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Comment by dreadedfuture | Hacker News Reader

Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?

Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter? I need a laptop, a table and a phone. I have been looking for over a year and I cannot find anything I like.

  0. I don't want arbitrary software running on my personal devices, fullstop. 
  1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software.
  2. I want my preferred free software to be able to access all installed hardware and use it to its full capabilities.
  3. I don't want to pay a $1000 premium to be able to do this.

This is one of the biggest market failures of our generation. All we have is fake choice, but not a single manufacturer wants to deliver plain open hardware. If you look at buying a car you will end up in exactly the same situation. In fact all consumer hardware of all sorts has the same problem.

RMS was right back then, but the problem has recently become much more serious. Back then it was only about laptops. Now I have to worry about my fridge spying on me.

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> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?

Counter-question: did you really think the free market was actually working for the consumer ?

A free market relies on multiple points:

- consumers are rational

- consumers have time and energy to compare alternatives

- alternatives exist

- it is essentially free to create an alternative, and alternatives take 0 time to become mature

- consumers have enough money to buy exactly what they want

None of those are true. Consumers aren't rational, or else there wouldn't be a multi billion dollars ad industry whose point is exactly to instill artificial demand. Consumers have too little free time to spend on chores, family, going out; they won't spend a weekend spreadsheeting a smartphone. The last competitor to the current duopoly failed because it didn't gain traction, and it was a multi billion dollar company. The income inequality keeps rising, people have to make a choice between paying rent and buying a new smartphone.

The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life but of shareholders' profits. A barely working, ad-ridden, slow as molasses smartphone that prints money just by being turned on is the expected outcome of those incentives.

> The free market has always been a fable. The whole economic system is not geared towards maximization of consumers' quality of life

No economist would claim that (and I seriously ask from where you got the "markets maximize consumers' quality of life" claim). Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.

> Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.

Where, in practice, "efficient" is conveniently circularly defined as "whatever the market decides". In the case of the OP, there's nothing "efficient" about grinding a computer to a halt under an oppressive layer of crapware, thereby wasting the user's time and energy (in both a literal and a figurative sense). The stark lesson of the modern age is that markets are hopeless at pricing in externalities.

Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.

And increasingly, consumers have become resources rather than market participants.

> And increasingly, consumers have become resources rather than market participants.

By their buying decisions, they actively decide that this is what they want.

They don't decide this is what they want, they decide this is the least bad they will bear.

I don't like Android, I don't like iOS. What do I buy ? Not the one that is best for me, because I don't have a real choice, but the one I will hate the least.

> I don't like Android, I don't like iOS. What do I buy ?

Not buying is also a possible decision. You should of course choose this choice if all other available option have a negative net value for you. The fact that you decided for Android or iOS shows that both of these choices have a positive net value for you - so what are you complaining about?

If I don't buy anything, I'm out of the market system and the whole argument of "the market is best" falls down: it means the market hasn't solved my problem.

> The fact that you decided for Android or iOS shows that both of these choices have a positive net value for you - so what are you complaining about?

Android suits me more, but I would like to be able to run multiple VPNs at the same time. What do I buy ?

I didn't buy Android because this is what I want, but because it's the closest. But how do I drive the decisions to where I want ? Am I supposed to wait that a million alternatives are created and have the same level as Android, then only can I buy what I need ? This just doesn't work.

> If I don't buy anything, I'm out of the market system and the whole argument of "the market is best" falls down: it means the market hasn't solved my problem.

This means the vendor makes no money from you. If a lot of people decide this way, the vendor will have to adjust or go bust - this is called "market adjustment".

The fact that you did buy tells the market that what you bought is of net-positive value for you.

> The fact that you did buy tells the market that what you bought is of net-positive value for you.

This doesn't mean the market is efficient. It means the market misunderstands itself.

That's like an AI recognizing Bugs Bunny as a cat and not as a chair, at least it's an animal, it is a net-positive over the alternative. That's still not what I want.

Try Librem 5 or Pinephone.

I applaud the efforts, but it's not there yet and still, look how long it took to be where they are today. Look at the lost efforts of webOS, Maemo, Symbian, FirefoxOS. Most of those have working forks, but only commercial ones are still living and are still not what I'm looking for.

Indeed, it's very much work in progress, but in my opinion it's very far already and people who are concerned about having alternatives should support such efforts (I do).

I don't believe that's true.

As an example, I hate every option available for phones right now but I can't just not have a phone. I have no real choice.

Whichever decision I make will send the wrong signal to "the market" and won't influence it to improve.

