> Apple has gone in the direction of net appliances
I agree that, with "Apple Silicon", they have left behind anything that could reasonably be traced back to the "openness" of old desktop computers.
New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do. As the Star Wars quote goes, "Pray I do not alter [the deal] further".
Sure, some people have managed to boot Linux on the ARM cores of the M1, but it's about as useful as pitching a tent in a corner of a stadium and declaring it useable housing. There is so much on the SoC that's closed and out of reach that I can only see the effort as misguided.
I find this attitude a bit misguided. There's never been as much availability in open computing as there is today. These are good times. A Raspberry pi running linux is miles and planets above what I could have imagined when I was a kid. And people somehow still pick an appliance explicitly designed to be closed (for a good reason) as an example of something. I don't get it.
There is a universe of difference between "availability" and "acceptability," and to presume that you can just pick open over closed for day-to-day tasks is oversimplifying things greatly.
To perhaps put it somewhat dramatically, the world outside of geekdom increasingly does not consider open computing to be acceptable; It is growing downright hostile.
I use Linux as my main operating system and it consistently gets harder to do over time as I interact with others in work and life; and there is no good technical reason (e.g. proprietary superiority) for this to be the case.
Surprised to see this feeling about Linux? For me it's never been easier to be a Linux user. More hardware works without configuration. I remember spending hours if not days tinkering in in Xorg.conf just to get a video card and monitor working together. A working camera and microphone used to be a pipe dream. There's more software than ever and it works better than ever. We have at least two major web browsers that are well supported. OK LibreOffice still isn't the equal of Word and Excel but it's better than ever, and now there's Google Docs, or other cloud alternatives that all work.
Not at at all what I meant; I 100% agree that for most "solo" activities, Linux is just fine; I'd argue better than the alternatives.
But (except for gaming, thanks Proton!) a lot of the "strongly interconnected" stuff is indifferent or hostile to Linux, especially the more air-quotes "professional" (perhaps I should say "corporate?") it is. I'm in academia, so I'm thinking about a lot of these LMS type tools (many of which are terrible anyway, but sometimes we have to use them.) Also stuff like Adobe, etc.
But there is more Linux support there than ever before too.
When I first started using Linux it wasn't uncommon for websites to demand you use ActiveX for example!
The only place where we're losing ground is in mobiles. There we really see the downside of proprietary monopolies like WhatsApp, etc. being able to decide where and how you can access the service.
We're in agreement here for sure -- my only issue is that the "proprietary monopoly" problem is far far greater than suggesting it's "merely mobiles" (which itself would be enough of an issue) Even if you don't see them now, they spring up FAST.
If you get to work inside your own silo, that's great, I try my damnedest to do the same thing;e.g. I've deliberately not learned Windows 10 precisely so I can really "walk the walk" in terms of showing people around me how bad I think it is.
But e.g. Covid challenges that way of doing things HARD. I work in higher-ed and also have young kids doing remote learning, and I can't just stand my ground when this tool or that tool pops up, either because of my career or because while I don't mind being a slight jerk to people around me about my tech choices, I won't/can't do so to these teachers who are trying their hardest.
That's a really optimistic view. Try to plug in a new nVidia card when you're running Wayland and see what happens. Also, benchmark an AMD GPU and wonder where the performance you're paying for went.
LibreOffice is a big monolithic disaster eating about 10x more RAM and CPU than the Microsoft alternative it's been designed to replace. Seems like nobody likes to compete with a free office to create something better.
If you buy Windows/Mac there is not even a question if the camera and microphone work. Also, games work often without tweaking and you won't be fiddling with settings when plugging in an external screen everytime.
100% agreed. I had a Palm OS PDA back when I was young, and while there was a healthy community of app developers, most of that was shareware, and the OS was pretty closed down. The IDE to develop for it was prohibitively expensive for me as a high school student.
Today, I can run full Linux distributions on both iOS and Android, interface with USB and Bluetooth devices via open APIs on Android, get a Raspberry Pi for less than the price of a full-price video game...
I'm certain that there are high school students out there doing just that and much more that I'm not even aware is possible. Many of them are sharing their progress on YouTube.
