10 ms·

One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on d

One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on developers. Good quality hardware married with a great OS / window manager. Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps, a thin layer of native code to run a bunch of javascript. The main notable exception is XCode, but the ecosystem of non-ios/apple developers is far larger. Wish someone would do this. I'd pre-order tomorrow.

rapsey 5y ago
Insurpassable barrier to entry. Not a chance.
- Jyaif 5y ago
  What are you talking about? Any large tech company could pull that off. The problem is those large companies are not interested in catering to a million developers, they are interested in catering to a billion people.
  - rapsey 5y ago
    Remember windows phone?
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      I do. I remember Microsoft stores too. They went 20% of the way and stopped, and decided that extracting rent from Office and Azure was all the work they wanted to do, rather than continue investing in hardware and in person support. Same with Google and their devices, except they did not even bother with in person support.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        >They went 20% of the way and stopped For how much more would you siphon money into basically empty stores, to see it as having gone "100%" of the way?
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Depends if I wanted to compete with Apple or not. I would have spent whatever it took. The board members at these companies obviously decided that cash now was more important than competing with Apple.
        coldtea 5y ago
        Maybe because they understand the sunk cost fallacy :-)
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        A sunk cost fallacy is only applicable if the assumption is the venture would result in failure. Which is even more damning of Microsoft / Google management.
        coldtea 5y ago
        >A sunk cost fallacy is only applicable if the assumption is the venture would result in failure. The sunk cost fallacy is not really about what the venture would actually do. One could be said to have fallen prey to it even if they double down and the venture eventually succeeds. What's important is that at the time of the decision (a) the path doesn't seem to be working, and (b) they think "but I've spend too much to quit now". This is more likely when one assumes it can still has a chance to succeed, than if they assume it will inevitably result in failure. Nobody that assumes inevitable failure would decide to continue.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I did not feel it needed to be specified since it is a trivial fact that nothing in life is certain. But Apple's product offering is a top to bottom customer experience involving in person help at stores around the country. Microsoft must have acknowledged that, since they went as far as opening stores and coming out with that line of non malware Windows products (as a side note, it is ridiculous that Microsoft even let their ecosystem get to that point). Which, yes, they might have had empty stores, but that is because they failed to continue investing in their mobile products, or even non mobile products. They would have had empty stores for 10+ years while they slowly build it all up, just like Apple had to. All I know is at this point Microsoft had two options: continue investing into creating an alternative to Apple, or cancel their plans and sit back and let the Office/Azure revenue flow in. Maybe it was a long shot, maybe they decided the size of Apple's customer base divided by two was not enough to satiate them, but whatever the case, they signaled that they do not have the talent/gumption/appetite for risk to pull it off. But if any company did have the opportunity to go for it, I would think Microsoft (and Google) with their income stream would have been in position to do it. Both companies seem to dip their toes, but never follow through.
    - Jyaif 5y ago
      Yeah. No apps = no success. A developer-focused computer would obviously run Linux, so you'd have a large ecosystem right from the start.
      - rapsey 5y ago
        Yet linux desktop is still where it has always been. A place for nerds who like to tinker.
    - realusername 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure it could have worked, their phones were getting traction in Europe, if they did not do the big framework screwup which destroyed their developer base, it would have worked.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      It could've succeeded if they didn't reset the app ecosystem twice (they already didn't have many apps, but the resets definitely didn't help).
    - WesleyJohnson 5y ago
      I loved the UI and the phone offerings from Nokia. I wish they would resurrect it - and I'm a dedicated MacOS/iOS user.
    - pixelgeek 5y ago
      As a Mac guy I thought that the Windows Phone wasn't a bad device. My buddy had one and it had all sorts of great features but they all worked within the Windows/x-Box universe he was in. I would have liked to see it succeed if only for there to be more competition. It also had a great 'copy and paste' feature
      - rapsey 5y ago
        Yep the phones were actually in terms of OS and hardware equal or better than iOS/Android. However even back then, the app ecosystem hurdle was already insurmountable.
      - foxpurple 5y ago
        This just proves it’s even harder. Even if by some insane luck you manage to build something that is very good, the general public still doesn’t want it.
        MonaroVXR 5y ago
        >Even if by some insane luck you manage to build something that is very good, the general public still doesn’t want it. This hits hard
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >Any large tech company could pull that off. The prerequisite of being a "large tech company" to pull it off is already a huge barrier to entry.
- ajsharp 5y ago
  What about the barrier to entry is insurpassable? Apple hardware in about a decade went from being something every developer I know raved about and loved to being something everyone complains about and is generally unhappy about. Apple went from being a computer company to a consumer electronics company. The more they expand into other consumer verticals (tablets, headphones, CARS), the more the computer products suffer.
  - rapsey 5y ago
    Yet their computers are still massively popular with developers. As for the barrier, it is in the software and app ecosystem.
    - ajsharp 5y ago
