42 ms·

My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do

• activiation 3y ago
  You can create and compile an Android app on an Android phone... I'm surprised you can't do that on an iPhone. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl=en_US&gl=US https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aide.ui&hl...
  • voz_ 3y ago
    [flagged]
    • fxtentacle 3y ago
      Try doing THAT with an iPhone ;)
  • wilsonnb3 3y ago
    The smartphone form factor is just not very good for software development. Even if the tools existed on the iPhone, nobody would use them. There is a more compelling argument about the iPad not being able to do software development since it is marketed as a laptop replacement.
    • TheFreim 3y ago
      > The smartphone form factor is just not very good for software development. I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop.
      • freedomben 3y ago
        > I believe with some androids you can connect it to a monitor and have a desktop environment styled mode, though at that point you'd be better served with a laptop. why? my oneplus has 12 GB of RAM, 8 cores, and 256 GB of storage (plus expandable with SD card). It's plenty capable for development/desktop use. I've done dev on a raspberry pi with 4 GB and 4 cores, I don't see why the oneplus wouldn't be a more than acceptable "laptop"
        • TheFreim 3y ago
          > why? I guess I'm just not used to phones being as powerful as they are.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • kitsunesoba 3y ago
      If there were iOS dev tools on the iPhone, I think they’d probably be built around Xcode’s Interface Builder and resemble something like a touch friendly version of Visual Basic or REALBasic, simply because the smartphone typing experience is so ill-suited for writing code. On iPad there’s Playgrounds, which is kind of an Xcode Lite that supports Swift and SwiftUI but to do anything substantial with it you’re going to want a physical keyboard of some kind.
    • pid-1 3y ago
      From a hardware point of view, your average iPhone is definitely fast enough for many types of development. What's really missing is an easy way to connect to peripherals, plus OS support. Samsumg has something in this direction, though I heard it's not quite mature: https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/ https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/dex/ https://youtu.be/Ku6eQvYRDrk?t=342 https://youtu.be/Ku6eQvYRDrk?t=342
      • accrual 3y ago
        I believe iOS and iPadOS both support standard HID devices if connected through a USB-to-Lightning or USB-C adapter. I've used a Logitech MX Ergo on an iPad Mini and thought that was pretty neat. I thought about getting a Magic keyboard and pairing that and the Ergo to the iPad as a lightweight SSH solution for traveling.
        • nehal3m 3y ago
          I've done some sysadmin work with an iPad, a Magic Keyboard and a Logitech MX Master 3. Works really well.
    • Mystery-Machine 3y ago
      You're missing the point. The point is _NOT_ whether _ANYBODY_ would use them, the point is that you should own your device and be able to install any software on it that you want. ...plus I'm sure some people would use it, at least sometimes.
    • trostaft 3y ago
      Indeed, developing directly on the smartphone would be ridiculous. But, to be honest, I have similar feelings to developing directly on a laptop. There's no position I can place it at to have an ergonomic position; I always end up feeling like I'm hunched over a tiny screen. Which is why, when I get into work, I dock it and use an external monitor + kb/m. So why can't I use my phone as that intermediary 'compute brick' I bring around? Sure, it's significantly less performant, and it would require incredible development work to make a mobile OS than can transition seamlessly into desktop. Well, that's exactly why no one does it.
      • activiation 3y ago
        > I dock it and use an external monitor + kb/m. You could do the same with a phone
      • asdff 3y ago
        It really wouldn't require that much work. Just expose the unix tooling these devices are running under the hood anyway. Expose the actual file system not a toy one. All of these complaints kind of go away when you simply jailbreak your iphone, expose the filesystem for yourself, and can do whatever thanks to the built in unix ecosystem the device already runs, but walls off from you normally until its jailbroken.
    • jerf 3y ago
      There's no longer any technical reason why you couldn't hook your cell up to a ~$20 USB-C dock and have a full Android environment with a complete desktop-style setup, driving your monitor, using your mouse, etc. Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more. I get that the empty clamshell laptop you slide a cell phone into never took off, but this just gets cheaper and cheaper every year. The drivers exist, the OS capability mostly or entirely exists, we're just... not doing it. With a dock, you can cobble things together; the TV your dad threw away, a keyboard you found at goodwill, any old mouse. Incredibly accessible; anyone with a phone and that level of access to tech could have a full computing environment. I have tasted this with my Steam Deck. I have some limited uses for it when I take it places but want it to do just a bit more. I'd love it even more if my cell phone, which has all the computing power it needs for the uses I have, could do it. If I was a student, or less well off, being able to turn my phone into a full computing environment and use it at its full power would be a great way to save money. The only two limitations on cell phones at this point are 1. the IO with the screen and touchscreen and 2. power limitations from being stuck on battery. Other than that they'd be quite credible laptops from ~2013 or 2015 no question, possibly even a few years later. Very capable nowadays.
      • Vrondi 3y ago
        Most people have zero clue this is possible, even on devices they already own.
      • freedomben 3y ago
        A lot of Android phones are capable of this (OnePlus, Samsung) but for reasons I don't understand Google disables it on the Pixel devices. I was infuriated when I tried to plug in my Pixel to a USB-C to HDMI cable and went down the troubleshooting rabbit hole only to find out that something I used to do all the time on my OnePlus wasn't possible.
      • gumby 3y ago
        > There's no longer any technical reason why you couldn't hook your cell up to a ~$20 USB-C dock and have a full Android environment with a complete desktop-style setup, driving your monitor, using your mouse, etc...Every year I'm more surprised this isn't happening more. Because many people can do everything they need on their undocked phone already. For me, my phone is an auxiliary device and my preferred device is the computer. But I'm sure I'm in the minority.
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • jrmg 3y ago
      I’d choose to use Xcode on Mac, but you _can_ write apps in Swift Playgrounds on iPad, and even upload them to App Store Connect for publication in the App Store.
      • freedomben 3y ago
        Isn't that just a thin client though? the actual "machine" is the server and you're just remoting into it? I don't think I'd consider that "developing" on an ipad since without the server it's totally dead in the water. I'd call that developing on a server
        • danielagos 3y ago
          No, it’s all done on iPad, you can develop and publish an app without using a computer at all: https://screenrant.com/publish-ios-apps-ipad-swift-playgrounds-4-how/ https://screenrant.com/publish-ios-apps-ipad-swift-playgroun...
    • asdff 3y ago
      People have been developing code for the last 50 years with command line ides. So long as the device has a command line and privileges its as fine of a platform as any, and orders of magnitude more performant than the hardware a lot of developers historically made a career out of. IO should be easy considering these things already have bluetooth and could interface with a keyboard. You don't need a mouse for command line work after all.
    • ComputerGuru 3y ago
      > The smartphone form factor is just not very good for software development. Even if the tools existed on the iPhone, nobody would use them. Tell that to those of us that wrote games on a TI-83.
  • twobitshifter 3y ago
    You know what though? Shortcuts exists on iOS. What is shortcuts? It’s a visual programming language for making apps on your iPhone. It allows you to interact and program your phone in a sensible manner for a small screen. Yeah it doesn’t give you keys to the kingdom, but the types of things you might want to do to automate using your phone are there.
    • jxramos 3y ago
      I've seen those but never fully comprehended what it was about or experimented. I need to watch some Youtube videos on the subject and take a bite into that world.
      • twobitshifter 3y ago
        It’s very cool, here’s an example of a tool made using chat gpt. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9_MbW9FK1fA&pp=ygUVc2hvcnRjdXRzIGlvcyBhbWF6aW5n https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9_MbW9FK1fA&pp=ygUVc2hvcnRjdXR...
  • Someone 3y ago
    I haven’t looked at it, but Apple claims you can develop apps with Playgrounds. See https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/ https://www.apple.com/swift/playgrounds/
    • Jtsummers 3y ago
      Which is not available for iPhone, iPadOS (minimum 16, which supports iPads from 2015 and forward) and macOS only.
• neonate 3y ago
  http://web.archive.org/web/20230615204308/https://raymii.org/s/blog/My_24_year_old_HP_Jornada_can_do_things_your_modern_iPhone_still_cant_do.html http://web.archive.org/web/20230615204308/https://raymii.org...
• yosito 3y ago
  > Boy do I miss the good old days, where devices were programmable by their owners instead of just e-waste consumption slabs. Wow, this quote really hits the nail on the head.