There's many things I worry about – the accessibility of computing and hacking is definitely not one of them.
The Raspberry Pi is a terrible example of "open computing". As well as the usual Broadcom close-source binary blob drivers, you also have a proprietary operating system running underneath Linux (ThreadX, now owned by Microsoft).
An interesting development/build environment going forward might be some sort of small form factor computer (i.e. Intel NUC, RPi4) running Ubuntu (possibly even Ubuntu Server on a multicore NUC). And then use a locked down, proprietary, ultra light Mac M1/Windows/Chromebook laptop to connect to the dev machine via SSH over local networking/USB networking - basically simulating the cloud development experience, just locally. It probably has the side benefit of making the transition from local development to production deployment look a lot more similar.
That's what I've heard about UEFI, TPM and Windows Vista too, yet people are happily building their own PCs and merrily running all kinds of software and operating systems on them. Others are buying heavily locked down iDevices [1] and are happy with them too. ´
People that want openness and the freedom to tinker with their own devices will always find a way to do so, moving away from systems that inhibit their efforts (or just breaking them open, getting people interested in reverse engineering, an invaluable skill even as an open source developer). Others that don't care will continue to not care and buy the system that best fits their needs.
I think it's almost an egocentric worldview to demand that everybody use an open system even if they have no desire to make use of that openness whatsoever at best, and see it as a security/complexity risk at worst.
[1] By the way, both iOS and Android can run a full Linux userspace today!
The only problem is that from a political perspective you have given away all of your power for convenience which is not a problem in say a country like the US until someone comes into power who does not like you or the people you associate with. So yes as long as things are going well security is better taken care of, etc. but when things are not going well for you then all your bases belong to them... like imagine China for instance. So if you had the foresight to build you own bases and your political system goes to shit, you still have the right to carry on with your life whereas in other cases you could be sent off to some place you rather not be sent off to and your life destroyed because the political system and/or company does not like you. And such change is swift, damaging, and isolating as the majority will usually fall in line or not have done anything enough to warrant any attention -- i.e. like as in your average Chinese citizen... but a minority will have and then will be persecuted and have their lives destroyed as a result. Say Hong Kong opposition.
I don’t see what a political perspective provides here. It’s not like you don’t have a choice in consumer tech, unless there are strong networking affects play.
So far, but how far... you should ask yourself. Businesses make decision in light of the current reality. So far Microsoft has had to deal with devs using open source stack on Mac due to things like Homebrew, forcing them to incorporate a whole Linux distro into their OS to keep devs there. So as long as you can keep open source going, you can hold the gates. But question is how long... indefinitely? As the market grows there is room but when the market shrinks and has maturity how much room will be left. And general network effects of the cloud are already felt all over the place, like a document produced on a pc hardly ever stays on the PC it ends up on Google Mail, Google Drive, Microsoft 365, etc. There is no privacy and basically at this point is a joke.
But there are strong network effects. The more people who use a platform, the more apps there are and vice versa.
Other people not caring about openness is like littering. Even if it helps you a little (you don't have to trade against any of the things Apple forces you to trade against), it's a huge problem when everybody does it.
Sounds recklessly optimistic. "I don't care if open platforms go from 5% to 0.1% market share - I am confident manufacturers will keep serving me. Also market share is the purest expression of democratic will, questioning that Apple users want to be prevented from running non-Apple-approved software is egocentric. As is worrying about adverse effects of a world where 90%+ of the population have surrendered control of their computers to a handful of giant corporations."
Who cares if those corporations could (can?) kill any software company by blocking their products. Or news company, for that matter:
Unfortunately, the consumer industry trend will be to follow Apple. I see little hope for competitive open computing devices. Ever since the Nokia N900, openness has consistently lost in the market against faster, slicker, more integrated competitors.
Only in those markets where computing is a fungible commodity, i.e. servers, is the flexibility of openness any benefit, and even there it loses some autonomy to black-box "management engines". While these are still the most plausible vehicle for open computing, I only see them as appealing to a niche of amateurs buying cheaper refurbished machines.
