Serious question: could anyone please share why this plea for repairable tech is so heavily downvoted by this community?
Edited to add: the author doesn't seem to themselves be heartbroken. This level of detail suggests enthusiasm.
Absolutely not! Reverse engineering is a lot of fun to me! Especially the moment of clarity when all the unknown pieces eventually fall together and I finally get the whole picture.
The result would be similar to the protectionist trade policies that hamper market entry for foreign produced goods in India and some Latin American countries like Argentina. There are enough customers elsewhere whose governments wouldn't give a thought to this that non-CA/US companies would safely ignore CA/US in this case. It would only work with coordinated effort.
There are also other second order effects not considered by a policy like this.
What's the timeline and what's the company scale that this levies?
Is the documentation expected on day 1? Great, Apple and Google and Sony and others will squash all small competitors. You will never see another small (< 20) person hardware startup (not that we see them often anyways) because the cost to produce this kind of documentation is non-zero, and the big players can easily absorb it into their processes. Additionally, small players would literally be handing the design to competitors. OK, maybe patents and things like that stop some companies from being bad actors and reproducing the product in short order, but it won't stop everyone especially in countries with laxer or no enforcement of patents.
Additionally, problems would be created if designs were produced in non-compliant countries. If I start up a hardware company and make a new device, but half my components are designed in Taiwan and they've decided to explicitly reject this, am I non-compliant for not releasing documentation I don't have the authority to release? And if I'm able to become exempted because of a 3rd party component, everyone else would start shifting their design departments to contractors (if necessary) in those countries or shift a portion of their company there.
And if you create exemptions for small businesses, the big businesses would do exactly what they always do, find loopholes to get subsidiaries/contractors to do the work and exempted and nullify the entire thing.
As nice as it would be to bring back (easier) access to system specs, it's impractical without fundamental culture changes that laws themselves don't usually produce.
The U.S. regularly imposes plenty of requirements that are far more difficult to meet, in many industries. The U.S. is the largest market in the world for many goods; I think the parent greatly underestimates the power and practices of national governments. Smaller countries also impose requirements.
> You will never see another small (< 20) person hardware startup (not that we see them often anyways) because the cost to produce this kind of documentation is non-zero, and the big players can easily absorb it into their processes.
I highly doubt that small players would be affected at all, because a small player wouldn't produce a custom chip. The level of documentation required is akin to API documentation that many services produce and this is not revealing any trade secrets, but enables customer to make full use of the device. If you create a product without any documentation, then you have bigger problems.
> If I start up a hardware company and make a new device, but half my components are designed in Taiwan and they've decided to explicitly reject this, am I non-compliant for not releasing documentation I don't have the authority to release?
This is false, because it is companies like Apple that tell component manufacturers to not sell or to not disclose documentation. Virtually any chip that you can get on an open market has complete documentation available. If you are ordering a custom chip, you shouldn't be allowed to tell manufacturer to not sell it to anyone else nor hide its documentation if it goes into your product.
If you were actually working in hardware design space you would know that what is being asked does not compromise trading secrets, it is done solely out of greed so that people are nudged towards subscription models and becoming dependent on a particular corporation.
This is just a case of Apple being careless. We have a right to criticize the largest company in the world, if not hold them to the highest standards possible. Instead, we've let Apple off the hook because nobody wants to stand up to them and call them out on it. We're all willing to bury those experiences, as long as our next laptop can export our Photoshop projects 500ms faster.
It is a practical requirement in the sense that it improves (potentially) the practicality of hardware systems.
Those are two distinct senses, I was writing about the former.
Isn't this statement a bit of a blanket? Not too long ago I purchased a laptop specifically for being tiny and lightweight (X1 Nano). Ports and expandability were an afterthought. Certainly many wouldn't mind increased thickness and bulk but there is absolutely a market for portability, at least in laptops and other mobile devices.
That said, the X1 Nano at least has removable/upgradable storage, which can't be found on heavier MacBooks, so there's absolutely an argument for adding expandability where it doesn't negatively impact portability.
I think Apple have a pretty good idea about marketing, and what sells a product and what most customers find attractive about it. The vast majority of computers sold are never upgraded, whether they can be or not and most people would never even think about it.
Understanding IC's to repair them is a failing prospect. They are black boxes by nature. If you can't actually repair it without the factory, why should they write you a manual to help you repair it?
Beyond that though, there is a degree of Power lost through dispelling the blackbox (information asymmetry is Power, never forget). Explaining how it works opens up PR doors places would rather not have to deal with, and cuts off avenues of development that companies in the space thrive on. See Nvidia graphics cards for an example. Nvidia doesn't "sell" you the card, in the sense of allowing you to do whatever you want with it because they can't. They are contractually required to hide implementation details around things like HDCP and the in hardware foundations of many streaming related DRM technologies.
Then you have other aspects, like their move to requiring Nvidia signed firmware to access the power control of modern cards. This ensures only their driver can feasibly compete in the market and locks out any potential competition that may be able to pull off a true innovation using their own hardware platform (see nouveau and the signed firmware issue).
All of this would be undone by actually being required to support user firmware implementation, and disclosing how everything works.
https://docs.nvidia.com/drive/drive_os_5.1.6.1L/nvvib_docs/i...
The above is a link to an offering for a self-driving processing offering (therefore safety-criticality somewhat justifies the absurd guarantees of firmware lockdown), but my experience tells me that once ypu nail down a tricky process like that, you worm it into as many parallel business vehicles as you can.
Just knowing another company is even capable of doing something like that is a signal of demand to competitors. Hence the desire to hide everything possible as no one else's business.
That's an unfortunate choice of words. I'm definitely looking for a product, not a service (which is why I bought my MacBook instead of leasing it), but everything I need the machine for overlaps with what Apple envisions me doing with the machine.
I don't want my machine to be amateur-repairman friendly and my OS to be infinitely customizable and tinkerable, because we already have that, it's called Linux on a ThinkPad and to me that's the antithesis of a Mac and I consciously decided not to use that kind of setup.
(I'm not strongly for or anti right-to-repair, but I tend to be against tight regulation when avoidable.)