A significant benefit Apple has is the ability to add new hardware features and integrate those into the OS (or vice-versa). That's much harder in the PC market (eg, back in the 2000s every Windows laptop had a different UI for wifi connectivity because that was supplied by the laptop or wifi vendor), and what progress there has been has been driven by Microsoft as part of the Windows hardware requirements. How does the free software world work with vendors to drive hardware design?
@mjg59 the strategy seems to mostly be stockpiling x200 thinkpads and buying anything and everything that has "risc-v" written on it
@aeva risc-v is, hilariously, the worst fucking disaster I've ever seen in terms of coherent feature developent
@archiloque @aeva risc-v supports vendor-specific opcodes, and while there's a process for specifying things many vendors have just shoved random shit in that space so you have risc-v platforms that just can't run binaries written for some other risc-v platforms
@mjg59 @archiloque @aeva x86 is basically the same. Vendors add extras to prop their benchmark numbers. Then the extras get either adopted or abandoned.
Ditto with software "distributions".
We can live with that, as we have alternatives and not blobs are required for mainstream ops.
