Doesn't apple do most of their manufacturing in asia? I don't get your point. We certainly can't match this quality in the west.

The exceptions I see include Apple and Raspberry Pi. And even then, there are missteps.

It’s not intentional… it’s just that companies rarely have integration as one of their core strengths. If you’re a hardware company, you are good at making hardware. The skills necessary for that are very different than the skills needed for software. To get both, you need management that values both and can build the separate teams. Especially true when you can argue that you’re working with the “community” to build out software and fix bugs. If you’re still selling enough hardware, how can you say these companies are wrong?

That’s honestly a hard thing to do unless that is your competitive advantage. And for Apple and Raspberry Pi, I’d argue that is their competitive advantage in their markets. For a long time they were the small fish in big ponds. So they needed to have some trait that allowed them to command higher margins. Integration of hardware and software was it.

East Asian companies hasn't shifted into maximizing perceived values over functions. I think it just feels fake and wrong to many. Another factor that I think might exist is, it might be simply hard to inflate values and sell experiences as East Asian company entities without good connections and/or cultural understanding to sell to developed Western markets.

East Asian engineers don't share the pain points as Western audiences. People don't use webcams - less sympathies exist for the urge to see faces. People don't use Linux on laptop - Windows is normal and fine. Don't recognize annoyances as annoying as often - it's considered signs of weakness. (Not sure about Nintendo complaints - people everywhere happily pay $80 for another Mario remakes on top of $500 console. Isn't that what you're asking for?). Kids aren't as interested in ROM cooking or piracy or software freedom in general - way more interested in enforcing IP rights themselves than demanding something from IP holders.

Or, widespread "just don't give a shit because they can't compete with Asian price dumpers" could be another reason. East Asian nations each has its own internal markets with massive surplus production capacities. Western companies had progressively moved into value engineering for survival, as Swiss watch industry famously did. The costs of East Asian physical products never represented its cost in the first place, only utility in context of economy at export destinations, and that might have affected how companies at the destinations have come to be.

The O6 was better in that regard than many boards, but the bar is not very high.

There's still no incentive to do this outside of server hardware (Red Hat doesn't support rebuilds of RHEL). Why bother making a firmware stack that allows anything to boot when you can just modify the Linux kernel to work on your non-standard hardware and work around any bugs, publish an Ubuntu image that you'll only update a few times and then call it a day. Then, maybe, just maybe, support for your SBC will be upstreamed a few years later, but long after it's actually useful.

Look how messed up and fragmented Android is still, even Windows Phone had a UEFI stack that in theory could allow all Windows phones of a certain architecture to have a shared image (although I don't believe this was fully achieved).

Imagine if Windows or Fedora for x64 had to be repacked for every single motherboard/CPU combination, it'd be insane, yet somehow it's fine for ARM, what a joke it's been allowed to become. I think electronic waste regulation is going to be needed to sort it out.

There is also an open source driver for the NPU somewhere (Zhouyi NPU) and some documentation, but nothing in an upstream kernel yet. https://zhouyi-npu-tutorial.readthedocs.io/en/latest/0_radxa...