Some may tout stuff like the RasPi as a viable alternative. Sure, but with the understanding that the RasPi is a CPU riding along a beefy VideoCodec/GPU, which has taken years of (ongoing) effort to implement open drivers for, and the RasPi4 still remains 2x slower than my 15 year old laptop.
In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.
I don't think much is changing when it comes to gaming PCs. They have been extremely modular and I see no trend for them to change. But when it comes to anything of mobile form factors, like laptops, I agree with you. Less and less ability to change and replace parts.
When a graphics card manufacturer is allowed to artificially gimp the hardware you bought, is that really any better? they modify firmware and drivers in order to restrict you from performing certain workloads.
Yes. Much. They're (presumably this is in reference to Nvidia either with the cryptocurrency mining limit or geforce/quadro divide) doing this in order to sell you a more expensive product which has those premium features. Note that in this case premium is literally true; these are features which, if you want them, you need to pay a premium for them. Product prices are set by demand, not by cost. One happy side effect of this is, if you're not trying to destroy the planet by wasting huge amounts of power mining cryptocurrency, gaming graphics cards might get easier to buy.
In other words, if you want something you have to pay for it. Intentionally making products which are segmented is a fundamentally different thing than what is being discussed up-thread.
But then again the gaming PCs are full of malware -- most game launchers can be very easily called that. Not to mention that part of them have been caught to install rootkits, or the more modest ones just don't allow the game to be started if you have Process Explorer running (they claim it's for preventing game cheats -- which doesn't work anyway).
So while I have a gaming PC myself, I have long ago removed anything personally sensitive from it. I can't view it as a platform for open computing by any means.
I agree with you about the software part, but I mostly meant the hardware. What I meant by gaming PCs was that there is a market of modular computers, mainly but not exclusively serving gamers. You can still build your own computer from parts you ordered on the internet. You don't have to put Win 10 with a bunch of games on it. You can install GNU/Linux. I have done precisely that.
Agreed on that. The PC platform allows us to build any specialized computer that we like and that's awesome.
But I am worried. Non-free firmware is everywhere. The Intel Management Engine showed a very dark side of the hardware vendors. How long until a remotely activated censorship or spying is brought to light?
I likely sound like a cheap doomsayer and a tinfoil hat but I firmly believe that the time for completely open general purpose computing is now. And I don't mean the SBC ARM toys like the RPi. I mean actual strong computers like the Ryzen 5000s or Intel 10000s / 11000s.
It's time. But who will work on it? We're all so busy surviving and insuring our olden ages. Sigh.
> I likely sound like a cheap doomsayer and a tinfoil hat but I firmly believe that the time for completely open general purpose computing is now. And I don't mean the SBC ARM toys like the RPi. I mean actual strong computers like the Ryzen 5000s or Intel 10000s / 11000s.
> It's time. But who will work on it? We're all so busy surviving and insuring our olden ages. Sigh.
So, buy from vendors that are working toward similar goals, like System76.
Wait, so because you are running proprietary software (games) and it puts restrictions, you refuse the whole platform? This makes no sense.
At my work, we used to use gaming PCs as high power compute boxes. We used them fully, and they worked great. And they were as open as a PC can get - they had all open source software, no rootkits, no suspicious files.
Please don't mix the platform and what you do with it. Freedom also means the freedom to give your freedoms away.
> Freedom also means the freedom to give your freedoms away.
Not necessarily. Freedom has its own equivalent to the Paradox of Tolerance (ie. tolerating the intolerant implicitly gives them the upper hand, leading to a decline in tolerance).
Because of that, there are various limits that are imposed on giving (or trading) your freedoms away, in the interest of maximizing freedom overall. For an extreme example, it is not legal to sell yourself into slavery (or indentured servitude, or most other variations on that theme).
Less dramatically, Fair Dealing / First Sale doctrines make imposing a restriction on reselling goods as a condition of purchase (most prominently applied to the secondhand book market) unenforceable. Various jurisdictions have similarly made non-compete clauses in employment agreements unenforceable. And so on.
