9 ms·

People are using iPad OS features on their iPhones

180 points by K0IN 11mo ago

tekacs 11mo ago
This is kinda wonderful to see - a peek into a world where we get to see the 'other side' of what would have been possible had Apple not locked our devices down beyond belief. Jailbreak stores have never felt like a particularly strong illustration of what's possible due to their tiny user market - I'd love to see what developers would do if even for a period we could use these devices to anything remotely like their potential.
- frfl 11mo ago
  There was a comment few weeks ago - I forget the topic, maybe it was the new M-series release or something - that was talking about how freaking fast these things are. And the comment was pointing out how locked down everything is and most of that power is pretty useless - I mean sure on device "AI" and faster apps...OK I guess. I'm not the target demographic for these things anyway, so my opinions are whatever. But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with.
  - LeoPanthera 11mo ago
    > But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. Could you elaborate? What specifically would you do? Because I'm finding it hard to imagine what I'd do with an "open" iPhone that I can't do now, but it's extremely easy to imagine all the horrific security risks that would emerge in what today is most people's primary computing device, storing data about literally their entire lives.
    - frfl 11mo ago
      My usage of "handheld" was vague. I meant any portable device (laptops, but also including phones/tablets). If you're finding it hard to imagine what you can do with a device that _does not_ restrict what you can do with it, then you're likely fine in the Apple ecosystem, that's fair and okay. Some people aren't, you'll just have to take my word for it, I don't wanna write an essay here and you're probably not interesting in reading all that. Security risk is a common one that comes up. Google used that to justify locking down sideloading recently. Let me take the risk. I bought this device, I should be allowed to make adult decisions right? I'm not downloading stuff off Limewire or a shady website. I'm downloading stuff off of Linux distro repos or F-Droid. There's a lot more to be said about all this. Including the amount of e-waste created because a device is too old to be supported by manufacturers, yet people run decade(s) old laptops/desktops using free OSs because they can. Just my 1AM rambling thoughts. Hope some of it makes some sense.
      - fooker 11mo ago
        > If you're finding it hard to imagine what you can do with a device that _does not_ restrict what you can do with it Go on, give some examples.
        frfl 11mo ago
        Idk, maybe like not being forced to use their new glass UI? Or whatever new UI trend they'll decide to implement. On a unrestricted OS, I can just switch to a different desktop environment. If you read the rest of this thread, instead of asking, you'll find plenty examples. But hey, if you like MacOS, great, anyone else's opinions don't matter.
        gilfoy 11mo ago
        > idk Yeah, was obvious from the first comment
        philipallstar 11mo ago
        Your definition of their product is different to theirs. They're selling a pretty sealed, you-get-what-you-get product. You want a hackable personal computer. A bit like how you buy a can of Coke and you can't add your own sugar. It just comes with sugar, unless you buy a different product from Coke, which is a fixed choice of sweetener. Saying "other products let you choose whether or not to add that sugar or sweetener" to me doesn't mean that Coke need to change anything.
  - miki123211 11mo ago
    In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes. I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve. The temptation to run "that one more background service" would be far too much for most apps, both free and otherwise. To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features. Free software is usually extremely bad at this by design, although there are exceptions (Graphene OS comes to mind). On Apple devices, core system services are written by Apple itself. That puts pressure on the software development side to care about battery perf, as that is what users want (and what increases sales). If software is written by 3rd parties with their own business goals unrelated to device sales, I'm afraid "featuritis" and lower development costs would win out over efficiency, as it usually does in such circumstances.
    - esseph 11mo ago
      To get good battery life out of a device, having complete software and hardware integration is key. That's the PC blessing and curse, having to support all kinds of different CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, RAM, etc from many different places. When you just have to focus on a handful of hardware platforms and when you own the hardware and software, this becomes much, much easier.
    - ChadNauseam 11mo ago
      > In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes. Well, except Android :P My phone runs a build of AOSP that I compiled myself. I can go change the source code to do whatever I want (and I do). It's pretty cool that that's possible IMO. To be fair, the drivers are closed-source
    - ragazzina 11mo ago
      Reading this comment, one would think Apple devices are very power efficient at the cost of running little in the background. In my experience, iOS has terrible battery life in the default mode, which is background app refresh enabled, and in general apps struggle keeping their state in the background, which is something that many people complain about on the internet. So the worst of the two worlds.