You can buy second-hand phone to avoid giving more profit to the producer.

Except older phones will be EOL much sooner and will stop getting updates.

Thanks 'free market'.

Use LineageOS - and indeed, thank the free market.

Lineage doesn't guarantee security updates for your device, even if there are official builds.

Not to mention lineage means no verified boot

The most efficient usage of resources is the constraint, not the goal. It means markets will use fewer resources for building 10 smartphone than an ad-hoc system, but it will not decide whether the 10 smartphones are needed or what kind of smartphone are needed.

> but [the market] will not decide whether the 10 smartphones are needed or what kind of smartphone are needed.

This is what buyers decide about via their buying decisions.

Also it doesn't imply it'll use the least amount of resources, it implies it'll use the least amount of _money_, which means the cost will be exported to countries that can't afford to say no... Are we really surprised at the amount of slave labor in the world?

I have a hard time believing that the monstrously bloated spyware know as Windows 11 is "the most efficient usage of resources".

> Markets rather optimize for the most efficient usage of resources.

Most efficient usage of resources in what sense?

In the sense that those who are willing to pay the most get preferred resource allocation in a way that is self-adjusting.

If a company is able to pay more for their commodities, it means that it is able to create more of an economic value of the commodities than a competitor (otherwise it would not be able to pay this price). This leads to a more efficient and effective use of the commodities that are traded on the market.

Producing something that people need but dont want isn't efficiency, its exploitation

It also encourages slavery. Who sows your clothes? Who assembles your phone? Who picks the vegetables you eat? Really it's all the same person: The cheapest option.

> It also encourages slavery.

Indeed, if slavery turned out to be more efficient, it would.

But I think that the claim that slavery is more efficient does not hold, since opressing people binds a lot of ressources; also opressed people tend to do work as minimally as possible.

So it is much more efficient to give people the illusion of freedom instead of enslaving them.

And yet, in our system that prioritizes efficiency, we have more slavery than at any point in human history. Something doesn't add up.

Efficiency in this case defined as "extracting as much money from consumers at as low a cost as possible", not "providing as much value as possible to consumers at as low a price as possible". The latter can, under the right circumstances (a competitive market) be the most effective way to achieve the former, but those conditions do not always occur, and most companies, for obvious reasons, do all they can to get into a position where they don't.

> Efficiency in this case defined as "extracting as much money from consumers at as low a cost as possible", not "providing as much value as possible to consumers at as low a price as possible".

"providing as much value as possible to consumers at as low a price as possible" is exactly the opposite of efficiency since as a company you don't have to invest that many resources for the given price.

What's the value in a spyware ridden laptop?

> What's the value in a spyware ridden laptop?

Pre-installing spyware gives money to the vendor of the laptop. The developer of the spyware can afford to give this money to the laptop vendor since he can use the collected data to make even more money.

Yeah obviously, I mean the value to the users

The parent said that they want a specific kind of smartphone, and questions why the market doesn't provide it. They essentially ask why the market doesn't provide something that suits them better

A free market relies on none of those assumptions.

I’m commenting because I can’t upvote twice. Other commenters are apologists working hard to defend their capital-religious beliefs. And, I’m here to support the statement that “the free market has always been a fable”.

I think the legacy of trust busting from the late 1800's and early 1900's carried over pretty well into the post-war boom in the 50's and 60's, and that's why we have so many stories about how home appliances lasted for 30, 40, and 50 years back then. I think our system started falling over with the deregulation under Reagan in the 80's, and it's being a steadily-increasing decline ever since. Matthew Stoller on Twitter is closely following Lina Kahn at the FTC, and she seems intent on restoring the balance between consumers and corporations, but I'm afraid that if she actually does something noticeable by the general populace in this regard, she'll simply be replaced by a "sympathetic" administration, and the organization "steered" back into compliance. If so, the people who do this should just disband them. It doesn't do us any good to have regulatory gatekeepers on the payroll, if they're only acting like the ratings companies in the MBS fiasco and subsequent meltdown.

FTFY: The last TWO competitors to the current duopoly failed because they didn't gain traction, and they were both a multi billion dollar companies.

Windows Phone and Fire Phone.

The market fails in almost every respect, and it's nothing new. We get sold crap clothes that discolor when it's perfectly known how to make them not to, crap food with all kinds of nasty ingredients like trans fats, etc.

I don't know how people can still think that the market optimizing and giving us the products we want at an adequate price is the default, when it's clearly the exception.

