Graphene requires flagship hardware.

I don’t mean like graphene as it stands now requires flagship hardware, I mean that graphene as a concept requires what is priced and treated as flagship hardware.

Compare the processors in flagship phones and those in gimmies by looking at their supported features and you’ll see a significant difference not just in cores and cache and onboard memory but in actual documentation and support for the kinds of hardware features (like memory tagging as referenced in this post) that graphene relies on.

Flagship phones don’t integrate and support these features because the manufacturers would like to give you what you’re paying for, it’s because meeting the needs of organizations that require them for their device fleet is profitable. If that component of phone design and engineering didn’t exist then everything would be Samsung whose device line can be fully differentiated by their screen sizes, camera features, screen resolutions and battery lives.

At the gimmie end of the spectrum it is already like that even for iphones although not as much.

Google was using the pixel line as a reference implementation of the Android platform, with their goal of providing device manufacturers something to measure their own work against and pay attention to to the function of so their android os wouldn’t become a flash in the pan and they could extend onto mobile use as a company. Android use grew significantly and they had to shift to using the pixel line as a trellis for a vigorous garden plant.

Bizarrely the pixel line was a money loser or a breakeven proposal for Google for several years. When you think about it that makes sense: they’re not playing the same game as the other Android manufacturers (make the cheapest thing, sell the cheapest thing!) so of course they’re not going to be looking good by the metric you use to measure that. The new Android phones represent a break with that plan and an attempt to move to competing directly with other major manufacturers so now their phones aren’t any good for graphene just like the Samsungs of the world.

Now a person might say “why can’t the damn phone companies just give us a gimmie phone with advanced security features we want?!” Well such a thing is possible but it would be a money loser from the drawing board and wouldn’t fit easily into the rubric of phone sales and tie up a shit ton of resources and time. So even if someone at a hardware company decided to do that their boss would shitcan the project asap.

That same person might say “well why can’t graphene support a gimmie phone?!” And that a great question too but it would mean diving into hardware that doesn’t have the capacity to meet the bar graphene has set for itself in terms of security. Hopefully the person who started that project would stop themselves when they recognize the situation.

True. The flagship thing makes it a bit out of reach for me.