Computer hardware has always had the tendency to get smaller (and faster) over time. Most people would call this a good thing, and I would wholeheartedly agree with them. However, along with this tendency to shrink comes a tendency for hardware manufacturers to become more and more secretive about their gear. There isn't a single cell phone you can buy over the counter today that would allow users to install their own homebrew OS without voiding every warranty under the sun. This tendency, I think, is evil.

Contrast this with the venerable Commodore 64 I still own, which came with this excellent book. Not only is just about every nut and bolt documented from a programmer's perspective, but you also get complete schematics with your hardware.

Moving a decade ahead in time, on to a generic desktop PC much as we know it today, it gets you a much faster and more powerful piece of kit. Openness is still there too, mostly, for programmers to do whatever they want. Items like a 386 CPU and plain VGA are all fairly well-documented. Getting a blow-by-blow circuit diagram for any kind of IBM PC or clone is becoming more and more difficult as time progresses though.

Size doesn't matter

With modern laptops it gets slightly worse already. At least desktop PC's are more or less open in that they allow the end user to swap most major components. Laptops reduce this ability to a bare minimum: you can replace the hard drive, the RAM and sometimes the wireless adapter. Want to swap the CPU? Change your video chip? Network card? Tough luck.

Of course laptop manufacturers aim for small and light form factors, which motivate them to solder all manner of formerly user selectable options straight onto the main boards. I think that's a reasonable course of action. Slots and standardized connectors are bulkier than chips integrated straight onto a single board.

The only major gripe I have with laptop manufacturers is that they usually don't even bother to tell me which major components are in each of their different models. You can do all kinds of research and find yourself with a slightly different network card or a different graphics chip. Highly aggravating if you're walking the straight and very narrow path of, for example, native FreeBSD compatibility.

Let's have a look at my late Acer Extensa 5220 budget notebook. Acer catalogued it as a single, unique model. Imagine how irked I was to find a Broadcom wireless network card in there, instead of the Intel one that was supposed to be there. Intel had drivers for FreeBSD. Broadcom? Not so much. Most fortunately the wireless network card could be swapped out, setting me back 30 euro's. Not a big deal in itself but still 10% of the total purchasing price.

So please, mr. Acer, give it to me straight next time and tell me which brands, models and types of major systems components I'll get when I buy your next notebook. A complete circuit diagram would be really nice, but I'll settle for just the major bits that require OS drivers to work. For now, I'm voting with my wallet by not buying Acer again until you change your ways.

Just whose tablet is that?

Today's iPad and its slew of clones are the latest fad. They're small, limited in scope, and utterly closed off by the manufacturer. Essentially they are little more than appliances. As soon as the manufacturer deems them to be "end of life" they'll be functionally frozen in time in the exact state they were in when the manufacturer lost interest. Think a bit on that: manufacturers have quite an incentive to make your toys obsolete as soon as they can. It keeps you buying new gear.

As an interesting counter example let me show you my collection of Silicon Graphics gear. Sure, it's old hat by now but it still works. As long as specs are available, some people will make operating systems for it. The native IRIX OS has been mostly abandoned for years now but OpenBSD just keeps going and going. My cute O2 'erwin' serves really nicely as a broadband router. Heck, most consumer routers contain similar MIPS CPU's anyway. Except Erwin is not only very cool looking and vintage, but also fully programmable to my specifications, still plays a mean game of Quake and it saves a spot in a landfill somewhere.

Sadly the same can not be said for 1st gen iPads. Someone might think of a completely cool new use for it five years from now. They'll be practically free on the second hand market, which would unlock all kinds of new use cases. The difference here is that the iPad is completely welded shut. You can not change the OS, and you'll have to do very evil things to it in order to even get full access to the manufacturer's OS itself. In short: the manufacturer owns the device in perpetuity, not you.

Where do you want to go today?

Microsoft used to sell Windows 95 using a neat slogan implying a whole lot of freedom. Such a statement is ironic coming from one of the greatest proponents of closed software ecosystems in the world.

Irony aside though. When tablets and the walled garden OS'es that seem "natural" with them become the norm, which they will be as soon as there's a good enough replacement for a real keyboard on them, that will be the end of all grass roots innovation. There will be no new "Linux" in the next decade and it'll be highly doubtful that the Linux we have today will even work on such devices at all. It will be a huge blinking GAME OVER to the entire free software community.

To make a long story very short: you're not going anywhere today. Or tomorrow, for that matter.