3 ms·
One reason one might want this is because of the hacker spirit. It seems more interesting and impressive to do what something was deliberately designed to not d
by dan-robertson 7y ago
One reason one might want this is because of the hacker spirit. It seems more interesting and impressive to do what something was deliberately designed to not do.
Another reason is that Apple’s hardware tend to be very high quality. For example, on JavaScript benchmarks (which you may or may not consider to be a good proxy for general/single threaded performance), an iPhone7 performs comparably to the current latest Android phones. Also spare parts or replacements are easy to come by.
I’m quite unconvinced that the boot loader exploit demonstrates that the platform is so insecure that you shouldn’t use it. If you want to run a different operating system on a typical android device you would either not need to circumvent such security measures (which doesn’t mean that they exist or work) or you would use some exploit that didn’t get such wide press.
- samatman 7y agoInteresting, I wonder how much of that is the fact that Apple has the only JS runtime which supports tail call elimination: https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/ https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/
- saagarjha 7y agoProbably very little. Apple's SoCs are far ahead of what is in most Android phones.
- londons_explore 7y ago"Ahead" isn't quite the right word. Making a large die area high performance ARM isn't hard. Its just very expensive, and only Apple has both the volume and margins to justify it.
- solarkraft 7y agoI remember the real reason being the optimization of an operation for array access that is relatively obscure, but heavily used by JS.
- saagarjha 7y agoI think it's more complicated than that.
- solarkraft 7y agoDo you have more information? I can't find the relevant article.