Generally, for a long time they treated components with software the same as any other component: You buy it as a standalone thing from your suppliers, who make it according to your specifications, e.g. lots of the electronics would come from a "tier-1" like Bosch, who many cases farm out making of different parts to their suppliers, who then contract bits from subsubcontractors, ... and in the end everything gets plugged together. The car maker at the top of the pyramid is giving some goals/designs and tests if everything fits together and shouts down the chain if it doesn't. And for physical parts and contained software that does kind of work. It involves a lot of specification writing and -checking, but that's what mech eng orgs are good at. A simple digital instrument cluster isn't that different from an analogue one in that regard, in the end it is "hardware has to have this shape, fulfill this spec, display has to read the following CAN signals to show what's needed". Similarly for a navigation system or software on a engine control unit. Where exactly the lines between what was done in-house and what is contracted fell varied (e.g. some at least nominally controlled the software platform for e.g. the navigation/entertainment unit themselves, others bought that too from the Tier-1 and ordered design customization as needed), but in general the car company is mostly doing "managing" and coordination.
But this has a bunch of downsides:
If you don't have the expertise in-house, you are beholden to what your suppliers can or are willing to do. If they do bad work, you can shout at them (and car manufacturers are quite good at shouting at suppliers), but you can't fix or potentially not even properly evaluate it. Integration across subcontractor trees is difficult to make work well and leads to even more spec-writing and shifting blame if it doesn't go well. Since the tier-1 is probably also not a software company, the software expertise is somewhere deep down the contractor tree and not properly involved with the high-level decisions.
E.g. a common complaint is why the UI in cars is so sluggish: What do you expect if the people deciding about the hardware didn't have trustworthy input from people actually building the software and the software is a hodge-podge from multiple suppliers forced to work against interfaces one supplier made up without concern if its useful for the others... or even pass rudimentary common-sense tests.
It also gets way worse the more integrated things become. E.g. if you have a separate box for the navigation system (in some cars it's literally a box somewhere you can take out and replace if you get a map upgrade, which gets power and a screen connector from the car), there's little to no software integration needed. In a modern fancy-ish car, the expectation is obviously that this is all integrated in one UI, the navigation can appear in the instrument cluster, map updates should probably be online and not require bringing the car to a dealer, you want one central computer instead of multiple small ones, ...
So to stop all this falling apart, someone needs to own it. The Tier-1 could, but it also doesn't have a clue how and the manufacturers obviously don't want to give those more power, so they try to bring it in-house. But if you've never had a internal culture for software to grow this from, it is really hard to do that.
VW specifically said they'd do it by force, with plans to hire thousands of software people over a few years to build a totally new software division that would own the entire stack from scratch. It's going about as well as one would think something like that would go...
Other manufacturers who noticed this earlier and let it grow slowly are faring better. Some had more experimental "labs" divisions which were closer to the software world, whose expertise now can be used. Some have accepted they have to farm some of it out and e.g. adopt Android Automotive, even though the industry was very hesitant about that initially (because it gives Google all that juicy user data and ownership over the connectivity services the industry really would rather control itself).
X = 3/5/7/9 = market positioning bucket. Higher is better
Y = generation, currently at 11. This is basically a numeric form of the "* Lake" naming, except for 10th gen where Ice Lake (10nm, better power efficiency) and Comet Lake (14nm, higher max perf) co-existed in laptops
ZZZ = position within that generation, higher is better, more detailed than the i3/i5/i7/i9 bucketing.
Suffixes:
H = "High Performance" - laptop CPUs with higher perf and higher energy usage. The fastest laptop chips in a given gen previously got branded "HQ" (originally the Q meant quad core), but otherwise HQ = H.
U = "Ultra portable" - laptop CPUs with lower perf and energy usage. Usually can boost well for short tasks, so you might not notice if the most intensive thing you do is compiling code but fall flat for longer workloads such as gaming.
Y = Lowest power usage - These are all garbage, to be honest. You might have one in your windows tablet or netbook.
M = "Mobile" - dead these days, as the H chips replaced them, there were a couple of gens where H and M co-existed with H > M > U.
G_N_ - Integrated graphics rating. All G3 cpus in the same gen will have the same igpu. This only exists on tenth gen/eleventh gen 10nm chips. These chips are more efficient than H/U series chips at the same perf, but don't yet reach the performance peaks of the H series due to lower clock speeds.
K - Unlocked overclockable CPUs, mostly desktop chips, but HK chips for laptops exist too.
F - No integrated GPU. Mostly desktop only.
T - Power efficient desktop CPU (thanks mehlmao)
These suffixes can be combined, e.g. HK for overclockable laptop cpus or KF for desktop cpus with overclocking and no IGPU.
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So the rule of thumb version for a laptop buyer is H = high power, U/Gx = better battery life, within that, pick highest perf ranking number (ZZZ) within your budget. Deduct 1-2 positions per generation out of date. If you need to compare cross-gen or vs AMD, you need to go look at reviews.
The G numbers in particular are pretty meaningless to consumers. Basically all Intel iGPUs fall into a bucket that is "Good enough for windows or esports titles, not good enough for new or recent AAA games".