  - Nursie 11mo ago
    > M1 macbook is a locked down Sure, iOS is certainly restrictive, fully locked-down, app store only etc etc, and I'd love a full-fat firefox with its plugin system available on my phone. But what are you doing on a non-Mac laptop that you can't do on an M1 mac? I'm a big fan of linux and have used it as a main machine for many years, but use an M4 macbook as my daily driver at the moment (everyone else I work with does too, it's just easier). I haven't felt limited at all. I can build and install whatever I like, I have brew for my tooling needs... Yeah I don't see it with Mac. Unless you're actually needing linux and dockerisation won't cut the mustard I guess.
    - esseph 11mo ago
      If you're a Linux sysadmin type, it's nice to stay in the same environment as your vms, kubernetes, docker/podman containers, etc. You also get nice eBPF tools.
      - Nursie 11mo ago
        Sure, it's definitely nice to have a consistent env, no particular argument there. It's more "where are the barriers/locks?" that I was interested in
        esseph 11mo ago
        Well, I can't really put Linux on most Macs. That's a barrier to me. Apple doesn't want my money, because Apple doesn't want to sell me a laptop. Apple wants to sell me a curated experience with multiple components in their ecosystem.
        undeveloper 11mo ago
        On M1 / M2, asahi linux has decent support. People daily drive it.
        esseph 11mo ago
        Yes there has been some initial work done, but it's not exactly a mainstream daily driver suitable for deploying in a production environment.
  - maccard 11mo ago
    > But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. Skipping the "handheld" bit of this just for a second. You can run an (almost entirely) open stack on your hardware, and do so on an i9/9800X3D with 256GB RAM, 5080, and MultiTB of NVMe storage. But it doesn't realy matter for 95% of users, because the hardware is already way faster than they need and the bottlenecks are on the server side and on shitty software architecture. I have an i9 with 128GB RAM for work, and Excel still takes 30+ seconds to load, Teams manages to grind the entire thing to a halt on startup, slack uses enough memory to power a spaceship... Running those apps on my desktop is pretty much the same experience as running them on my 10 year old macbook.
    - dylan604 11mo ago
      > slack uses enough memory to power a spaceship... Which spaceship though? Not sure spaceship is the model you're looking for, as all of the ones I'm familiar have had a very locked down limited amount of memory. Apollo had something like 4Kb of memory. The space shuttle had 1MB.
      - JoblessWonder 11mo ago
        Yeah... it almost seems like a brag instead of an insult. I wish my programs used only enough memory to power a spaceship!
        volemo 11mo ago
        “My program suite is ported to x86, x64, ARM, and Apollo Guidance Computer” :D
      - maccard 11mo ago
        Yes you're correct. It seems like you got my point though. Slack often uses more memory than my IDE + compilers combined, to display the chat history of 60 people.
  - vessenes 11mo ago
    Curious - what do you do on your Linux (or FreeBSD natch) box that your m1 couldn’t?
    - bigyabai 11mo ago
      I'm surprised that anyone has to ask, anymore: - Locked, proprietary bootloader with no guaranteed Linux support - No official Vulkan drivers, DXVK broken without downstream patches (unlike every other GPU I own) - Every Docker solution runs worse than WSL (somehow) - macOS is ad-ridden and genuinely intolerable - APFS is borderline useless relative to EXT4 and NTFS, doubly so if you collaborate at work
      - spicybbq 11mo ago
        What I get from this is a description of how it is locked down, but not really an explanation of what you wish to do but cannot.
        bigyabai 11mo ago
        I'm so sorry, can you attempt to infer based on the clues I've left you?
        deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
        spicybbq 11mo ago
        Maybe try having a conversation instead of being so defensive.
      - vessenes 11mo ago
        So, gaming and x64 native docker? I presume collaboration at work means some sort of remote mounting of filesystems -- is `brew install samba` bad in some way? Re: ads - this is genuinely my complaint with Windows, but I thought I was getting a pretty ad-free experience in Mac, what am I missing?
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
    I recently sold my 1TB M1 Cellular iPad at a loss and picked up a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro for exactly the same reason. I don't even need GNU-freedom, regular MacOS is fine. I just can't live with a iPadOS anymore. edit: you can pry locked down iOS from my cold dead hands. Love it exactly because it's a walled garden.
    - c-hendricks 11mo ago
      Having trouble understanding your edit. Start with a laptop, you believe they should be open. Remove the keyboard so it's only a screen, you believe they should be opened. Shrink that screen down, and now they should be locked down?
