Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel? There must be a good reason for this to happen, it even happens at the other end of the scale, but I would think the very basis (just any drivers, not even good ones) are an affordable investment? What use is your product if every review will say “good product, alas Windows and Linux won’t run”?
A reason I can imagine that drivers are (I don’t know!) somewhat interchangeable, so invest in drivers for your product and you are stimulating all current and future competitors as well.
jauntywundrkind 1 days ago [-]
ARM has such a mess. They don't actually make chips. And they don't make a sizable % of the design that goes into chips. There's all kinds of other IP, from power management to USB controllers, all manners of things they don't do.
So then the task falls to the chip makers. Who each are trying to figure out what to do themselves.
These folks don't usually want to do that or have the chops. There's usually one or many different folks taking off the shelf open source and porting it to this particular platform. These folks have a strong strong anti-incentive to do the right thing to upstream support: no one's gonna keep buying sdk's from these software vendors if they upstream support. And it is a pain to upstream support, to spend possibly years figuring out the long term way to do something.
(Notably some good players who focus on mainlining have emerged: Bootlin, Collabora.)
It's all so terrible. Theres some attempts to mature the platform, to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe (SystemReady and an array of neighboring acronyms). But man, it's so bad, your question is so searing, so obvious. This whole world systematically seems unable to do the right obvious good thing for itself, has resolutely remained a shitty backwater for 3+ decades versus x86.
cookiengineer 16 hours ago [-]
I wanted to add an exception to this: MNT Research.
These guys are always doing the right thing, and they care so much about it that they even go as far as designing their own keyboards, touchpads, usb controllers and other things that would contribute to the amount of proprietary blobs otherwise.
Though their Rockchip based platform is more a low end performance product at the moment. I really hope they can compete with high end x86 laptops in the future because they're the good ones.
> to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe
There's still no incentive to do this outside of server hardware (Red Hat doesn't support rebuilds of RHEL). Why bother making a firmware stack that allows anything to boot when you can just modify the Linux kernel to work on your non-standard hardware and work around any bugs, publish an Ubuntu image that you'll only update a few times and then call it a day. Then, maybe, just maybe, support for your SBC will be upstreamed a few years later, but long after it's actually useful.
Look how messed up and fragmented Android is still, even Windows Phone had a UEFI stack that in theory could allow all Windows phones of a certain architecture to have a shared image (although I don't believe this was fully achieved).
Imagine if Windows or Fedora for x64 had to be repacked for every single motherboard/CPU combination, it'd be insane, yet somehow it's fine for ARM, what a joke it's been allowed to become. I think electronic waste regulation is going to be needed to sort it out.
mappu 21 hours ago [-]
The Radxa Orion O6 we're talking about is not server hardware, but they did implement ServerReady UEFI firmware anyway, and it does allow anything to boot. In the article they booted unmodified, upstream Windows and Linux distro ISOs.
geerlingguy 20 hours ago [-]
s/ServerReady/SystemReady/
(Though mostly server hardware is the only Arm hardware that goes through the process and gets the cert)
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
Someone told me once, yes we set breakpoint on the CPU, doesn't do anything to the AMBA bus on SoC it's a peripheral you know, the bus clock keeps going and DMA keeps going in and out if you stop the CPU, that's how we debug stuffs young man.
I was like, that sounds fun...
pabs3 18 hours ago [-]
> versus x86
At least on ARM there is a chance your boot firmware will be non-proprietary, with u-boot or similar.
wmf 1 days ago [-]
Drivers are extremely expensive to develop (like 10x more than the hardware) and mostly interchangeable so every company is trying to free-ride on someone else to develop the drivers.
sitkack 10 hours ago [-]
That is why the hardware should be more capable/intelligent. Drivers are the problem so drivers can’t be the solution.
You can’t turn chicken soup back into a chicken.
jrmg 1 days ago [-]
With the dearth of drivers as described, how do the manufacturers even know that all the hardware works? That there are no flaws in how it’s all wired together? How do they test everything?
Palomides 1 days ago [-]
the chip manufacturer usually craps out a hacked up android build
dijit 1 days ago [-]
ok, but, naively... Android is Linux with a userland- so the drivers must exist in some form.
kanwisher 1 days ago [-]
Android has some ability to have binary drivers that aren't easily reusable for normal linux branches
notpushkin 1 days ago [-]
Yup. There’s libhybris/Halium which wraps Android drivers for glibc-based Linux distros, but I think it’s more of a hack / stopgap solution.
arghwhat 1 days ago [-]
From the perspective of drivers Radxa is not the hardware manufacturer. They combine off the shelf hardware according to its documentation to create a product.
