cameras had hardcoded credentials and poor default security, and Huawei routers have had vulnerabilities - like many western alternatives. But none of these have been proven to be intentional or used for state spying. In contrast, the West has been caught with INTENTIONAL backdoors - many of which have been directly linked to government and intelligence services. Juniper firewalls had a secret access mechanism tied to compromised cryptography. Trustwave issuing subordinate certificates to facilitate MitM snooping on all TLS traffic. Netgear and Cisco devices including undocumented public-facing remote access features. These were not speculative or theoretical. They were discovered, documented, and in some cases quietly patched without disclosure. None of these were revealed out of transparency. They were found by researchers or whistleblowers. If there is no public evidence against Chinese devices, there is no case. Assuming intent without proof is not analysis. It is projection. And let’s not ignore the obvious: many of these devices are manufactured in the same Chinese factories. But once a US brand name is stamped on the box, the fear seems to vanish. Somehow, they stop being a threat...
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Completely new kernel and userspace? Wonder how long until it's Tier 1 or Tier 2 for Rust. ... Do they use GCC in China?
- overflowcat 1y ago
  It's already Tier 2. [1] *-unknown-linux-ohos: > Tier: 2 (with Host Tools): aarch64-unknown-linux-ohos, armv7-unknown-linux-ohos, x86_64-unknown-linux-ohos > Tier: 3: loongarch64-unknown-linux-ohos OpenHarmony has no support for gcc. All the toolchains are LLVM. [2] [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/openharmony.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/openharmony... [2]: https://gitee.com/openharmony/third_party_llvm-project https://gitee.com/openharmony/third_party_llvm-project
nylonstrung 1y ago
Really cool to see the microkernel vision come to reality Who in 1990 would have thought a Chinese telecom company would productionize it before Hurd even released 1.0
- deafpolygon 1y ago
  Quite easy when you are a state apparatus
  - andreleite77 1y ago
    This is an interesting comment. It makes me wonder why the Pentagon, with a US$1 trillion budget and being a critical piece of the US state apparatus, could not create a solution like that in recent years.
    - betaby 1y ago
      The US government ( most governments in the world ) decided to give money to Microsoft instead.
    - dialup_sounds 1y ago
      The DoD already uses a commercial microkernel OS called INTEGRITY for various applications.
  - FooBarWidget 1y ago
    Statements like this are just lazy justifications, born out of the desire to reinforce a certain world view, rather than genuine effort to understand. Much has already been said about why Huawei is not simply a state apparatus, so I won't repeat that. The point I rather want to make is this: having a factually wrong image of the counterparty is dangerous, especially if you view the counterparty as an enemy (justified or not). If you care about advancing your material interests, then you might want to emulate what you believe makes the counterparty successful (in this case, the belief that they're a state apparatus). But when you find out that the emulation yields bad results because your image of the counterparty was wrong in the first place, you will have wasted a bunch of time and resources. It's in your interest to get your world view right the first time aroubd.
snvzz 1y ago
With this, China is ahead. HarmonyOS is a modern (post-Liedtke) microkernel, multi-server OS. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is stuck with the likes of Linux (monolithic), Windows NT (ugly hybrid) and MacOS (pre-liedtke Mach, hybrid, ugly). Good technology exists (e.g. seL4, genode, RISC-V) but we seem to be stuck investing into bad tech.
- notyourwork 1y ago
  Without disagreeing, can you tell me what makes this a game changer? How would I apply this in my personal life or at work?
  - chvid 1y ago
    Modern microkernels deliver stability, security, performance (look it up if you want the details). Back when I did CS we were talking about this as the next big thing in operating systems. It didn't happen - common operating systems instead expanded in scope, started to include things like a web browser and supporting a gazallion pieces of hardware, rather than trying to "do things right". The game changer part is of course in terms of the broader tech war. What we have here might be a consumer operating system that is technologically better than what is on offer from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Built by a vilified Chinese company.
    - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
      This is not a game changer. Microkernels have been a reality for ages. See QNX or even Fuchsia. I don’t know what "modern" microkernel means. The architectural concepts haven’t changed. There are reasons nobody uses true microkernels. IPCs are slow and the gains are limited compared to the strategies all broadly used kernels already use. They are no monolithic kernel anymore. Everyone has slowly but surely been shifting more and more things to user space in isolated processes including Linux and Windows. Hongmeng might be an interesting kernel. It might also not be. Sadly its proprietary and there are very little benchmarks not published by Huawei. Personally I won’t hold my breath for this one.
rurban 1y ago
Their initial supposed large system type was supposed to run refrigerator displays though: https://gitee.com/openharmony#system-types https://gitee.com/openharmony#system-types Not laptops
xrhobo 1y ago
[flagged]

