The standards are really bad and it’s not just about protocols but hardware. Should they give away every hardware design needed too?
Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.
> The standards are really bad and it’s not just about protocols but hardware.
Okay, if their hardware is esoteric, open the protocols for interacting with hardware.
> Should they give away every hardware design needed too?
Yeah probably. It would be a lot better, more like x86. We would actually get repairable phones instead of landfill fodder. But that's a different issue.
> Lighting was an incredible boon in an era of micro usb, people just seem to forget how shit everyone else was. Now we have usb-c where companies are required to supply the port but doesn’t have to follow any actual specification, yay for standards.
And then it became a cheap scam, whereby Apple made a few dollars off of every single lightning cable produced by anyone on Earth due to licensing.
Also, as for USB-C - doesnt matter, still better. My chargers work across multiple devices. Yes, there's some standards noncompliance, this is still a huge improvement over ZERO cross compatibility.
Last time I checked x86 is not open, it’s licensed just like the lightning cable, och and USB-C.
Its comparatively much more open, with interface and protocols specified and open source firmware implementations widely used in the wild. I'm also including BIOs/UEFI in this.
ARM and phone manufacturing is a hot mess in comparison. We're still trying to reverse engineer M series MacBooks and iPhones are off limits. Android is also not open source, no AOSP does not count.
There would be a lot more competition in the space if the hardware had proper specs, like x86 does.
What competition has x86 seen? I’m old enough to remember when there was more than Intel and AMD. When did they last license x86 to a competitor, 30+ years ago?
It’s great that documentation exists, but it doesn’t make for competition. ARM is at least licensing out to more than two manufacturers.