Sometimes the original suppliers will have drivers, sometimes they just ship documentation and let it be up to the customers to write it, sometimes someone else contributed upstream support. When you get "drivers" from e.g. Lenovo, they didn't write them - they're just sending what they got along.
Nothing would work if there weren't drivers in general, the issue is that hardware can be configured in multiple ways and it's not all going to have have proper support or be well tested. In Linux land, this stuff sorts itself out as people get their hands on the hardware, pretty similar to how e.g. laptop support comes to be.
rjsw 1 days ago [-]
ARM themself have an open rec right now for someone to work on GPU drivers, the one in this SoC isn't supported by panthor.
ZiiS 1 days ago [-]
To a certain extent if your reviewers can just turn it on they spend their time benchmarking.
geerlingguy 1 days ago [-]
Some of us try out every possible interface... but it turns into quite a slog, as usually only about half the advertised features work by the time the board ships to the public. Things like GPIO, display interfaces, NPUs, etc usually require a lot of tweaks if they work at all.
The O6 was better in that regard than many boards, but the bar is not very high.
My guess is that they wanted the board to be available to devs early to get feedback. I might buy this board in a few months, when it will likely work out of the mainline kernel.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> Can anyone explain me the economics of why a novelty hardware supplier would Not invest in drivers / software in parallel?
There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time. As soon as you take a peek below the surface, no matter what, it begins to reek.
Let's just go through the stuff I personally own or have experience in peeking... Samsung does decent hardware, but their modifications to Android, or their "hacks" for powersaving that keep messing up apps, or their "smart" TVs that are buggy and slow as fuck (not to mention riddled with ads!)... Sony makes excellent cameras hardware-wise but the software/firmware side sucks ass - the fact that they require a dedicated software to be used as a webcam instead of just exposing UVC is already braindead enough, but even more so given that they run on Linux and the Linux kernel already ships with UVC gadgets. Nintendo makes excellent games but even the new Switch 2 ships with a chipset that's years old. Mediatek's leaks for BSPs / Android are frightening in terms of code quality.
Unfortunately, the competition just isn't there. Chinese companies are even worse penny-pinchers than Korean or Taiwanese, and Western companies outside of Apple and Raspberry Pi just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers or because, like many things in the ham radio scene, get cloned in a matter of months.
mbreese 1 days ago [-]
I don’t think there is a need to limit this geographically. As a rule hardware companies are bad at software. It doesn’t really matter where they are from. If you’re including things like TVs that spy on you, don’t forget Visio. They are one of the poster children for making TVs with content tracking and/were they are based in California.
The exceptions I see include Apple and Raspberry Pi. And even then, there are missteps.
It’s not intentional… it’s just that companies rarely have integration as one of their core strengths. If you’re a hardware company, you are good at making hardware. The skills necessary for that are very different than the skills needed for software. To get both, you need management that values both and can build the separate teams. Especially true when you can argue that you’re working with the “community” to build out software and fix bugs. If you’re still selling enough hardware, how can you say these companies are wrong?
That’s honestly a hard thing to do unless that is your competitive advantage. And for Apple and Raspberry Pi, I’d argue that is their competitive advantage in their markets. For a long time they were the small fish in big ponds. So they needed to have some trait that allowed them to command higher margins. Integration of hardware and software was it.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
There is no single company from Asia that market electronic physical experience. Other than Nintendo. IOW there's Nintendo.
East Asian companies hasn't shifted into maximizing perceived values over functions. I think it just feels fake and wrong to many. Another factor that I think might exist is, it might be simply hard to inflate values and sell experiences as East Asian company entities without good connections and/or cultural understanding to sell to developed Western markets.
East Asian engineers don't share the pain points as Western audiences. People don't use webcams - less sympathies exist for the urge to see faces. People don't use Linux on laptop - Windows is normal and fine. Don't recognize annoyances as annoying as often - it's considered signs of weakness. (Not sure about Nintendo complaints - people everywhere happily pay $80 for another Mario remakes on top of $500 console. Isn't that what you're asking for?). Kids aren't as interested in ROM cooking or piracy or software freedom in general - way more interested in enforcing IP rights themselves than demanding something from IP holders.
