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Comment by dash2 | Hacker News Reader

Apple sells billions of iPhones, all with the same hardware and OS. As a result it can afford to spend a lot of money on design.

You would not enjoy an iPhone made by your local electrician.

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Not local, but small and competitive was nice. Electronics were so much more fun twenty years ago. Nowadays a company is a bold risk-taker if their glass sandwich has an extra button on top.

Consumer stuff sure, but we didn't have today's proliferation of hobbyist platforms back then either. The fun things are still out there, they are just different.

Have you tried the Framework Laptop? It's a great example of how small start-ups can build better devices than the giants. Difficult, yes -- impossible, no.

The Framework is only better than a MacBook Pro if you care about repairability, customizability, freedom, etc., which most people don’t. It’s also worse in many ways — less polished OS UI, worse screen resolution.

> The Framework is only better than a MacBook Pro if you care about repairability, customizability, freedom, etc.

Those are three pretty huge things... For me personally, repairability is secondary to their very convenient modular IO port system.

> Less polished OS UI.

You can have them install Windows without the typical manufacturer bloatware or you can put *nix on it. For me, that's better than macOS.

> worse screen resolution

The resolution on the MacBook Pro 13 and the Framework are nearly the same: 2560 x 1600 vs 2256 x 1504.

Imo people overstate how good the macOS UX is. It's fine if you're used to it, but when I started using it for the first time there were lots of little unpleasant surprises and inconsistencies. The way people talk about macOS' design gave me expectations that macOS did not meet.

It's a niche product for hardware hackers. (That's why its sales are so low.)

Whether it's a niche product or not is beside the point. The point is that a small entity can build a device that is arguably better designed, better reviewed, affordable and readily available for purchase.

Me, an economist: if it's better, why does nobody buy it?

People are buying it... so much so that Framework has been struggling to keep up with the demand. All of their early batches sold out well in advance. I placed my order two months ago and it was backordered for a month. Batch 6 (the current batch) is the first batch they've had all year where they haven't been massively backordered.

I'm glad, but Apple ships millions of Macs every quarter. When Framework catch up, then I'll agree they're better and not niche. Of course as a hacker I might prefer Framework, believe it is better, even evangelize it. That's a different use of the word, though.

The original question was whether a small company can make a better device than a very large company.

Here you've defined "better" to include "can ship very large quantities", which is almost a circular way of defining the answer to be negative, no matter what the company does.

If it can ship very large quantities, it's not a small company.

Indeed, my original point was that there are huge economies of scale in design. That's why it would be a bad idea for everything to be small-scale and local, which the GP was arguing for.

It doesn't really matter that it's a niche product. The mere fact that it's out there does show to less tech savvy people what's possible. That's very important because many of them are not even aware things can be done differently.

Framework laptop is not possible without the supply chain investments made by large conglomerates.

True, but is that relevant? All companies, big and small, depend on all manner of services, materials, infrastructure, etc that are provided by other entities.

Even if that's true, what does it matter and what are you implying? No innovation because the big good corps paved the way before that?

Imagine what would happen if Rome made those big and long roads all across Europe and then nobody used them out of respect of all the labor that went into them. :D

I agree that there are things that are possible only from a giant organization.

However, IMO both Apple and Microsoft are at best indifferent to their customers. Not fixing bad UIs even when people complain, putting ads in products you paid for, requiring centralized accounts just to install free apps. You've heard it all before.

I wouldn't enjoy an iPhone made by my local electrician, but I want software to respect me. Linux DEs have genuine flaws and yet I truly miss nothing and gain everything when I move from my work Macbook or my gaming Windows partition to my Linux desktop.

I don't think the decision is between a vertically-integrated big-corp device and a vertically-integrated small-corp device. Even just the current iPhone hardware (which is absolutely incredible engineering) with free software would be a big improvement.

with new technology such self printing IC, 3D printing. Designs specs can be easily shared, why is it not possible? The whole idea of have one big factory making one thing is quite inefficient. Decentralisation always is more resilient.

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