      - monerozcash 11mo ago
        The walled garden is very pleasant, you really have to put in exceptional amounts of effort to get malware on your device.
        c-hendricks 11mo ago
        Sure, maybe the person I replied to has that same line of thought. Why do the same restrictions bother them on a bigger screen is what I'm getting at. What if the iPhone supported more traditional desktop resolutions when plugged into a display, you'd be staring at a screen with an Apple UI and more desktop/tablet like amounts of screen real estate. What of the walled garden then.
        ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
        Apple's heavy handed vision works for me in the phone format. I've spent my years messing with android ROMs and don't want to go back. I would love plug-in display type functionality for my phone, but not at the expense of leaving the walled garden.
        monerozcash 11mo ago
        In my case, I use bigger screen devices with somewhat exotic productivity tools that would not necessarily fit well in the walled garden. On the other hand, an ultra locked down macbook would sound pretty ideal for day-to-day browsing, handling financial tasks, work communications and so on. Really everything except the software development tasks I work on. On the other hand, I do almost everything over SSH already. I guess I really could easily live with a completely locked down base MacOS install without any issues. Even Terminal.app isn't too bad anymore.
  - runjake 11mo ago
    > But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. I sort of don't have to imagine, because somewhat viable options like this exist (eg. GrapheneOS). The issue there is that I'd still rather use a more polished handheld device (iOS) than jump ship and get those extra features. And wondering what GrapheneOS would be like with all its power, plus the polish of iOS is pointless fantasy, because it likely won't ever happen. My guess, based on experience, is that eventually, iOS's quality will degrade enough that I'll find Android or GrapheneOS more attractive.
    - volemo 11mo ago
      > eventually, iOS's quality will degrade enough that I'll find Android or GrapheneOS more attractive. Tbh, with the quality of the latest iOS I’m getting pretty close to that point. Looking at Ubuntu Touch right now.
  - deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  - StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
    That’s pretty much Google current bet. They are slowly enabling first party support for Linux app on Android while connected to a screen in a desktop mode. It makes a lot of sense considering high end SoC are now more powerful than the M1.
  - einsteinx2 11mo ago
    > I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with. Your M1 has supported Linux pretty well for years now… Install the Fedora Asahi Remix and give it a try.
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago
    Missed an opportunity there to say that you can use the Ferrari only on a track, while you can go on any road with the Civic!
- jajuuka 11mo ago
  I imagine we might seen some of these features in a iPhone foldable since it will have the space to take advantage of these features.
bossyTeacher 11mo ago
Apple will probably say that it locked down the features because they could brick the phones
- isoprophlex 11mo ago
  They locked it down because this way, it offers a superior experience to their revenue streams
- carstenhag 11mo ago
  On Android you can use split screen apps. Either some apps are broken (including some I was part of writing...) or it's really annoying to put in text when both apps are open. It's really just useless almost alway
  - hagbard_c 11mo ago
    ...except when it is really handy to have so why lock it down? I use it quite often on a 6” screen - small by 'modern' standards - and would not want to see our disappear 'to protect me' or for some other bullshit reason. This, b.t.w., is one of the many reasons why I vastly prefer Android-as-it-was over anything from the fruit factory and probably also over Android-as-it-will-become. I don't want my hands to be held by some vendor who thinks I'm too stupid to cope with some complexity to achieve my goals and would rather I buy yet another overpriced trinket from them. It is my feet and my gun and it is up to me if I want to risk shooting the former with the latter.
  - makeitdouble 11mo ago
    I end up using it a lot. I'm always fascinated at the threshold where people will decide something just won't happen ("useless") because it's not comfortable enough. I'm more in the camp of pushing the limits as far as technically possible if it means I'm neither walking around with a 13" screen at all time nor need to be home to be able to look at two things at the same time. So I'll be fine with readjusting a bit the window to input text if it means I can do the thing now instead of 6 hours later. At least I don't want Google to kill the feature just because it requires working around some quirks.
LeoPanthera 11mo ago
I have an 11" iPad and the screen still feels too small to use windowed apps. It gets very cramped very quickly. I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless. What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not.
- rock_artist 11mo ago
  It might not be super practical on the device display. But with external display and keyboard/mouse this becomes much more usable.
  - 650REDHAIR 11mo ago
    Honestly a dex competitor would really help keep me in the Apple ecosystem.