Or, widespread "just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers" could be another reason. East Asian nations each has its own internal markets with massive surplus production capacities. Western companies had progressively moved into value engineering for survival, as Swiss watch industry famously did. The costs of East Asian physical products never represented its cost in the first place, only utility in context of economy at export destinations, and that might have affected how companies at the destinations have come to be.
bgnn 1 days ago [-]
This is slightly racist and totally wrong on many many points. Are American hardware companies better at software? Dell? HP? Vizio? Intel? AMD? Or European companies: Philips, Siemens? It's all the same. Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW..
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> Are American hardware companies better at software? Dell? HP? Vizio? Intel? AMD?
Depends. If you're looking for consumer goods, they're just as dogshit as everyone else. Products intended for large commercial customers, particularly where support contracts are involved, tend to be actually decent.
> Or European companies: Philips, Siemens?
Never had an issue with Hue, never had an issue with Bosch-Siemens "white goods".
> Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW..
iOS certainly is not an abomination. I'm using both Android and iOS, and the latter is much more polished.
betterThanTexas 1 days ago [-]
> There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time.
Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia? I don't get your point. We certainly can't match this quality in the west.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia?
Yes, but on the back of every MacBook there is the line "Designed by Apple in California" and the software is made in California as well.
Asia is just chosen for manufacturing because of the close proximity of supply chain vendors and cheap but reliable labor cost.
betterThanTexas 1 days ago [-]
Well then Asia is de-facto doing the hardware. Apple is just paying for it.
Apple is famously sitting on a mountain of cash. How easily do you think they could replicate the supply chain of even one of their products without outsourcing it?
drob518 1 days ago [-]
Apple is designing the hardware in the USA, not Asia. Asia designs the manufacturing process, which they are quite good at.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
> Asia designs the manufacturing process, which they are quite good at.
Not even that, for some parts like the aluminium cases ("unibody") or the laser-bored microholes in their old magsafe connector for the LEDs, Apple designed the whole process.
wjnc 1 days ago [-]
Any thoughts into the Why? Culture, finance, …? I get your point. Also thinking about Sony or Nintendo. Billions more to be made if only those firms where more technically-commercial (make accounts and buying stuff for parents Easy).
drob518 1 days ago [-]
IMO, it’s company culture and focus. At Apple, they are focused foremost on designing the customer experience. If you’ve ever unboxed one of their products, you can tell from the first moment that they care about even this part of the product life. It’s only 5 minutes and yet someone has clearly spent time on it. That carries through to the integration of hardware and software in the products. That doesn’t mean Apple is the best at either hardware or software. IMO, there are companies that do just as well or better at either of those things. But Apple does whole product design better than anyone. That is something that is very difficult to add to an organization that doesn’t understand it. IMO, it really started for Apple with Steve Jobs and being the founder, he was able to drive that into the culture. But it wasn’t there even for them at the start. IMO, it really got going when Steve returned the second time and drove products like iMac and iPod.
numpad0 1 days ago [-]
Apple products aren't just well designed, but they feel like each has specific tiny set of target audiences they are built for. That would be a very politically unpopular move in East Asian cultures, one that could socially kill the targeted group.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
Cutthroat capitalism is definitely part of the reasons, especially when looking at China and the low end of the market. When there are dozens if not hundreds of factories that have the skilled people to put up a hardware design either from scratch or as a clone of something already existing, "time to market" trumps everything - the earlier you can get the product on Alibaba, Temu or the alphabet-soup sellers on Amazon, the better. As soon as the hardware is ready and the software somewhat stable, out the door it goes - there is no responsibility, no accountability along the chain, so why invest in it?
For the "big ticket" brand items, honestly I don't know. If anything I wouldn't blame it on culture (partially because I lack enough knowledge of Asian cultures, partially because blaming systemic issue on culture can quickly devolve into outright racism), but on capitalist incentives once again - the common standard seems to be "as low in terms of quality as you can get away with", there is no market force pushing for better products, and no legal/regulatory pressure either.
digisocialnet 1 days ago [-]
What about DJI?
cgio 1 days ago [-]
For one their app does not work on a recent pixel but does e.g. on an oppo…Id say GP argument is valid.
mschuster91 1 days ago [-]
Let's just say I'm pissed about the Mini 3 Pro's controller. Has an USB-C host and client port but isn't capable of actually using them for anything relevant, and the built-in wifi is rotten. Zero way of extending the drone's functionality by writing one's own apps/scripts - but the cheaper N1 that just uses a phone, there's hacks for it...
markvdb 1 days ago [-]
s/from Asia//
jasoneckert 1 days ago [-]
> Prices for those in the US (like me) just tripled due to import tariffs (ordering the 32 GB model went from $400 to $1500).
