Probably partly because it uses the word, "sheep". The word "sheep" is often considered a derogatory non-argument that serves only to rally up believers rather than a substantive piece of rhetoric.
Apple makes hardware that runs macOS. They do not make hardware to run Windows/*nix. They do not need/want to support those other OSes, else, they would make a product that would do that. They have theirs and they feel it is perfectly fine for the product they are offering "thank you very much". Since day one of Apple, the Steves argued open/closed system. Up to the Apple II, Woz won. With the Macintosh and ever since, Jobs won. It is now Apple's ethos. It is theirs to decide. You are free to not like it. Others don't like it, shrug their shoulders and choose to do it anyways. Some of them will even share what they've learned, and some of those will even do that well. If you choose to follow, thank them, and join the movement. Complaing that a company isn't doing exactly what you want just seems sad and pathetic to me.
I'm not voting on it either way, so I can't say, but I personally find it off topic. TFA is a technical article; there are plenty of articles that discuss right-to-repair etc.
Edited to add: the author doesn't seem to themselves be heartbroken. This level of detail suggests enthusiasm.
> Edited to add: the author doesn't seem to themselves be heartbroken. This level of detail suggests enthusiasm.
Absolutely not! Reverse engineering is a lot of fun to me! Especially the moment of clarity when all the unknown pieces eventually fall together and I finally get the whole picture.
Probably the repeated insistence on "force" and "forcing" this result. It's not a practical requirement or an enforceable one in the end unless nearly every government (and every government for every country with a significant manufacturing industry) goes in on this together.
It only takes one government to make it happen (or even a state that is large enough that manufacturers will not choose to stop selling products there). If this was passed e.g. in California, that would open the access up for almost anyone in the world.
It would be practically unenforceable if CA did it, or even the US. The market in both is large, but not large enough, and it's hard to force compliance on companies from other countries.
The result would be similar to the protectionist trade policies that hamper market entry for foreign produced goods in India and some Latin American countries like Argentina. There are enough customers elsewhere whose governments wouldn't give a thought to this that non-CA/US companies would safely ignore CA/US in this case. It would only work with coordinated effort.
There are also other second order effects not considered by a policy like this.
What's the timeline and what's the company scale that this levies?
Is the documentation expected on day 1? Great, Apple and Google and Sony and others will squash all small competitors. You will never see another small (< 20) person hardware startup (not that we see them often anyways) because the cost to produce this kind of documentation is non-zero, and the big players can easily absorb it into their processes. Additionally, small players would literally be handing the design to competitors. OK, maybe patents and things like that stop some companies from being bad actors and reproducing the product in short order, but it won't stop everyone especially in countries with laxer or no enforcement of patents.
Additionally, problems would be created if designs were produced in non-compliant countries. If I start up a hardware company and make a new device, but half my components are designed in Taiwan and they've decided to explicitly reject this, am I non-compliant for not releasing documentation I don't have the authority to release? And if I'm able to become exempted because of a 3rd party component, everyone else would start shifting their design departments to contractors (if necessary) in those countries or shift a portion of their company there.
This is wrong on so many levels, but I will address this one:
> You will never see another small (< 20) person hardware startup (not that we see them often anyways) because the cost to produce this kind of documentation is non-zero, and the big players can easily absorb it into their processes.
I highly doubt that small players would be affected at all, because a small player wouldn't produce a custom chip. The level of documentation required is akin to API documentation that many services produce and this is not revealing any trade secrets, but enables customer to make full use of the device.
If you create a product without any documentation, then you have bigger problems.
> If I start up a hardware company and make a new device, but half my components are designed in Taiwan and they've decided to explicitly reject this, am I non-compliant for not releasing documentation I don't have the authority to release?
This is false, because it is companies like Apple that tell component manufacturers to not sell or to not disclose documentation. Virtually any chip that you can get on an open market has complete documentation available. If you are ordering a custom chip, you shouldn't be allowed to tell manufacturer to not sell it to anyone else nor hide its documentation if it goes into your product.
If you were actually working in hardware design space you would know that what is being asked does not compromise trading secrets, it is done solely out of greed so that people are nudged towards subscription models and becoming dependent on a particular corporation.
Perhaps the courts could force component manufacturers to release the basic specs anyway, regardless of any agreement they may have with Apple. That way they would need to choose between complying and produce documentation on request, or have the component banned for use.
> It would be practically unenforceable if CA did it, or even the US. The market in both is large, but not large enough, and it's hard to force compliance on companies from other countries.
The U.S. regularly imposes plenty of requirements that are far more difficult to meet, in many industries. The U.S. is the largest market in the world for many goods; I think the parent greatly underestimates the power and practices of national governments. Smaller countries also impose requirements.
What you're outlining right now are issues that affect the status quo anyways. Small companies always fight an uphill battle with larger ones, and copyright law is almost never respected: what else is new? Even still, they're weak excuses not to provide the public with information that likely already exists.
I'd contend that a requirement like this, without exemptions for small businesses, would make things worse for small businesses than big businesses and worse than the present situation. It's similar to many other legal regulatory requirements, small businesses end up bearing an outsized cost relative to their revenue.