    - wjnc 11mo ago
      With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro. They are sitting on a golden cash flow and not willing to revolutionize computing again (as the iPhone did). Just as a N=1, I would rather pay a recurring fee in the Disney-Netflix range to Apple to get more liberty in usage from my machines. But I think they don’t dare to go those routes, because they need the broad market base and cannot extract the current cash flow from a smaller base, while setting expectations that the Googles, Samsungs can copy. Industry leaders dilemma. Apple currently settles on market differentiation via physical products.
      - Topfi 11mo ago
        Historically, cannibalizing has always been the right choice when it comes to such things. That was a major point of the first iPhone, that it was a full replacement for your iPod, which was instrumental in its success. All this thinking does is cloud ones judgement and let competitors succeed. Not saying you are wrong, this may be the reason Apple operates nowadays, but I maintain it is shortsighted.
asadm 11mo ago
Looking at the video, I can see why this was locked down. I wouldn't hand my mother that kind of complex UI.
- crooked-v 11mo ago
  What's really missing here is the mode where you plug the iPhone into a monitor, connect keyboard and mouse, and suddenly it's a functional desktop-lite in the same way that a basic iPad now is.
  - asadm 11mo ago
    Android has it and I love it!
  - nicoburns 11mo ago
    What's missing is the mode where you plug it in and it's a full desktop running macOS.
- wiseowise 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - asadm 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - yeasku 11mo ago
      [flagged]
- amomchilov 11mo ago
  Are you suggesting that the test for whether they should “allow” a feature is whether your mom can figure it out? Why?
ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago
This is not exactly something that any old schlub will be doing. I don’t find many of these features useful on my iPad (to be fair, my Mini is my daily iPad), let alone, my iPhone. I can’t see myself doing all that work, for features I don’t want to use.
sroussey 11mo ago
The Medusa stuff is new and yeah, it’s in iOS as it’s the basis for the foldable.
- ichicoro 11mo ago
  Got a link with more info about the Medusa stuff? The OP is down currently...
znpy 11mo ago
I wonder if i could di the opposite: make an iPad believe it’s an iPhone. I don’t see no reason why i couldn’t use my iPad’s built-in modem to make and receive calls. I mean, i could just bring my ipad and my airpods around and be done.
- halapro 11mo ago
  An iPhone for $399? Preposterous
- trvz 11mo ago
  iPadOS 26 brings the Phone app to iPad, so you can do exactly that now.
  - znpy 11mo ago
    That still requires an iPhone to be around though. Basically extra hardware that shouldn't be needed. So that's still BS.
- kotaKat 11mo ago
  Long, long ago there were some jailbreak hacks to pull this off. It was some funky mess with swapping modem firmware and pulling in the iOS dialer, if I recall. Closest thing you can get now is that they finally brought the dialer app to the iPad... I can sort of make calls now through my cellular iPad using my iPhone's voice account with the "wifi calling on other devices" feature.
- badc0ffee 11mo ago
  Assuming you're talking about the cellular modem - wouldn't you need to have a voice plan and a phone number, not just a data plan like you'd typically get for a tablet?
rcarmo 11mo ago
This would be a great thing to use with an external display when traveling, but of course it will never happen.
- trvz 11mo ago
  You can already use an iPhone a desktop computer, just not well: keyboards work fine, with AssistiveTouch you can get a pointer for your mouse, and by connecting iPhone to an external display it mirrors its display. Sadly, that includes the orientation and resolution. I've been hoping Apple will get eventually around to work this out, and the article shows it'd be easier than anticipated. I think it'll happen eventually. As for travelling specifically, it'd be easier to bring a MacBook than to bring a mouse and keyboard and portable display. The display could be replaced by a TV in your acommodation, but it's rare to be able to use that ergonomically. It'd be instead quite interesting in general for people who already only use little more than the browser.
  - rcarmo 11mo ago
    Actually, I use my iPhone with a Remote Desktop app and a Bluetooth keyboard fairly often (as long as I remember to take my HDMI adapter when traveling). It’s perfectly usable for checking your corporate email in a hotel in a pinch, (it gives me a full widescreen desktop) although that has to be coded into the app (Blink Shell does the same thing).
Gigachad 11mo ago
Linked site is unusable. Screen is completely covered in ads.
- bdcravens 11mo ago
  If your browser supports reader mode, it becomes tolerable.
- schappim 11mo ago
  It was completely unusable on an iOS device with slightly increased text size.
