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Wow, thats some conspiracy theory. Only a teeny tiny fraction of hardware companies have any relationship with Apple whatsoever. For those that do yes their Apple work is lucrative, but for most of them like Sony or Samsung it's a minuscule fraction of their overall revenue, and even then is only for very specific components. Large swathes of their output has nothing to do with Apple. The supply chains of most PC manufacturers never go anywhere near Apple or any of Apple's suppliers at all, yet somehow Apple is responsible for their shoddy quality and poor compatibility? Amazing.

Also the cognitive dissonance is deafening. The company with industry leading device lifetimes and premium long lasting second hand market value is, er, guilty of built-in obsolescence. How does that work exactly?

I mean Ive got to think you must know both those points are true. The fact that Apple has nothing to do with the vast majority of the PC supply chain, and the fact that Apple devices have industry leading lifetimes and service and support is just overwhelmingly supported by the evidence. I just don't see how you can not know those things. Yet here you are making this argument. I just find it really puzzling. Are you really not aware of these things, or deny that they are true? Are these things we actually need to dig into and discuss?

I'll concede on the repairability point, yes that's a valid argument. I would contend that it's mostly just a tradeoff between compactness and simplicity of design, versus repairability and it's up to customers to choose which they value most, but Apple has sometimes gone too far in unnecessarily obstructing repairability.

>I mean Ive got to think you must know both those points are true.

Hardware relating Comments on HN has always been fairly low quality to say the least, comparatively speaking to many other subjects. But Apple M1 sort of brings the worst out of it. My current counting right now over 10K comment suggest most have very limited understanding of Hardware tech, little on Hardware business, and quite literally zero on supply chain.

So I would not be suspired If many doesn't know.

I could count people with one hand who have to constantly comment and correcting all the wrong assumption, TSMC capacity limitation, NAND and DRAM price fixing etc etc. And now we have Apple's supply chain monopoly.

The world currently ships approx ~1.2B Smartphone every year, and Apple represent less than 20% of it. And if you include Tablet, PC and Laptop ( Which shares the same supply chain ) Apple is much closer to 10%. The premium Apple pays is not leading edge ( apart from 5nm TSMC ) but very strict quality control and capacity guarantee.

My observation into this issue, is that most software developers and tech workers are so far removed from old model ( non-tech ) of business they have very little understanding of Logistics, Supply Chain, Lead Time, Sales Channel, Distribution and Discovery ( Marketing ). And ironically enough the world best company at doing all of the above is also a tech Company called Apple.

FWIW, it is because we read articles like this one, and because we are constantly told that Apple has exclusive deals for good touch screens from Samsung (who happens to also make the one other good line of competing phones, and which you explicitly stated was a place where people are wrong).

https://thenextweb.com/apple/2011/08/21/apple-locks-its-riva...

> How Apple locks its rivals out of the tablet market with exclusive sourcing deals

Care to explain how we are wrong instead of just claiming we are dumb? I promise that if you educate me (somewhat a bit famous in the "hating on Apple" space) I will help educate others. (Though, FWIW, I do know that a lot of Apple's hardware is semi-custom design, and so if the argument is that I know but find it irrelevant for this comment thread. I am focusing on the belief that Apple makes it hard for others to source parts, which has a lot of history to it.)

I guess I will write a long blog post when I have time. But that article is from 2011. So that perspective were correct at the time but no longer relevant now.

Example when the first iPad using NAND launched, Apple secured nearly 60% of the world's total NAND production capacity. That was not a monopoly or exclusive deal. It was out of necessity. Securing a stable supply of critical component is the norm is any industry. It is up to the manufacture to decide whether they should expand their capacity to meet demand ( from others ).

In again NAND example, since the cost of building a new fab and amortisation time is far too long, most would delay any Capex spending until it is absolutely necessary. With high demand and fixed supply, NAND and DRAM price were sky high, and Samsung managed to be the most profitable company for 3 quarters in 2017, only to be overtaken by Apple. The profits then fasten the capacity increase cycle because the risk are now comparatively lower.

Smaller players who do not have the volume, forecast and commitment will always be left at the will of their manufacturing partners. But partners / vendors will always complain these players dont give ( accurate ) forecast. Capacity planning in itself is a profession. And these are common, if not the norm across all Manufacturing industries, from Food, Metal, Raw Mats or even Transport like DHL where they have Data Scientist working on Flight Space ( Their unit of capacity ).

Apple is superficially "premium" nowadays.

It has been releasing faulty keyboards on it's macbooks for years. They knew. They didn't care. They just continued to release new ones every year with the same faulty keyboard.

Not to mention staingate (which affected me personally).

Those 2700$+ macbooks with ghosting screens. The stupid chip that does a weird sound when you stop your music.

The list just goes on and on.

And this is the stuff on the surface. Go open a macbook and analyze every single component quality...

Apple has always been superficially premium

It’s an Intel machine

They’ve released versions with bad graphics cards, bad batteries.