It is because most people don't actually care about those issues (discolored clothing, crap food ingredients etc.) to any measurable degree. They might in theory, but in practice they exert zero effort to educate themselves on these issues and learn how to discern better products from worse ones. And if the consumer doesn't care, why should companies care?

I'd argue most consumers do care, but only after the fact.

Also being able to care and then act brings the assumption that you have the free time to spool up a mini research project on each and every consumer good you buy.

Yeah, it is like a mass psychosis.

It's easy to hide lower quality but very difficult to hide higher prices.

Game theory suggests that the vast majority of consumer goods will be nearly free, relative to their high quality counterparts, at the minimum viable quality.

> We get sold crap clothes that discolor when it's perfectly known how to make them not to,

I cannot remember the last time my clothes discolored, and I buy what I think are cheap clothes by US standard (Uniqlo/Next/Express/Macys/ASICS/Adidas).

But to address your point, I would rather pay $30 for a pair of jeans that maybe has a little discoloration in 5 years, which I currently do, than $100+ for a high quality pair of jeans that might last 20 years but I have to pamper and take care of.

Where the clothing market does not work is addressing the externality of plastics pollution, since it’s all short term benefit to individuals now at long term cost to society later.

>crap food with all kinds of nasty ingredients like trans fats, etc.

Trans fat is really minimal to non existent in most developed countries. But is a good example of when regulators need to intervene to protect the public.

I'm not even talking about the color fading in 5 years, I'm talking about clothes that shed pigment from the first wash and not only discolor, but ruin the rest of your laundry...

If you don't experience it often, I imagine it might be a Europe vs. US thing. I have often heard that clothes for sale in the US tend to be more robustly made (maybe because of the widespread use of tumble dryers?). In Spain what I said above is definitely a common occurrence, and you don't even get rid of that by paying for good brands, I have had clothes from e.g. Lacoste do that. And the reason is that they skimp on a chemical that fixes the dye. It's perfectly avoidable, but they just don't bother.

Interesting, I cannot relate to that.

> I have often heard that clothes for sale in the US tend to be more robustly made (maybe because of the widespread use of tumble dryers?).

Maybe, although the Next brand I wear a lot gets shipped to me from UK. I throw my unsorted clothes in the washer and then the dryer and then fold them and put them away.

My British family spends a lot more time sorting by color, turning jeans inside out, washing them on specific water cycles, then line drying them, then ironing them.

I figured I was just buying clothes that need less work.

The only time that’s happened to me was maybe 11 years ago when someone bought me a red t-shirt in Mexico. Red everywhere. That’s literally never happened to me in the US.

Counter argument, the market is getting exactly what they want.

It’s just not aligned with what you want them to want. They want fast fashion that lasts a couple weeks, because that’s how long fashion trends last, and they want foods that taste good over is healthy. The market is just giving them what they want.

And hear me out, if people are going to be throwing clothes out every couple weeks regardless of quality, it's better that they're made as cheaply as possible.

It's true that the market gives people what they "want", in the sense that they choose to buy that. That's almost a tautology.

But most of the time they choose to buy that because they don't have enough information, or they have misleading information.

No one wants a pair of pants to ruin the rest of the laundry. And there is food without trans fats that tastes as well if not better, but it's easier to just put trans fats or whatever the next crap product is and not inform the consumer.

In case you are not aware of this concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus

Pretty much all consumers know excess sugar, carbs, oil, salt, and calories in general are bad for them. Yet they still want to consume them.

I went to a party last night where there were several obese healthcare professionals (doctor level). Yet they ate pizza, and one even put ranch dressing on it.

The market is selling plenty of healthy food. People do not want it though, for the same reason a dog or other pet will engorge themselves if they were offered unhealthy amounts of easy calories.

Taste is learnt. Some people consider junk food to taste good only because they’ve been conditioned to eat it when they were growing up. If junk food was not a regular thing in your life, I doubt you’d consider it particularly tasty. Due to health issues when I was a child I couldn’t eat a lot of things at all growing up which for others were just not that healthy. I always ate at home. As a result I don’t consider junk food particularly tasty. Quite the opposite, home-cooked meals made out of raw ingredients are the most delicious thing I can think of. I also have a group of friends a bit older than me who grew up before McDonalds and KFC entered my country. For them too stuff sold by those places isn’t particularly pleasurable to eat. On the other hand I saw plenty of families who these days go to McDonalds every Saturday/Sunday, where the children are conditioned to expect regular visits to those places and will make a huge drama if it doesn’t happen. If you’re in US, from what I’ve heard even normal food in supermarkets is already more processed and the fresh stuff may somehow even be more expensive, so that’s a whole other can of worms.

