My purely personal opinion is that it should be obvious why manufacturers/vendors don't document everything in great detail: that is tantamount to making those implementation details API and promising support for some indefinite period into the future - no matter how many warnings are put on it. Any observable behavior of a system (or CPU instruction set) becomes public API over time.

People get irately angry when a warranty replacement ends up with a slightly different system (CPU stepping, firmware revision, or whatever) that breaks something. They get only slightly less angry when buying a newer system does the same: "XYZ worked on my previous system!!!!1 this is broken garbage!!1111 Widget Inc is deliberately screwing over loyal paying customers to force us to buy more widgets, it makes me sick!!!!!1111" - this is not too far off from comments made here on HN at times.

Making seemingly trivial changes becomes an exercise in walking a minefield of unknown compatibility constraints.

That's besides the extra work of hiring technical writers to spend time converting a jumble of engineering notes, comments on bug tickets, and code comments into publicly presentable documentation - and making sure to keep all of that up to date when anything changes. For something almost no one knows or cares about that you may completely change in the next version.

100% this. "API is forever" is a saying for a good reason, and writing good API takes a lot of extra work and planning - and we still frequently get it wrong.

Apple (and I’m pretty sure ARM as well) does not want you writing programs that rely on its proprietary extensions to the ISA. The specific things mentioned here are either not exposed to userspace or wrapped in API that hides these implementation details so that third party developers don’t have to deal with them. And Apple changes all these almost every year, which they certainly wouldn’t be able to do if they exposed these; you’ll note that some of my experiments that I wrote not even a year ago are linked in the article as being fundamentally broken now.

> Apple (and I’m pretty sure ARM as well) does not want you writing programs that rely on its proprietary extensions to the ISA.

Well, but at least some people at Apple do. Kind of. They built a mechanism for loading alternate kernels while knowing full well that it would require reverse engineering in order to use. A former engineer said as much. https://twitter.com/XenoKovah/status/1339914716454526979

In a way, Apple has done this for years. Their Mail app contains a third-party plugin API (which dates back to at least Tiger, so it's not some unfinished feature they forgot to remove), but it's completely undocumented. You can't use it unless you reverse engineer it.

I don't quite get it, really.

Ok, perhaps I should qualify that: they don’t want normal app developers doing this, because those ones want stability. But I believe there are some at Apple that (correctly) see that allowing certain extension points like these is healthy for the overall community. But it’s all under the table…

I don't understand the trade secret concern. Reverse engineering is legal. If you're afraid someone might rip off your product that's what the law is for.

All they do is lock out customers from owning their devices. It's about control- plain and simple.

> If you're afraid someone might rip off your product that's what the law is for.

You have two mechanisms to protect from copying: trade secrets and patents.

If you document it, it’s not a trade secret anymore. If another person figures it out, it’s also not a trade secret anymore.

And Apple (and others) document plenty of stuff in patents. However, those aren’t loved by this community either.

Don't forget that if e-ink wasn't patented, there's a good chance that it would be cheap enough to integrate into everyday utilities.

And if it wasn't patentable, there is a good chance that it would never have been developed or industrialized. It will eventually go off patent and be widely available

> Don't forget that if e-ink wasn't patented, there's a good chance that it would be cheap enough to integrate into everyday utilities.

Why do you (and several others on HN) keepi making this claim with so much confidence? Do you work in the electrophoretic display industry? Do you know what the costs are to make electrophoretic displays? Is there any evidence that patents are what dominate the costs of producing electrophoretic displays? Or do you think there is even a slight possibility that the dominant factor of price is actually volume and scale of production?

Wacom is a good example of patent lock-in. For years they held all the necessary patents to the battery less EMR pen technology and only ever made high end pro-level devices and only ever licensed the technology to makers of high end pen input devices. End result - a generation of digital artists deprived of tools they needed (especially affordable pen displays, only Wacom used to sell those due to the patents they held and at mind-bogglingly high prices).

Now finally a few years ago their patents finally lapsed, forcing them to finally compete with other companies on price and quality.

End result - affordable 13 inch pen displays available at about third to quarter of the old Wacom price from multiple vendors.

I can only imagine the situation is similar if the original E-ink developers managed to patent all the necessary technologies to bloc everybody else.

Same thing for 3D printing - it only really took off once Stratasis could no longer milk their FDM patents to block all progress in affordable 3D printing area.

> I can only imagine the situation is similar if the original E-ink developers managed to patent all the necessary technologies to bloc everybody else.

All this imagination is amazing to me as a person who actually works in the display industry. It is like someone walked into a sports car showroom and announced that these cars are too expensive because of patents and it has nothing to do with volume and actual cost of iron and rubber. And then a bunch of other people all agreed with them and started blogging about it. Because that's what I see happening here. I wonder when someone like this will walk into an Apple showroom and start exclaiming that these apple products are all too expensive because of patents and not because of other factors.

As for Wacom and Stratasis, I have no idea since I don't work in those industries. But I've never seen convincing proof put forth. Circumstantial sure, but clear data that would convince me that "Stratasis used FDM patents to block all progress in 3d printing" doesn't seem to be available.

The parent comment was no where near delicate enough to have any chance - I believe that Apple has simply become too polarising a subject on HN to be able to have a productive debate about their flaws, perceived or real, technical or ethical. As a result many of us have learned the hard way to not bother engaging any more... I might be in for one more lesson.