  • lolsal 3y ago
    "e-waste consumption slabs" really does a disservice to all of the art that has been created with these devices (visual, auditory, textual), all of the communities that have been built by information sharing and network effects, education that has come from looking up anything at any time, and the exploration that apps like Maps, Weather, Translate, etc encourage and enable. "I can't compile from a command line, so this is e-waste and only used for consumption." - give me a break.
• elromulous 3y ago
  There's something abhorrent about running gcc on windows.
  • 2h 3y ago
    Might want to tell that to the Rust programming language, Go, Zig and many others. You think Windows dev shouldn't happen just because you don't like it?
    • dlivingston 3y ago
      They all use the LLVM backend -- nothing to do with gcc. AFAIK there is no native GCC compiler for Windows. You have to use a pseudo-Linux environment like Cygwin or MinGW.
      • 2h 3y ago
        > AFAIK there is no native GCC compiler for Windows might want to check your facts before spouting nonsense. there is, and has been for many, many years. more than one in fact: https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw https://github.com/mstorsjo/llvm-mingw https://packages.msys2.org/base/mingw-w64-gcc https://packages.msys2.org/base/mingw-w64-gcc https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/x86_64/release/mingw64-x86_64-gcc https://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/cygwin/x86_64/release/...
        • dlivingston 3y ago
          ??? Those are MinGW LLVM/Clang, MinGW GCC, and Cygwin GCC, respectively. I don't count either as truly native Windows, like I said earlier -- Cygwin certainly isn't.
          • 2h 3y ago
            You are really showing your ignorance. Any cygwin packages marked mingw64 do not rely on the cygwin DLL for build time or run time.
  • 3y ago
• leshenka 3y ago
  Not by the fault of their own, though, but because of AppStore’s policy.
• jeron 3y ago
  I'd like to see someone make a modern day Jornada out of the UNIHIKER that's also on the front page
• can16358p 3y ago
  Yup. I always wanted to develop, compile, and run programs on a small screen device that is meant to be a personal communication and media consumption device! Just because a device's hardware is capable of something doesn't mean it makes sense to implement it. The whole article feels clickbait to me TBH.
  • jrm4 3y ago
    And who should have that power of implementation? You, because of your opinion? The companies? Or the people who bought and paid for the devices? It is emphatically not the case that there exists any meaningful difficulty or cost to do the implementation. Just open/root the devices for those who choose to do so and let them go. Or would you rather limit freedom?
    • can16358p 3y ago
      Opening up a device just because a very niche user base (HN isn't representitive of general public) has a proof-of-concept use case that isn't productive in most cases, that would bring maintenance issues and possible attack vectors? I'm glad Apple doesn't do that and focus on what generally matters.
      • smoldesu 3y ago
        I mean, I feel like I've heard this argument a lot... "HN isn't representative of general public" "We don't need file browsers because the general public doesn't use it" "You shouldn't be able to install Emulators because the general public doesn't" If we follow this reductive line of reasoning, nobody would ever do anything on an iPhone besides buy stuff. The iPhone supports hundreds of features that aren't representative of the general public, Apple chooses to deny you this one because they are afraid of it hurting their bottom line.
    • paulcole 3y ago
      I would 100% rather limit freedom of the end user at the expense of the company’s freedom. It’s my choice to buy the product or not.
• 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
  Modern technology sucks. Most developers still use a hypertext document viewer as the interface for most applications. That hypertext document requires more RAM to run than I used to have total in hard drive space (for operating systems that also had hypertext document viewers, that rendered the same visual result as today). All new protocols have to run over port 443; I doubt there's been a new protocol port registered with IANA in 5 years. Smart devices have no keyboards and rely on swiping on glass. Everything runs off an internet connection so you can't really leave your house or a major city and keep things working, to say nothing of vendor service outages. Android could run regular old Linux and apps and give you a desktop, but it doesn't, because we are not holy enough to receive a useful user interface. Samsung had DeX in their phones like 10 years ago but apparently that's done for, and good luck finding any modern devices that support the standards needed to do things like output video, audio, ethernet, etc via USB-C. Bluetooth is still total garbage. We still have no audible user interfaces other than shitty cloud-vendor-specific "assistants" (even though I made my own audible user interface 15 years ago for a Car PC with nothing but open source tools). We still pay the same amount for a computer today that I paid for one 20 years ago (although adjusted for inflation I guess those older ones were more expensive). Computers today do exactly the same thing they did 20 years ago: save a document or image or video over a network, display it, print it. The only difference is they now do it in a much slower, more wasteful way. And programming is still a thing. To make a new program, a bunch of humans have to sit around typing out lines of text into a screen, and going through a laborious process to compile and test it all, and it's still full of bugs. We could have much better technology. The proof is right there in the article, from 24 years ago. We don't have anything better because we just suck at making technology. We have resigned ourselves to wasting time and making crap.
  • sophacles 3y ago
    I have a 20 year old laptop. Literally, I bought it for $1700 in 2003. It doesn't run any software better than the $20 raspberri pi I also have. It certainly doesn't run software better than the $1200 desktop I built recently - that one can play games on one monitor while web browsing on another (sometimes I'll kick of a compile on that machine between matches and neither seems to be hurt too bad by both things running, if I tried that on the old laptop I'd probably have to call the fire department). Of course my desktop machine doesn't actually have a "desktop" (a silly name for a place to hold random icons, a misguided attempt to make computers 'familiar' for folks who didn't quite get it by using a bad metaphor) - it just shows me windows and pops up a pretty menu to choose apps when I press a button. It has 32GB of ram, and even when running games and lots of browser windows and tabs I rarely use more than 16GB of them -- including the fs caches. When the old laptop was current, I would use it for dev, and send compiles off to a distcc cluster. Using that cluster I could get a linux kernel built in a couple hours from scratch - I can do the same on my single desktop machine today, but in way less time (and there's a lot more code). Similarly, I would rip CDs and queue up the wav for each track so the cluster could pick them up and encode them as flacc and mp3. I'd rip a stack of CDs until my drive was mostly full, and go to bed. In the morning the encoding was almost finished. Last time I had a device that could read CDs a few years ago, the bottleneck was reading the CD, and a whole stack of CDs would finish in less time than just ripping would 20 years ago. I have "slow" internet at home, so saving them to some internet drive might make the whole process take the same amount of time as the ripping process in the past. I'm sorry you're disappointed we don't have flying cars yet, but it's a bit absurdist to claim tech has gotten strictly worse and that the old days were better - because the tech today is literally orders of magnitude better than it was 20 years ago.
• GenericDev 3y ago
  Dang. This is the future I wanted to see for mobile devices. Really bummed where we're at right now in the mobile ecosystem. It's crazy to me that even now iOS/Android still obscure your directories from you, and navigating them is treated as something to hide from the users despite being an integral part of the operating system. Really wild how these companies leaned into disrespecting their users. A lot of people might say "It's to help the users and remove touch points they don't care about", but the truth is that in making these decisions they have trained users to ignore these mental models and completely hidden or removed the opportunity to normalize these aspects of the operating systems and the device. Really wish it wasn't this way.
  • jtotheh 3y ago
    modern users (for example, kids) are able to get by with their files in the default folders of the applications and no concept of a directory tree. And with performant search they don't worry about it, they just search for the file. I don't know that that's due to disrespect but it's a thing.
    • altcognito 3y ago
      Mostly because they either don’t know any better or they’re resigned that they’ve only ever been sold a locked down device. It is an abomination. Even the tools apple and Google does provide are awful at backup and file transfer.
      • lolsal 3y ago
        Why is visually navigating a directory tree superior to telling the computer "show me photos of my family" and having it do a better job than I manually good?
      • tqi 3y ago
        > Mostly because they either don’t know any better.. Who is disrespecting the users now?
      • neilalexander 3y ago
• jtotheh 3y ago
  You can write your own apps for your personal iPhone on a mac (with Xcode,which is free) - granted you have to own a mac. Also, the iPhone can do things the Jornada can't.......
  • 1827163 3y ago
    Such as tracking you every moment of your waking life. How modern technology has become so evil, looking back. Nowadays every device we have is clearly spyware, from the point of view of 1999.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    TFA says this clearly. The whole point of the article is that the device can be used to develop and build software for the device, on the device, without an external system...