Other features are more of interest to DIY builders, nobody is going to sell you a laptop with no igpu and no dgpu, and if you're not interested enough to read up on this, you certainly don't care about overclocking.
That's evidently not true. Or at least grossly misleading. Countries can and are refusing to allow all people who want to get onto flights bound for the country they're citizens of.
My country (.au) is currently limiting inbound international travellers to 3000 per week, with over 40,000 Australian citizens registered as trying to get home. Some of those people have been trying for close to 12 months to get home.
These restrictions mean that airline seat pricing is going insane. In pre Covid times, I'd regularly fly Sydney to SF round trip for $AUD1500-$2000 or so on United. A recent news report says they're now flying business/first class only flights with the cheapest one way LA-SYD tickets being $AUD21,000.
Can you imagine being on a trip last Jan/Feb with a return ticket for March or April, only to be told your return ticket keeps getting bumped for higher paying customers but you could always upgrade to a $21,000 ticket to get home. And your travel insurance says "Sucks to be you, you're not covered for pandemics, as outlined in section 374 on page 93 of your Product Disclosure Document you got when you paid your premium. Have a nice day!" So now you're stuck in the US, originally of a 90 day tourist visa waiver and not legally able to work, and there's no casual work available anyway because of Covid shutdowns, and you've needed to manage to find food/shelter for 12 months while waiting for a flight home. I know one of those people, and know of several more...
I am glad that the public backlash forced them to fix a deliberate BACKDOOR that they had introduced (by design) in the Network Extension Framework that macOS Big Sur now forces all the firewalls to use. (At least, they claim to have removed it). But it is hard to trust them again, and I would prefer to use a firewall that uses its own kernel extension to manage the network than using Apple's API again. (Obviously that's going to be really hard with the changes they have made to the OS).
I know many Apple's fan see this as a positive move.
But let's not ignore the pattern of privacy violations and user data collections due to deliberate design and the "apology" and "changes" that follow once CAUGHT. A few of these that immediately come to mind are:
(For those who want to diss me for the above, realise that Apple's new found love for privacy doesn't mean shit without such public scrutiny and discussions. And if you want it to last, remain suspicious and VOCAL on any such possible violations.)
Generally, for a long time they treated components with software the same as any other component: You buy it as a standalone thing from your suppliers, who make it according to your specifications, e.g. lots of the electronics would come from a "tier-1" like Bosch, who many cases farm out making of different parts to their suppliers, who then contract bits from subsubcontractors, ... and in the end everything gets plugged together. The car maker at the top of the pyramid is giving some goals/designs and tests if everything fits together and shouts down the chain if it doesn't. And for physical parts and contained software that does kind of work. It involves a lot of specification writing and -checking, but that's what mech eng orgs are good at. A simple digital instrument cluster isn't that different from an analogue one in that regard, in the end it is "hardware has to have this shape, fulfill this spec, display has to read the following CAN signals to show what's needed". Similarly for a navigation system or software on a engine control unit. Where exactly the lines between what was done in-house and what is contracted fell varied (e.g. some at least nominally controlled the software platform for e.g. the navigation/entertainment unit themselves, others bought that too from the Tier-1 and ordered design customization as needed), but in general the car company is mostly doing "managing" and coordination.
But this has a bunch of downsides:
If you don't have the expertise in-house, you are beholden to what your suppliers can or are willing to do. If they do bad work, you can shout at them (and car manufacturers are quite good at shouting at suppliers), but you can't fix or potentially not even properly evaluate it. Integration across subcontractor trees is difficult to make work well and leads to even more spec-writing and shifting blame if it doesn't go well. Since the tier-1 is probably also not a software company, the software expertise is somewhere deep down the contractor tree and not properly involved with the high-level decisions.
E.g. a common complaint is why the UI in cars is so sluggish: What do you expect if the people deciding about the hardware didn't have trustworthy input from people actually building the software and the software is a hodge-podge from multiple suppliers forced to work against interfaces one supplier made up without concern if its useful for the others... or even pass rudimentary common-sense tests.
It also gets way worse the more integrated things become. E.g. if you have a separate box for the navigation system (in some cars it's literally a box somewhere you can take out and replace if you get a map upgrade, which gets power and a screen connector from the car), there's little to no software integration needed. In a modern fancy-ish car, the expectation is obviously that this is all integrated in one UI, the navigation can appear in the instrument cluster, map updates should probably be online and not require bringing the car to a dealer, you want one central computer instead of multiple small ones, ...
So to stop all this falling apart, someone needs to own it. The Tier-1 could, but it also doesn't have a clue how and the manufacturers obviously don't want to give those more power, so they try to bring it in-house. But if you've never had a internal culture for software to grow this from, it is really hard to do that.
VW specifically said they'd do it by force, with plans to hire thousands of software people over a few years to build a totally new software division that would own the entire stack from scratch. It's going about as well as one would think something like that would go...
Other manufacturers who noticed this earlier and let it grow slowly are faring better. Some had more experimental "labs" divisions which were closer to the software world, whose expertise now can be used. Some have accepted they have to farm some of it out and e.g. adopt Android Automotive, even though the industry was very hesitant about that initially (because it gives Google all that juicy user data and ownership over the connectivity services the industry really would rather control itself).