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Comment by Abishek_Muthian | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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We had that in the form of Windows CE based smartphones. As open as a PC, no walled garden, no app stores, just load your app and launch it. The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices.

>The market spoke decisively in rejecting it in favor of the iPhone and Android devices.

Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations? Given that the general public is largely unaware of DRM and the like, it was likely for lack of other features. There's no inherent reason why a more open phone OS couldn't succeed in the market. After all, Android devices are generally more open than iOS devices and they've got the vast majority of the smartphone market.

>Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations?

Obviously other considerations.

Where there is only a small handful of options within a class of product, any statement about "what the market wants" should be limited to very broad strokes. The consumer doesn't select from the entire possibility space, they buy from the available options.

Any "correlation is causation" statement about minor details when there are dozens of other larger distinguishing feature are the words of a lying huckster. Giving them the benefit of the doubt isn't that they're not-lying, the benefit of the doubt is that they're lying to themselves too. That's how wrong it is to make those inferences.

> "a lying huckster"

Rather rude, don't you think?

I did make the context quite narrow and add the caveat for people who are simply deluding themselves, but yeah, it's rude. I've spent enough of my professional life listening to people try to tell me what sales numbers "mean" to have any higher of an opinion.

> "Sure, but did the market reject it because it was a more open platform, or because of other considerations?"

My point was that openness didn't outweigh other considerations in the eyes of people purchasing them.

Windows Mobile smartphones were actually dominant in the market until the iPhone was introduced. IIRC from the industry data I had access to, there were over 100 different models in a variety of form factors from a couple dozen OEMs concurrently being sold at its peak. So it was at least ahead of all the alternatives before that point, which weakens the argument that it was "other considerations" that were the main culprit.

They weren't as open as you remember for most people using pre-iPhone smart phones. Carriers did all sorts of things to cripple reduce functionality so they could sell it back to you.

A major factor of the iPhone's early US success was forcing a major US carrier (AT&T) to stop doing consumer hostile things and just let the device connect to the network as intended.

So, in part, it was improved openness that drove iPhone/Android's success. It just was network openness instead of device openness.

Can I boot Linux on an iPhone? Install android instead?

I don't think we ended up in a place much better off from a freedom perspective.

Android is a little better because parts of it are open. Google has been steadily moving things into play services though, which is not open. There is now an open source replacement for play services - I don't think it's very compatible yet though.

MicroG is fairly compatible, but obviously it's can't do anything about DRM like SafetyNet.

> Google has been steadily moving things into play services though, which is not open.

This is a good thing, they've been de-googling the base OS and making it as stripped down and bare-bones as possible.

This is a huge win for security, privacy, and freedom in general, and exactly what they should be doing. Android should be a small, secure Linux based operating system with an API that makes it easy to build services on top of it. The Google ecosystem should be completely decoupled from the OS.

Fair enough, but android without play services is also barely usable and most apps will not run.

It's also an effective way of building the walls around the garden.

I'm relatively ambivalent to a walled garden if and only if there's a (reliable) way to opt out of it. In Android's case, it's not only quite possible to opt out of Google's garden, but arguably rather commonplace (Amazon's "Fire" devices, most custom ROMs by default, etc.). In iOS' case, it's outright impossible.

Opting out will be harder and harder because technologies like SafetyNet will make most apps unusable on non google approved devices.

which makes me wonder why amazon or facebook haven't started leading an open-source alternative to google play services.

It's such an easy way to run the mobile race compared to start ing from scratch.

Android with google services replacement MicroG GmsCore runs most apps without hassles.

My experience is quite the opposite: they are hardcoding more things to be hard to replace - you can only have /system apps not affected by forced battery saving limits, the new file-based encryption is moot on unlocked bootloader etc.

With bootloader exploits, yes: https://projectsandcastle.org

The market rejected it because it had crappy UX. Those smartphones were marketed for balding dads in white shirts, working in cubicles. Steve Ballmer types.

The iPhone had 60 fps smooth animations, a built-in iPod, a huge capacitive touchscreen, and most importantly none of the baggage of being associated with balding managers in their 40s. It was sexy. It was a fashion statement.