57 points by overflowcat 1y ago

We should have known that if we limited China from accessing our tech, they'd just grow their own. The game is afoot, and China knew to de-risk and decouple. I don't think that it can be stopped at this point. HarmonyOS, RISC-V, DeepSeek, domestic EUV, etc. China is standing up its own tech pillars. So I suppose American lawmakers see this as a game of slowing down the competition rather than fully impeding it. China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge, or if that edge will even matter. In the meantime, we're holding up our own tech giants up to antirust scrutiny (and rightly so). But does that also hinder America's lead on China? And, if so, what will that mean for the tech/AI race? Europe is also hell-bent on slowing down American tech. Again, rightly so - data sovereignty is important, and anti-competitive, monopolistic behaviors have long stifled domestic industry and talent. American giants shouldn't be allowed to behave that way as guests in other peoples' homes.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
I hope Europe figures it out too
snapcaster 1y ago
Won't claim to be an expert but there were many high profile stories of china breaking up or otherwise limiting their biggest tech companies. Why would the US not propping theirs up hinder america's lead?
- andrekandre 1y ago
  what a lot of people don't get about china is their tech sector is build on intense internal competition; its a specific goal of the industrial policy....
Teever 1y ago
> We should have known that if we limited China from accessing our tech, they'd just grow their own. It was known and was accounted for. The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology on our terms instead of their own. They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost.
- Qem 1y ago
  > They were always going to do this, they just had to do it faster than they otherwise wanted to, which has an opportunity cost. It will pay itself and offset those costs once they reach breakeven and start selling their equal or better tech in the international market, displacing the incumbents.
  - Teever 1y ago
    If that was the case then they would have done this work without impetus from external policy.
    - zamadatix 1y ago
      Not necessarily. That would imply competing with the multinational incumbents during the first trillion dollars of investment is just as easy and profitable as having the market cleared out for you because the US placed tech export bans, caps, or pricing pressures to parts of the world market (not just China alone). Of course this doesn't automatically mean China wouldn't eventually pull ahead without the external pressure either. I'm just not as convinced it was so clearly a forced opportunity cost loss as much as something which provided a washed mix of both friction and acceleration despite assuredly preventing the US from making more money while its tech was farther ahead.
- echelon 1y ago
  > opportunity cost What was the opportunity cost in this equation? A substantially smaller bailout for their commercial real estate market? > [The idea is to make them spend resources developing their own technology] on our terms (emphasis added) What terms did we dictate? Timelines? Trade? How does America or the West emerge ahead here?
Havoc 1y ago
Big part of anti trust is because it crushes healthy competition so don’t think that is necessarily incompatible with winning tech races. > China will eventually route around every road block, so the question is whether or not any of this will help America keep an edge I’d say the lead is so slim it’s basically already gone. At least in the practical sense. If you were to isolate both right now. Cut them both off from the outside. One would be able to produce a modern cellphone the other would not. Any sort of residual technical lead in the pure IP/knowledge sense is good for 3 years max I reckon.
h4kunamata 1y ago
When you prevent somebody from accessing what is out there, they release their own. The problem with that?? Well, only they mastered it since it was developed with local tech, by the time the goods are sent worldwide, you are blindfolded. Still, I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you.
- phantompeace 1y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes
- supermatt 1y ago
  > I would never buy a Chinese tech device, you are buying a surveillance system to allow its government to spy on you. There is no public evidence that Chinese consumer tech has ever been used to spy for the Chinese government. None. Meanwhile, the USA has been caught running mass surveillance programmes like PRISM and tapping the phones of its own allies. That is confirmed. And yet it is the USA making the most noise, spreading fear about Chinese tech. People only seem to worry when the device doesn’t have a US brand on it. You can be a patriot, but don’t be naïve. Believing unproven claims while ignoring confirmed facts is not critical thinking.
  - the_third_wave 1y ago
    O you sweet summer child, think of why there is no public evidence on Chinese espionage while you can easily rattle off a laundry list of Western espionage programs and you'll realise your mistake: China is a closed society without public inquiry while most of the West hangs its dirty laundry out for all to see and comment upon. Look under the cover of that Xiongmai camera, that Huawei base station or those Chinese inverters and you'll find plenty of remote access and control facilities which no doubt were left there purely by accident.
    - supermatt 1y ago
      That sounds clever, but it dodges the core issue. You're treating suspicion as proof. Yes, China is less open, but that doesn't justify assuming guilt without evidence. Both Western and Chinese tech have had security flaws - whether truly accidental or not is up for debate. As you mentioned, Xiongmai cameras had hardcoded credentials and poor default security, and Huawei routers have had vulnerabilities - like many western alternatives. But none of these have been proven to be intentional or used for state spying. In contrast, the West has been caught with INTENTIONAL backdoors - many of which have been directly linked to government and intelligence services. Juniper firewalls had a secret access mechanism tied to compromised cryptography. Trustwave issuing subordinate certificates to facilitate MitM snooping on all TLS traffic. Netgear and Cisco devices including undocumented public-facing remote access features. These were not speculative or theoretical. They were discovered, documented, and in some cases quietly patched without disclosure. None of these were revealed out of transparency. They were found by researchers or whistleblowers. If there is no public evidence against Chinese devices, there is no case. Assuming intent without proof is not analysis. It is projection. And let’s not ignore the obvious: many of these devices are manufactured in the same Chinese factories. But once a US brand name is stamped on the box, the fear seems to vanish. Somehow, they stop being a threat...