This was the biggest takeaway for me in this post. In the past, to experiment with a particular piece of new hardware, we had to a) obtain the hardware, and b) obtain or create software for it. With a) fast becoming out-of-reach for most people, this puts a dampener on b).
danieldk 1 days ago [-]
There are a lot of open source developers outside the US. While development will certainly take a hit, the world is larger than the US. For more niche boards, it may not even change things much - they are often hard to get due to limited supplies and now more boards will just end up in the hands of developers on other continents.
_whiteCaps_ 1 days ago [-]
I'm not so sure about that. I think it's also possible that these niche boards won't get built if they aren't able to sell them in the US market.
buyucu 1 days ago [-]
China has 1 billion more people than the US. These board would still get built, it's just that you won't be able to read the manuals because they will be in Chinese.
doawoo 1 days ago [-]
Reading this line made me so mad. I've been a huge fan of lower power ARM CPUs... this literally just halt/hampers progress in this country. I can't believe we have to put up with 4 full years of this crap.
I would have purchased this board in a heartbeat otherwise. Ugh.
cyanydeez 1 days ago [-]
....atleast 4 years
zettabomb 1 days ago [-]
I bought one of these, with the full 64GB of RAM. So far it's been a fun machine to play with. In UEFI mode I can install Fedora 42 with essentially zero issues (it tells you that the bootloader didn't install but actually it did and works fine), which is quite smooth for ARM. It will be nice to see the CPU clusters, GPU/NPU drivers, and various PCIe snags worked out, but I really like what it has at this price point (assuming you're not in the US).
cenamus 1 days ago [-]
I actually had the bootloader error message on my install too (regular intel amd64 CPU), so might be something else
irusensei 1 days ago [-]
Does the CPU includes something like an fTPM? The documentation also suggests there is an unsoldered TPM included.
zettabomb 1 days ago [-]
As far as I can tell, no. It's a separate footprint on the PCB, not difficult to add if you've done a bit of soldering. I haven't tried that yet.
buyucu 1 days ago [-]
does Vulkan work? It's a must-have for llama.cpp.
aseipp 1 days ago [-]
There is a fork of Mesa with some support for the onboard GPU (Immortals G720), but it's not upstream yet and might not be for a while. Some people on the forums have installed various discrete GPUs, which would obviously work (modulo bugs.)
The whole tariff situation will probably dry out a significant amount from the incentives for such boards and it seems the only good options for a powerful ARM personal computer or home server are basically Macs or Ampere.
walterbell 1 days ago [-]
Asahi Linux is making slow but steady progress on Macs.
Ampere was acquired by Softbank, owner of Arm.
qwertox 1 days ago [-]
Radxa has been notoriously bad at supporting their hardware from the software side.
Their hardware is great, but they launch a product and then won't offer a proper distribution for it, hoping that some developers will take care of this for them, for free.
This is why I love Raspberry Pi so much: they care about the software just as much as about the hardware, if not even more. And that is great. Because the hardware, once you have it, that's it, it won't change.
I don't know about Raspberry OS, but when I installed Raspbian 12 Bookworm on my first-gen Raspi with 500MB RAM, it worked. It's now working as a VPN server.
Jan 10, 2024: beta 6: Currently there is an issue preventing the Debian CLI image from booting, and we suggest users to use the Desktop variant instead for now. Ubuntu CLI: This flavor is provided as-is except for critical issues. Users should look at Debian CLI as an alternative.
There are now community maintained Armbian variants, but it took a long time for them to appear. There was also a distibution by some other volunteer, but Radxa did nothing.
zozbot234 1 days ago [-]
AIUI, even the Raspbian is only supported by a somewhat hacky downstream kernel to begin with. It takes time to achieve proper upstream support, and even then the community can only succeed due to how popular the Raspberry Pi hardware is.
als0 1 days ago [-]
It at least supports SystemReady. Presumably any OS that is SystemReady compatible will just work?
The SystemReady firmware is currently a bit limited. Not only does it still have high idle power consumption, it disables 4/12 cores.