Dont forget about all those shitty clothes that dont get sold at Walmart/kohls/Costco/etc end up being dumped in a Chilean desert

https://www.insider.com/discarded-fast-fashion-clothes-chile...

Efficiency!

The company that would do those things wouldn't get investment or would be actively railroaded; that's why. There are plenty of underserved markets with huge market demand, you identified one of them, and they will remain underserved, because they are in direct opposition of present-day ruling class interests of real-time granular control.

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?

Just like the market is "failing" when people complain about bad airline experiences… but continue to buy the cheapest flights/seats they can find?

Why do you think the seats are so cheap?

Convenience > everything else

Also- just because it's a big deal to you and me, doesn't mean it actually is. How much does it actually hurt you? That's why people don't care. In the grand scheme of things is a wicked "first world problem". We live extremely privileged lives if this is really a huge annoyance (it is to me btw).

I wish things were more open. Would the entire streaming community ever have happened without a general purpose computer? It is hard to know what alternate future we have been robbed of by being force fed closed and locked down platforms.

My personal devices are a Fairphone with e/OS and a Purism laptop. The laptop probably fails no. 3, but they do fulfill 0.-2. imho. There are alternatives. And for the prices I suspect that there is not enough demand for prices to come down.

Our family laptop and my personal desktop run Linux Mint. Those do not have open firmware, but that's it.

Do banking apps run on e/OS?

Good question, I don't run any banking apps on Android out of principle. I don't like authenticator apps either but they are better than SMS verifcation which I despise. Where possible, I use a Yubikey or other separate read-only device.

Banking is only done on a laptop booted from a read-only stick and with a TAN-generator.

> 3. I don't want to pay a $1000 premium to be able to do this.

That part is I think selfish. I do want to pay a premium to be able to do all that, but that market doesn't really exist.

It's not selfish if they mean they "can't" rather than they "don't want".

If someone doesn't want to spend $2000 instead of $1000 on something that does what they want/need better than the $1000 version; I'd argue that they don't really mean they "don't want" to, they mean they can't financially, whether literally or justifiably.

I can't justify spending $2000 on a phone that does things I want it to do better than the $800 equivalent (which we shouldn't forget is also quite a premium to many), so I buy the "cheaper" one and "make it work".

If the difference between $1000 and $2000 were inconsequential to me, then I don't see why I wouldn't "want" to pay that premium.

So, I argue, GP isn't selfish as you put it, they just choose their words poorly on this point; or you take them too literally.

I'd be interested to hear from GP in this regard.

Here you go: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5.

Easy Answer: consumers decide on one factor and one factor alone: price.

And no need for the exaggeration, in many cases you can buy an iPad for less than that crappy windows laptop with all the spyware. Even for a fully featured Air, the price difference is way less than $1000

It seems like every other commenter is missing this. People would rather pay for a $200 TV and complain about the ads on it than buy a properly priced TV.

I'm not aware of a price point where TVs come with no ads: https://old.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/co5aw4/unrem...

Buy a commercial display. Not only will it last decades with regular consumer use there's no built-in OS to slow it down.

> I want my preferred free software to be able to access all installed hardware and use it to its full capabilities.

This would cost enormous amounts of money for practically no benefit whatsoever to the manufacturer. Modern hardware is complex so drivers are costly and Linux-on-desktop enthusiasts are an incredibly, incredibly small niche. Which, I must add, is just getting smaller and smaller as WSL and ChromeOS and ChromeOS Flex subsumes many of the use cases. In fact, I am not even sure what is left.

The manufacturer don't have to make it work with arbitrary software. They could just stop making it more difficult then necessary.

The amount of work to get a driver use a modern chip to full capabilities is really huge. It almost never happens with volunteer written drivers, whether the manufacturer is friendly or not. The fragmentation is just too big.

The free market always tends to fail if there’s a monopoly. A duopoly is apparently also a failure mode, here (regarding phones).

But in the case of laptops, I’m not sure the market has failed. Apple is selling MacBooks like hotcakes. The Framework laptop is attacking at a different angle, and I have high hopes for System76 and friends.

Yes, there’s loads of hot garbage, but there are really good alternatives.

>Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?