      I'd argue they're popular because no better alternative has been created (yet). My point with the software is that most software people use to create software/apps is increasingly created with web technologies / electron apps, so the native app ecosystem on a desktop machine is increasingly weakening as a moat.
      - qsort 5y ago
        I'd say the #1 reason is that most developers (myself included) want the intersection of: - Unix-like, developing on Windows is pure torture - Don't waste my time with configurations, drivers and other crap, I want a machine that I can be productive with out of the box. Take my money if you have to, but I don't want to edit Xorg.conf ever again. You can talk about polish all day, but no machine that doesn't satisfy both is even close to appealing for a majority of developers in my experience. You are right about the native app ecosystem being less of a blocker, but that's in line with my point.
dotancohen 5y ago
Put Kubuntu on any modern Dell desktop or Thinkpad laptop. In 95% of the cases enjoy total hardware compatibility right out of the box, and a UI that will pass for "The next Windows" for most people whose needs do not exceed browsing the internet and Facebook properties. If they need a photo manager, in my experience the most common application need after a web browser, then Digikam really cannot be beat.
- nobleach 5y ago
  While hardware may work, there are so many niceties people will have to learn to deal with. Plugging in an external monitor may or may not work. Audio may or may not switch like folks are used to. (Try telling someone to launch alsa mixer) Want to use bluetooth? It might work. If it doesn't, you're going to be messing with things deeper than a "Facebook/Internet user" wants to deal with. I am a full time Linux user. And I'll probably support anyone who wants to try it until the day I die. I absolutely love it. But we still can't enjoy some of the simplest use cases without screwing around with configs and in some cases, writing scripts that listen to DBus or udev.... So every time I hear someone say, "just use Linux" I think... nah, just buy a Chromebook (and - yeah, use Linux). If your needs are any more than that, Linux might not be for you.
  - mojzu 5y ago
    Reasons like these are why I switched to using virtualised Linux for most of my development, trying to run it natively on hardware works great 95%+ of the time, but that last 5% is usually tricky to fix without delving into years old mailing lists. And even if you can get things working, there's still often serious quality of life problems like the bluetooth stack randomly failing 5+ times a day
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Plugging in an external monitor may or may not work Sadly, this is now true for Macs as well. Were by "not work" I mean: not finding/not supporting the proper resolution and/or refresh rate for the display.
burlesona 5y ago
Software ecosystems have a major chicken and egg problem. If you wanted to create a new platform, your best option would be to go the other way and make an OS that was “just electron” and ran all the electron apps in the world faster and better than anything else. Unsurprisingly Google has tried this with Chromebooks, but their track record on consumer product development is so poor that perhaps they just didn’t execute well and someone else could pull it off. Another challenge is that if you did that you gain wide software compatibility but you lose any obvious differentiator. The likely way to win would be if you could make a laptop that was “just as good at running web apps as your Mac, with just as much battery life and just as nice hardware” but somehow cost under $400 or so. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if we see that coming out of Chinese OEMs in the next decade.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  > but somehow cost under $400 or so. Screens are the most expensive things on a laptop, mobile and tablet. So you are not going to get a good screen
  - burlesona 5y ago
    That would be the trick. Perhaps a screen manufacturer will realize they could make better margin if they built just enough “netbook” around the screen to sell it as a computer, or perhaps screens will just get cheaper until at some point a “good enough” netbook screen is very cheap.
Closi 5y ago
If by "biggest opportunity" you mean "biggest opportunity to lose all your money and chase a pipe-dream" then I agree :) 'Next/Apple' isn't a quick playbook - it's an over 30 year R&D effort to create a hugely complex software and hardware business, and it spent about $100 billion in R&D to get its products where they are today (at the absolute cutting edge of technology). Writing your own modern OS and building/manufacturing good hardware to compete with this is difficult enough, and then you have the even bigger challenge of getting all the major software vendors to support your new platform.
- ajsharp 5y ago
  Didn't say it would be quick. Sure, it was a long cycle for them, but the ecosystem is much further along now. I think it's to bring to market in the hundreds of millions.
- rsync 5y ago
  "'Next/Apple' isn't a quick playbook - it's an over 30 year R&D effort to create a hugely complex software and hardware business, and it spent about $100 billion in R&D to get its products where they are today ..." But isn't this much, much easier if you just piggyback on the Apple hardware ? I always expected this to happen. Circa 2008 or 2009 I thought that any day now there would be a linux distribution built specifically foe one single Apple laptop. No hardware issues, no gremlins, no moving targets - you would have a (very) fixed hardware target and optimize just for that. Then I, as a user, could just go to the Apple store and buy a nice shiny device and install MBAlinux on it and call it a day. I really don't understand why this never happened. Further, in many ways it seems that the opposite of this happened - installing linux/FreeBSD is weirdly painful on Apple laptops which is unexpected since we all know what is inside of them and the installed base is huge. So I would suggest that you could, indeed, build a hardware/software ecosystem - just let Apple build the hardware part ...
  - Closi 5y ago