AbuAssar 11mo ago
So iOS and iPadOS are the same thing…
- hollow-moe 11mo ago
  There's no way they would blatantly lie to the EU to avoid having the ipad marked as gatekeeper by adding it to the numbers of the iphone
- jeroenhd 11mo ago
  Wasn't that always obvious? Surely nobody actually believed Apple built an entirely separate OS for their slightly-larger iPods?
  - Philpax 11mo ago
    I'm sure we all assumed that they came from the same codebase, but I don't think any of us were expecting the features to be shipped to both platforms and disabled at runtime as required. I expected a common codebase with the iPadOS features disabled at compiletime for iOS, and vice versa.
singularity2001 11mo ago
I wish there was a way to get rid of this new features on the iPad. Getting a split screen now feels incredibly clumsy compared to before
Ezhik 11mo ago
Can this be used to enable multiple display support on iPhones/non-pro iPads? Would be pretty damn cool if so.
- brookst 11mo ago
  I think the hardware is t there in A-series chips. But not positive.
  - Ezhik 11mo ago
    Has to be software, given that the non-Pro iPads can mirror the internal display or play video full screen.
- Ezhik 11mo ago
  Update - YES. Misaka26, enabling Stage Manager through it enables external display support on my non-pro iPad.
bradgessler 11mo ago
I want macOS on my iPad Pro so I can plug my Moonlander keyboard into it and have a “laptop” that doesn’t destroy my wrists.
- eddieroger 11mo ago
  You can have that today. If you get a USB-C breakout for the dock, it'll treat the Moonlander, or any keyboard, like a normal keyboard. You can not destroy your wrists right now, as I sometimes choose to do.
  - swores 11mo ago
    I’m pretty sure they are saying they want both that keyboard plugged in and MacOS rather than the limited iPadOS; not that they think MacOS is required to be able to plug a keyboard in.
    - bradgessler 11mo ago
      Exactly. iPadOS can’t run a Unix shell and docker, but macOS can. I don’t even want touch to work on the iPad running macOS. Just let me run my own input hardware against it.
NaOH 11mo ago
Actual title: How to Enable iPad Features like MultiTasking & Stage Manager on iPhone via MobileGestalt
throw0101c 11mo ago
I wish the iPad went back to being more iOS-like: something like multiple Safari windows, each with their own collection of tabs, is something I wish I could disable (both for myself, and for some of the seniors I'm tech support for). I have iDevices because I want simplicity and single-task-ness; I have Macs for multi-tasking. If Apple needs to satisfy both single- and multi-tasking iDevices users, there should be some kind of mode toggle.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- gyomu 11mo ago
  Turn off windowed apps on your iPad https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635 https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635
  - throw0101c 11mo ago
    > https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635 https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635 TIL.
- runjake 11mo ago
  You can disable or not use these features. Like gyomu said below, iPadOS Windows Apps is optional and opt-in. The default is full screen: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/work-with-multiple-windows-at-once-ipad08c9970c/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/work-with-multiple-wind... Select "Full Screen Apps". And you do not have to use Tab Groups. iPad User Guide link: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/organize-your-tabs-with-tab-groups-ipadf5a4dd79/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/organize-your-tabs-with... Unsarcastically speaking, I've been using these OSes for 2 decades plus but I still read through each OS's respective User Guides and still learn a ton every release. iPad User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados iPhone User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios Mac User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac
- 11mo ago
timeon 11mo ago
This site, among other things, wants to: "Create profiles for personalised advertising ( 644 partners included )". 644? Isn't that creepy?
nottorp 11mo ago
Sad but unrelated: There seems to be something wrong with the Cloudflare server that's supposed to serve me (Bucharest, they say). I was trying to take a break and read something on HN. Clicked on 4 sort of interesting headlines, 3 got me the Cloudflare error (including this one) and one sort of loaded some navigation bar without CSS and content. Cloudflare offers a great service... until it breaks half the internet.
- htk 11mo ago
  I'm on the same boat. Several links on HN are not opening.

180 points by K0IN 11mo ago

tekacs 11mo ago

This is kinda wonderful to see - a peek into a world where we get to see the 'other side' of what would have been possible had Apple not locked our devices down beyond belief. Jailbreak stores have never felt like a particularly strong illustration of what's possible due to their tiny user market - I'd love to see what developers would do if even for a period we could use these devices to anything remotely like their potential.

