It's a fair point. It is not a blind spot -- I did think about it, but I don't think I have ever owned an Asian-designed computer or used Asian-designed software. Ditto African or Australian, FWIW.
I once owned a 2nd-hand Sony Ericsson P910, an early smartphone with the UIQ GUI -- but this was a Symbian device with a Swedish-designed UI. I'm honestly not sure how much input Sony had. And I have a Playstation 2. My tablet is Chinese, by a Chinese company (Chuwi), but it runs an American OS: Android. These are about as close as I can claim, sadly, so I am really not fit to comment or judge.
Whereas most of the world's electronics are partly or totally manufactured in Asia, it's mostly by or for American- or European-owned companies.
I am aware of many fascinating Japanese computers and similar devices, from the FM Towns to the Pomera e-ink portable word-processors, to the MSX2 and MSX2 Turbo-R computers, which interest me greatly and I'd like to have -- but I don't.
The Julia programming language (AIUI, an Indian project) looks fascinating, but I am a poor programmer and old enough to find learning new languages extremely hard -- not something I would do as a leisure activity. So I have never tried it myself.
There is no lack of creativity there, certainly. There is a huge amount. It is just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.
Why that is the case is a fascinating question that I am ill-equipped to address.
Do you have a source for this claim? I suspect it's incorrect, especially once you stop focusing quite so strongly on CPUs and programming languages and start considering everything that goes into a computer or mobile device such as RAM and networking, not to mention displays, which are just as important as the CPU.
> It is just that little of it seems to directly influence the world market elsewhere.
In the country where you live, maybe. Aren't the Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Korean, and so on, markets part of the world market?
Maybe I have a different perspective on things since I live in Vietnam. But your article comes across as kind of myopic to me.
I once saw a British OS, Symbian, used around the world. I saw a Finnish company's phones used around the world. A little British computer maker designed what's still the most popular CPU architecture, ARM, but the company is long dead.
I understand many of the world's hard disks come from Thailand and Malaysia -- but from factories owned and run by Western Digital, Seagate, etc.
Yes, every country is part of the world market, but the salient point is who manages to break out of their own national market.
I am trying to think of Asian companies who make and sell computers or computer-related tech internationally. Samsung, Toshiba, Hitachi... But they run American OSes and use American designs.
Sony and Nintendo don't, but then they don't make CPUs or GPUs, do they? Sony's PCs run Windows, like the Japanese laptop vendors' do. When Sony made PDAs, they ran PalmOS; when Sanyo did, they ran Windows CE.
American dominance was not so universal just 25y ago. Can we identify what happened?
Is this all "worse is better"?
And the largest manufacturer of screens, ram, and SSDs is Samsung. When it comes to smartphones, again, Samsung is top, then Huawei, and Apple is third. Laptops? It's Lenovo, a Hong Kong company. HP is second. Game consoles? Sony and Nintendo are top there, MS is third.
(Edit: and CPUs, top is Arm, Japanese.)
Saying these companies don't impact the world market is just plain wrong.
Lenovo -> IBM
Samsung + Huawei -> Google
SSD, screens, ram -> commodity
You might balk at SSDs being mere commodities (or screens for that matter). Surely Samsung SSDs and screens are better! Sure, and as a designer I might care. But I probably wouldn't, past the promised MTBF, viewing angle and contrast ratio.
Put the SSD+display+CPU together and you get, for better or worse[1] , a largely American computing device. You don't get a BBC micro or an Acorn. Or a Setun.
Nintendo is the only one who obviously stands out as different, making a unique computing device (albeit with an American CPU). Although even the N64 was largely an American design (SGI)
[1] I think worse, in the sense that everything is a Unix monoculture.
Components like the CPU and OS might be designed in America, but it's the higher level software development and hardware design that takes these largely off the shelf parts and assembles them into an actual product, and in the case of Nintendo that happens in Kyoto, not Silicon Valley. Is that really any different from say, assembling a piece of furniture out of materials and components sourced from around the world? Without the product design and assembly all you'll have is a collection of wood and nails lying about.
Same with the N64 - it might have been an SGI designed system at it's core, but through the guidance of Nintendo which developed the higher level industrial design of the console, the controller, the concept of using carts over discs, some of the more lower level OS functions, and of course the user facing software like Mario 64, etc. All the things that actually make the N64 the N64. SGI didn't decide to make a games console all on their own.
Why would I balk at that? SSDs, screens, RAM, CPUs, GPUs, laptops, phones, and are all commodities. I don't care about any of them past their specs and build quality.
> Samsung + Huawei -> Google
Oh come on. That's some serious reaching to prove your point right there.
> Oh come on. That's some serious reaching to prove your point right there.
On the software front it's right on the mark though. Those devices wouldn't be much without Google. I know that Samsung in particular has had some other platforms (Bada? Tizen?) to try to break that dependency, but correct me if I'm wrong, I don't think it's been successful. AFAIK Google also has some kind of hardware requirements posed on the OEMs, so they influence hardware design this way.
But a bunch of this is more recent than the time period the article is discussing, as the comment you're replying to made some mention of.
Top Personal Computer Vendor in 2019 by Market Share is Lenovo[0]
Top Mobile Phone Vendors by Market Share in 2020 Q1 is Samsung, Followed by Huawei [1]
Top Games Console vendor is Sony [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...
[1] https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/vendor
[2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20181129005477/en/Nin...
The last mainline console they designed was the SNES, albeit they've been designing almost all of the mobile consoles.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_game_co...
And the Switch represents them getting out of the hardware market entirely by converging their mobile and home console lines and going with an Nvidia designed machine for both.
