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Comment by lmm | Hacker News Reader

Hardware companies are usually terrible at software - there just seems to be this incompatible worldview, even when they work very hard on the problems.

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Having had some experience fiddling with consumer grade routers, I am convinced that nothing could have produced the resulting mess that is supposed to be the software, other than sheer unadulterated apathy.

After hundreds of different router models, it's vexing that so many of these companies are/were unable to come up with software as decent as ddwrt/openwrt to work on their OWN hardware. It's not even standardized across models. Why the hell would you use completely different stuff on two different but ultimately similar products you have? Why not just license one of the existing opensource solutions and call it a day?

</rant>

surprise surprise, the only people who do are Apple. Airport extremes are genuine pleasures to set up, there's a literally an app for your iphone you can use which lets you do most basic tasks.

and you also have to install a Mac app to gain access to the more advanced features. Yay for people on non-OSX machines (and OSs they dual-boot into).

The way Apple products work makes sense if you imagine they were imported from some alternate world where Apple has monopolies in each category it competes in. If you really do only have Macs, iPhones, Airport routers, AppleTVs, etc. it all works together really well. An all-Mac household has a similar feeling to an all-Windows enterprise office--everything magically talks to everything else and sets itself up and enforces policies it gets politely asked to by the domain.

I kind of wish there was some open standard on this OS interoperation glue stuff -- X11+NFS+Kerberos+MIT client-cert auth was just about right for the early 90s, but we screwed it all up somehow instead of evolving it into something competitive with the two big modern closed-source environments. I mean, Linux got WINS-based zero-config link-local peer name resolution from Microsoft, Bonjour/mDNS-based resolution from Apple, but this was never a problem the FOSS community (or even the BSD folks) tried solving themselves. When there are real open-spec solutions for problems, Microsoft and Apple both seem happy to implement them; Linux just doesn't seem to want to do anything other than playing catch-up when it comes to multi-device experience.

It also supports about 0 "advanced" features that ddwrt/etc. support.

have you encountered avm routers like fritz.boxes? they are fantastic and easy.

From when I was in to building PCs and overclocking, I remember all the horrible value-add tools that came on CDs with motherboards etc. They were sure fond of their homemade UI widgets and non-rectangular masked windows.

That is more of an Asian cultural thing that is immediately clear when you visit a Chinese computer store and see blinking non-rectangular widgets obscuring anything that is not a computer.

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