  • type0 3y ago
    > You can write your own apps for your personal iPhone on a mac Sure and you can write your own apps for some devices on a mainframe, even today
• luke-stanley 3y ago
  I had one of these and a Psion when I was a kid. These days I have an Android phone. I know about the Astro Slide but my phone is already great. I have a pocket Bluetooth keyboard but it's not an optimal size. I'd love a 4 row scissor switch Bluetooth keyboard that fits in my pocket with my phone. I get such retro feelings. I'm not entirely stuck in the past. Maybe I'll make use of an old phone as a remote touch screen keyboard, with Gboard on an old phone and WiFi keyboard on the new one. I feel like hybrid physical/swipe keyboard could be interesting though.
• abawany 3y ago
  I used to be able to do something similar on my Sharp Zaurus SL5500 with the stock rom: there were various interpreters and compilers available for it and the built-in keyboard had mappings for the needed characters so I could write small programs and then compile and run them right on the device.
• 1827163 3y ago
  I had one running NetBSD together with a Cisco Aironet 350 PCMCIA WiFi card for wardriving purposes. With the driver for the WiFi card patched to enable monitor mode. Had two different antennas, a quarter wave dipole, which I made myself, and also an Andrew QD-2402, a 16dBi antenna (!) that could receive WiFi APs from more than 20km away, when on high ground. You could even develop software on it, compile programs with GCC, write Perl scripts to do various things, e.g. automatically scan for and connect to open access points as you walked around town. I think that script even tested if the access point had Internet access or not, and blacklisted ones that didn't. Worked really well, there were so many open access points back in the day. Also had the "links" / "eLinks" web browser, that was text only. And you could also overclock the bus to the Epson video chip, to allow for faster display updates. The video chip had 2D acceleration, I might have written an XFree86 driver for that, but cannot be sure about it. I also wrote a flashing tool for the WiFi card, that let you alter the regulatory domain settings to enable full 100mW power output, and also change the MAC address stored in Flash. I think I have the source code to that somewhere... It's just so amazing to see that the functionality of that enormous WiFi card has now been shrunk down to a tiny QFN chip, an ESP32.
• tedunangst 3y ago
  Why isn't HP still selling the Jornada?
  • drivers99 3y ago
    "Soon after HP's merger with Compaq in 2002, HP discontinued its Jornada line of Microsoft Windows powered Pocket PCs, and continued the iPAQ line that started under Compaq." "In mid-August 2011, HP announced that they would be discontinuing all webOS devices." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ According to the linked source: "But then HP encountered the grim reality faced by anyone trying to compete with Apple in mobile devices: making competitive hardware is difficult, and attracting developers is even more so. It's the Catch 22 situation I spoke about in my earlier webOS analysis: no apps = no customers = no developers = no apps." https://web.archive.org/web/20110925012246/http://mobile-device.biz/content/item.php?item=31468 https://web.archive.org/web/20110925012246/http://mobile-dev...
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• ases 3y ago
  There was, for a little while, the idea that a mobile device could seamlessly plug into an external display, with external input devices, and swap between a "desktop" and mobile mode. I believe Mozilla tried to invest in this pretty heavily. But it went nowhere. I suppose the technical challenges of the time were too great, and the mobile devices that won the space were locked down like the iPhone, where it was better to have the ecosystem that let you sync your mobile device to something more powerful if you really wanted. But given the power inside mobile devices these days, Apple silicon especially, I think it is sad that this vision never really came to fruitition. It seems like the perfect sort of device for most modern users. Something that is open and unlocked, and you can plug it into bigger things to solve the problems many other commentors are talking about around difficulty programming on small screens, etc. But that's the whole of modern computing history, I suppose.
  • oh_sigh 3y ago
    Perhaps it will now that third party app stores will be force onto apple. Granted, you still won't be able to jailbreak your iphone by just typing in the root password, but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024.
    • gumby 3y ago
      > ...but you will probably be able to install compilers and interpreters onto an iphone by 2024. If you live in the EU. I look forward to Emacs on the ipad.
      • fragmede 3y ago
        There's already a ymacs port in the App store.
    • fragmede 3y ago
      Compilers and interpreters have been allowed for a while now (with some caveats). Pythonista is an iOS Python IDE that lets you write apps on your iPhone.
  • 3y ago
• mbiondi 3y ago
  You can write python code on an iphone with Pythonista.
  • FredPret 3y ago
    ...but should you?
• juujian 3y ago
  Nifty little machine, that aspect ratio is quite strange though. Such weird, long lines of text. =
• w_for_wumbo 3y ago
  While previous machines had those possibilities enabled to allow the user to do much more, it also means those possibilities were wide-open to any third-party software that was installed on the machine. It's not that modern machines can't do those tasks, but that they generally shouldn't do those tasks. It's not unreasonable for device manufacturers to sandbox and restrict access to functionality to protect the majority of their users. Even despite these attempts the app stores are full of malware, just imagine how much worse it could be if these apps could also compile their own variants and then abuse Bluetooth/Airdrop to spread it.
  • jrm4 3y ago
    You don't have to "imagine," you're basically describing most of the history of viruses and Windows. So what? I'm entirely unconvinced by this sensationalist take; I'm quite certain we've lost more than we've gained from turning general purpose computers into nanny-state locked down devices.
    • asdff 3y ago
      I work with undergraduates sometimes and its amazing what we can take for granted in terms of computer literacy these days. Some of these kids haven't touched a desktop OS until they get into college, at which point they are just using like google docs and sheets and the filesystem within those webapps. They don't really get what files are, what file types are, what folders are even, and look at me like I have two heads when I say copy and paste some text to a document, save it, send it over. You think they'd be hamstrung for life but honestly, there isn't much computer literacy in the workforce from what I've seen, either. They'd fit right in. It just sucks to think about all the kids who might have gone further with computing if more of it was exposed to them, instead of locked up basically until they get into college and demoralized by a crushing CS curriculum, since highschools and middle or elementary don't really teach this stuff either.
      • jrm4 3y ago
        Are you me? :) I teach IT at a university, undergrads and grads. All of this is exactly correct. The oddest thing is explaining to people my age (I'm 46) how many of my IT students are likely less knowledgable about those kinds of basics (despite having other, to me odd, skills, like fake instagram accounts and such)
• lmm 3y ago
  How hard is doing development on Android, really? You can just build the app and run it, can't you? Equating that with Apple's genuinely awful stance is lazy and hurts the cause.
  • freedomben 3y ago
    I originally started a reply to you to tell you why you're wrong, but after thinking through the contemporary process, I agree. It's pretty trivial to install an app and do dev on android without any external machine, and you can easily plug in a keyboard and/or mouse and use that too. I agree much with OP but I think he's being a little too hard on Android
• jrm4 3y ago
  100% I would still use my Nokia N900, with literally just enough updating to work on the modern networks, if such a thing were possible.
• recursive 3y ago
  My 24 year old Discman has a headphone jack.
• detourdog 3y ago
  24 years ago one needed all those tools to make the device useful. Today we have the app store with a small learning curve.
• zwieback 3y ago
  Rasberry Pi and some other SoC-based embedded boards allow on-board development but it's never as much fun as it should be. At the end of the day I prefer some mixed model where I run VSCode or similar on the PC and download/remote-debug on the target.
• asylteltine 3y ago
  But my iPhone can do almost a million things this thing can’t. What’s the point of this article?
• Prcmaker 3y ago
  For me the most amazing part here was the briefly mentioned spec of having a CFL backlight. I would have never considered that, but for the era it makes perfect sense.
• accrual 3y ago
  It's so cool to see modern workflows and software on old devices. I chase this through my retro computing hobby, seeing how far I can take old machines. Do any HN users have a recommendation for a lightweight distro that would run on an SSE1-only Pentium III CPU? The most recently supported Ubuntu distro is a little too heavy for it.
• rad_gruchalski 3y ago
  > Users should be in control of their devices One data point on this whole debate around Apple walled garden. It's basically my own opinion, not a blank statement. It won't be very popular here but whatever. Here it goes: The reason why I'm personally sticking with the iPhone is exactly the walled garden. I had a 3G, the 5, and now the 8 for last 5 years (there goes the argument about buying a new phone every year). I bought all of them knowing very well what I'm getting into and I want it to remain that way. If I didn't want a walled garden, I'd get an Android phone.
  • xmprt 3y ago
    Just curious. What benefits do you see yourself getting by having a walled garden?
