That's why I commute to the office via horse — so I don't need to deal with those fascists at the DMV. Sure the costs of boarding and hay and horseshoes pile up, but at least I'm not being hassled by The Man.

This is a weirdly reductive take. Any new technology can be better in some aspects and worse in others. (To use your car/horse analogy: cars are much faster and have increased standards of living, but they have also had large negative effects on society and the environment.)

And it's a poor analogy because driver licensing is almost a straight consequence of how dangerous cars are, but the openness of an SoC does not directly follow from how fast it is.

And the PC has been a massive mistake that needs rectifying?

From the point of view of IBM, most likely yes, otherwise there wouldn't have been PS/2 and MCA architecture.

Hence why laptops and 2-1 hybrids are basically back to the days of vertical integration of 16 bit computers, whose the PC was the only exception.

So let's all make sure, for apples sake, that is fixed then.

Not really, PC laptops and hybrids are pretty standardized. A slim case doesn't really make it vertical integration.

Try to use anything other than Windows or ChromeOS on such laptops, with 100% support of underlying hardware.

Many of us are? And we can replace parts from third parties.

It is getting more and more integrated though which makes it hard to replace parts. But that has more to do with greed and size requirements than vertical integration, a soldering iron can amend some of that. Driver situation isn't by any means something new or necessarily an indication of vertical integration either.

Looking at my Asus sold with Linux "support" I doubt it, hence why I explicility stated 100%.

As for the rest, nothing that regular consumers would ever bother with.

I don't have any issues, but I did do my research.

We are talking about vertical integration are we not? Don't see how any of that is relevant then.

Which is exactly the proof of how Linux fails at that, by not proving it, thanks for confirming my assertion.

And since you did your research the wider public would appreciate to learn in what consumer shop one can get such out of the box experience.

I don't even know what you are arguing about anymore.

Since the DMV exists primarily for traffic safety, I assume Apple is removing your ability to run whatever you want on your processor for your safety too?

LOL, I almost thought you were serious for a moment.

The DMV is a revenue source for most states. Same with traffic cops. They both only have a tenuous link to traffic safety.

I was serious. I don't want to actually get into the usefulness of the DMV, I was just assuming a common opinion for the purposes of the discussion since the OP made the comparison to the DMV.

I think you will find that The Man is especially going to be hassling you with your horse.

Yeah, just like they hassle me with my wire-wrapped homebrew OpenBSD-based SDR mobile phone in my blue Radio Shack project box every time I try to get on an airplane. Why does The Man always pick on me?!

No private copter yet? Look at Elon. He flies to work with his Rocketman suite and disturbs the LAX flight controllers and pilots all the way. The Man

Yeah this point is being continually missed - having better performance doesn't mean much if you are limited in what you can do by the OS, the ecosystem and the hardware. As it is you can't run another OS or attach external or PCIe GPUs to anything Apple Silicon. So if macOS continues the downward trajectory or if someone else comes up with a better GPU you're stuck unlike with a PC.

I think it is typical of Apple to have feature poor early entrants and then increase feature set with new generations. I am sure in the next few years the GPU/other pcie issues will be resolved.

I'd bet money Apple and Nvidia remain incompatible for the foreseeable future.

So? Consider 3 aspects:

1. Power efficiency (read: battery life) 2. Performance 3. Openness

99% of consumers only care about 2 of those. The more that time goes on, the more it becomes clear that prioritizing openness, in particular for hardware, is a direct trade-off against building a great consumer product.

I think this is simply a consequence of the fact that the technological overlords who wish to oversee all of computing had not had a chance to overly lock down computers just yet (though they certainly wish to do it). Once they inevitably overplay their hand and the average consumer truly loses the ability to run the things he wishes to, you'll start to see a dramatic increase in the consumer's desire for openness.