There wasn’t even an AppStore on iOS initially.

>Those smartphones were marketed for balding dads in white shirts, working in cubicles

Ouch, burn. Though oldschool cubicles sound better than the current open office chicken farms I've seen.

Hehe, true! Cubicles are much better from a privacy perspective, but the startup kids tore them down on the dubious pretext of hindering collaboration. It was only a matter of time before BigCos followed suit, if only for the obvious cost saving reasons.

I don't mind open offices for the 5 man starups made of the guys who met in college and are trying their luck with blood sweat and tears, however I really do mind them in the nouveau wannabe pseudo startups where it's an open chicken coop for the developer plebs and private offices for the sales/marketing/management.

But it's ok, they give you a ping pong and foosball table. /s

Let’s hope that the pandemic kills the open office!

> "Those smartphones were marketed for balding dads in white shirts, working in cubicles. "

While true, I wouldn't say that's a burn because it was exactly those people who could afford smartphones and justify paying the painfully high bandwidth charges of that era. Remember, those phones cost as much as a iPhone today but in 2005 dollars (ouch). The ubiquitous Blackberry, a.k.a. the "Crackberry", and Palm devices were also aimed at the same business and professional market.

These early devices paved the way to the current smartphone market.

That is exactly the point. When a 16 year old non-male teenager is accepting it, than you won. See iPhone, facebook, whatsapp, tiktok or whatever they are doing nowadays.

I owned two of these devices as a personal information manager (contacts calendar ...). They were not comfortable and the data plans then were so prohibitive expensive that modern usage was far away.

There's no need to stereotype.

From the wording: you are right, I apologize.

Regards the argument: if you do not win this audience (predominantly female) you are doomed.

For the records: I do not want to attribute any positive or negative characteristics to any of the audiences.

Are you really arguing the that Windows CE platform was more open than Android?

Back in 2005, an open source Linux based phone was a hippie pipe dream, and carriers were FIRMLY against allowing anything open source on their networks. Android blew all of that wide open, and now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS. This is what we were all dreaming about back then. I feel like this is an incredibly underappreciated fact.

Yes, some carriers lock down their Android phones, because it's an open platform, so carriers can do what they want with it, but since the dawn of Android there have always been high end Android phones that were trivial to put into developer mode and install whatever wacky OS mods you want.

> now the most popular phone OS in the world is an open source Linux based OS

That's an interesting comment, because it really calls attention to how us nerds often perceive things differently from how the rest of the world does. I am guessing that most consumers would not recognize something that just used vanilla AOSP as an Android phone. Google's closed-source add-ons are a huge part of what people think of when they think, "Android."

I mean, the average person only has a vague idea of what an OS is, let alone a specific one like Android

> "Are you really arguing the that Windows CE platform was more open than Android?"

The topic is the control that the user has over a phone they purchased, not source code availability for the OS, so yes, I am. Windows CE smartphones provided access about the same as Windows 98/NT in terms of the freedom to run apps and providing apps unfettered access to OS level APIs. The same can't be said for Android and Apple's sandbox + walled garden model.

The only Linux smartphone I can think of from that era that offered similar access and control was the (I think?) Nokia N900 and interest in those was IIRC negligible.

I feel like you're trying to sell the utter lack of a security model as some sort of feature.

Power users and developers have always had the ability to circumvent the Android sandbox on their own devices.

Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems.

N900s were pretty rad little toys, but anything you could do with them you could also always do on Android. The base Android OS doesn't have a built in package manager, but you can easily run a more classic Linux distro in a chroot or something.

Linux Deploy has been around for almost a decade now.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.meefik.linu...

> "I feel like you're trying to sell the utter lack of a security model as some sort of feature."

I'm just describing the way things happened to be back in that era.

> "Windows CE just never tried to implement security. Malicious apps had unfettered access to everything, just like in most Windows based ecosystems."

