I don't get why people believe that Apple is so much better than any of the other big ones..

http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-iphone-app-secret-access...

Apple always refuses to comment on bugs, security holes and basically anything they can not use for marketing. You WANT to believe that Apple is better.

I clicked on this to see why too. My understanding is that they were just as anti-privacy as Google or Samsung.

They signed on to PRISM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_(surveillance_program) , they happily work with the government over user privacy in articles all the time, and those are just the things we know about. I'm sure there are more PRISM-like back room government deals that we haven't heard of out there, and I haven't seen anything that would make me believe that Apple wouldn't sign on to them.

IMO it's just a PR stance to make them stand out from the rest.

Is this related to Purism announcing that they had successfully disabled the Intel Management Engine on their laptops? Or is that unrelated? Sorry, this is all new info to me.

> Is this related to Purism announcing that they had successfully disabled the Intel Management Engine on their laptops? Or is that unrelated?

It is completely unrelated.

Intel ME is about a remote servicing interface that exists on all current Intel processors. While it has some usages for managing computers in a corporate setting or managing servers (keyword to look for: Intel Active Management Technology (Intel AMT), which needs Intel vPro), it exists on nearly all current Intel processors (except, I think, Intel, Quark; but this processor is built for completely different purposes). Thus there are rumors that it is a backdoor for, say, 3-letter agencies. I don't want to spread any rumors here, but just say: Because Intel ME is very large and complicated (according to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iffTJ1vPCSo 5 MB in size) it is a real concern that lots of security gaps will be found (and some have been found in the past), which, because of Intel ME's structure (according to https://schd.ws/hosted_files/osseu17/84/Replace%20UEFI%20wit... it runs on ring -3) can easily lead to really dangerous security holes. Just for this reason alone any responsible admin should try to disable Intel ME so that this security liability does not have to stay open.

PRISM is a surveillance program by the NSA.

No, from a security stand point I can feel pretty confidant that Apple is better so long as iOS 0days are still selling for 10x that of their counterparts.

how hard would it be for a bunch of semiconductor / cpu designers / cs students to team up and release a nice open hardware so that we can forget about PRISM and the likes ?

That's the whole idea behind the RISC-V platform [1]. It's well-funded, well-designed, has amazing pedigree (David Patterson literally wrote the book on computer architecture). It's even licensed such that companies can use it in proprietary designs.

And yet, making the actual switch is a tremendously difficult task. On the software side alone, it requires recompiling every application you want to run on your platform. That doesn't even touch the cost of rolling the actual hardware. There are more than a few examples of this: Intel's Itanium, Oracle's SPARC, Berkeley's MIPS, Transmeta's Crusoe, etc. Sure, these all had niches (embedded systems, research hardware, a few high-end servers) -- but breaking out into the mainstream (a.k.a. like x86-64 and ARM/ARM64) is damn near impossible.

[1] https://riscv.org/

This would be a bit different. Itanium, Sparc, Crusoe, ARM... all these CPUs were offering is the promise of better performance in some aspect.

Nobody expects RISC-V to beat i7 or Ryzen in any benchmarks.

IMO its purpose is to be the in hardware what GNU/Linux was in software.

edit: GNU/Linux, not just Linux :)

> This would be a bit different. Itanium, Sparc, Crusoe, ARM... all these CPUs were offering is the promise of better performance in some aspect.

Crusoe and ARM were not about the promise of better performance, but of being much more energy-efficient for the intended purpose (though since a few years ARM tries to get into a (more) high-performance field).

Energy efficiency kind of falls under the "performance" category. Just not raw MIPS performance but "performance per watt".

What I wanted to say is that the major selling point of RISC-V would be its open-ness rather than anything performance (or power) related. In that respect it has already captured the attention of interested parties, regardless of that the actual performance will be.

I heard that so far riscv chips (a few were taped IIRC) were just too slow. I deeply believe that with simple and open silicon (cpu, gpu) you'd get a huge amount of visible benefits for end users that don't require Apple A10 levels of performance.

- Less bugs

- Potentially better applications since the lower layers are stable and don't require you to fight it (as an example, pre vulkan drivers were hell, linux software has to circle around that)