Like, the Switch literally has the same RAM chips as the Tegra X1 dev boards. That's normally something that you'd swap out just based on your purchasing department's relationships with the chip vendors more than anything else and you almost never see those carried over.
Which, last time I checked is a switch exclusive game.
And my point anyways, is that Nintendo hardware isn't Japanese designed anymore. Which is objectively true.
Their software is great though, and is Japanese designed. Their OS reminds me a lot of Fuchsia, but actually completed and shipped.
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Nintendo+Switch+Lite+Teardow...
I can't find any public information on what the Tegra X reference design is without registering an account with Nvidia, but even if you're telling the truth you conveniently ignore that said ram chips are made by Samsung.
I mean, it's not a commodity. Another SoC means it's not a switch anymore as the software is incredibly tied to the specifics of that SoC.
> I can't find any public information on what the Tegra X reference design is without registering an account with Nvidia, but even if you're telling the truth you conveniently ignore that said ram chips are made by Samsung.
Here you can see the Samsung K4F6E304HB-MGCH chips being referenced for the Jetson Tegra X1 developer board.
(https://developer.download.nvidia.com/embedded/L4T/r24_Relea...
Also, Samsung isn't a Japanese company, so their chips being in there doesn't make it any closer to Japanese hardware.
It seems that most of the actual OS layer of the switch is designed to be hardware independent. I mean they managed to run Skyrim on ARM so it's not a stretch to say it wouldn't take much effort to move to a different SoC. Maybe using a different SoC would be difficult with Linux, but it doesn't seem the case with the OS they're using.
> eSOL, a leading developer of real-time embedded software solutions, today announced that its µITRON 4.0-compliant real-time operating system (RTOS) and exFAT file system have been adopted in the Nintendo Switch™ game console developed by Nintendo Co., Ltd
https://www.esol.com/news/news_57.html
> Supported CPUs are numerous. ARM, MIPS, x86, FR-V and many others including CPUs supported by open source RTOS eCos and RTEMS, both of which include the support for µITRON compatible APIs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRON_project
> Also, Samsung isn't a Japanese company,
This thread started because of a statement on "Asian companies"
There's no GPU shader compiler on the system, all of the games' shaders are compiled for this exact GPU micro revision. There's a lot of other ways that the games are tied specifically to this SoC. The closest you'd be able to get would be running the games in an emulator.
> uITRON stuff
Their OS really isn't uITRON derived, but I can believe they took the exFAT stack from there.
You can see the shape of the OS here, and it's pretty different from uITRON. https://switchbrew.org/wiki/SVC There might be a compat layer in the driver process for the exFAT driver though. They threw in a FreeBSD kernel space compat layer for their IP stack process for instance.
> This thread started because of a statement on "Asian companies"
That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the switch is Japanese hardware.
You're missing the point. If they can port a third party x86 game using a notoriously janky decades old game engine to ARM then they can easily move to using a different SoC if need be.
> That's cool and all. I was correcting your specific assertion that the switch is Japanese hardware.
You were being pedantic about what is and isn't hardware engineering. You can't just sell a bare PCB with a SoC on it.
7 research centers in China, one in the US, one in Japan. That's from their US facing site too.
Nope, Julia is MIT.
Jeff Bezanson, Stefan Karpinski, and Viral Shah were all at MIT, under the patronage of Alan Edelman.
Still, the article makes a useful point.
It doesn’t appear to be true at all for Apple phones: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+11+Pro+Max+Teardown/1...
https://www.counterpointresearch.com/global-smartphone-share...
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Samsung+Galaxy+S20+Ultra+Tea...
LOTS of Qualcomm ICs as well as Skyworks, Qorvo and Maxim which are all US companies.
I mean I don’t think it really matters but if they moved to the US because the US economy was valuing those things then it’s the product of the American economy from a economic point of view.
You might as well pretend SpaceX isn't American either, because Elon is from South Africa. And Nvidia isn't American, because Jensen Huang is from Taiwan. Google is half Russian because Sergey Brin was born in Moscow.
Indeed. It takes a civilisation to make an iPhone. Many US multinationals have EU development divisions of one sort or another. Dublin is doing very well out of FAANG at the moment.
Where are the owners? Well, if it's a publicly quoted company, they're all over the world.
Where are the corporate taxes paid? Staff salaries and sales taxes are paid locally. But profits can be routed to the cheapest jurisdiction, so Apple is technically an Irish company when it comes to profit accounting, on which they pay almost no tax (see Ireland v European Commission (Apple Sales International) (Cases T-778/16 and T-892/16) (15 July 2020))
Perhaps the real question is, "When the nationalists come for you for displaying insufficient loyalty, which jurisdiction do you end up in?" The barrier between US and China is gradually being raised again.
As for C++ and C#, maybe it wasn't the money. Maybe it was the culture that attracted them? Maybe they were Danes by DNA but they identified as American? If that's the case, they it's fair to say that those languages have deep American roots.
Java is Canadian. APL and J are Canadian. R is from New Zealand. Go is partly Canadian. Pascal and Modula-2 are Swiss. Scala is Swiss too. Lua is Brazilian. Ocaml is French.
A small objection: Java came out of Sun, a Californian company. It would seem to me to be as American as Solaris, NeWS, SMF or vi. No?
When it comes to programming languages, C++ and C# were both created by Danes, although they were working in the US at the time. Presumably because that's where the money was. Does that mean the US gets to claim these languages?
Personally, I think it just invalidates the whole argument of what is American and what is European. Creation of modern tech is a global effort. If you look inside any modern laptop or smartphone you'll find that most it was manufactured in Asia, and that the software and hardware design was split between many different countries and continents, and that the actual people doing the work are even more diverse.