Of course, there are plenty of circumstances where free societies have determined that the freedom to give up your freedom is allowed, or even encouraged, but it is hardly universal across the board.
> Wait, so because you are running proprietary software (games) and it puts restrictions, you refuse the whole platform? This makes no sense.
It doesn't make sense indeed because I am not saying that. I am saying that most software running on these platforms is proprietary and at least a part of it is malicious. I think we were discussing the merits of the various platforms plus what most usual folk uses them for. If not, then my mistake.
We're quite free to assemble any PC we like and install Linux on it. At least we have that still.
The consumer industry. And I think it is to be expected, and frankly, not a bad thing.
For example, I am not a car guy, so I just want my car to get me where I want to. I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part. And I understand that people feel the same with computers.
But Macbook Pros are not supposed to be consumer products! It is called "pro", that should be for a reason. People work on these machines, there are developers, sysadmins, etc... You can almost consider it a dev kit for the entire Apple ecosystem. That's why I am a bit concerned. The "consumer product" trend is starting to overstep its borders.
> I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part.
Sure, but the right comparison is between an engine that you can access and might sometimes require work on your part (or you can hire someone else to do it) and an engine you can't access, and in fact is so locked down that no one not approved by the manufacturer can access it, so when you encounter any problem you have to take it back to the manufacturer, who (it turns out) almost always says the only solution is a total replacement of the engine.
You're forgetting one factor in this slide to locked-down engines: as a customer I prefer an integrated engine with a significant lower chance of failing so I will not have to work on it or pay someone to fix it.
It could be we're straining the whole discussion too far with all these analogies, but in any case, I think that would make sense if it were actually true that you'd never have to work on it. In the real world, my friends seem to be at the Apple store for repairs constantly, and Apple is bricking [1] older hardware when they release software upgrades.
I believe it has become just a marketing term - but the original macbook pros were very much geared towards lots of computing power to get serious business done. It has shifted over time.
> For example, I am not a car guy, so I just want my car to get me where I want to. I much prefer an engine I can't access that fits my needs over an engine that I can access but requires maintenance on my part. And I understand that people feel the same with computers.
Ironically your car is a bigger spy device than your phone.
> In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.
But, as you note, there is a huge benefit for open server and embedded computing, and there may be trickle-up and trickle-down effects to desktop computing.
Moreover, programmable hardware is becoming more price and performance competitive, and open source support software is becoming more functional and usable, so we may be in an interesting era where at least some hardware becomes more "open" and it's viable to run a full stack of open source software, starting with your own custom RISC-V CPU on an FPGA.
>> In other words, there is no viable consumer market for open computing.
This is a chicken and an egg problem.
Corporations don't have an incentive to create open consumer devices (lock-in,planned obsolescence). Consumers don't have an option of a consumer (not maker/hobbyist) level open computing device (TINA).
Hence the appearance of a non-viable consumer market.
> New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do.
This easily-debunked claim is repeated daily on HN. Obviously, macOS is a less malleable platform than some others. But the introduction of Apple Silicon did not radically change the extent to which the platform is "locked down." You can still boot alternative operating systems, disable system protections, and compile and run your own code (even the kernel!).
Except the device doesn't conform to any standards, and apple hasn't bothered to document any of it. Given they tend to release new devices on a yearly cadence its quite possible that the "hackers" will never catch up. Sure in 4-5 years it might be possible to boot a linux distro on the M1, but by then apple will have the M5, with new GPUs, reworked interrupt, iommu, etc. So its great apple has this speedy device, but its likely that in the couple years it will take to open it up, it will be behind the curve. That is the problem with the rest of the "open" arm ecosystem, you looking at 5 year old SOCs designs. The "good" stuff might as well not exist at all.
And then its there is almost always a perf/power difference between a reverse engineered device and the native drivers.
This again has nothing to do with whether "you only get to do what Apple lets you do."
I'm not arguing the M1 is an open platform (as, say, PINE makes), only that it is not significantly more closed than the Intel-based Mac. Nothing has changed with regard to Apple's lack of documentation. Nothing has changed about the ability of the platform to execute open source code. The pace of hardware releases, and Linux's preparedness to deal with the changes to the hardware, are independent from the openness or non-openness of the platform.
