You don’t. Open hardware is a positive for the company and almost entirely neutral for the consumer.
I guess you could say It’s a positive for us too, since you are not subsidizing the ARM royalties with every tech purchase you make. But I wouldn’t bet on this cost cutting being passed down to us.
> Open hardware is a positive for the company and almost entirely neutral for the consumer.
I'd say it's the other way around, actually. And possibly a negative for the company in the current market, since it also needs to worry about competition based on their sources. The same as with open source software.
It's entirely positive for the consumer, since it gives them the choice to choose between several manufacturers of the same design, or even manufacture the product themselves, if they have the capability. Open hardware is the end goal of the right to repair movement, in this sense.
Even if the consumer doesn't have the capability to verify that the product they're using was built from open sources, they still retain their rights to modify, build and distribute their own versions. This is what "open" means. Note that this is the case with OSS too. It would be very difficult to prove that a specific binary was built from a specific source, but there's usually a degree of trust that the binaries provided by the developers were built from the same source the user has access to. The developers can also provide a mechanism for this to be validated, via checksums, reproducible builds, etc. I imagine that a similar mechanism might exist for hardware as well.
RISC-V isn't open hardware though, it's open architecture. Open architectures make it easier to design new chips. That isn't necessarily going to translate into cheaper or more easily repairable or more open-to-the-user products.
This isn't about RISC-V, but specifically about the BeagleV-Ahead board. They have an OSHW certification[1], and provide schematics and design documents[2].
Whether that will provide tangible benefits to the consumer is hard to say, as it will depend on how popular this design ends up being, among many other factors. Unlike with software, most end users don't have the capability to build their own versions, and have to rely on other manufacturers to do that. Still, this is surely a step in the right direction, and is more consumer-friendly than traditional closed architectures, platforms and products.
I guess you could say It’s a positive for us too, since you are not subsidizing the ARM royalties with every tech purchase you make. But I wouldn’t bet on this cost cutting being passed down to us.