You do this by standardizing interconnection at both the physical and protocol levels, and leave everything else alone. Then you allow both to evolve at a reasonable rate (maybe 10 years for the physical interconnects, maybe less for protocol since back compat is much easier there).

This leaves people free to tweak form factors, energy efficiency, system capacities etc. etc.

We don't need to care about the final results ("small medium large"), we need to care that you can connect things together (which also means "replace one component with another"). Same for automobiles and most other consumer technology products.

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Aurornis a day ago | parent [-]

> Then you allow both to evolve at a reasonable rate (maybe 10 years

Automakers already get 10-15 years or more out of their platforms. The same series of engines will be used across the their lineup for a very long time. Transmissions are shared across car makers, and so on.

That’s not a problem. The request above was for all auto manufacturers to have to fit into a standardized format.

It would be like telling Intel, AMD and Apple that they all had to use the same CPU socket for 5 years and they all had to be interchangeable.

Do you think we’d have MacBook Pros with all day battery life that also have 500MB/s of memory bandwidth if the company was forced to use a standard CPU socket that all manufacturers agreed on? Definitely would not. Some other country without such requirements would be enjoying them, though.

It’s a demand that makes less sense the closer you are to the subject matter.

	▲	PaulDavisThe1st 20 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Despite 36+ years as a programmer at more or less every level of computing, I don't know that much about CPU sockets. However, my impression is that we'd not be particularly limited by a requirement that a given physical CPU socket design (size, pinouts, power supply) was used for 10 years. As a self-builder, and thus periodic (re)purchaser of motherboards and cpus, my sense is that the majority of the changes to CPU socket specs are gratuitous and unnecessary. I could be wrong.