The fact that my router was hacked to run DD-WRT doesn't make it an open hardware platform. The fact that a newer model can't be hacked the same way doesn't make my router "more closed" in retrospect.
I don't know what standards they should conform to but I doubt there is a vendor-agnostic GPU driver that Linux has that works with every non-M1 computer. It wasn't that long ago that Wi-Fi support on Linux all seemed to depend on reverse-engineered Atheros drivers. Hardware support has always been a problem on Linux, regardless of vendor. Day 1 availability of hardware support in Linux is not the indicator of openness.
There is more to reverse engineer on the M1 than there is on a random Intel based mac. Intel has been a reasonably good opensource steward as evidenced by all the .intel.com contributors to the linux kernel, and a goodly amount of documentation. Yes the intel has plenty of closed source firmware/etc but a lot of it exists to provide standardized boot flow/etc.
The M1 has none of that, so a random intel mac's reverse engineering is limited to only the parts Apple changed from what is mostly a set of platform standards that have been built up over decades. The core system IP (interrupts, iommu, virtualization, pci, memory controllers, USB, etc) already have linux drivers. The M1 OTOH isn't even fully compliant with the ARM instruction sets because they apparently have extended even that.
So, yes the hardware may not technically be locked down, but for all intents it might as well be, since Apple could have picked up the ARM system specifications and conformed to them but they didn't. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of SGI's failed attempt to create a new "PC" standard by dumping all the legacy, designing their own chipset/etc and running their own firmware. Yes it was an x86, but it didn't run anything except their blessed version of windows NT (IIRC). It was a dead end, because it turned out it didn't really offer any advantages, over a boring old PC, cost twice as much and removed the ability to run a bunch of software.
The M1 is much the same, it loses out in a lot of ways not only on the software front, but the hardware front as well. If it weren't for its fairly outrageous single threaded perf, which is at least partially enabled by being fully two process generations ahead of intel it wouldn't be noteworthy at all.
Of course you cannot have absolute guarantees about the future but it doesn't mean there's an excuse for so much misinformation about the products on the market today.
Apple's head of software engineering has repeatedly publicly dismissed the idea that macOS will become as locked down as iOS.
In each of the past several years of releases they've expended a great deal of engineering effort to improve macOS security for the average user while giving advanced users control (for instance, they simultaneously developed secure boot on new Macs, and made it possible to boot alternate operating systems).
They continue to release source to several OS components such as the kernel, the cryptographic frameworks, etc.
They've never expended any real effort in developing DRM to prevent Hackintosh users from running the OS.
Criticism of system internals being poorly documented, and complaints against security features obstructing tinkering are valid, but nothing they've done is signaling that they intend to abruptly change course and create a truly locked-down Mac.
How is this question not moving the goal posts? The top comment claims that Apple Silicon is more locked down than previous Mac iterations. It is not. Does that say anything about future hardware? No. But we are in the same boat with the raspberry pi. If broadcom decides to fuck over hackers who want to use alternative is software for newer hardware iterations, they can.
Anything can happen in the future. When purchasing hardware, look at what you can do with the device that is in front of you.
Can you be confident that any future hardware, or linux even, will remain open to tinker with? If you're worried about tech being closed up, that's fine and well. I wholeheartedly agree with you. But future hardware being limited isn't the same as forcing an update on existing owners, locking services to new devices, etc.
We’re talking about hardware here. There’s no guarantee that all future hardware will be able to boot an unsigned Linux kernel that the user compiled themselves.
Tell that to people who were caught by surprise when redhat decided CentOS was no longer viable. Sure you could find alternatives, but it was still a deeply undesirable disruption.
> You can still boot alternative operating systems, disable system protections, and compile and run your own code (even the kernel!).
Except that the hardware is undocumented and complex, so there aren't any alternative operating systems that can actually use it. The people who have it "running" don't actually have working drivers for components required for ordinary usage.
The claim I responded to is that suddenly Apple Silicon-based Macs are more locked down than the Intel-based ones, and that "you only get to do what Apple lets you do." It is false.