    > But isn't this much, much easier if you just piggyback on the Apple hardware ? Sure, it's easier, but then I'm not sure what the point is or what makes it one of the biggest opportunities of our time. I also understand why it never happened - there is already a unix-based OS which is designed with perfect compatibility with the Apple Hardware called OSX! I'm not sure what the advantage to a consumer would be for replacing OSX with linux - other than the fact that it gives consumers choice - but of course providing a distro that only operates on a specific Mac is then limiting hardware choice so it doesn't really solve that in some respects. And if it's just for developers, then wouldn't developers want some choice of hardware, good support for tooling, the ability to test native apps without virtualisation e.t.c. IMO I suspect the Venn-diagram of developers who: * want a Mac but don't want OSX * don't mind that they can't upgrade their hardware * are willing to run some totally-new operating system * Accept that it will initially lack the support of the runtimes they use, and some software, and won't be able to develop certain types of software because of this. * Accept that if they wish to continue using the OS for their next laptop they will be fully locked-in to a single hardware model. is pretty vanishingly small.
runako 5y ago
> focused on developers The problem with this is which developers? People who write embedded systems? Web developers? People who write custom Windows applications? Any given developer subset is likely to find this hypothetical new developer computer to be either too complex to use or not differentiated enough from Windows or MacOs (or ChromeOS). > Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps This is not true for most people whose primary employment is writing software, or working on software teams. Most people who get paid to write code work primarily in either the Java or .NET ecosystems and use something like Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Visual Studio. (Many more are using niche-specific tools in a captive platform like Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, etc.) If the new platform doesn't have 100.0% binary compatibility with legacy tools written for Windows and/or MacOS, its addressable market shrinks substantially.
- ajsharp 5y ago
  Agree to disagree. Java is inherently cross platform. Jetbrains stuff runs on any linux platform, as does vscode and any of the modern development workflow stuff. The development stack is steadily moving away from native apps. Vscode is essentially a webapp, and indeed it can run be run as one.
  - runako 5y ago
    Fair enough about Jetbrains! VSCode is not the entire stack needed to build Windows desktop applications. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of developers who build applications for the Windows desktop. I'm not (for the most part) a .NET dev, but my current understanding is that only Visual Studio running on Windows is a first-class citizen with the ability to access all parts of the dev stack. The Windows dev stack doesn't need to move away from native Windows applications any more than does Xcode need to move away from MacOS.
- kitsunesoba 5y ago
  I would also argue that focusing on developers too much is actually a loss for users. Developer productivity above all is how we've ended up with resource hogs like Chrome and Electron as well as never-ending erosion of customizability in software as well as the user's level of control and privacy. It's critical to have a great developer story yes, but to make a stellar platform that needs to be balanced with a great user story, and that means developers might not always get everything they want down to the letter.
coldtea 5y ago
>One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on developers. Why would that be an opportunity though? It would be a low margin niche, with a small market segment, of which most would stick with Apple/Lenovo/Dell.
- ajsharp 5y ago
  Software developers are a large and massively growing market segment. That's not niche.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    There a tiny slither of the global population, which in no ways constitutes "One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now".
    - ajsharp 5y ago
      Lol. Ok. You're right. Congratulations! How's it feel?
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    And only a tiny fraction of them would care. I’m quite happy with my iPhone and don’t want a random HN freedom phone. I don’t ever even intend to develop something for my phone and if I did, I would want to target android and iOS.
linguae 5y ago
Have you looked into Purism (https://puri.sm https://puri.sm)? Purism makes its own hardware such as the Librem line of smartphones and laptops, and maintains its own Linux distribution called PureOS. Purism also funds the development of apps (https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/ https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/).
- ajsharp 5y ago
  Had not seen this. Thanks for sharing.
- elliekelly 5y ago
  > The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS, a fully free, ethical and open-source operating system that is not based on Android or iOS. And physical hardware kill switches? This almost seems too good to be true.
  - ThatGeoGuy 5y ago
    The physical kill switches work as described, but yes, the phone is "too good to be true." It will not (yet) replace your iPhone, although you can get pretty far on your own if you don't mind SSHing into such a device and messing with stuff on your own.
  - foxpurple 5y ago
    The catch is it costs more then an iPhone, gets about 2 hours battery even if the screen is off, and has a cpu slower than a $50 android.
jrsj 5y ago
Fuchsia is really the only new OS under development that I’m aware of. And it’s not even clear if Google intends to ship it outside of niche embedded use cases like Nest products etc
sneak 5y ago
Developers unhappy with Windows, Mac, and Linux is not a very big market. Most developers I know are happy with their mac or windows spyware, or their rough edges linux rig.
ur-whale 5y ago
> Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps, a thin layer of native code to run a bunch of javascript. I'd be interested to know what "we" means in this sentence. Do you mean your team? Or developers in general? If the latter, I am not sure what industry you work in, but I very much doubt the majority of developers operate in the environment you describe.
dev_tty01 5y ago
>One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on developers. If it was focused on developers, it would by definition not be re-running the Apple playbook. Developers are much too small a market to justify that level of investment.
a-dub 5y ago
i think a lot about this, these days, to be honest. re-run the next/apple playbook? no. build an integrated hardware and software company that fixes personal computing through ground up rebuilds of everything from processors to operating systems and programming languages to solve the annoyances of security, privacy, software bloat and the generally humdrum nature of new technologies being shipped these days? maybe. it would be amazing to build systems that are are so beautiful that they inspire people like berners-lee and carmack to do their things.