BirAdam 22 hours ago [-]
I agree with Mr. Geerling here. I very much wish to see an "open" ARM system, and I want it to be competitive with at least the Apple M1. Unfortunately, due to poor driver support, this ain't that. ARM has had a bad fragmentation problem, and I fear that this will be even worse with RISC-V. For those wanting really open systems with decent drivers, it would appear that x86 or the RPi are really the only options.
ninth_ant 21 hours ago [-]
Fragmentation is only one of the problems. The bigger problem is that these devices are still largely toys for hobbyists. This isn’t an insult… I’m one of them, I have a variety of fun little arm and riscv boards.
Lack of mainline kernel support and other standards will hamper their widespread adoption. But as the market matures and shows real commercial potential this will start to be financially worthwhile for the vendors to address.
So your assessment is correct for today’s market. But with China being hammered by the trade war, it’s all but certain their industry will accelerate their efforts to have fully
domestic tech solutions — and the same will be true of Europe and other parts the world as well.
All it takes is one of them to embrace standards to get more commercial success, and then the others will copy and chase them.
ksec 1 days ago [-]
ARM China, and CIX, Cix CD8180 SoC, Armv9.2 Architecture.
I was under the impression that ARM China doesn't have the latest license to Armv9 and stops at Armv8. While ARM HQ opened a separate ARM Unit in Shanghai under a different name ARM Something ( Some Chinese Phonetics ). But CIX has had this SOC with Armv9 announced a while ago. So I assume ARM China is now officially back under ARM HQ / Softbank control?
By Control I dont mean just swapping a new CEO but the actual power structure of the company.
zabzonk 1 days ago [-]
Is this so they can say they are "Orion Arm", which is where we are in the Milky Way galaxy?
drob518 1 days ago [-]
Clever
sunshine-o 1 days ago [-]
> If you're just doing AI stuff or GPU compute, this board might actually be a decent option, all things considered.
Looking at the benchmark [0]
When I first saw the board I thought this might be the RPi of the "AI age" since it is IMHO the most affordable option with 64Gb of RAM.
But I am always cautious if we can really make the most of the so called "30 TOPS NPU"
> once I installed the Nvidia proprietary driver with sudo ubuntu-drivers install nvidia:570, it was quite stable
Didn’t expect this to just be available for ARM. It really is making its way out of „weird niche platform“ territory to „it’s just a PC“! Especially together with the SystemReady firmware.
wmf 1 days ago [-]
The ARM Nvidia driver is needed for Tegra/Jetson and Grace Hopper so it has been in the works for a long time.
walterbell 1 days ago [-]
Nvidia spent time trying to acquire Arm, before regulators blocked. Project Digits client on the way.
buyucu 1 days ago [-]
This sounds like a cool board. Does anyone know if the APU works with llama.cpp?
A reason I can imagine that drivers are (I don’t know!) somewhat interchangeable, so invest in drivers for your product and you are stimulating all current and future competitors as well.
So then the task falls to the chip makers. Who each are trying to figure out what to do themselves.
These folks don't usually want to do that or have the chops. There's usually one or many different folks taking off the shelf open source and porting it to this particular platform. These folks have a strong strong anti-incentive to do the right thing to upstream support: no one's gonna keep buying sdk's from these software vendors if they upstream support. And it is a pain to upstream support, to spend possibly years figuring out the long term way to do something.
(Notably some good players who focus on mainlining have emerged: Bootlin, Collabora.)
It's all so terrible. Theres some attempts to mature the platform, to make some standards so at least folks can boot something maybe (SystemReady and an array of neighboring acronyms). But man, it's so bad, your question is so searing, so obvious. This whole world systematically seems unable to do the right obvious good thing for itself, has resolutely remained a shitty backwater for 3+ decades versus x86.
These guys are always doing the right thing, and they care so much about it that they even go as far as designing their own keyboards, touchpads, usb controllers and other things that would contribute to the amount of proprietary blobs otherwise.
Though their Rockchip based platform is more a low end performance product at the moment. I really hope they can compete with high end x86 laptops in the future because they're the good ones.
Also, check out their gitlab: https://source.mnt.re/explore/projects
There's still no incentive to do this outside of server hardware (Red Hat doesn't support rebuilds of RHEL). Why bother making a firmware stack that allows anything to boot when you can just modify the Linux kernel to work on your non-standard hardware and work around any bugs, publish an Ubuntu image that you'll only update a few times and then call it a day. Then, maybe, just maybe, support for your SBC will be upstreamed a few years later, but long after it's actually useful.
