Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by judge2020 1179 days ago
Proprietary parts aren't necessarily bad, it just depends on why they're proprietary - if it's just to go-to-market faster, it's fair to criticize the decision, but often there are legitimate downsides that would result in less-than-ideal compromises in terms of performance or features. Hopefully such companies doing this are transparent and will answer inquiries into why they made these parts decisions.
1 comments
landofredwater 1179 days ago
By proprietary, I more meant the "only certain people can get access" more than the part itself being open to tinker at that sort.

Think the weird random chips apple uses more than the fact that 90% of CPUs on market aren't totally open; one is still clearly more accessible.

link
judge2020 1179 days ago
> Think the weird random chips apple uses more than the fact that 90% of CPUs on market aren't totally open; one is still clearly more accessible.

The random chips are their competitive advantage - Intel chips are notoriously power-inefficient, and AMD chips are still x86 which is an inefficient architecture. The only difference is that you can't build your own M2 computer, which isn't exactly moving any goalposts besides Apple opening themselves up to the grueling, low-margin work of setting up logistics for their different SKUs of chips, working with board partners to define specifications, and dealing with supporting the utterly random hardware people plug into their PCIe lanes (Macs 'work' in that Apple has rigorous test cases for 99% of scenarios; Windows had so many driver problems throughout Windows 7, 8, and 10 because MSFT to maintain backwards compatibility for components from 2002; this is why W11 has mostly dropped official support for older CPUs).

link
landofredwater 1179 days ago
Intel is x86(_64) as well, mostly (rumors of plans to make an ARM competitor to Nvida and Apple).

And yes, not being able to make your own M2 computer does make the chip less open.

Open-ness is a scale, and if you're going to call something "open-source hardware" you should be able to source the hardware entirely yourself. Not being able to do that is closed hardware.

EDIT: clarified the "mostly"

link