Whether or not anyone has gotten other operating systems to run well on these machines is orthogonal to the claim.
I have an Alienware laptop whose trackpad doesn't work on Ubuntu, which sucks, but I don't accuse Dell of plotting to take away my ability to run my own software because of it.
> The claim I responded to is that suddenly Apple Silicon-based Macs are more locked down than the Intel-based ones, and that "you only get to do what Apple lets you do." It is false.
It is true for the reason I stated. You can run other, less locked-down operating systems on Intel systems, as well as older, less-locked down versions of macOS. On Apple Silicon-based Macs you in practice have to use the latest, more locked-down version of macOS.
> On Apple Silicon-based Macs you in practice have to use the latest, more locked-down version of macOS.
Because Apple Silicon computers were not available on the market until 3 months ago. Of course you have to use the "latest, more locked-down version of macOS" considering they have never released any other version of macOS for this platform! It is absurd to expect that they would backport support for an _entirely new architecture_, a monumental engineering effort, to previous versions of macOS.
If you are going to claim that Big Sur is more locked down than the previous release, I'd also like to see citations about that. The most significant change is that the OS-provided files are now on a read-only partition. You can still break the seal and modify it if you want.
Whether or not they prevent you from downgrading to Big Sur from the next release remains to be seen. They do so on iOS, but this has never been the case on macOS, which has the `softwareupdate` command line tool that can download OS installers for past releases, plus Time Machine for rolling back to earlier snapshots.
> It is absurd to expect that they would backport support for an _entirely new architecture_, a monumental engineering effort, to previous versions of macOS.
What they could easily do, however, is to release a new version of macOS which is not more locked down than historical versions.
> If you are going to claim that Big Sur is more locked down than the previous release, I'd also like to see citations about that.
Snow Leopard didn't have Gatekeeper. Things are clearly going in a particular direction.
Also, inconveniences are "more locked down" or else you could argue that nothing is ever locked down because all you have to do is find a security vulnerability and jailbreak the device.
The meta problem is that hackers love to contribute to stuff just for the challenge. They don't have a consolidated philosophy to make things and a mega corporation that put out products that the public buys. You basically need a Linux foundation that competes and fights with Microsoft and Apple but instead you have Google co-opting open source stuff to make a viable competitor and closing things down even further, where pretty much everything happens on their servers. It seems that democracy and openness in that sense always creates value that it can't capture but is instead captured by Capitalists with deep pockets. The value created by open source can't be used to forward the open source or user centric philosophy.
How could it? Well you need the same level of zealotry and fundamentalism that Steve Jobs inspired in Mac users and then deliver products that capture that Zeal. Where you could not pry me away from a Mac for a decade until Windows created WSL 2 so is now bareable as a daily driver. Before that it was a decade of Linux, which was as good and useful as a Mac... just never bundled, marketed, all the quirks worked out, so it could be sold properly. What made Macs replacement for Linux was the community which made tools like Brew which would make it possible to install all the goodies you need for development. It seems all the software still gets developed by open source, and all the value is captured by Capitalists.
As Theil pointed out you need a monopoly, competition distributes which is not good for someone looking to maximize capital. But at the same time necessary for society, for what good is society without distribution. It seems he's basically advocating for working against society and everyone with money is like yes we need more of that.
To some extent this is handled via GPL/AGPL, which gets in the way of companies building a fence around your work and locking you outside. If you use them.
But the general idea that you need a monopoly is wrong. You don't need a monopoly, only scarcity. Monopoly is extreme scarcity but you don't actually need that. Just enough to turn a profit and stay in business.
Redhat makes plenty of money and has a monopoly on nothing. They're just not in the consumer products business. Somebody needs to be the Redhat to Apple's Microsoft.
Realistically Google's business model isn't completely useless here, i.e. make free software to sell services to the users. Or make free software to sell hardware to the users. The problem with Google is that they became too much of a publicly-traded conglomerate and then they get bad incentives to betray the community -- having a monopoly actually makes it worse because it enables abusive behavior.