Yes, and? That's just as true of early PalmOS and the other early mobile OSes. Security against malicious apps just wasn't a consideration at that time on smartphones/PDAs precisely because there was no app store and no significant quantity of malicious apps.

Except the Android of today has not much in common with the Android from ten years ago. Android might be open sourced but is by no means like the linux that you'd run on your PC and is being increasingly built to wall you into Google's services while Samsung and the rest try to remove Google as much as possible from the equation and sway you to their services. Basically you're the cashcow they try to heave around. What a mess to be in.

Oh, and let's not forget that while Android itself is open source, the Android on your phone right now is full of binary blobs for even the basic shit. Camera driver? Image processor? Fast charging? LTE modem? Fingerprint sensor? OLED calibration? most of them are binary blobs specific either to the chip/sensor manufacturer or the OEM who designed the phone as they consider this stuff proprietary IP they wish to keep secret from the other Android OEM competitors. Move to LineageOS and you risk loosing a lot of your phone's fancy features because of that.

I love my Androids but it's still a mess and the openness is slowly going away(since Android 9 we lost call recording capability which was a huge blow for my use case). At least we still have f-droid.

There are many bluetooth call recorders out there. They are better than nothing.

Only devs that don't code for Android can ever consider it an open source Linux based OS.

The fact that it uses Linux kernel and related features is an implementation detail, only visible to Google and OEMs.

What regular developers see is a Java/Kotlin based userland, with a native layer having a set of predefined stable APIs, which includes ISO C, ISO C++ standard libraries, a POSIX subset, GL/Vulkan and a couple of Android specific ones.

Tomorrow Android can be another Fucshia subsystem, and again, only Google and OEMs will notice the change.

They rejected it because the experience was garbage not because it was open. My least favorite part is constantly manually pruning open apps to fit in tiny memory.

So basically what many of us still do on iPhone and Android devices.

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.

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

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.

>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.

> and once you add a display, and peripherals you're looking at over $100

I believe the basic idea of the Raspberry Pi is that everyone already has the display (a television), so the only peripherals you need are the power supply, keyboard, mouse, and HDMI cable, which together should be around USD 15 or even less (from a quick search for local prices here then converting to USD).

>I believe the basic idea of the Raspberry Pi is that everyone already has the display (a television)

Sounds like a pretty poor assumption to me. In EU at least, over half the people I know own no television(TV tax is huge here and excluding boomers, nobody watches it anyway because Netflix) and if we assume all families in developing nations own a TV in the household then it would be difficult to do any productive type of work on it as the TV would probably be used a lot for, you know, watching TV and other entertainment rather than having it reserved just as a tool. Good luck writing your homework on your TV while your dad wants to watch his game and your mom her show.

Even in developing nations, second hand PCs are such affordable commodities that they're a no brainer.

TV tax it's just for the UK.

How are you so certain it's only in the UK?

It's definitely a thing here in Germany and Austria, and a relatively expensive one at that for just possessing a TV, and I'll bet my hat it's a thing in most EU countries.

Not in Spain.

Lucky you. Still, it's not a UK only tax, as you originally claimed.

They're not so lucky. In Spain the public broadcasters are paid from government grants from general taxation, so any tax payer pays towards it whether or not they have a TV and watch it.

In any case, you're right, most of Europe has TV licenses of some kind or other [1]

Thought notably in the UK, you can certainly own a TV without paying TV license [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...

TV Taxes and Licenses?

What is that? Is there something in the EU that doesn't have a special tax or required paperwork?

In the case of the UK, the purpose of the Taxes is to pay for the programming that is broadcast over the airwaves, i.e. it funds the BBC.

This is somewhat of a 'compare and contrast' to the US Model, where either stations are funded by advertisements, or the public broadcasting stations that rely primarily on grants, as well as what they can get from the government; but in the case of the US, technically 'everyone' is paying into PBS whether they have a TV or not.

I have to be completely honest here...

Entertainment is a multi billion dollar industry. Companies like Disney are making record profits. Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?

>Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?

Because why bother when you get money from free by law through taxes?

