It only takes one government to make it happen (or even a state that is large enough that manufacturers will not choose to stop selling products there). If this was passed e.g. in California, that would open the access up for almost anyone in the world.

It would be practically unenforceable if CA did it, or even the US. The market in both is large, but not large enough, and it's hard to force compliance on companies from other countries.

The result would be similar to the protectionist trade policies that hamper market entry for foreign produced goods in India and some Latin American countries like Argentina. There are enough customers elsewhere whose governments wouldn't give a thought to this that non-CA/US companies would safely ignore CA/US in this case. It would only work with coordinated effort.

There are also other second order effects not considered by a policy like this.

What's the timeline and what's the company scale that this levies?

Is the documentation expected on day 1? Great, Apple and Google and Sony and others will squash all small competitors. You will never see another small (< 20) person hardware startup (not that we see them often anyways) because the cost to produce this kind of documentation is non-zero, and the big players can easily absorb it into their processes. Additionally, small players would literally be handing the design to competitors. OK, maybe patents and things like that stop some companies from being bad actors and reproducing the product in short order, but it won't stop everyone especially in countries with laxer or no enforcement of patents.

Additionally, problems would be created if designs were produced in non-compliant countries. If I start up a hardware company and make a new device, but half my components are designed in Taiwan and they've decided to explicitly reject this, am I non-compliant for not releasing documentation I don't have the authority to release? And if I'm able to become exempted because of a 3rd party component, everyone else would start shifting their design departments to contractors (if necessary) in those countries or shift a portion of their company there.

This is wrong on so many levels, but I will address this one:

> You will never see another small (< 20) person hardware startup (not that we see them often anyways) because the cost to produce this kind of documentation is non-zero, and the big players can easily absorb it into their processes.

I highly doubt that small players would be affected at all, because a small player wouldn't produce a custom chip. The level of documentation required is akin to API documentation that many services produce and this is not revealing any trade secrets, but enables customer to make full use of the device. If you create a product without any documentation, then you have bigger problems.

> If I start up a hardware company and make a new device, but half my components are designed in Taiwan and they've decided to explicitly reject this, am I non-compliant for not releasing documentation I don't have the authority to release?

This is false, because it is companies like Apple that tell component manufacturers to not sell or to not disclose documentation. Virtually any chip that you can get on an open market has complete documentation available. If you are ordering a custom chip, you shouldn't be allowed to tell manufacturer to not sell it to anyone else nor hide its documentation if it goes into your product.

If you were actually working in hardware design space you would know that what is being asked does not compromise trading secrets, it is done solely out of greed so that people are nudged towards subscription models and becoming dependent on a particular corporation.

Perhaps the courts could force component manufacturers to release the basic specs anyway, regardless of any agreement they may have with Apple. That way they would need to choose between complying and produce documentation on request, or have the component banned for use.

> It would be practically unenforceable if CA did it, or even the US. The market in both is large, but not large enough, and it's hard to force compliance on companies from other countries.

The U.S. regularly imposes plenty of requirements that are far more difficult to meet, in many industries. The U.S. is the largest market in the world for many goods; I think the parent greatly underestimates the power and practices of national governments. Smaller countries also impose requirements.

I'd contend that a requirement like this, without exemptions for small businesses, would make things worse for small businesses than big businesses and worse than the present situation. It's similar to many other legal regulatory requirements, small businesses end up bearing an outsized cost relative to their revenue.

And if you create exemptions for small businesses, the big businesses would do exactly what they always do, find loopholes to get subsidiaries/contractors to do the work and exempted and nullify the entire thing.

As nice as it would be to bring back (easier) access to system specs, it's impractical without fundamental culture changes that laws themselves don't usually produce.

I almost agree with this, except for the part where you claim that "It's not a practical requirement": this is entirely a practical requirement. People who use Macbooks gripe constantly about the viscous repair and replacement process. Apple's refusal to recover data (or even help customers recover data) is a hostile experience, whether it logistically qualifies as one or not. Customers deal with these issues, and Apple holds all the cards in their hands with the capabilities to fix them. People wouldn't care if the latest iMacs were twice as thick but could upgrade the memory and maintenance the internals. People wouldn't give the Macbook shit if it was twice as thick but had HDMI and USB A. Nobody cares about a thinner product, our current devices are about as ergonomic as they can get without sacrificing durability (if not compromising it, in Apple's case).

This is just a case of Apple being careless. We have a right to criticize the largest company in the world, if not hold them to the highest standards possible. Instead, we've let Apple off the hook because nobody wants to stand up to them and call them out on it. We're all willing to bury those experiences, as long as our next laptop can export our Photoshop projects 500ms faster.

> People wouldn't give the Macbook shit if it was twice as thick but had HDMI and USB A. Nobody cares about a thinner product, our current devices are about as ergonomic as they can get without sacrificing durability (if not compromising it, in Apple's case).

Isn't this statement a bit of a blanket? Not too long ago I purchased a laptop specifically for being tiny and lightweight (X1 Nano). Ports and expandability were an afterthought. Certainly many wouldn't mind increased thickness and bulk but there is absolutely a market for portability, at least in laptops and other mobile devices.

That said, the X1 Nano at least has removable/upgradable storage, which can't be found on heavier MacBooks, so there's absolutely an argument for adding expandability where it doesn't negatively impact portability.

>People wouldn't care if the latest iMacs were twice as thick...

I think Apple have a pretty good idea about marketing, and what sells a product and what most customers find attractive about it. The vast majority of computers sold are never upgraded, whether they can be or not and most people would never even think about it.

It's not a practical requirement in that from an enforcement perspective and economic sense (under the current commercial and economic models) it is not practical.

It is a practical requirement in the sense that it improves (potentially) the practicality of hardware systems.

Those are two distinct senses, I was writing about the former.