    • selectodude 3y ago
      Not having to worry about shit. There are dozens, if not hundreds of mobile devices I can buy where I can root and have full access to them. I just don’t trust myself to be able to secure them properly. I am happy, no, thrilled, for the opportunity to offload that risk to Apple.
      • ajsnigrutin 3y ago
        You are aware that iphone is a phone, that could be rooted just by visiting a website and clicking on a button?
        • showdeddd 3y ago
          How can clicking an HTML element root my iPhone?
          • ajsnigrutin 3y ago
            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JailbreakMe https://www.pcworld.com/article/486995/jailbreakme_30_how_does_it_work.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/486995/jailbreakme_30_how_do...
• causality0 3y ago
  Those old palmtops sure bring back memories. I'd probably still have one as a hobby device, except for the fact they all came with ghosty, smear-y DSTN screens whose black-white response time is better measured in seconds instead of milliseconds.
  • 1827163 3y ago
    You could alter the video timings on the Jornada a bit, by writing to the video chip registers directly. That would slightly improve its abysmal contrast ratio.
    • causality0 3y ago
      Contrast, sure, but pixel response time is so slow it can barely compete with a modern e-ink display.
• hondo77 3y ago
  It can also do things my watch, refrigerator, car, iPod, washer & dryer, and smart lightbulbs can't do. Know why? Because they're not meant to write and compile programs on. Why would anyone want to write software on the ergonomically constrained (for writing software) iPhone? Just because? Gotta do better than that.
  • PopePompus 3y ago
    Well, I run iPython on my Pixel phone a lot. When I'm at home, I can ssh into the phone and edit files etc with a real keyboard and desktop display. I have many Python functions defined which allow me to do quick, but fairly complex, calculations on-the-go. I also mount the phone's filesystem using sshfs on my desktop machine. That automatically happens whenever the phone connects to my home WiFi. Much of this may be possible on an iPhone too, for all I know, but with a Pixel phone, a Linux desktop and a bunch of Raspberry Pis doing home automation stuff, I only have to know Linux. So I hardly ever write software using the phone's screen and virtual keyboard (although I do occasionally do it), but I write quite a bit of code on the phone using the desktop machine to provide better I/O.
    • Aditya_Garg 3y ago
      How many people in the world do something like that? Even in the bubble that is HN, how many people do that? The average person benefits a lot more from a walled garden.
    • mardifoufs 3y ago
      I think you can do all of that on Apple too. They have an exception for educational/dev language interpreters IIRC . Just a random example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pyto-python-3/id1436650069 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pyto-python-3/id1436650069 It can even run shortcuts which is pretty cool for home automation. I don't own an iPhone but your comment made me check if it was possible to run actual commands on the different python ide apps on Apple.
    • amphitheatre 3y ago
      This is a fun use of technology I lose by having my iPhone 8 Plus. Previously I had an Android phone I used to automate to the nines with Tasker and such. Having similar capabilities on all of my devices and holistically binding them together (as you do with sshfs and similar technologies) is enjoyable and has more utility than any regular walled garden. Vendors locking down their devices to prevent advanced users from unlocking its full potential is sad. I'm switching over to Android soon - once my current phone dies and I can find a capable device with a headphone jack, replaceable battery, and USB-C - and your setup has inspired me to get back into this game!
• zwieback 3y ago
  Much as this makes me happy (I started at hp when this thing came out) I have to say that a phone is not the same as a PDA or other embedded device. A lot of the difficulty of developing on a phone is that the appstore model and ubiquitous connectivity pretty much mandates a much higher level of firewalling and sandboxing. If you get a separate phone you won't use for making calls and texting then jailbraking and doing on-board development isn't that hard.
• s0sa 3y ago
  Do one thing well. While I think these types of devices are neat, it’s not surprising that this isn’t the reality of modern portables. It’s a (relatively) barely portable, degraded desktop experience.
  • shortcake27 3y ago
    I agree with this to the point that I want to see iOS reverted. I preferred the days when iOS was extremely limited. The features it had were perfected and stable. Now we’re seeing dozens of new features and changes every year. iOS is becoming confusing, feels less polished, and is full of bugs. It goes against everything iOS used to be.
• concurrentsquar 3y ago
  I always wanted a Windows CE clamshell laptop, but I just have not had the time to look at ebay. The small laptops were always interesting to me. Is there a 3D printable case for the Raspberry Pi that is like one of these? I looked at the DevTerm but I heard that it's not that good, and anyways it's not exactly the same as this.
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    These aren't Raspberry Pi based, but may be what you want: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347805
• johnklos 3y ago
  I'm not sure I understand the allure of running an OS that has so many distros that are almost hostile to non-mainstream platforms. When the volunteers tire of keeping their mini-distros up to date (and they often do, given enough time), owners of older devices like these are left with just a few options: not care about updates (and possible security issues), try to do the work of applying updates themselves, or abandoning the platform. I don't see the attraction, except for those who enjoy the challenge of updating things themselves. Another option is NetBSD, which doesn't eject platforms because they're not popular. It's one thing if the toolchain requires extensive work, like VAX or ns32k, but if there's enough interest, it happens. Otherwise, most code is portable, so what's written for popular architectures works for less common ones. I'll have to test the latest NetBSD 10 on my Jornada hardware, both ARM (earmv4) and SuperH (sh3el). There're even good sets of pkgsrc binaries for these less common platforms: https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/earmv4/ https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/earmv4/ https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sh3el/ https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/sh3el/
  • RobotToaster 3y ago
    Wouldn't Gentoo or Source Mage GNU/Linux be similar?
    • johnklos 3y ago
      I think projects like Gentoo are philosophically similar to NetBSD and therefore might make for a good place to start for Linux on older platforms, but the number of directly supported platforms is quite a bit smaller than NetBSD's.
• russdill 3y ago
  The title is a bit disingenuous. These are things that the iPhone can do, and have been possible on past revisions. These are things that iPhone won't do.
• TheBrokenRail 3y ago
  I really hate the modern idea of locking down devices to protect users from themselves. It's my device and I should be allowed to install what I want on it. Android's better than iOS in that regard, but that doesn't mean it isn't still terrible. Sure, you can sideload apps, but you still can't run as root unless your device's manufacturer allows it. And sure, it might have a built-in file manager, but in newer versions of Android, you can't read/write to /sdcard/Android/data without a separate device. And this trend is even infecting non-phone devices as well. You can't install extensions on Firefox if they haven't been signed by Mozilla. The only way to disable this restriction is to use a fork or beta version (Developer Edition or Nightly).
  • golergka 3y ago
    Have you ever helped a relative who installed a dozen IE toolbars and so much malware that his computer became unusable? This is what happens when you give a user the ability to install whatever he wants. This is what still happens for a lot of android phones.
    • warning26 3y ago
      Ah yes, the “lowest common denominator” argument. Personally, I hate the idea that everyone should be punished because some people can’t handle something.
      • tekknik 3y ago
        If only people thought this way about guns, where the overwhelming majority causes no problems yet <1% are insane so some people try to ban them for everybody.
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
      • comboy 3y ago
        They are majority. Why punish them because a few people can't handle not having full access to the device? I like open ecosystems but I don't think your argument holds. Nobody can be an expert in everything.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dghughes 3y ago
  I wanted one of these so bad back in the 90s. I'm surprised I didn't buy one but I think it cost about $1,000 CAD (stuff here is much more than in the US). That's about $1,700 today but really $1,700 now doesn't really compare to $1,000 in the 1990s. It would probably be at least a month's pay for me back then.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• ChildOfChaos 3y ago
  Oh shock horror. The iPhone doesn't do something a niche nerd does... what a surprise.
  • type0 3y ago
    ah, don't be childish
    • ChildOfChaos 3y ago
      Fair, I expressed my opinion maybe in the wrong way? It just seems like a very odd thing to complain about / say. The user is using a very niche device to do a very niche task and then complaining that a modern consumer device that is used by Millions with very different goals, doesn't do the extremely niche task that the niche device did.
• piersj225 3y ago
  I might have missed something, does anyone know what happened to Ubuntu phone? I was hoping that was going to be an alternative to iPhone or Android.
• earthscienceman 3y ago
  I would legitimately use this or anything like it as an SSH gateway often. It would be very neat to have. Does anyone know just how bad the version of Devuan they propose using runs, how slow? If you aren't using graphics I assume it's probably fairly quick... fluxbox can't be that bad either, right?