This is just typical late stage capitalism, no? The step after commoditization isn't "and then they just quietly settled for being treated like a utility and not having huge profit margins anymore". It's more often "and then they tried to find other ways to monetize by selling ads and demographics information" or "then they bought up their competitors and raised prices again" or "then they formed a cartel with their competitors" or "then they tried to de-commoditize the product category by charging 200% more for a 20% performance improvement, while stopping production of the previous version" or "then they started charging more for related services and maintenance" (cf. printer ink cartridges and razor blades). Being the "winner" or "last/biggest company standing" of a product category means you get to do all of the above consumer-hostile fuckery to try to keep profit margins high.

The requirements sound like you want Linux and open-source BIOS. All doable with today's consumer-grade laptops, although I never cared enough to install custom BIOS.

The market failed in part because it appears to goose up productivity when you cut team size, outsource, and OKR your way to "measurable performance." Nobody was left with any willingness to call this crap out. Nobody was incentivized to say the bloatware was causing product returns.

How to fix this? It has to come from every CEO, down through management, to empower the people who ask expensive questions like "Why is the bloatware so shitty?" This doesn't happen because most CEOs cannot grasp that that is how Apple gets to charge so much more for their laptops, and that they have to give up managing by the numbers to get there. (Not that Apple hasn't got numbers people, especially on the supply chain side.)

You don't need open source systems to get there. Open source in commercial systems can help, but it isn't fundamental to getting the bloatware under control. Microsoft does it with Surface in part to put pressure on their OEM customers, like Google does with Pixel. This isn't just to be good to their end-users. They would probably kill their OEMs if they could and be more like Apple, if they could.

Just get a MacBook Air.

It won’t constantly try and stop you from doing work, unlike windows or Linux (on a laptop).

Dollar for dollar, the M-series chips are quite powerful.

"Just get a Macbook" isn't really a solution. Sub-1000€ customer grade hardware is plenty capable for a lot of tasks people might want, and some other users want the ability to run the OS of their choice too.

Personally I consider the modern OSX interface a huge hindrance to get any decent work done, compared to Windows or any Linux with a DE.

If you just need a computer to connect to the internet and occasionally entertain yourself, you can get an OK looking laptop for $500AUD or about $300USD/300EUR. Never mind sub 1000EUR. That’s kind of an insane price when you think about it. And it is too good to be true, because they load it up with junk.

But people aren’t thinking about the software. They see a half decent looking machine for very little money and bite because they don’t want to spend more.

I bought Dell Latitude 3410 for $600. It was loaded with Ubuntu with zero bloatware as far as I can judge. Just some Dell logos and some module blacklists. I upgraded it with SSD and RAM, replaced Ubuntu with Fedora and now it's a little beast which can back me up if my main laptop would die.

In order for that consumer-grade hardware to be that cheap, the vendors add bloatware from other vendors to augment the loss of profits by selling at close to cost, or at least a severely limited margin. This has a knock on effect of making what would be decent enough as a simple daily driver have extremely poor performance.

GP's comment specifically says,

> 1. I want to be able to run my preferred free software.

and Apple in general is the chief abuser of this user freedom, less so on Mac devices, but extremely so on iPhone/iOS devices: it allows to run only vetted software, often against the interests of the users, and, in some cases, retroactively altering the deals [0], so "doing a market research" prior to buying the device, as many regular HN users suggest, won't really help.

[0]: Pray they don't alter it any further.

Apple just recently removed from AppStore one of the most popular map application (2GIS). It contains absolutely unique information for my city, lots of reviews, etc. It's hard to imagine my life without this app nowadays.

Now I'm thinking about Android phone, as my iPhone 8 started to throttle and I think it's time to upgrade.

To put this in context: the developer of 2GIS is a Russian company with headquarters in Novosibirsk, owned mostly by Sberbank. They have most likely been sanctioned due to Russian invasion of Ukraine. I don't think Apple had any choice in the matter of removing it.

True, but on any other platform you'd just sideload it. State sanctions do not apply to people doing things in private, for the most part.

Apple has had choice to allow side-loading. And some rumors that they're working on it is the only thing that keeps me interested in this platform, honestly. That's not the problem with Android, for example. Google can remove all they want from their Play Store, installing APK is easy.

PS it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.

There's nothing stopping you from side-loading Mac applications. Just download the application bundle, right click on it and choose "Open".

OP was talking about phone apps.

But the context of this entire post is laptops.

> Google can remove all they want from their Play Store, installing APK is easy.

