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> Apple's approach to hardware design warrants criticism. By creating GPUs with limitations that hinder standard functionalities like tessellation shaders and using non-standard page sizes, Apple places unnecessary obstacles in the path of developers. This closed ecosystem not only complicates the work for open-source contributors but also stifles innovation that could benefit all users.

Apple designs its hardware to suit its own ends, and its own ends only. It's obvious to everyone here that this supports their closed business model, which actually works for them very well - they make excellent hardware and (some software flakiness more recently notwithstanding) the median user will generally have an excellent time with their hardware + software as a result.

So they're not placing "unnecessary obstacles in the path of developers" at all by designing their hardware as they do - they're just focused on designing hardware to suit their own needs.

(Also note that if their hardware wasn't excellent, there wouldn't be such interest in using it in other, non-Apple-intended ways.)

I am genuinely curious if those barriers have technical justifications. There's a pretty stark difference (to me, at least) between ignoring standards in order to reinvent better wheels and intentionally diverging from standards to prevent compatibility.

It's a question of whether they're _not_ investing resources to maintain standard behavior or they are actively investing resources to diverge from it. If it's the former, I don't find any fault in it, personally speaking.

> Alyssa's solution to the 4KB vs. 16KB page size discrepancy by running everything in a virtual machine feels like both a clever hack and a potential performance bottleneck.

In her initial announcement, she mentions VM memory overhead as the reason that 16 Gigs of RAM will be the minimum requirement to emulate most Windows games.

> This closed ecosystem not only complicates the work for open-source contributors but also stifles innovation that could benefit all users.

from their perspective, motivated devs are doing all the heavy-lifting for them. from this side of ecosystem, they would mainly care about native app compatibility and comparable AI (inference) experience.

both of the above seem to be taken care of, sometimes through combined efforts. other than this, they are happy to lock things down as much as they can get away with. the community unfortunately gravitates towards overall appeal rather than good open initiatives.

> Should the community continue to invest significant resources into making closed systems more open, or should efforts be redirected toward promoting more open hardware standards?

False dichotomy. Do both!

What do you mean by “should the community do X” ? The Community is not some form of organisation with a mission and objective, it is a loose collection of individuals free to put their talents and explore intersts into whatever they please. You imply that this creative and inspiring work somehow stifles innovation and hurts users which is frankly absurd.

You should re-read the last paragraph of my comment and note that it is directed towards Apple.

I said ‘imply’ because your response is not to an article on apples walled garden but work of open source developers. I agree with you 100% on criticizing apple but not on whether someone should put effort in making it more open.

OP was talking about the middle paragraph of your comment, not the last one. I.e. the one in which you're talking about what "the community" should do, which is not really a meaningful question.