It takes time to re-design and ship. They replaced numerous “bad keyboard” models for people.

Meanwhile, every plastic Lenovo or Dell needs a new hinge or battery cover every year, and screws fall out.

I’d take physically legit with hard to source issues like ghosted screens since I’m only using it for text and browsing and occasional sound hiccups than a laptop that falls apart after 2 years.

My recent 15” MBP has outlived Dells of the same age at my employer.

80% of the way there is better than 60%

Came here to defend my plastic Lenovo. Two years and counting, looks and feels like new. The keyboard still makes me want to just keep typing.

What Lenovo/Dell models were those? And how are you exactly calculating these percentages?

It looks like you speak from your own experience, and so do I.

Enterprise grade laptops from either Lenovo and Dell are known to be very sturdy and well made. Not sure if the materials will be as nice for your fingers as the macbook materials, but for sure they won't fall apart.

I have had thinkpads that would have survived falling from a third floor. I just don't see how a macbook is more reliable than a thinkpad or a precision.

Try throwing a macbook out your window.

> You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices.

"pays the premium on the premium quality stuff" reads very weird to me. Isn't that how generally the world is supposed to work? You pay a premium for premium stuff? If not Apple, somebody is anyways going to do it right...

I agree with the majority of your post, but this part here is flat out wrong:

> You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices.

Hardware is hard. Some Atmel or whatever low brain microcontroller can be had on a board with hand-painted selfmade-etched circuits or shoddy breadboard stuff, at the frequencies these things operate signal integrity doesn't really matter.

But anything with a brain powerful enough to run Linux? Then you're delving into differential signalling at extremely high frequencies - which means you have to precisely account for trace widths, trace thickness and trace length matching simply to ensure that the signal from your CPU arrives at your RAM chip intact. You'll ned an awful lot of awfully precise voltage levels other than 3v3/5v, with equally precise requirements on timing in getting them up. You also won't be able to get away with a two layer board, you'll need three or more layers and a lot of vias - and now, you can't manufacture your own prototypes any more but need to order at a PCB shop which means you either pay through your nose for speedy turnaround and low volume or wait for weeks for pool orders.

And once you have the PCB you'll need to populate and solder it - where you will run into such nasty things as minimum order quantities and the need for a pick-and-place machine if you don't want to go nuts. And if that's not enough, have fun with NDAs and no support for hobbyists by big SoC vendors due to small volumes (I have extensively written about that topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25208056).

The best solution if you needs smarts is to look into either adopting a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module if you can get away with its performance, or look into COMexpress if you need serious, up to Intel Xeon scale levels performance - but be warned, designing for that ain't exactly easy either.

You seem to be forgetting about the powerful EDA software that will help with the design and its verification.

Which isn't free (and easy to use!) either.

And I forgot about another thing too: the supply of people. While everyone and their dog can attend some six weeks coding bootcamp or teach themselves using free and open resources and can then start contributing to open source code, dealing with hardware requires a good education in fundamental physics, good amounts of money for components and tooling (a good soldering iron, air filters, fine-controlled hot air gun, a decent oven, the equipment and the chemicals for etching, a precise micro-drill, ...). Many people don't have that amount of upfront money and skills, and those that do often don't have the amount of free time to help advance open source because, as I wrote, it takes lots of time and money to deal with smart hardware.

I completely agree with your overall point, but on a pedantic note, you don't need to etch your own PCBs these days.

> everyone and their dog can attend some six weeks coding bootcamp or teach themselves using free and open resources and can then start contributing to open source code

Perhaps this was intended to be hyperbolic, but no, you can't become a kernel developer, say, in six weeks. You can learn to dabble in web development in that time, but you'll barely have taken the first step toward being a serious software engineer.

They said that it was possible to contribute to open source, which is surely true. Not that they could be a kernel developer.

Granted, but six weeks is easily long enough to learn how to assemble a computer, or to do basic soldering. If we're going to compare hardware skills and software skills, let's do so in a reasonable way. If we're talking about building a new system from the ground up, I think the comparison to kernel development is about right.

Much skill is needed to make a serious contribution to an open hardware project, but the same is true for many types of software.

I don't think you understand very well how hardware design works. Most hardware designers write code just like software developers. Most of them have never used a hot air gun, and most of them can't explain in much detail how a transistor works at the physical level (they learned this once in their education, but have since forgotten, simply because they don't need to know this in their daytime jobs). Yes, once you need to fab your design (and iterate on it) you need other disciplines, but the work here is more or less the same for any design.

> Most hardware designers write code just like software developers.

You're talking about people doing FPGA work which is a totally different skillset than making your own PCBs - and even more lacking in people contributing to open-source projects because it is (at least in my opinion) even harder to get a grasp on, and capable FPGA development boards cost a boatload of money.

I'm pretty sure he meant people who design hardware using Hardware Description Languages which aren't only used to configure FPGAs... you can build ASICs using them too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_description_language

PCB design doesn't involve much coding. It's typically done in a semi-manual way using a CAD-like interface. Here's an example for a simple board:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2b1UdOmxVrw

There is, as yet, no magical piece of software that automatically produces good layouts - not even for simple designs like this where signal integrity is of little concern.

