Well, that was a bizarre turn even by the standards of Cringley's recent pieces. Throughout the piece he conflates "trust" with "trustworthiness" and ignores the branding layer altogether. For instance; users overwhelmingly trust OpenAI and Anthropic, even if neither company is particularly trustworthy. The layer of trust doesn't come from companies like 2Brains, their brand is a non-entity to consumers.

Consumers identify with big names, the majority are simply too uninterested to care about the color of their tokens. They want the Siri logo in the corner, the Gemini backend, the Alexa integrations, to hell with any of their reliability. It's a bit funny that Cringley puts ARM in the same boat as Dolby, even though ARM's architecture licenses make it clear that Apple is the Dolby of ARM. Nobody would bat an eye if the next iPhone featured an in-house ISA, modern ARM arches practically belong to Apple anyways. ARM's low-to-medium end products like STM-32 and Cortex are being eaten alive by unlicensed clones and RISC-V chipsets. For the past 2 decades, ARM's brand has been dragged through the mud compared to Apple or Nvidia's reputation for fixing ARM's ISA.

Idolizing ARM and Dolby seems like a good way to make yourself the underdog. You don't want to be begging other companies to license your tech, you want to be the best.