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Comment by wvenable | Hacker News Reader

The hardware and software, in any device, should not be so inextricably linked as to prevent the hardware from working at all without the software. Regardless of whether we are taking about iPhones, computers, cars, or farm equipment.

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But it is way too hard to cleanly separate the hardware from the software without introducing extra complexity and security issues.

How so? The iPhone is literally just a computer and the vast majority of computers are cleanly separate from their software.

That's baloney - virtually no computers these days are "cleanly separate" from their software, at least outside of tiny microcontrollers. Do you have any idea how much software executes before they even get to the point where the operating system beings to boot?

The idea that a CPU is going to come out of reset and start executing instructions that you provide at the reset vector is thirty years out of date.

Now that you mention it, I wonder what non-separable code would run on, say, a Corebooted Thinkpad running Linux with the Intel ME disabled. Surely that would be running 100% code that was not on it when it left the factory.

AFAIK, even fastidiously "liberated" core/libreboot Thinkpads like https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-t440p/ still end up using Intel's memory-reference-code for DRAM training etc.

ref. https://doc.coreboot.org/northbridge/intel/haswell/mrc.bin.h...

... plus Intel's microcode.

Is it though?

Looking at Linux and all the devices it powers (including most of the internet infrastructure) - it would seem that it is possible to do pretty good security on very open software that's as separate from the hardware as can be.

That has more to do with boundary defence than the OS itself, and those are more-often-than-not closed. The majority of infrastructure that you are alluding to is also heavily locked-down.

Now you’re saying that—I as somebody that very much appreciates the advantages my…for instance…Apple Silicon MacBook Pro has over a ThinkPad running Ubuntu—should not have the right to purchase the product I like because of your ideology dictating arbitrary restrictions over what’s on the market.

Don’t conflate user freedom with just…being salty that not every product is for you.

Remember, in the US at least, you might own the physical hardware, but you're only licensing the software.

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