rapsey 5y ago

Insurpassable barrier to entry. Not a chance.

Jyaif 5y ago
What are you talking about? Any large tech company could pull that off. The problem is those large companies are not interested in catering to a million developers, they are interested in catering to a billion people.
- rapsey 5y ago
  Remember windows phone?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    I do. I remember Microsoft stores too. They went 20% of the way and stopped, and decided that extracting rent from Office and Azure was all the work they wanted to do, rather than continue investing in hardware and in person support. Same with Google and their devices, except they did not even bother with in person support.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >They went 20% of the way and stopped For how much more would you siphon money into basically empty stores, to see it as having gone "100%" of the way?
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        Depends if I wanted to compete with Apple or not. I would have spent whatever it took. The board members at these companies obviously decided that cash now was more important than competing with Apple.
        coldtea 5y ago
        Maybe because they understand the sunk cost fallacy :-)
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        A sunk cost fallacy is only applicable if the assumption is the venture would result in failure. Which is even more damning of Microsoft / Google management.
        coldtea 5y ago
        >A sunk cost fallacy is only applicable if the assumption is the venture would result in failure. The sunk cost fallacy is not really about what the venture would actually do. One could be said to have fallen prey to it even if they double down and the venture eventually succeeds. What's important is that at the time of the decision (a) the path doesn't seem to be working, and (b) they think "but I've spend too much to quit now". This is more likely when one assumes it can still has a chance to succeed, than if they assume it will inevitably result in failure. Nobody that assumes inevitable failure would decide to continue.
        lotsofpulp 5y ago
        I did not feel it needed to be specified since it is a trivial fact that nothing in life is certain. But Apple's product offering is a top to bottom customer experience involving in person help at stores around the country. Microsoft must have acknowledged that, since they went as far as opening stores and coming out with that line of non malware Windows products (as a side note, it is ridiculous that Microsoft even let their ecosystem get to that point). Which, yes, they might have had empty stores, but that is because they failed to continue investing in their mobile products, or even non mobile products. They would have had empty stores for 10+ years while they slowly build it all up, just like Apple had to. All I know is at this point Microsoft had two options: continue investing into creating an alternative to Apple, or cancel their plans and sit back and let the Office/Azure revenue flow in. Maybe it was a long shot, maybe they decided the size of Apple's customer base divided by two was not enough to satiate them, but whatever the case, they signaled that they do not have the talent/gumption/appetite for risk to pull it off. But if any company did have the opportunity to go for it, I would think Microsoft (and Google) with their income stream would have been in position to do it. Both companies seem to dip their toes, but never follow through.
  - Jyaif 5y ago
    Yeah. No apps = no success. A developer-focused computer would obviously run Linux, so you'd have a large ecosystem right from the start.
    - rapsey 5y ago
      Yet linux desktop is still where it has always been. A place for nerds who like to tinker.
  - realusername 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure it could have worked, their phones were getting traction in Europe, if they did not do the big framework screwup which destroyed their developer base, it would have worked.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    It could've succeeded if they didn't reset the app ecosystem twice (they already didn't have many apps, but the resets definitely didn't help).
  - WesleyJohnson 5y ago
    I loved the UI and the phone offerings from Nokia. I wish they would resurrect it - and I'm a dedicated MacOS/iOS user.
  - pixelgeek 5y ago