• whalesalad 3y ago
  I had a Jornada 680 without the keyboard and it was truthfully a piece of garbage. Without jailbreaks and Linux they are as good as a coaster. You can jailbreak an iPhone and achieve the same result. Don’t rly see the argument from the author.
• DrNosferatu 3y ago
  Isn’t running Linux in the iOS browser, to compile with GCC, as fast as the HP Jornada?
• fmajid 3y ago
  The Planet Gemini would be a modern equivalent: https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/ https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/ Also GPD: https://www.gpd.hk/product https://www.gpd.hk/product
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Came here to say this, found your comment and upvoted it instead. The currently-sold Gemini also functions as a 4G phone that's compatible with the AT&T and T-mobile networks. Planet Computers has some more advanced keyboard phones as well.
    • rcarmo 3y ago
      They also have gained an incredibly bad reputation in the Psion community (hardware, shipping, support, etc.). That has kept me from considering them...
• hcks 3y ago
  Here comes the whining. Listen, nobody is preventing you from buying an Ubuntu-phone or whatever, root it, install Debian on it, play Tux Racing for 10 minutes and let it collect dust in your drawer for eternity afterwards.
• treprinum 3y ago
  PinePhone + PineKeyboard might be what you are longing for. Maybe even Planet Computers Gemini.
• tombert 3y ago
  That's something I've been saying for a long time. It frustrates me a bit when you see these announcements for a productivity app on iOS, and I'll just sit there thinking "wow, this is almost as cool as the stuff I had on Windows 98...". Stuff like Excel have (historically) been substantially worse than their desktop counterparts on mobile. Now, in some ways I do understand why this is; I suspect the people making the apps figure that if you're doing "real" work, you'll probably still defer to a "real" computer running Windows or macOS or Linux, but that sort of implies that smartphones aren't "real" computers. My iPhone 12 Pro is so much more powerful than a typical Windows 98 computer that I'm not even sure how you'd quantify it [1], but if I had to actually do work, it's not immediately obvious to me that the iPhone would actually be the superior option. Microsoft Office 98 is still pretty usable, early Photoshop is primitive but still reasonably intuitive, it's not hard to get proper text editors. [1] Obviously you can look at clock speeds and "flops per second" and stuff like that, but there's other ways that modern computers are more powerful that are less obvious, like custom decoder/neural chips, better compilers and more efficient operating systems, etc. I think the safest thing to say is it's a lot more powerful.
  • memefrog 3y ago
    I don't think Excel is worse on a phone than on desktop because people don't think it's capable of "real work". It's worse because the whole interface of Excel is designed around a mouse and keyboard. The tiny little cells, the dragging things to be wider and narrower, typing everything - everything is designed around using a very accurate pointer and a keyboard. I have no idea how you'd use Excel productively on a phone. Even if the cells are the same size as they are on a desktop, the screen is tiny, so you'd not be able to see anything. And if the cells are smaller, then they're even harder to use. They actually need to be bigger to be a decent touch interface, and then you'd be constantly scrolling around. The same applies to things like text editors. Phone keyboards are awful for typing anything except English prose. The only reason they're usable for typing is the autocorrection features. I turned mine off for a while and then you really realise how precise you have to be to type everything correctly on a phone. You certainly can't write code on them - imagine switching to the symbols keyboard every couple of seconds. It just doesn't make sense. It's bad enough typing a URL.
• tbailey 3y ago
  [dead]
• iguana_lawyer 3y ago
  What are you smoking? You can develop and run python on iPhones.
• OJFord 3y ago
  > smaller than a netbook Wow, I'd forgotten about netbooks! What a brief craze in hindsight - but it was a craze, they were hardly niche. Like if the iPhone 3G and 3GS and the Nokia N95 and something else came out, but then that was it for 'smart phones'.
  • mk_stjames 3y ago
    2007-2008 suddenly about half of everyone in grad school had some form of Asus Eee PC. There was a cheap one around $399 and a much more expensive one that was around $899 and you could easily tell the difference at a glance due to the screen size and resolution. The small one was like 800x480 whereas the higher end model was 1024x600. I remember being fascinated by them and really jealous. But then, I never took my laptop anywhere. I really didn't even use a computer outside lab workstations up until 2010-ish I think. The frequency at which people started using devices outside their home really changed dramatically between 2005 and 2010.
• failuser 3y ago
  The iPhone is popular because of what it can’t do, not because of what it can. Power users need their own ecosystem, but as always they are too segmented to get it to any usable level, so some old devices are still as good as it will ever be so someone tech-savvy. Many people still think that mobile devices peaked with Psion 5 or N900.
  • pessimizer 3y ago
    > they are too segmented to get it to any usable level No, the problem is always firmware, hardware, drivers... If everybody were required to publish specs for these SoCs and peripherals, we'd see competition and vastly different outcomes. > N900. The N900 would have had continuity with any number of subsequent devices, it certainly had the coders and the community. The problem was constantly having to reverse-engineer everything, so all of the projects got sick and died. Governments have made a special effort to preserve the monopolies of mobile carriers, manufacturers and OS vendors. They even carved out a mobile exception in the US for guidelines about net neutrality. I think that governments, OS vendors, and telecom have entered into a partnership because they have a shared goal of limiting user control over mobile devices as much as can possibly be gotten away with. The OS vendors and manufacturers are interested in a captive customer base that is subject to their whims and policy changes. The government wants monitoring and editorial access to communications. Open hardware that runs standard Linux is absolutely impossible to tolerate if you have those goals.
    • failuser 3y ago
      > firmware, hardware, drivers You can get all of those as a paying customer.
• systems_glitch 3y ago
  I bought a GPD Pocket 7 when they crowdfunded it. To me it felt like the first mobile general purpose computing option that continued where palmtops of the old days left off. For me personally, its predecessor was a Toshiba Libretto 110CT. Netbooks were kind of a step-backwards middle phase for me.
• londons_explore 3y ago
  The lack of modern devices having development environments easily accessible (ie. can access within 30 seconds with no setup needed) is severely hurting the supply of 'hobby' programmers. The end result is programming as a profession will stagnate. Just like the rail industry stagnated in the early 20th century, the car industry stagnated in the 80's, the aviation industry stagnated after concorde, etc. Industries stagnate when the influx of new people with new and wild ideas gets drowned by old timers who have 'always done it like this'.
  • londons_explore 3y ago
    Perhaps this is why javascript frameworks have been in fashion for more than 6 months at a time lately.
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    Don’t worry, the industry has at least one more act in it. That’s when the stagnant industry that is nonetheless critical to daily life is taken hold of by a new generation and relentlessly optimized for maximum profit extraction. Hope you like car seat heaters as a service, Spirit Airlines and precision scheduled railroading!
• speakspokespok 3y ago
  My Dad had one of these when it was still new. With a pcmcia NIC and JLime I was able to then ssh into it. Realize this was long before PIs or Arduino's existed. I distinctly remember the feeling, while holding that Jornada in my hand, when I first SSH'd into it. I was inside the machine held in my hand.
• HL33tibCe7 3y ago
  I daily drive an obscure Linux distribution on a Thinkpad. I value free software and customisation. But I still use an iPhone. Why? Three reasons. One: reliability. I rely on my phone for payments: I no longer even carry a wallet most of the time. My phone has to work. And my iPhone just works. Over the years Apple have earned my trust - a trust that was repeatedly shattered when I ran Android. Two: security. I trust my phone with my entire digital life. Apple’s walled garden is inherently significantly more secure than Android’s ecosystem. I also trust Apple more than I do Google on hardware and software security. For example, see the recent Pixel lockscreen bypass. Apple quite simply don’t fuck up like this. It just doesn’t happen. Three: ergonomics. Android and other free phone operating systems are not in the same league. By the way, I can do everything mentioned in this article with iSh on my phone.
  • Arch485 3y ago
    > Apple quite simply don’t fuck up like this Apple doesn't fuck up like this that you know of so far ;)
  • kart23 3y ago
    > Apple quite simply don’t fuck up like this. It just doesn’t happen. huh? https://theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-high-sierra-bug-apple-mac-unlock-blank-password-security-flaw https://theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-high-si...