> A company that doesn't purposefully force manufactured obsolescence as a business model

Apple's mobile devices, laptops, and desktops have some of the best longevity and the best resale values in the market.

> As some one else said, every spare dollar I have is going to fund a company that values open source hardware, open source software, right to repair and own.

What is this whimsical company, and how exactly does it make money?

> You know why open source hardware is expensive for lower quality? Because Apple pays the premium on the premium quality stuff. But I'm that process they also drive up the prices.

Apple is not even in contention over the same stuff. Nothing open sourced can fund the development process of a 5nm IC, as the tooling alone would be tens of millions if not more. The total cost of an IC would be in the hundreds of millions (making something of the M1 class is billions).

Open source is lower quality unless there is a commercial sponsor. This is almost universally true for software and hardware. This is because people, naturally, have less resources to invest in something with zero to no financial return.

> What is this whimsical company, and how exactly does it make money?

I mean, Olimex isn't exactly poor. https://www.olimex.com/

Olimex makes low end development tools, not consumer products; and it’s not a large company by any means.

> What is this whimsical company, and how exactly does it make money?

https://puri.sm/products

Is their hardware really open source? Are they making money? Is a $799 phone with hardware that dates 5 years back considered a "viable consumer product", or is this a niche device that just shows how open source fails to produce viable consumer products?

See my reply above and check the FAQ: https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque....

> Is their hardware really open source?

The phone is going to get Respects Your Freedom certification by the FSF.

Can I download a zip file which contains all of the phone’s engineering information, which I can then submit to Foxconn and manufacture millions?

https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

So the answer is a resounding “no”:

>> Purism published the KiCAD schematics files for the DevKit, which was entirely designed with free software tools. However, Purism has not released the CAD files or the Gerber files for the Librem 5, in order to prevent the creation of clones. CEO Todd Weaver says that Purism needs to recover its development costs before releasing the Gerber files, which they are “thinking about releasing in a time capsule” of “3 years, 5 years, something like that.”

Not to mention the plastic CAD files, tooling, etc.

Your "resounding no" is the very definition of FUD. In fact, it is more "yes" than "no". Name me any other company which publishes x-rays, schematics and promises to publish KiCAD files for their hardware.

Not sure where the FUD is (that's the third time in this thread that you've thrown the "FUD" accusation, just saying). Purism does not publish manufacturing files, with a specific claim that they want to prevent their product from being copied. They say so themselves, in the link you provided.

There's very little you can do with electrical schematics alone. It's probably just enough for someone to claim a product is "open sourced" while keeping it proprietary for all intents and purposes.

> (that's the third time in this thread that you've thrown the "FUD" accusation, just saying)

Yes, you are right. The reason is the wrong claims written in a convincing tone and (intentionally?) ignoring facts.

For example, here you ignore that this company is providing much more than any other company typically provides (schematics). Purism also promise manufacturing files and have a history of fulfilling their promises (even though sometimes with delays). I have no idea how you can say "resounding no" if you take into account the alternatives.

What is the point of having the right to repair a phone that, 3 years after it's crowd funding campaign, now has 5 year old hardware, still can't reliably make calls and has a sub 2 hour battery life?

It can reliably make calls [0] and has a decent battery life [1] (even though it cannot sleep yet!). If you have more concerns, you can check the community FAQ [2].

Concerning the old hardware, it's the most powerful phone which can run latest Linux kernel and the only one recommended by the FSF [3]. Specs is not the whole story in smartphones [4].

[0] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Cellul...

[1] https://puri.sm/posts/librem-5-4500mah-battery-upgrade/

[2] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

[3] https://www.fsf.org/givingguide/v11

[4] https://source.puri.sm/Librem5/community-wiki/-/wikis/Freque...

Can make calls sometimes and being reliable are I suppose a matter of experience and opinion.

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/librem-5-review-the-lin...

This is not a review of the mass production batch (Evergreen). Please stop spreading FUD. Evergreen started shipping in November. Some people received theirs recently:

https://forums.puri.sm/t/received-my-librem-5-evergreen/1087...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Purism/comments/jzj6s1/i_have_recei...

Ok, it looks like you're quite right I'm out of date. My apologies.

What's the point?

You own it. You control it. YOU have the power. That's the damn point.

You have all the power but none of the utility.

You are spreading FUD. The phone can do almost everything, including 3D-games.

Fine, so you can port tuxracer to it.

If you want to play an actual game people care about and think there are game companies building those for PureOS you're delusional.

Depending what you call "actual game", you can play some of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_HXQJkWjUQ.

Concerning "game companies", this is a typical problem of new hardware and is quite expected (in the beginning). The difference however is that you do not have to rewrite anything, just recompile for Debian ARM and make it fit the screen. Potentially thousands of games should run well after quick adjustments.