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

Completely new kernel and userspace? Wonder how long until it's Tier 1 or Tier 2 for Rust. ... Do they use GCC in China?

overflowcat 1y ago
It's already Tier 2. [1] *-unknown-linux-ohos: > Tier: 2 (with Host Tools): aarch64-unknown-linux-ohos, armv7-unknown-linux-ohos, x86_64-unknown-linux-ohos > Tier: 3: loongarch64-unknown-linux-ohos OpenHarmony has no support for gcc. All the toolchains are LLVM. [2] [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/openharmony.html https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/platform-support/openharmony... [2]: https://gitee.com/openharmony/third_party_llvm-project https://gitee.com/openharmony/third_party_llvm-project

nylonstrung 1y ago

Really cool to see the microkernel vision come to reality Who in 1990 would have thought a Chinese telecom company would productionize it before Hurd even released 1.0

deafpolygon 1y ago
Quite easy when you are a state apparatus
- andreleite77 1y ago
  This is an interesting comment. It makes me wonder why the Pentagon, with a US$1 trillion budget and being a critical piece of the US state apparatus, could not create a solution like that in recent years.
  - betaby 1y ago
    The US government ( most governments in the world ) decided to give money to Microsoft instead.
  - dialup_sounds 1y ago
    The DoD already uses a commercial microkernel OS called INTEGRITY for various applications.
- FooBarWidget 1y ago
  Statements like this are just lazy justifications, born out of the desire to reinforce a certain world view, rather than genuine effort to understand. Much has already been said about why Huawei is not simply a state apparatus, so I won't repeat that. The point I rather want to make is this: having a factually wrong image of the counterparty is dangerous, especially if you view the counterparty as an enemy (justified or not). If you care about advancing your material interests, then you might want to emulate what you believe makes the counterparty successful (in this case, the belief that they're a state apparatus). But when you find out that the emulation yields bad results because your image of the counterparty was wrong in the first place, you will have wasted a bunch of time and resources. It's in your interest to get your world view right the first time aroubd.

snvzz 1y ago

With this, China is ahead. HarmonyOS is a modern (post-Liedtke) microkernel, multi-server OS. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is stuck with the likes of Linux (monolithic), Windows NT (ugly hybrid) and MacOS (pre-liedtke Mach, hybrid, ugly). Good technology exists (e.g. seL4, genode, RISC-V) but we seem to be stuck investing into bad tech.

notyourwork 1y ago
Without disagreeing, can you tell me what makes this a game changer? How would I apply this in my personal life or at work?
- chvid 1y ago
  Modern microkernels deliver stability, security, performance (look it up if you want the details). Back when I did CS we were talking about this as the next big thing in operating systems. It didn't happen - common operating systems instead expanded in scope, started to include things like a web browser and supporting a gazallion pieces of hardware, rather than trying to "do things right". The game changer part is of course in terms of the broader tech war. What we have here might be a consumer operating system that is technologically better than what is on offer from Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Built by a vilified Chinese company.
  - StopDisinfo910 1y ago
    This is not a game changer. Microkernels have been a reality for ages. See QNX or even Fuchsia. I don’t know what "modern" microkernel means. The architectural concepts haven’t changed. There are reasons nobody uses true microkernels. IPCs are slow and the gains are limited compared to the strategies all broadly used kernels already use. They are no monolithic kernel anymore. Everyone has slowly but surely been shifting more and more things to user space in isolated processes including Linux and Windows. Hongmeng might be an interesting kernel. It might also not be. Sadly its proprietary and there are very little benchmarks not published by Huawei. Personally I won’t hold my breath for this one.

rurban 1y ago

Their initial supposed large system type was supposed to run refrigerator displays though: https://gitee.com/openharmony#system-types https://gitee.com/openharmony#system-types Not laptops

xrhobo 1y ago

[flagged]