  • everfree 3y ago
    > For example, see the recent Pixel lockscreen bypass. Apple quite simply don’t fuck up like this. It just doesn’t happen. iOS 6.1 lock screen bypass: https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/14/3987830/ios-6-1-security-flaw-lets-anyone-make-calls-from-your-iphone https://www.theverge.com/2013/2/14/3987830/ios-6-1-security-... iOS 12.1 lock screen bypass: https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/1/18051186/ios-12-1-exploit-lockscreen-bypass-security https://www.theverge.com/2018/11/1/18051186/ios-12-1-exploit... iOS 13 lock screen bypass: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/13/20863993/ios-13-exploit-lockscreen-bypass-security https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/13/20863993/ios-13-exploit-l... iOS 15 lock screen bypass: https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/20/lock-screen-bypass-enables-access-to-notes-in-ios-15 https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/20/lock-screen-bypas... macOS 10.13 lock screen bypass: https://theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-high-sierra-bug-apple-mac-unlock-blank-password-security-flaw https://theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/29/macos-high-si... (macOS bypass mentioned by kart23)
• nomorepdfs 3y ago
  But it can't do more things than an android phone....
• fb03 3y ago
  Is there something modern buyable in 2023 that provides the same experience as this guy has? Just a neat pocketable linux "box" with decent battery life (5 hours sounds awesome)
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Yes, and then some: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347805 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36347805
• FallDead 3y ago
  was in the android camp for a long time, many of my friends wasted hours with android modifying and breaking the phone, it was fun but now I have an iphone that just works.
• chx 3y ago
  It's astounding we are still here. It's been 13 years since I blogged http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom this. Luckily, my prediction wasn't correct and the app stores on PCs didn't gain much traction. So there's still a way out. But, admittedly, the relative ratio of phone users vs total computer users are growing and so the mindset I was afraid for is indeed dying out. Cyberpunk novels featured people who can't even read any more just click icons. Are we getting there? Maybe but luckily much slower than I thought.
• EricE 3y ago
  "Boy do I miss the good old days, where devices were programmable by their owners instead of just e-waste consumption slabs." Boy I miss the good old days when you had to build the board in your computer before these interlopers could buy pre-built computers. Ugh. Not everyone wants a science project. I know this is hard for many techies to understand but not everyone loves tech for the sake of tech. For many these are just tools no more special than any other tool and if they don't do useful work they are a burden.
• semifinal0505 3y ago
  Are there any websites like HPCFactor that are still up and running for PalmOS or Windows Mobile?
• thx 3y ago
  ok / respekt but my iPhone 13 pro max is literally my fav ting me own (rok linux on z pc but the iPhone be
• hot_gril 3y ago
  My iPhone shouldn't handle laptop tasks. I do think the iPad is really silly, like an intentionally gimped laptop where people for some reason jump through hoops to make it work almost like a regular laptop, even spending $300 on a keyboard. But that's fine cause I simply buy a MacBook instead.
• sideproject 3y ago
  I was rummaging through my junk and came across Sony Clie PDA - I'm going to boot it up and write a post about it soon - I do have a font memory of buying this expensive toy thinking I was so busy that I needed an electronic fancy to-do list only to find out later that I was just playing games on it.
  • Jtsummers 3y ago
    I read a lot on my Clie, and I recall it having a Scheme (?) implementation I played with in my CS classes. At least until its battery crapped out and by then I had a laptop which was much more pleasant to use. I think mine got tossed in a purge 6 or 7 years back.
• yakubin 3y ago
  Note to the author: I'm not sure if that's intentional, but if it isn't: the "cursor: default" rule in CSS for the html element creates a weird effect where hovering over text doesn't change the cursor's shape to indicating possibility of text selection (vertical bar), instead keeping it as the default triangle shape.
• Fervicus 3y ago
  [flagged]
• 29athrowaway 3y ago
  I have an old Galaxy Tab 10.1 (2011) somewhere in my house. It doesn't get OS updates and it is now incompatible with the Google Play Store. Now it is almost as if it was a bricked device.
• rchaud 3y ago
  The first iPhone didn't have copy & paste. That wasn't a mistake. iOS has by design been a dumbphone OS favouring vendor lock-in, with some progressive enhancements over the past 15 years. It only took them a decade to release have a local file manager app! And unlike say, Reddit, they didn't allow any 3rd parties to build one for them, because apparently only Apple could get this groundbreaking technology right! /s
• zactato 3y ago
  I’m so glad all over my elderly family members have locked down iPhones and iPads. Remember all that tech support you had to do back in Windows 98 days? Modern devices are too complex for most people to really grok. The only sane solution is to lock them down.
• wackget 3y ago
  Things the iPhone can't do in 2023: 1. Connect via USB to a PC as a mass storage device (MTP does not count). Want to easily share files between your PC and iPhone? Haha, fuck you. 2. Be switched on immediately when plugged in, after the battery runs out. Desperate to use your iPhone when its battery dies? Haha, fuck you. 3. Be controlled remotely, VNC-style. Want to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor to control your phone instead of your thumbs? Get fucked.
  • jxramos 3y ago
    This limitation of the Files app glaringly omitted in this workflow still gets my goat https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/444977/how-can-i-get-the-ios-files-app-present-in-the-macos-finders-iphone-files-tab https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/444977/how-can-i-g...
  • lolsal 3y ago
    You're saying "can't" like your points are technical limitations instead of product choices. For what it's worth, my brand new washing machine still can't make my morning coffee, either.
  • LeoPanthera 3y ago
    > Want to easily share files between your PC and iPhone? Just plug it in: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201301 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201301 You define "easy" as using a USB cable, but most people would think that cloud storage is easier. You can do that too: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-files-and-folders-in-icloud-drive-iph17f9f92a6/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/share-files-and-folde...
    • wackget 3y ago
      Those solutions don't expose the phone as a storage drive like Android phones can, though.
  • abhibeckert 3y ago
    > Connect via USB to a PC as a mass storage device ... if you want a mass storage device... buy a mass storage device? Personally I'm happier with the cloud though. I want all my files in the cloud anyway as an offsite backup, and the internet is generally fast enough that I can access the remote copy whenever I need it. > Be switched on immediately when plugged in, after the battery runs out My battery never runs out though. But seriously iPhone CPUs are pretty power hungry with 3.46Ghz with six cores and aside from just booting up there's also some pretty high decryption going on to decrypt and verify the operating system hasn't been tampered with. I'm pretty sure a USB cable can't provide enough watts. > Want to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor to control your phone instead of your thumbs USB and Bluetooth keyboards totally work with iPhones, and iPads. I use a mouse and keyboard all day long every day with my iPad (I'm happy with my thumbs for my phone, but I could use the keyboard for that too). And you can absolutely connect it to an external screen too, with HDMI or over a network connection.
• jxramos 3y ago
  > Otherwise it is e-waste the moment it leaves the factory. This statement left me contemplating this biasing to e-waste in our production lines, which is to essentially ask how much easier is it to repurpose old devices that permit root administration vs those which do not? This isn't to confuse that every old admin friendly device becomes a repurposed computing tool but the fact that the fraction of those old devices which do, which percent are admin friendly and which are not. That's an interesting question.
  • jxramos 3y ago
    Actually now that I read more into the article his post makes me regret donating my old PocketPC to the Goodwill some years back. If I had known this capability and appreciated it back then I could have used it for some kitchen inventory roles I've been contemplating getting a junk tablet for.
• kristianpaul 3y ago
  Not fair comparison but iSH https://ish.app/ https://ish.app/ had helped me to overcome challenges like running web-servers and other linux system related stuff
• zaroth 3y ago
  Can’t you develop and install anything your heart desires on your own iPhone if you join the Dev Program? Obviously this doesn’t let you distribute and sell content on Apple’s store. But that’s above and beyond having the ability to run what you want on your own device.
• low_tech_punk 3y ago
  Brilliant hack. Btw, iPhone can't do things that even iPod can. http://www.ipodlinux.org/ http://www.ipodlinux.org/
• kagevf 3y ago
  Get rid of the Windows key, and give me a ctrl and alt key on the right side. And some way to do "right-click"; usually S-F10 works, but I'm not sure those keys at the top are "fucntion keys". To me it seems like it would be a major hassle to code without both of the ctrl and alt keys, but maybe the keyboard is so small it's not a factor anyway?