Look how messed up and fragmented Android is still, even Windows Phone had a UEFI stack that in theory could allow all Windows phones of a certain architecture to have a shared image (although I don't believe this was fully achieved).
Imagine if Windows or Fedora for x64 had to be repacked for every single motherboard/CPU combination, it'd be insane, yet somehow it's fine for ARM, what a joke it's been allowed to become. I think electronic waste regulation is going to be needed to sort it out.
(Though mostly server hardware is the only Arm hardware that goes through the process and gets the cert)
I was like, that sounds fun...
At least on ARM there is a chance your boot firmware will be non-proprietary, with u-boot or similar.
You can’t turn chicken soup back into a chicken.
Sometimes the original suppliers will have drivers, sometimes they just ship documentation and let it be up to the customers to write it, sometimes someone else contributed upstream support. When you get "drivers" from e.g. Lenovo, they didn't write them - they're just sending what they got along.
Nothing would work if there weren't drivers in general, the issue is that hardware can be configured in multiple ways and it's not all going to have have proper support or be well tested. In Linux land, this stuff sorts itself out as people get their hands on the hardware, pretty similar to how e.g. laptop support comes to be.
The O6 was better in that regard than many boards, but the bar is not very high.
My guess is that they wanted the board to be available to devs early to get feedback. I might buy this board in a few months, when it will likely work out of the mainline kernel.
There is no single company from Asia that deals in mass produced consumer goods that's capable of doing decent hardware and decent software at the same time. As soon as you take a peek below the surface, no matter what, it begins to reek.
Let's just go through the stuff I personally own or have experience in peeking... Samsung does decent hardware, but their modifications to Android, or their "hacks" for powersaving that keep messing up apps, or their "smart" TVs that are buggy and slow as fuck (not to mention riddled with ads!)... Sony makes excellent cameras hardware-wise but the software/firmware side sucks ass - the fact that they require a dedicated software to be used as a webcam instead of just exposing UVC is already braindead enough, but even more so given that they run on Linux and the Linux kernel already ships with UVC gadgets. Nintendo makes excellent games but even the new Switch 2 ships with a chipset that's years old. Mediatek's leaks for BSPs / Android are frightening in terms of code quality.
Unfortunately, the competition just isn't there. Chinese companies are even worse penny-pinchers than Korean or Taiwanese, and Western companies outside of Apple and Raspberry Pi just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers or because, like many things in the ham radio scene, get cloned in a matter of months.
The exceptions I see include Apple and Raspberry Pi. And even then, there are missteps.
It’s not intentional… it’s just that companies rarely have integration as one of their core strengths. If you’re a hardware company, you are good at making hardware. The skills necessary for that are very different than the skills needed for software. To get both, you need management that values both and can build the separate teams. Especially true when you can argue that you’re working with the “community” to build out software and fix bugs. If you’re still selling enough hardware, how can you say these companies are wrong?
That’s honestly a hard thing to do unless that is your competitive advantage. And for Apple and Raspberry Pi, I’d argue that is their competitive advantage in their markets. For a long time they were the small fish in big ponds. So they needed to have some trait that allowed them to command higher margins. Integration of hardware and software was it.
East Asian companies hasn't shifted into maximizing perceived values over functions. I think it just feels fake and wrong to many. Another factor that I think might exist is, it might be simply hard to inflate values and sell experiences as East Asian company entities without good connections and/or cultural understanding to sell to developed Western markets.
East Asian engineers don't share the pain points as Western audiences. People don't use webcams - less sympathies exist for the urge to see faces. People don't use Linux on laptop - Windows is normal and fine. Don't recognize annoyances as annoying as often - it's considered signs of weakness. (Not sure about Nintendo complaints - people everywhere happily pay $80 for another Mario remakes on top of $500 console. Isn't that what you're asking for?). Kids aren't as interested in ROM cooking or piracy or software freedom in general - way more interested in enforcing IP rights themselves than demanding something from IP holders.
Or, widespread "just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers" could be another reason. East Asian nations each has its own internal markets with massive surplus production capacities. Western companies had progressively moved into value engineering for survival, as Swiss watch industry famously did. The costs of East Asian physical products never represented its cost in the first place, only utility in context of economy at export destinations, and that might have affected how companies at the destinations have come to be.
