Comment by chrisjc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrisjc | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think I'll always associate anything that runs on Qualcomm (thought it's not just them) as temporary due to its short lifespan and lack of vendor support based on my experience of buying Android phones, tablets and media devices. I think this is already true of some (all?) Chromebooks that actually have expiration dates.

This is probably not a fair comparison since it's a laptop and windows-based, but it would take a lot to win me back with how much money, time and effort i have lost over the years with these products... not to mention the amount of ewaste has been generated.

Even more true with my experience with Motorola (Lenovo); $600+ phone stops getting support/updates after 6 months of ownership... trade-in value of $28. Never again.

Then again, seeing Intel with some serious competition warms me up a little bit. Also the thought of an ecosystem of blossoming Linux distros for ARM laptops/desktops makes me excited.

I stopped buying Qualcomm smartphones years ago. There's no way I'd by a laptop with one of their chips.

What an unfortunate choice by Lenovo.

>What an unfortunate choice by Lenovo.

Well they didn't have much choice here. MediaTek, Samsung, and the rest are equally bad. The ARM SoC market is flooded with chips designed to have the shortest SW support lifespan possible.

Maybe Nvidia can get its shit together and put out a competitive ARM chip.

MTK has the advantage of somewhat available (leaked) design information and source code, and there's a pretty thriving Chinese developer community --- at least around their phones/tablets.

The fundamental problem is the refusal to publish driver source. Nvidia is one of the last companies on earth I'd expect to do that.

Sadly, I don't think Qualcomm is even any worse than average. I don't think for example MediaTek, Samsung or Nvidia are doing any better.

I think even the Pinephones with their Allwinners and Rockchips aren't perfect, with both models being based on I believe older SoCs (although the Rockchip in the Pro has been modified, afaik).

I'll happily take worse hardware with good community support over fresh off the line stuff that's up to its eyeballs in broken corporate crap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com