• cush 3y ago
  My 24 year old Casio has a battery life 200x longer than the Apple watch
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• satvikpendem 3y ago
  This is exactly what I mentioned before in another thread about Apple and how visionOS will be a similar walled garden unlike macOS and thus it will be very difficult to use it as a laptop replacement, by Apple's design. > Anyone else worried that Vision Pro will simply be a large iPad and not macOS like, ie closed app store and not geared towards productivity? The fact that to run VSCode you need to mirror your own Mac simply boggles the mind, it's like Apple wants to cut off the potential of the device at the knees simply to continue selling services. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36329540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36329540
  • rchaud 3y ago
    AVP is another vector for vendor lock-in, same as iOS. It cannot even do video out from a Macbook, because then you might actually play a video or a game without passing through Cupertino's toll gates.
    • satvikpendem 3y ago
      It's a shame, I wonder when we'll get the comparable version of AVP as Android or Windows is to their respective Apple devices. I definitely don't want to mirror a Mac to play games, lol.
      • slondr 3y ago
        Lenovo makes an AR headset which mostly functions as an external monitor to a Windows PC or Android phone, which sounds like what you want: https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3/?orgRef=https%253A%252F%252Fduckduckgo.com%252F https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/thinkrealitya3/?orgRef=https%25...
        • satvikpendem 3y ago
          Thanks, I'll take a look. It'd be better if it were a full replacement to a PC or phone, but that might take yet more time to develop.
    • 3y ago
• sxcurry 3y ago
  My 24 year old truck can do things an iPhone still can't do
• uguuo_o 3y ago
  Forget side-loading, the fact that I can't develop and run my own applications on iOS without having to ask apple for permission every week is infuriating.
• ipcress_file 3y ago
  I came here for the Jornadas and all I get are walled garden debates. Sigh. Back to HPC:Factor...
• retrocryptid 3y ago
  So... sections of the comments here have made some assertions about the history of Unix and Mach (and I guess Leenucks by extension) which aren't supported by the factual record. As a service, I have posted a link to the Wikipedia page on the history of Unix over here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36349883 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36349883 It might be useful to ask questions or make comments about Unix, Mach, Leenooks, Solaris, HPUX, IRIX, ConvexOS, AIX, A/UX or plain ol' SVR4 over there. Or heck... keep doing it here. I'm not your mother. Just seems off topic for this discussion so I spun up another thread over there.
• xvilka 3y ago
  iPhone software quality and performance is way ahead of Android. I am all for open source, even partial, like in case of Android, if there is no other choice. But the Android architecture and code quality, especially apps, is absolutely horrible. We need something like iOS but open source. Even if it runs on top of Linux kernel, just with a proper system and user-level environment.
• akerr 3y ago
  I code widgets in JavaScript using Scriptable on my iPhone. There's full development environments (e.g. Pythonista), web servers (WorldWideWeb), virtual machines (UTM) etc without jailbreaking. Otherwise, SSH and VNC let me access the best machine for a particular job while using a very reliable phone that will receive years of upgrades.
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• canadianfella 3y ago
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• throwaway14356 3y ago
  It seems everyone has forgotten the point of writing your own tools. It would take some serious effort making the gui usable for others, effort cleaning up my code for review and last but not least it should have at least some documentation. It even had buttons for functionality that either isn't implemented or behaves oddly but it is just for me, I can use it just fine. Or say: I need a static phone app with a bunch of family recipes, an index, each one a shopping list and a start button that counts down for each task involved. It should have pictures of grandma, ideally with the dish. That I have to do that from a website is just silly. It should work for 1000 generations without payments or reviews and have access to nothing outside the app. If you think the prison computer is a great platform to migrate all our things should you be entitled to an opinion? It seems like one doesn't want to have any? People need to experience more platform shitification or the platform ripped from under your feet. It just happens, everything starts out nice. Enough of that and you will see the point of languages or protocols that lack an all powerful ruler "protecting", even a benevolent a creative visionary may eventually make place for a simplistic money man. haha, I accidentally pictured apple under Mitt Romney...
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• delta_p_delta_x 3y ago
  Does this not give the OP eye strain? I don't even type very long comments on HN/Reddit on my phone, let alone write code. I switch to my desktop set-up as soon as I can. I can't stand low resolution and low refresh rates, let alone a tiny screen—it has 1/54th the resolution that my monitor has. I suppose this is one of those 'I'm doing it just because I can' things.
• Gigachad 3y ago
  My 24 year old kitchen knife can do things the iphone still can't do. But they aren't the same product for the same use case.
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• chazeon 3y ago
  I have the exact the same feeling with Steam vs iPhone, iPad, Vision, or whatever they advertise as the next computer. What SteamOS has is a desktop that allow user to run real browser with proper ad blocker, has a desktop that user can set whatever shortcut the user like, run whatever script to process the user’s file. The next computer doesn’t do those things.
  • cma 3y ago
    SteamOS is Google Play Services for desktop linux. For a while you couldn't use the touchpads without running the steam client. They break existing dual boot setups every firmware update so in some ways are more hostile to alternative OSes than Windows. The hardware of Steam Deck is generally more open though if you forgo SteamOS itself.
• piloto_ciego 3y ago
  Is anybody using a pine phone to approximate this sort of experience?
• Aleklart 3y ago
  You could download and run gcc and any app on iphone for 15 years now, implying it is the same iphone from 2008. Just jailbreak it. Online. Only iphones you can’t just download and run gcc are from 2018 onwards. These make you need some other device to upload gcc signed (by you) that can compile and execute code in the sandbox of own process. And, you can get windows or linux emulator (in fact, for ANY popular architecture) and run anything you want. Can your ancient device do it? Can it do anything useful? Because recompiling old trash over and over for amusement soon be banned in EU as part of global warming effort (along with eating bugs).
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• lispm 3y ago
  The big difference are exactly 24 years and billions users and their devices on the Internet and 5G networks. That requires a different type of device and different levels of support/security.
• tobiasbischoff 3y ago
  He is so right. When everybody is on iPhone / iPad - who develops the apps then? Back when i was young, computers encouraged curiosity, today these devices encourage to watch tiktok.
• bambax 3y ago
  > Office 2003 is the best version ever released IMHO Oh my god this is so true. The last version without that ribbon nonsense.
  • vel0city 3y ago
    Yeah, Office 2003's live collaboration tooling is just fantastic. I'll take having a single document shared with my team that we're all able to edit live than having _v2_draft_v3_FINAL_v2.doc getting shared around in a massive email chain or getting mangled on a shared drive, thank you.
• wkat4242 3y ago
  I love my Sony Z4 Tablet with its bluetooth dock (which is actually attached like a laptop, unlike the floppy covers popularized by the Surface Pro that are around these days). Unfortunately they never made a successor and its Android version is getting so old I can't run most modern apps anymore :(
• sspiff 3y ago
  Ah the memories! I used to run JLime and NetBSD on Jornada and MobilePro machines. While definitely not perfect, they were really nice and useable, and far more portable than contemporary laptops. You could run X11, they had PCMCIA (for wifi and extra storage), and were just such a wonderful mix of weird and useful. Glad to be reminded of those good times :)
• Technotroll 3y ago
  AFAIK you have to be 18 years old to apply to Apple's iOS developer program. This is a huge problem within teaching. Please do tell me if there are legal ways around this.
• barneygale 3y ago
  This thread should be linked from the wikipedia article for "false dichotomy". Apple fanboys just can't help themselves.
• nologic01 3y ago
  Unless and until we get real competitive markets in technology the enormous potential will lay dormant in the machinations and "visions" of a handful of power centers. Techies just dont realise how extremely concentrated this domain and how this deprives from unlocking possibilities. With billions of users there are potential markets for all sorts of devices. You are not going to see them for as long as the dinosaurs stomp on any sign of competition.
  • sofixa 3y ago
    I hope the Digital Markets and Digital Services Acts from the EU will help push in the right direction towards proper competition.
    • rakoo 3y ago
      Capitalism endgame is monopoly, any sufficiently old market ends in a n-opoly. Competition doesn't work, we've been trying that for centuries already and this is where we are. Companies' goal isn't to better people's lives, it's to widen their profit margins. What do you think will change if we add more competition that hasn't worked until today ?