Count your blessings, as at least the BBC produces world class content viewed worldwide(former Top Gear, Dr. Who, etc) so you get your money's worth but in Germany, ARF and ZDF receive nearly as much money as the BBC but produce almost nothing worth watching by the Germans, let alone abroad, because why would they give a fuck when than sweet taxpayer money keeps rolling in no strings attached regardless.

> Entertainment is a multi billion dollar industry. Companies like Disney are making record profits. Instead of relying on taxes and fees to make government-approved entertainment why not simply... make content people want to watch?

Well, it's a question of which devil you want.

In the case of Disney, much of their profits are driven by an entire lifestyle that they are selling. There's the Media itself, but then all the toys, the amusement parks, etc. And all of the advertising that goes with those, and all of the social impacts it has as a result (see next point for more)

If you go for an advertising based model, You wind up with 2nd or 3rd order social impacts. Even in the 80s, the decade of 'greed is good', the FTC put limitations on advertising in children's programming due to the psychological impacts it had. (I'd be curious to see another good look taken today, but regulators are even more toothless now than they were then.)

In both cases, however, you are at the end of the day going to be beholden to either your advertisers, or your corporate overlords for your content. And if they don't like that content, it will not see the light of day in any meaningful form, regardless of the public interest.

I feel all approaches have their place, but perhaps the advertising model could use a bit more modernization in it's regulation, with what we now understand about behavioral psychology.

Most EU countries you pay the tax regardless of owning a TV or not, it is part of the electricity bill or similar.

I have lived half of my life in Germany and still find it strange having GEZ, or whatever replaced it now, instead of everyone pays approach that most countries on the continent do.

Linux desktops used to run with 4MiB of RAM on a 33MHz processor. You don't need the ultimate best to have a usable computer.

OK, sure, "we got to the moon with 4Mhz" but try watching youtube, editng photos and google docs with that configuration.

What you probably mean by usable computer is either an embedded system or some ssh server but what most people actually do with computers is access the web and the modern web is so bloated that without fast hardware and proper software it becomes a pain to do anything remotely productive or fun.

That's why the PI is not yet a good mainstream PC. It's too slow sometimes and has too many gotchas that the users who are not tinkerers won't put up with.

You can run X11 with a non-compositing window manager on very low performance hardware.

But will it run modern web pages and youtube?

To be fair, YouTube doesn't run on Linux anyway, it crawls, unless you happen the have the magical combination of proper drivers.

My point exactly. How can we expect tiny cheap linux computers like the PI to replace PCs for the average joe if they can't even run Youtube?

Unless the hardware powers datacenters or mobile/IoT devices, HW manufacturers don't even bother supporting linux with drivers.

They can, just not with any Linux, exactly due to drivers.

Put into them a custom closed OEM distribution, or the Windows for the Pi, and there is no issue playing YouTube with proper hardware acceleration.

YouTube plays fine on my 2020 laptop running Linux. The only feature I miss out on (that the hardware provides) is HDR, but it's a small loss for me to have my preferred development environment.

Lucky you for having the right set of drivers.

> there was a time when only IBM was capable of making PCs

They may have been the only one's that could use the term "Personal Computer" for a short time, but they were not the only ones making PCs. You had Commodore, Amiga, HP, Wang, Apple, etc. Even still, IBM's PCs were not locked down and were, for the most part, based on an open architecture allowing you to freely upgrade parts. Later down the line (specifically the original IBM PC) when the technology allowed for it, you could even install other operating systems like CP/M-86, UCSD p-System, and MS-DOS.

In the 80's, "PC" meant IBM or compatible. Nobody ever called their Apple, Amiga, Commodore 64, etc. a "PC."

There were even some products, like the "Apple II PC Transporter" that made your Apple II compatible with a PC. That meant an IBM PC.

Right. My point was that "PC" was used exclusively for IBM as a marketing term, but it was not the only "personal computer" available. PC became a generalized term much later, although Apple still held on to PC being a term for any computer that was Windows-based (or simply any computer that wasn't a Mac).

The DMCA did not exist then. Nor did strong encryption and code signing.

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