And if you create exemptions for small businesses, the big businesses would do exactly what they always do, find loopholes to get subsidiaries/contractors to do the work and exempted and nullify the entire thing.
As nice as it would be to bring back (easier) access to system specs, it's impractical without fundamental culture changes that laws themselves don't usually produce.
I almost agree with this, except for the part where you claim that "It's not a practical requirement": this is entirely a practical requirement. People who use Macbooks gripe constantly about the viscous repair and replacement process. Apple's refusal to recover data (or even help customers recover data) is a hostile experience, whether it logistically qualifies as one or not. Customers deal with these issues, and Apple holds all the cards in their hands with the capabilities to fix them. People wouldn't care if the latest iMacs were twice as thick but could upgrade the memory and maintenance the internals. People wouldn't give the Macbook shit if it was twice as thick but had HDMI and USB A. Nobody cares about a thinner product, our current devices are about as ergonomic as they can get without sacrificing durability (if not compromising it, in Apple's case).
This is just a case of Apple being careless. We have a right to criticize the largest company in the world, if not hold them to the highest standards possible. Instead, we've let Apple off the hook because nobody wants to stand up to them and call them out on it. We're all willing to bury those experiences, as long as our next laptop can export our Photoshop projects 500ms faster.
> People wouldn't give the Macbook shit if it was twice as thick but had HDMI and USB A. Nobody cares about a thinner product, our current devices are about as ergonomic as they can get without sacrificing durability (if not compromising it, in Apple's case).
Isn't this statement a bit of a blanket? Not too long ago I purchased a laptop specifically for being tiny and lightweight (X1 Nano). Ports and expandability were an afterthought. Certainly many wouldn't mind increased thickness and bulk but there is absolutely a market for portability, at least in laptops and other mobile devices.
That said, the X1 Nano at least has removable/upgradable storage, which can't be found on heavier MacBooks, so there's absolutely an argument for adding expandability where it doesn't negatively impact portability.
>People wouldn't care if the latest iMacs were twice as thick...
I think Apple have a pretty good idea about marketing, and what sells a product and what most customers find attractive about it. The vast majority of computers sold are never upgraded, whether they can be or not and most people would never even think about it.
It's not a practical requirement in that from an enforcement perspective and economic sense (under the current commercial and economic models) it is not practical.
It is a practical requirement in the sense that it improves (potentially) the practicality of hardware systems.
Those are two distinct senses, I was writing about the former.
Besides the sheep bit, there's two unsaid parts that ring out to me.
Understanding IC's to repair them is a failing prospect. They are black boxes by nature. If you can't actually repair it without the factory, why should they write you a manual to help you repair it?
Beyond that though, there is a degree of Power lost through dispelling the blackbox (information asymmetry is Power, never forget). Explaining how it works opens up PR doors places would rather not have to deal with, and cuts off avenues of development that companies in the space thrive on. See Nvidia graphics cards for an example. Nvidia doesn't "sell" you the card, in the sense of allowing you to do whatever you want with it because they can't. They are contractually required to hide implementation details around things like HDCP and the in hardware foundations of many streaming related DRM technologies.
Then you have other aspects, like their move to requiring Nvidia signed firmware to access the power control of modern cards. This ensures only their driver can feasibly compete in the market and locks out any potential competition that may be able to pull off a true innovation using their own hardware platform (see nouveau and the signed firmware issue).
All of this would be undone by actually being required to support user firmware implementation, and disclosing how everything works.
The above is a link to an offering for a self-driving processing offering (therefore safety-criticality somewhat justifies the absurd guarantees of firmware lockdown), but my experience tells me that once ypu nail down a tricky process like that, you worm it into as many parallel business vehicles as you can.
Just knowing another company is even capable of doing something like that is a signal of demand to competitors. Hence the desire to hide everything possible as no one else's business.
I think you are missing the point. I don't need to know what's inside the black box, but how to communicate with it. Nobody wants documentation that you could send to a factory and said "make me this".
Nobody asks for firmware source code either.
In the software world, companies are happy to release API documentation - it does not reveal any secrets, but lets customers use the product in many other ways.
The same goes with chips.
I dont think its the community. Its just that the people who read/comment on apple related articles tend to be the kind of demographic that dont value those aspects as much. They are looking for a service, not a product.
That's an unfortunate choice of words. I'm definitely looking for a product, not a service (which is why I bought my MacBook instead of leasing it), but everything I need the machine for overlaps with what Apple envisions me doing with the machine.
I don't want my machine to be amateur-repairman friendly and my OS to be infinitely customizable and tinkerable, because we already have that, it's called Linux on a ThinkPad and to me that's the antithesis of a Mac and I consciously decided not to use that kind of setup.
(I'm not strongly for or anti right-to-repair, but I tend to be against tight regulation when avoidable.)
It is the community, but not because we don't care about it. It's because in a thread on an article like this it's not a very valuable comment. The comments it generates (including yours and mine) has nothing to do with the SPRR or exception levels.