    As a Mac guy I thought that the Windows Phone wasn't a bad device. My buddy had one and it had all sorts of great features but they all worked within the Windows/x-Box universe he was in. I would have liked to see it succeed if only for there to be more competition. It also had a great 'copy and paste' feature
    - rapsey 5y ago
      Yep the phones were actually in terms of OS and hardware equal or better than iOS/Android. However even back then, the app ecosystem hurdle was already insurmountable.
    - foxpurple 5y ago
      This just proves it’s even harder. Even if by some insane luck you manage to build something that is very good, the general public still doesn’t want it.
      - MonaroVXR 5y ago
        >Even if by some insane luck you manage to build something that is very good, the general public still doesn’t want it. This hits hard
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Any large tech company could pull that off. The prerequisite of being a "large tech company" to pull it off is already a huge barrier to entry.
ajsharp 5y ago
What about the barrier to entry is insurpassable? Apple hardware in about a decade went from being something every developer I know raved about and loved to being something everyone complains about and is generally unhappy about. Apple went from being a computer company to a consumer electronics company. The more they expand into other consumer verticals (tablets, headphones, CARS), the more the computer products suffer.
- rapsey 5y ago
  Yet their computers are still massively popular with developers. As for the barrier, it is in the software and app ecosystem.
  - ajsharp 5y ago
    I'd argue they're popular because no better alternative has been created (yet). My point with the software is that most software people use to create software/apps is increasingly created with web technologies / electron apps, so the native app ecosystem on a desktop machine is increasingly weakening as a moat.
    - qsort 5y ago
      I'd say the #1 reason is that most developers (myself included) want the intersection of: - Unix-like, developing on Windows is pure torture - Don't waste my time with configurations, drivers and other crap, I want a machine that I can be productive with out of the box. Take my money if you have to, but I don't want to edit Xorg.conf ever again. You can talk about polish all day, but no machine that doesn't satisfy both is even close to appealing for a majority of developers in my experience. You are right about the native app ecosystem being less of a blocker, but that's in line with my point.

dotancohen 5y ago

Put Kubuntu on any modern Dell desktop or Thinkpad laptop. In 95% of the cases enjoy total hardware compatibility right out of the box, and a UI that will pass for "The next Windows" for most people whose needs do not exceed browsing the internet and Facebook properties. If they need a photo manager, in my experience the most common application need after a web browser, then Digikam really cannot be beat.

nobleach 5y ago
While hardware may work, there are so many niceties people will have to learn to deal with. Plugging in an external monitor may or may not work. Audio may or may not switch like folks are used to. (Try telling someone to launch alsa mixer) Want to use bluetooth? It might work. If it doesn't, you're going to be messing with things deeper than a "Facebook/Internet user" wants to deal with. I am a full time Linux user. And I'll probably support anyone who wants to try it until the day I die. I absolutely love it. But we still can't enjoy some of the simplest use cases without screwing around with configs and in some cases, writing scripts that listen to DBus or udev.... So every time I hear someone say, "just use Linux" I think... nah, just buy a Chromebook (and - yeah, use Linux). If your needs are any more than that, Linux might not be for you.
- mojzu 5y ago
  Reasons like these are why I switched to using virtualised Linux for most of my development, trying to run it natively on hardware works great 95%+ of the time, but that last 5% is usually tricky to fix without delving into years old mailing lists. And even if you can get things working, there's still often serious quality of life problems like the bluetooth stack randomly failing 5+ times a day
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > Plugging in an external monitor may or may not work Sadly, this is now true for Macs as well. Were by "not work" I mean: not finding/not supporting the proper resolution and/or refresh rate for the display.

