Originally posted by milkylainen
View Post
Out of all the vendors around, apple's M1 chips are actually quite open and trustable, far more so than anything intel has ever made. Take it from Asahi themselves [1], the people actually analyzing them. If you want this openness to continue or dare I say increase then you have to incentivize it with your wallet.
There is no way around this. Not with petitions. Not with boycots. Not with licences. Companies don't care about or handily work around all of the above.
People (particularly the more extreme in free software) turn their noses up at anyone and everything, but at the end of the day that moves NOTHING forwards. Old thinkpads might be fine for the most zealous, but A) every thinkpad ever made (Stallman's T420 included) suffers all the problems in [1] (plus other issues [2]) and B) it ensures better products will never be made. Those people are out of the market and encourage others to leave it as well. All future products will be targeted at those who remain.
There are companies striving for better (eg. also Raptor Computing Systems) or in the case of apple, allowing it, and if that's going to both continue and expand then it needs to be supported. That includes *anything* more open than the industry average. Apple's M1, Raptor's POWER9, both are acceptable.
[1] https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1444246840728174597
[2] Closed-source EC firmware, a proprietary intel processor with factory-burned microcode (even if left unpatched; then it's just buggy too), kilobytes of on-die 8051 running thermal and power management, plus the 8051(s) running the trackpad, south bridge, sdcard reader, etc., and an i486 system in the iGPU doing scheduling and power management. Purity doesn't exist in old machines.
Comment