Depends. If you're looking for consumer goods, they're just as dogshit as everyone else. Products intended for large commercial customers, particularly where support contracts are involved, tend to be actually decent.
> Or European companies: Philips, Siemens?
Never had an issue with Hue, never had an issue with Bosch-Siemens "white goods".
> Even Apple has the abomination of iOS on their great HW..
iOS certainly is not an abomination. I'm using both Android and iOS, and the latter is much more polished.
Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia? I don't get your point. We certainly can't match this quality in the west.
Yes, but on the back of every MacBook there is the line "Designed by Apple in California" and the software is made in California as well.
Asia is just chosen for manufacturing because of the close proximity of supply chain vendors and cheap but reliable labor cost.
Apple is famously sitting on a mountain of cash. How easily do you think they could replicate the supply chain of even one of their products without outsourcing it?
Not even that, for some parts like the aluminium cases ("unibody") or the laser-bored microholes in their old magsafe connector for the LEDs, Apple designed the whole process.
For the "big ticket" brand items, honestly I don't know. If anything I wouldn't blame it on culture (partially because I lack enough knowledge of Asian cultures, partially because blaming systemic issue on culture can quickly devolve into outright racism), but on capitalist incentives once again - the common standard seems to be "as low in terms of quality as you can get away with", there is no market force pushing for better products, and no legal/regulatory pressure either.
This was the biggest takeaway for me in this post. In the past, to experiment with a particular piece of new hardware, we had to a) obtain the hardware, and b) obtain or create software for it. With a) fast becoming out-of-reach for most people, this puts a dampener on b).
I would have purchased this board in a heartbeat otherwise. Ugh.
There is also an open source driver for the NPU somewhere (Zhouyi NPU) and some documentation, but nothing in an upstream kernel yet. https://zhouyi-npu-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/0_radxa...
Ampere was acquired by Softbank, owner of Arm.
Their hardware is great, but they launch a product and then won't offer a proper distribution for it, hoping that some developers will take care of this for them, for free.
This is why I love Raspberry Pi so much: they care about the software just as much as about the hardware, if not even more. And that is great. Because the hardware, once you have it, that's it, it won't change.
I don't know about Raspberry OS, but when I installed Raspbian 12 Bookworm on my first-gen Raspi with 500MB RAM, it worked. It's now working as a VPN server.
See this, for example: The Zero 3e is a really great board, but this is the software they offer for it https://github.com/radxa-build/radxa-zero3/releases
3 weeks ago: internal test build
Apr 8: internal test build
Jan 10, 2024: beta 6: Currently there is an issue preventing the Debian CLI image from booting, and we suggest users to use the Desktop variant instead for now. Ubuntu CLI: This flavor is provided as-is except for critical issues. Users should look at Debian CLI as an alternative.
There are now community maintained Armbian variants, but it took a long time for them to appear. There was also a distibution by some other volunteer, but Radxa did nothing.
https://github.com/ARM-software/arm-systemready
Lack of mainline kernel support and other standards will hamper their widespread adoption. But as the market matures and shows real commercial potential this will start to be financially worthwhile for the vendors to address.
So your assessment is correct for today’s market. But with China being hammered by the trade war, it’s all but certain their industry will accelerate their efforts to have fully domestic tech solutions — and the same will be true of Europe and other parts the world as well.
All it takes is one of them to embrace standards to get more commercial success, and then the others will copy and chase them.
I was under the impression that ARM China doesn't have the latest license to Armv9 and stops at Armv8. While ARM HQ opened a separate ARM Unit in Shanghai under a different name ARM Something ( Some Chinese Phonetics ). But CIX has had this SOC with Armv9 announced a while ago. So I assume ARM China is now officially back under ARM HQ / Softbank control?
By Control I dont mean just swapping a new CEO but the actual power structure of the company.
Looking at the benchmark [0]
When I first saw the board I thought this might be the RPi of the "AI age" since it is IMHO the most affordable option with 64Gb of RAM.
But I am always cautious if we can really make the most of the so called "30 TOPS NPU"
- [0] https://github.com/geerlingguy/ollama-benchmark/issues/13
Didn’t expect this to just be available for ARM. It really is making its way out of „weird niche platform“ territory to „it’s just a PC“! Especially together with the SystemReady firmware.