burlesona 5y ago

Software ecosystems have a major chicken and egg problem. If you wanted to create a new platform, your best option would be to go the other way and make an OS that was “just electron” and ran all the electron apps in the world faster and better than anything else. Unsurprisingly Google has tried this with Chromebooks, but their track record on consumer product development is so poor that perhaps they just didn’t execute well and someone else could pull it off. Another challenge is that if you did that you gain wide software compatibility but you lose any obvious differentiator. The likely way to win would be if you could make a laptop that was “just as good at running web apps as your Mac, with just as much battery life and just as nice hardware” but somehow cost under $400 or so. I actually wouldn’t be surprised if we see that coming out of Chinese OEMs in the next decade.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
> but somehow cost under $400 or so. Screens are the most expensive things on a laptop, mobile and tablet. So you are not going to get a good screen
- burlesona 5y ago
  That would be the trick. Perhaps a screen manufacturer will realize they could make better margin if they built just enough “netbook” around the screen to sell it as a computer, or perhaps screens will just get cheaper until at some point a “good enough” netbook screen is very cheap.

Closi 5y ago

If by "biggest opportunity" you mean "biggest opportunity to lose all your money and chase a pipe-dream" then I agree :) 'Next/Apple' isn't a quick playbook - it's an over 30 year R&D effort to create a hugely complex software and hardware business, and it spent about $100 billion in R&D to get its products where they are today (at the absolute cutting edge of technology). Writing your own modern OS and building/manufacturing good hardware to compete with this is difficult enough, and then you have the even bigger challenge of getting all the major software vendors to support your new platform.

ajsharp 5y ago
Didn't say it would be quick. Sure, it was a long cycle for them, but the ecosystem is much further along now. I think it's to bring to market in the hundreds of millions.
rsync 5y ago
"'Next/Apple' isn't a quick playbook - it's an over 30 year R&D effort to create a hugely complex software and hardware business, and it spent about $100 billion in R&D to get its products where they are today ..." But isn't this much, much easier if you just piggyback on the Apple hardware ? I always expected this to happen. Circa 2008 or 2009 I thought that any day now there would be a linux distribution built specifically foe one single Apple laptop. No hardware issues, no gremlins, no moving targets - you would have a (very) fixed hardware target and optimize just for that. Then I, as a user, could just go to the Apple store and buy a nice shiny device and install MBAlinux on it and call it a day. I really don't understand why this never happened. Further, in many ways it seems that the opposite of this happened - installing linux/FreeBSD is weirdly painful on Apple laptops which is unexpected since we all know what is inside of them and the installed base is huge. So I would suggest that you could, indeed, build a hardware/software ecosystem - just let Apple build the hardware part ...
- Closi 5y ago
  > But isn't this much, much easier if you just piggyback on the Apple hardware ? Sure, it's easier, but then I'm not sure what the point is or what makes it one of the biggest opportunities of our time. I also understand why it never happened - there is already a unix-based OS which is designed with perfect compatibility with the Apple Hardware called OSX! I'm not sure what the advantage to a consumer would be for replacing OSX with linux - other than the fact that it gives consumers choice - but of course providing a distro that only operates on a specific Mac is then limiting hardware choice so it doesn't really solve that in some respects. And if it's just for developers, then wouldn't developers want some choice of hardware, good support for tooling, the ability to test native apps without virtualisation e.t.c. IMO I suspect the Venn-diagram of developers who: * want a Mac but don't want OSX * don't mind that they can't upgrade their hardware * are willing to run some totally-new operating system * Accept that it will initially lack the support of the runtimes they use, and some software, and won't be able to develop certain types of software because of this. * Accept that if they wish to continue using the OS for their next laptop they will be fully locked-in to a single hardware model. is pretty vanishingly small.