      • nologic01 3y ago
        At least on paper, capitalism is not synonymous with oligarchy. All these corporate entities rely for their existence and "profitability" on a legal system, a security apparatus, on vital for their operations utilities such monetary systems, educational institutions etc. etc. that are bankrolled by the collective. Corporate legal entities are merely granted a license to operate within defined sandboxes. If society and its politics refuses to design sandboxes that will serve it well we should not expect to see the benefits of the invisible hand or whatever positive attributes might be associated with the design. It is not rocket science. The first and most powerful rule which is related to this discussion is simply: don't give any toddler too big a sandbox. It gets on their head and the outcome is that the entire family suffers.
        • 3y ago
• rimliu 3y ago
  My horse can do no car can - eat hay. So what?
• elAhmo 3y ago
  It seems that very important use case for the author is developing/programming and compiling software on the phone. I work as a software developer for living, and ignoring the part that there are other things other than actual programming that can be done on any phone, I never had the urge to program on a phone. None of my friends or colleagues wishes to do that either. I prefer a monitor, but laptop would do. But using smartphones for 15 years, I never complained that I cannot program on them.
  • vicek22 3y ago
    That's strange, my latest Google Pixel has enough computing power that I could easily do my frontend development on it if I connected screen and keyboard and if the OS supported it. I wouldn't be keen on writing the code on touchscreen, but I would love to have one small device that I can "dock" when I need to switch to poweruser mode.
    • ZiiS 3y ago
      You can. A USB-C to HDMI cable with any Bluetooth Keyboard and Mouse. And install `termux` from the official app store. Vim/Emacs and every imaginable build chain work fine. You can even setup a vscode server to open in the browser if that way inclined.
      • cma 3y ago
        I believe the Play store termux is outdated and it should be installed from F-Droid instead.
• rldjbpin 3y ago
  while it's a cool feature, i don't think it is a fair ask. walled garden or not, each company decide the tradeoffs of features they assign to their consumer technology. clearly apple has made theirs with restricting what apps can do in ios. even with them being forced to enable sideloading, it would probably take a lot before a termux alternative can be possible in that ecosystem. regardless, if one was a future model of the other and the feature was removed, then i could understand the argument. - a person peering at the garden from the outside
• MagicMoonlight 3y ago
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• qwerty456127 3y ago
  For my whole life I dereamed about a pocket computer like this - one which would run real desktop OS and apps.
• fodkodrasz 3y ago
  Just saw this product line mentioned in a forum thread about living off-grid: https://www.gpd.hk/gpdpocket/ https://www.gpd.hk/gpdpocket/ The form factor and the fact it is basically a standard pc, just very compact make me think if this is pretty much equivalent to the pocket computer in the article? (The company has some other interesting products, the DB9 RS-232 on some makes me wonder if I might actually buy one sometime)
  • nicholassmith 3y ago
    I think the Gemini (https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/gemini-pda https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/gemini-pda) is probably a little closer to the Jornada that I remember. I've been trying to find a justification other than "ooh, shiny" for a while, it would be perfect for throwing in a bag to do some hobby project work whilst at a coffee shop and with wifi you can off-site the compilation to a remote box.
• CrampusDestrus 3y ago
  And none of those things actually matter. Rose tinted glasses at its finest
  • alejoar 3y ago
    > And none of those things actually matter. Rose tinted glasses at its finest They don't matter to you.
    • ggregoire 3y ago
      They don't matter to 99.999% of iPhone users.
• egometry 3y ago
  The only thing I've learned from this comment thread is sbuk REALLY stans for apple.
• consultSKI 3y ago
  My 10 year old BlackBerry Playbook was light years ahead of the iPad in functionality with standard features like mouse support (which iPad only received a few years ago). The QNX-based OS v2.x was amazing. In fact, QNX is now used on over 200 million automobiles. https://blackberry.qnx.com/ https://blackberry.qnx.com/
• dkmn 3y ago
  In addition to the points he makes, there is less of a complexity barrier to jump with that generation of machine. Modern OSX/MacOS/iOS is arguably elegant but also complex and hardly something you control... A far cry from the demo'ed C compiler. I can see a lot of utility in that little rig. And a lot of future proofing.
• PaulHoule 3y ago
  I have to admit that one of the best computers I ever owned was a pink netbook I bought in a hurry when I was short on cash. It was great for ham radio because of the long battery life (log your contacts when you are operating out of a tent.) Once i swapped out the HDD for an SSD, it became a great car computer (for the passenger) because it had a power supply that would plug into the cigarette lighter. I'd use it to play music and, with a Bluetooth GPS and Microsoft Streets and Trips it was a much better navigator than any handheld, car or phone navigator I've ever used.
• uni_baconcat 3y ago
  Respect, tolerance, kindness. There are a plethora of articles like this that capture the feeling of retrospective. I don't see any difference. Though comments here are quite heated.
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  You mean like alert you to missed phone calls? It's disgraceful that the iPhone went out the door without this basic, standard feature. But it's straight-up petulant and insulting that Apple has refused to fix it this entire time... but did add repeating alerts for TEXTS, in a settings screen that is otherwise the same as the Phone app's.
• DoubleGlazing 3y ago
  Leaving aide the software and abilities side of things, I wish devices with this form factor were still available. I used to own a Philips Velo, Psion 5mx and a Nokia Communicator. The keyboards were good enough be useful, great for typing something up whilst on the train or as a pocket-able computer to take with you on trips. There are some mini laptops on the market which are certainly a lot more versatile and powerful, but they don't have the narrow rectangle form factor of all those 90s devices. They are small, but not really suitable for throwing in your pocket. Yes, I know you can get Bluetooth keyboards for modern smartphones, but they just aren't as convenient as a single device you could fold up and put in your pocket.
• gunapologist99 3y ago
  I love devices like this with full-travel keyboards. In the pursuit of the almighty thin, we've sacrificed great keyboards.
• gcanyon 3y ago
  Title: My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things your modern iPhone still can't do! Then in the article: can do one thing your modern iPhone can't. It turns out that one thing is root access. But they're gaining root access by installing an entirely new operating system. There are a few hardware-secured parts of an iPhone (I Am Not A Hardware Expert, but at least the Secure Enclave and maybe the Touch ID/Face ID hardware), but beyond that, there's nothing stopping people from creating/installing a new OS on iPhone hardware, is there? So it's not "The HP Jornada can do things an iPhone can't do" as much as it is "people have done things for the HP Jornada that no one has for the iPhone" And that is (I think) mostly because the iPhone is ridiculously more complicated hardware than the HP Jornada is. I'm making these numbers up, but: it seems likely the team creating iOS numbers in the thousands, while the Jlime team has 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jlime
  • t0astbread 3y ago
    Is is possible to boot iOS devices into an alternative OS? Googling around I found OpeniBoot but it seems to only support older iPhone and iPad models (and iPod).
  • krunkcoin 3y ago
    Outside of a handful of special ultra-unlocked iPhones Apple sells (or loans maybe? Don't remember the details) to security researchers, no, you cannot reliably boot your own OS on iPhone hardware. Apple's secure boot ROM only trusts bootloaders cryptographically signed by Apple's private signing key. Short of finding a flaw in that ROM or a jailbreak good enough to take over from the booted iOS, there's no path to booting something else. While people have found such boot ROM and jailbreak flaws in the past, recent hardware and iOS have no known vulnerabilities good enough to take over (AFAIK). (and note also that Apple guards against rollback attacks on iOS devices - once you've upgraded a device to a new iOS version, there's no going back to an older version with a jailbreak.) The complexity of Apple's hardware is not a barrier. Apple Silicon Macs run essentially the same hardware as iPhone, only more complex (because there's more stuff to support in the bigger SoCs they put in Macs). When Apple updated their secure boot to work well for Mac, they chose to explicitly support that which is forbidden on iPhones: they give users an interface allowing them to locally sign a bootloader and store a cryptographic hash in the Secure Enclave so that the boot ROM will trust it just as if the bootloader had been provided by Apple. Because this path exists, people have been reverse engineering Apple's SoCs and there's a working Linux distro (Asahi Linux) and a BSD port. Not everything works yet, but a surprising amount does.
• hestefisk 3y ago
  I want one. Where to buy? Are these super expensive?
• _ea1k 3y ago
  TBH, an amazing number of comments in this thread are refuted by the simple fact that iOS already has an alt store. It is already not a walled garden, they just put weird restrictions on you (number of alt apps?!) even after you get out.
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