> Redhat makes plenty of money and has a monopoly on nothing.
Redhat managed to leverage their monopoly on their own trademarks to prevent anyone unauthorized from offering Redhat-branded support services, coupled with the time-bound monopoly on their own updates (because obviously no one gets those until they actually get distributed) that translates into a short delay for other vendors to incorporate those improvements (and longer if any discussion of whether to include them is warranted).
For most purposes these delays are inconsequential, but plenty of customers are willing to pay for the privilege of getting bugs and critical security fixes distributed and deployed ASAP just so zero-day vulns can't become one- or two-day ones (at best).
It's worth noting that this is more a matter of perception than reality, since by far the biggest factor delaying the eventual deployment of updates including critical security fixes is the customer's own internal processes, but it is hard to get a customer to admit that going from a 15-day to a 14-day delay hardly justifies paying a premium.
You're just using a pedantic definition of monopoly that would cause anybody to have a monopoly on something. It's equivalent to saying that no two pieces of real estate are identical so land ownership is a monopoly, even though in practice land is fungible with other land and owning one piece of land is not what anybody means by a monopoly.
Redhat is clearly not the iOS app store or 1970 AT&T.
Trademarks aren't even property, they're a consumer protection mechanism. You nominally can't even sell them, though the restriction is more in theory than in practice.
I'm not being pedantic. Copyrights, trademarks, and patents are all monopolies, and most of their realizable market value is derived from that (more technically, the exclusivity is what enables the conversion of use value to market value).
Trade secrets are an even more extreme case of a monopoly that doesn't even have the expiration dates of patents and copyrights, or the active defense requirement of a trademark.
>New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do.
This is not true. iOS is certainly locked down but you can still build from source on MacOS, and many folks do; far more use tools like Homebrew to skip the build part and still get access to arbitrary tools. And while the Mac App Store exists, there is no requirement that all software be distributed that way.
apple didn't put up huge insurmountable barriers on m1. microsoft's secure boot mandates certain keys be shipped on devices but also requires users be able to add their own keys.
thus far it's been phones where users have no rights to their devices g no access to bootloaders. if you do jailbreak or root, on Android SafetyNet comes & slaps you in the face, disables a bunch of apps. I think apple has some similar restraint?
I think you'll be shocked how much use folks make of these systems, with reverse engineering, even with no support. if the door is left open people do amazing things. the gpu should be working very well. some problems spots may remain. but running a system, watching it tick, carefully, reveals so many secrets. it's only when humanity is locked out, when the process of human discovery & collective advancement are blocked, that our great human potential is squandered, wasted.
What Apple is doing with their hardware trumps anything that Microsoft or Google does with the software, in my opinion. With software at least it's more or less possible to hack it to your liking or replace it with something else. Thankfully I never had the displeasure of owning any of Apple products and hopefully I never will.
I don't understand the vitriol towards Apple. They are selling a closed (eco)system, definitely. But many people have lived through the virus-ridden 90s and early 2000s and want the confidence that comes with pre-approved software. Who over the age of 30 doesn't remember doing tech support on crappy Windows computers for family for years? Is that still needed for those family members with Apple computers? Not in my experience.
I also want the ability to choose and use an open computer - and I can still do so. I have both Apple and non-Apple devices. Apple hasn't destroyed my ability to build a Linux box. Chill.
> Is that still needed for those family members with Apple computers?
Honestly though, it's not nearly as needed on Windows machines either. The common maintenance needed for software issues has strongly decreased as good security features have become more advanced and feasible. One of those advancements is windows realizing "Hey, that unix permission stuff, that seems like an up-and-coming idea" and actually implementing proper ACLs to protect most of the sensitive files on your machine.
I agree that, with "Apple Silicon", they have left behind anything that could reasonably be traced back to the "openness" of old desktop computers.
New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do. As the Star Wars quote goes, "Pray I do not alter [the deal] further".
Sure, some people have managed to boot Linux on the ARM cores of the M1, but it's about as useful as pitching a tent in a corner of a stadium and declaring it useable housing. There is so much on the SoC that's closed and out of reach that I can only see the effort as misguided.