runako 5y ago

> focused on developers The problem with this is which developers? People who write embedded systems? Web developers? People who write custom Windows applications? Any given developer subset is likely to find this hypothetical new developer computer to be either too complex to use or not differentiated enough from Windows or MacOs (or ChromeOS). > Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps This is not true for most people whose primary employment is writing software, or working on software teams. Most people who get paid to write code work primarily in either the Java or .NET ecosystems and use something like Eclipse, IntelliJ, or Visual Studio. (Many more are using niche-specific tools in a captive platform like Oracle, SalesForce, SAP, etc.) If the new platform doesn't have 100.0% binary compatibility with legacy tools written for Windows and/or MacOS, its addressable market shrinks substantially.

ajsharp 5y ago
Agree to disagree. Java is inherently cross platform. Jetbrains stuff runs on any linux platform, as does vscode and any of the modern development workflow stuff. The development stack is steadily moving away from native apps. Vscode is essentially a webapp, and indeed it can run be run as one.
- runako 5y ago
  Fair enough about Jetbrains! VSCode is not the entire stack needed to build Windows desktop applications. There are tens or hundreds of thousands of developers who build applications for the Windows desktop. I'm not (for the most part) a .NET dev, but my current understanding is that only Visual Studio running on Windows is a first-class citizen with the ability to access all parts of the dev stack. The Windows dev stack doesn't need to move away from native Windows applications any more than does Xcode need to move away from MacOS.
kitsunesoba 5y ago
I would also argue that focusing on developers too much is actually a loss for users. Developer productivity above all is how we've ended up with resource hogs like Chrome and Electron as well as never-ending erosion of customizability in software as well as the user's level of control and privacy. It's critical to have a great developer story yes, but to make a stellar platform that needs to be balanced with a great user story, and that means developers might not always get everything they want down to the letter.

coldtea 5y ago

>One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on developers. Why would that be an opportunity though? It would be a low margin niche, with a small market segment, of which most would stick with Apple/Lenovo/Dell.

ajsharp 5y ago
Software developers are a large and massively growing market segment. That's not niche.
- coldtea 5y ago
  There a tiny slither of the global population, which in no ways constitutes "One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now".
  - ajsharp 5y ago
    Lol. Ok. You're right. Congratulations! How's it feel?
- foxpurple 5y ago
  And only a tiny fraction of them would care. I’m quite happy with my iPhone and don’t want a random HN freedom phone. I don’t ever even intend to develop something for my phone and if I did, I would want to target android and iOS.

linguae 5y ago

Have you looked into Purism (https://puri.sm https://puri.sm)? Purism makes its own hardware such as the Librem line of smartphones and laptops, and maintains its own Linux distribution called PureOS. Purism also funds the development of apps (https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/ https://puri.sm/fund-your-app/).

ajsharp 5y ago
Had not seen this. Thanks for sharing.
elliekelly 5y ago
> The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS, a fully free, ethical and open-source operating system that is not based on Android or iOS. And physical hardware kill switches? This almost seems too good to be true.
- ThatGeoGuy 5y ago
  The physical kill switches work as described, but yes, the phone is "too good to be true." It will not (yet) replace your iPhone, although you can get pretty far on your own if you don't mind SSHing into such a device and messing with stuff on your own.
- foxpurple 5y ago
  The catch is it costs more then an iPhone, gets about 2 hours battery even if the screen is off, and has a cpu slower than a $50 android.

jrsj 5y ago

Fuchsia is really the only new OS under development that I’m aware of. And it’s not even clear if Google intends to ship it outside of niche embedded use cases like Nest products etc

sneak 5y ago

Developers unhappy with Windows, Mac, and Linux is not a very big market. Most developers I know are happy with their mac or windows spyware, or their rough edges linux rig.

ur-whale 5y ago

> Most of the software we use to create software are electron apps, a thin layer of native code to run a bunch of javascript. I'd be interested to know what "we" means in this sentence. Do you mean your team? Or developers in general? If the latter, I am not sure what industry you work in, but I very much doubt the majority of developers operate in the environment you describe.

dev_tty01 5y ago

>One of the biggest opportunities in technology right now is to re-run the Next/Apple playbook and create a new hardware/software technology company focused on developers. If it was focused on developers, it would by definition not be re-running the Apple playbook. Developers are much too small a market to justify that level of investment.

a-dub 5y ago

i think a lot about this, these days, to be honest. re-run the next/apple playbook? no. build an integrated hardware and software company that fixes personal computing through ground up rebuilds of everything from processors to operating systems and programming languages to solve the annoyances of security, privacy, software bloat and the generally humdrum nature of new technologies being shipped these days? maybe. it would be amazing to build systems that are are so beautiful that they inspire people like berners-lee and carmack to do their things.