Please, let's not act like this is a real solution. It's definitely better than not having that option at all, but:

- 99.5% of users don't even know it exists or how to do it because it's intentionally hidden away

- Because of the above fact, it's generally not viable to develop an application that can only be sideloaded, anything that gets removed from the Play Store usually dies

- Google has recently been moving away from the traditional APK format and towards their new "split APK" structure meaning you cannot sideload apps that were downloaded from the Play Store without a third party app to handle it

> Apple has had choice to allow side-loading.

They had that choice, and they've chosen not to. This, on one hand, keeps you from side-loading 2GIS, but on the other hand, keeps seniors' iPhones from crapware (as per TLA).

> That's not the problem with Android

The wider problem is what will happen when your side-loaded APK will need to make a TLS connection to 2GIS website, but its TLS certificate has been declared invalid by the cert authority (because sanctions). Or what will happen when the BGP routing protocol will direct the traffic to 2GIS website to go to a sinkhole (because sanctions). Or what will happen when 2GIS web servers from HP and Dell will be rendered inoperable by a remote command (because sanctions).

> it's funny that Europe pushing for side-loading could potentially help with by-passing sanctions.

No doubt Linux, OpenOffice, and RISC-V will be of tremendous help to Putin's Russia.

> on the other hand, keeps seniors' iPhones from crapware

The crapware they install is from the official app store, not "sideloaded" apps.

Apple had a choice to NOT have a restrictive policy on not allowing app sideloading. It wouldn't be an issue for users if they could just download the app themselves.

This way Apple could comply with sanctions, removing the app from the AppStore, and not causing their users any real harm.

This would also allow users in China to use messaging apps like Signal.

Linux on laptop works really well on older devices in particular. Zero problems so far with Mint on old Thinkpad.

Got a 12th gen LG gram, literally everything just works out of the box with Fedora. Old hardware not necessary for Linux.

Arch on a 5000 series AMD 2in1. Even the pen works.

Macs just have different annoyances. Ever since the notarization crap was added, programs randomly either start instantly or take several second. For some reason this randomness is even more infuriating to me than being constantly slow. Another probably unrelated thing: It takes up to 10 seconds on my new M1 Mac for the first debug session to start in Xcode. Of course this is not the sort of evil malware the article is about, but for me as a user it's just as frustrating to wait for anything on a 21st century computer. An M1 Mac is so fast compared to a 30 years old computer that everything should always happen instantly.

All in all I like my Mac better than my Windows PC or Linux laptop, but Apple software is just regressing a bit slower than the others.

While I broadly agree that modern Macs "have other annoyances", if this is the one causing you grief, you can get rid of it in 30 seconds.

`sudo spctl --master-disable`

Turning off Gatekeeper also turns off the notarization checks.

I have a running theory about software developers: the average programmer makes code just fast enough that it doesn’t feel slow on their own machine.

Of course, us software engineers usually buy very expensive computers! The end result is that the average software will always run slowly on the average hardware, forever, no matter how fast hardware gets.

It’s a tragedy and I hate it. I feel like software engineers need “slow CPU thursdays” or something, where every Thursday your cpu is intentionally throttled down to run at the speed of a below average user’s computer. If we don’t feel our user’s pain, we will never understand it.

(Though this would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow. Hm! I wonder how you’d implement that!)

> would only take off if we could whitelist the compiler somehow

Well, a slow compiler means you write less code and pull in fewer dependencies to solve a problem, win-win ;)

From a development point of view, you may have a point, though mechanisms to circumvent this are addressed in this thread. But for the typical user, or indeed other 'Pros', these are not showstoppers. Since the topic of the whole thread is about poor performance generally for typical users, I think your (valid) concers are somewhat moot. What is distressing is that in order to get something that is easy to self-manage, Apple is the only choice. Microsoft try to be all things to all people, and linux is still too complex for the majority of everyday users to manage. The closest is Ubuntu, which is often treated with distain by the vocal OSS purists.

Mac also comes with all sort of crap installed you cannot get rid of. It may be a bit less intrusive than Microsoft, but it's basically the same strategy, just that they control the hardware and you don't notice it that much.

Linux gives you full customizability on the other hand, but it's not for everybody (yes, in theory there are some very simple and usable distros, but in practice users often need software that is not available on them, like Office).

At least a modern Mac is smooth and usable out of the box - which is more than I can say for just about any big brand windows laptop you can buy today.

It feels like theft when a windows laptop is advertised based on its CPU, except when you take it out of the box 60% of that cpu is consumed all the time with some terrible HP bloatware or something. What an utterly terrible experience.

