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Comment by fartcannon | Hacker News Reader

I just don't understand. How can you be excited to silo off computing technology? Because you're impressed by benchmarks? Another comment mentions margins - 200 dollar ram upgrades. What's exciting about that?

We need competition and an open play field or I fear the barrier to entry for new hackers will grow too large.

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The alternative is worse; continued stagnation of CPU performance. At least Apple is pushing the boundary higher. Now AMD/Intel/Microsoft will have to up their game. Competitive pressure is almost always a good thing in an industry, at least for customers.

I'm okay with 5% yearly increases in performance if it means I don't have to pay Apple $200 for an 8GB RAM upgrade. If I can choose which SSD to buy or which GPU or CPU. Nobody else is capable of doing what Apple has achieved here. That's not a good thing for customers, considering how authoritarian Apple behaves as a company over its customers.

Intel have stagnated, but in their last 3 generations AMD has gone:

* from miles behind to ahead in multi-tasking workloads (ryzen 1000)

* drew "close enough" to Intel but Intel had a immediate counter (ix-8xxx vs ryzen 2000)

* Cut the feet from under Intel's HEDT CPUs and rendered them mostly pointless, and managed to keep a "close enough" position despite Intel releasing a new CPU generation soon after (Ryzen 3000 vs Intel 10xxx)

* Took a convincing lead which Intel has no answer for (Ryzen 5000 vs Intel 10xxx)

Intel have certainly stagnated but are promising any day now they'll be out of their slump and on a new process for mainstream CPUs. Maybe, maybe not, but their failures are no guarantee AMD are also going to hit a wall, especially since unlike when Intel planted themselves firmly on top, there are challengers in sight still for AMD.

Being angry at Apple for this is misplaced, though - the anger should be directed at the PC industry for essentially wasting their time with subpar products.

It is absolutely absurd that one company kicks the rest in the ass.

No one is angry. I'm perplexed.

Apple are delivering performance that beats so many other setups running off a battery. And x86 emulation comes close to the real hardware.

And at this price point who cares about the RAM upgrades anymore? The lowest end system matches systems far more expensive than an extra $200. All of this is great for most end users.

In the short term, perhaps it's fun.

What happens when open computing goes away? When creativity is dictated by one company. Certainly competition with that company will be banned, as it is on iOS. The term 'most users' will slowly shrink until it encompasses no one but consumers.

This is the wrong direction. We should be trending to even more open computers. Not appliances that can also run python scripts.

Is linux dying off or something? How is open computing going to die away?

I use Linux myself at work and currently as my daily driver. But I can’t in good conscience recommend it to regular people. If you want more competition, open source has to be competitive.

I've taken half a step back on advocacy this past year... I've been deploying on Linux servers and using containers a lot more, that's got uptake from work. But Linux desktops have been a no-go and beyond this, WSL2 has been pretty decent.

I am concerned that Apple will close all paths for open software to keep adding life to unsupported older hardware though. I feel the same about Phones and mobile devices as well. Reduce and Reuse come before Recycle for a reason.

Open computing is dying? Drama much?

I'll be concerned when the Apple goons barge in my house and bust up all non-Apple technology.

Until then I think open computing is perfectly safe. Open computing certainly isn't going away on macOS - despite all your hand wringing about "authoritarian Apple".

The part that perplexes me about this -- about the open source fundamentalists with whom I share quite a few views -- is that they ceded control of the base layer half a century ago and never talk about it.

No matter how open our software, it still runs on hardware which we can't build. No matter how open the HDL of that hardware, it has to be manufactured on a process we can't replicate.

I really want to see more people focus their energy into building an enthusiast-friendly fab. The idea alone gets so readily dismissed because people focus on how extreme top-end fabs are without considering that there might be alternatives if your priorities/requirements were different. But I think it'll still happen, some day. Free the base layer! Make open source eternal!

I stoped paying attention when those fundamentalist started buying Apple hardware to develop GNU/Linux software.

While it would be cool, such a project is ridiculously far from practical and certainly would not result in anything usable for most purposes. Silicon fabrication is intrinsicly a slow, high-investment process which only pays off if you can get enough volume. There's little room for an open-source approach to this kind of industry (where's our open source HVAC?).

You make a lot of assumptions, maybe without even noticing you've made them. Silicon + CMOS happens to be one really high-performing combination. But it's not the only possible platform for computation. The past has seen us through vacuum tubes, magnetic core memory (and its cousin, magnetic logic), TTL (or resistor/transistor logic if you want to reduce the process steps), and through to modern MOSFET-based technologies. Along with each transition are numerous other computational platforms which didn't catch on -- usually because they didn't optimize for the things which the market demanded (e.g. perf, power, yield, and cost at volume).

Among all the possible platforms for logic, it's hard for me to imagine that there's not at least one which has properties usable for at least some set of applications by enthusiasts.

It goes back to the way we were doing in the older days focusing on platforms, each with its own set of features that made them unique, while triggering discussions on the school's playground which one of them was the best, no big deal.

Yeah, as long as Windows on ARM is planned to be a stepping stone for a more locked down computing future, I'm kind of happy that it continues to flounder.

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