What crap that you can’t get rid of does a Mac come with?

Most of the preinstalled apps (Home, Maps, Siri, Stocks, ...) cannot be uninstalled by dragging them from the Applications folder to the Trashcan. I don't have any use for any for those apps, so I would really like to get rid of them instead of cluttering up my Applications folder.

For some others it works (for instance Numbers and GarageBand). The randomness (why can some preinstalled apps be uninstalled, but other not) is pretty close to a dark pattern.

I don't think you can uninstall Cortana or Calculator from Windows. The stocks app I will grant is a little weird.

The uninstallable apps on macOS also are never required to have open and running. So yea, it's 4 or 5 extra items in your main ~/Applications folder, but that seems like a small price to pay for all of the other benefits.

I see. Agree you should be able to delete those, but even if you don't use them, they're a far cry from "crap" especially in the context of the discussion about exploitative bloatware that runs constantly and makes low-end laptops unusable.

None of the extra Apple apps do anything unless you run them, so the worst case they take some storage and mental space (when you see them in your Applications folder). And they're obviously included because Apple thinks they're actually useful to enough people, even if you disagree.

Yea, I can't think of anything off the top of my head that cannot be uninstalled. Perhaps iMessages/Facetime. Maybe they are referencing the fully populated Dock? Those apps can all be uninstalled though. It's not different than Windows or Linux showing you the default apps that come with the OS.

The music app

What's wrong with LibreOffice?

My Macbook spends first 10 minutes after boot by trashing CPU and disk with some sketchy mds_stores process. I have no idea what it does it do. Every single time. Looks like some kind of indexing for me which I didn't ask for (and I tried to turn related options off which didn't help al all).

Spotlight indexing (for Spotlight search: ⌘+Space). In System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, you can add folders or disks to prevent Spotlight from indexing them.

I turned it off, it did not help. It still starts on boot and spends minutes indexing who knows what. I never use this Spotlight feature. I guess it looks for forbidden files on my disk, I heard that Apple does that and you need CPU to compute hashes.

I'd get that checked out. It's definitely not normal behaviour.

FWIW my very expensive 2017 iMac has the same behavior. CPU pegged 24/7 by "mds" and "mdworker_shared". Just opening Activity Manager right now, I see about 20 mdworker_shared processes, each claiming ~11% CPU. I think disabling Spotlight get this under control, but then again, I like and use Spotlight. Surely Apple is capable of writing software that doesn't need to run full blast constantly.

Just checked mine - 13" MPB 2018 - just booted no mds, mdworker_shared initially at 1.7% cpu now process has exited.

Yea, trust me, it's annoying. I have no idea why it's happening, and web searches and stack overflow have not been particularly helpful. I have resigned myself to just living with a warmer room and having my mac's fans running constantly. This problem has been going on for years, and it's obviously not on Apple's Radar (pun intended).

Lol! If you live near a store, take it in. I’ve had lots of good experiences with Apple stores and soft/hardware issues. The ‘geniuses’ can be a a bit full of themselves, but all in all outcomes are good.

Apple has service centers everywhere. Go have them look at it.

I’ve gotten probably $10k worth of repairs for free across my apple devices. I’ve even purchased broken apple devices in warranty to walk them to the Apple Store to walk out with new hardware.

Obviously it's a software issue and has nothing to do with hardware. Why would I waste my time and risk my laptop being damaged by incompetent workers. I have had enough bad interactions with service center to not visit them unless absolutely necessary.

mds_stores = spotlight. It's a macOS thing, can't be "fixed" on a store.

I hate to say it, but this is the correct answer. iPhone's are great as well. I used to not understand why people loved Apple so much.

Now I understand that Apple just works when Windows/Android often don't, and iOS/MacOS are generally more user-friendly for non-tech people.

Except that in cases where Apple devices don't just work you are screwed. A few years back a friend of mine had her MacBook Air's system language suddenly change and wasn't able to change it back as the option panel to do so just froze each time. I had to do an extensive Google search as most answers I found were generic variations of "bring it to an Apple shop" or "reinstall and use a backup" (which we did, didn't fix the issue). In the end I had to edit some config file to switch the language back. Safari's language was still wrong afterwards, but she could live with that.

That does suck, but one of Apple’s strengths is that you can walk into an Apple Store and have stuff like that fixed- usually quickly and often for free.

You must not use macOS a lot if you think it doesn't get in the way.

Every single workday for over a decade. Mac is never the issue. The butterfly keyboards were a disaster but I got those replaced with overnight shipping both ways.

Well, good for you. Not my experience. Last thing that bit me, in a long list of annoyances and bugs: https://www.reddit.com/r/macbook/comments/ehcjya/comment/fcm...

As for hardware failures, again, good for you. Here it's more like 3-4 days before getting it fixed or replaced.

Linux hasn’t gotten in the way of my work at all. When did you last use it?

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?

In my environment, more and more people are switching from $BRANDXYZ to Apple (or Linux). To me, it doesn't look like the market is failing, rather the opposite. But of course, this is not a Representatione evaluation.

The problem is, however, that not everyone wants to or can afford this.

It comes down to incentives. No one on the supply side is incentivized to make a product the average consumer WANTS. They are incentivized to make something that the consumer will wind up BUYING. And all of their incentives are extremely short-term, from the CEO on down, and UP, to the shareholders. All we care about is stock price. That's it. Everything, inside and out, tracks back to the singular god of share price. You can say that the trade press cares about something else, but, no, they don't. If internal metrics are making middle managers hit their KPI's, then that tracks with share price, no matter how screwed up those KPI's are. It's all just so perverse and incestuous.

One of the reasons is the value assigned to spyware/crapware subsidises the cost of the physical product and increases over time in a race to the bottom. It's especially clear on items that the market suggests you need to upgrade every couple of years to keep them competitively priced, but even long cycle items like laptops and tvs are suffering from it.

To start with it looks like you're getting a discount from one manufacturer, but you can spend more for a clean slate, then they all abandon the clean slate models and you can't even buy control.

Can you even buy an everyday consumer Windows laptop from without crap on it these days?

The market is still concentrating wealth into a few select hands, so it is not failing.

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?

It didn't. There are Apple stores all around the world, full of people ready to help seniors in person or over the phone, on a really nice computer.

>Why are all consumer grade electronics running closed sourced questionable code that you cannot alter?

Hmmmm

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?

Because the market is too free, and needs some additional,heavy and very restrictive regulation.

I hope the EU will do something in this sense, sooner or later.

"Let the market decide" doesn't work, that's the gist of it. It's only capitalist-idealists that still believe that.

I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation. Since websites didn't self-regulate when it came to tracking people, legislation came in to make them do so, making everything worse for everyone because then instead of removing the trackers, corporations decided to apply dark and annoyance patterns to make people just hit the easy accept button.

Even self-regulation doesn't work. A decade ago, MOST of the smartphone manufacturers self-regulated and settled on using micro-USB for charging. Apple refused to cooperate, so now legislation came in.

> I mean it CAN work, but only with government / legal oversight or self-regulation.

If NSA / CIA types don't have access to the Intel Management Engine backdoor, I will eat my own mouth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine

Thanks, government oversight.

So, funnily enough, there's a secret ME disable that Intel made specifically because someone at the CIA or NSA got cold feet about the whole "secondary boot-up processor that can pwn the main processor cores" thing.

It is telling that the feds are unwilling to eat their own cooking.

Although "disable" is not the same as "remove" it is better than nothing.

https://www.ptsecurity.com/ww-en/analytics/disabling-intel-m...

I don't even think it's the Fed's cooking. Large enterprises were asking for a way to detect, wipe, and reset a compromised machine, remotely, while the compromised OS was still running. Intel ME was their solution to this.

If it was not intended as a universal backdoor I think there would be some way for the hardware's owner to disable it or buy hardware without the baked-in backdoor.

> Question: why does the market fail so miserably in this respect?

The most common type of market failure is monopoly/oligopoly: you can choose Microsoft or Apple. They have a suffocating grip on OEMs, making it very difficult to develop alternatives.

The real question is: Why is human society tolerating oligopolies on software, CPUs and hardware in general?

It seems that at a scale that matters with high technology, there is no 'human society', only empires and corporations.

Downvoted for saying this. HN is becoming a hybrid of 4chan and linkedin.

The market isn't failing, it's just that the subset of users that care about such things but aren't just switching to linux dwarfs the number of people who don't care about this at all. There is no incentive for companies to cater to the wishes of this minority.

As the meme goes, "that just sounds like a market failure with extra steps".

There's also a group (maybe the largest group?) that might care if they knew what the benefits are. Alas, free software doesn't have a lot of money to spend on marketing.

easy: the market is far from infallible.

Because you cannot just sell hardware anymore. There is no MRR from that and investors expect their quarterly returns. It's that simple.

Runaway capitalism has fucked the promotion of the interests of consumers.

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