frfl 11mo ago
There was a comment few weeks ago - I forget the topic, maybe it was the new M-series release or something - that was talking about how freaking fast these things are. And the comment was pointing out how locked down everything is and most of that power is pretty useless - I mean sure on device "AI" and faster apps...OK I guess. I'm not the target demographic for these things anyway, so my opinions are whatever. But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with.
- LeoPanthera 11mo ago
  > But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. Could you elaborate? What specifically would you do? Because I'm finding it hard to imagine what I'd do with an "open" iPhone that I can't do now, but it's extremely easy to imagine all the horrific security risks that would emerge in what today is most people's primary computing device, storing data about literally their entire lives.
  - frfl 11mo ago
    My usage of "handheld" was vague. I meant any portable device (laptops, but also including phones/tablets). If you're finding it hard to imagine what you can do with a device that _does not_ restrict what you can do with it, then you're likely fine in the Apple ecosystem, that's fair and okay. Some people aren't, you'll just have to take my word for it, I don't wanna write an essay here and you're probably not interesting in reading all that. Security risk is a common one that comes up. Google used that to justify locking down sideloading recently. Let me take the risk. I bought this device, I should be allowed to make adult decisions right? I'm not downloading stuff off Limewire or a shady website. I'm downloading stuff off of Linux distro repos or F-Droid. There's a lot more to be said about all this. Including the amount of e-waste created because a device is too old to be supported by manufacturers, yet people run decade(s) old laptops/desktops using free OSs because they can. Just my 1AM rambling thoughts. Hope some of it makes some sense.
    - fooker 11mo ago
      > If you're finding it hard to imagine what you can do with a device that _does not_ restrict what you can do with it Go on, give some examples.
      - frfl 11mo ago
        Idk, maybe like not being forced to use their new glass UI? Or whatever new UI trend they'll decide to implement. On a unrestricted OS, I can just switch to a different desktop environment. If you read the rest of this thread, instead of asking, you'll find plenty examples. But hey, if you like MacOS, great, anyone else's opinions don't matter.
        gilfoy 11mo ago
        > idk Yeah, was obvious from the first comment
        philipallstar 11mo ago
        Your definition of their product is different to theirs. They're selling a pretty sealed, you-get-what-you-get product. You want a hackable personal computer. A bit like how you buy a can of Coke and you can't add your own sugar. It just comes with sugar, unless you buy a different product from Coke, which is a fixed choice of sweetener. Saying "other products let you choose whether or not to add that sugar or sweetener" to me doesn't mean that Coke need to change anything.
- miki123211 11mo ago
  In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes. I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve. The temptation to run "that one more background service" would be far too much for most apps, both free and otherwise. To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features. Free software is usually extremely bad at this by design, although there are exceptions (Graphene OS comes to mind). On Apple devices, core system services are written by Apple itself. That puts pressure on the software development side to care about battery perf, as that is what users want (and what increases sales). If software is written by 3rd parties with their own business goals unrelated to device sales, I'm afraid "featuritis" and lower development costs would win out over efficiency, as it usually does in such circumstances.
  - esseph 11mo ago
    To get good battery life out of a device, having complete software and hardware integration is key. That's the PC blessing and curse, having to support all kinds of different CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, RAM, etc from many different places. When you just have to focus on a handful of hardware platforms and when you own the hardware and software, this becomes much, much easier.
  - ChadNauseam 11mo ago
    > In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes. Well, except Android :P My phone runs a build of AOSP that I compiled myself. I can go change the source code to do whatever I want (and I do). It's pretty cool that that's possible IMO. To be fair, the drivers are closed-source
  - ragazzina 11mo ago
    Reading this comment, one would think Apple devices are very power efficient at the cost of running little in the background. In my experience, iOS has terrible battery life in the default mode, which is background app refresh enabled, and in general apps struggle keeping their state in the background, which is something that many people complain about on the internet. So the worst of the two worlds.
- Nursie 11mo ago
  > M1 macbook is a locked down Sure, iOS is certainly restrictive, fully locked-down, app store only etc etc, and I'd love a full-fat firefox with its plugin system available on my phone. But what are you doing on a non-Mac laptop that you can't do on an M1 mac? I'm a big fan of linux and have used it as a main machine for many years, but use an M4 macbook as my daily driver at the moment (everyone else I work with does too, it's just easier). I haven't felt limited at all. I can build and install whatever I like, I have brew for my tooling needs... Yeah I don't see it with Mac. Unless you're actually needing linux and dockerisation won't cut the mustard I guess.
  - esseph 11mo ago
    If you're a Linux sysadmin type, it's nice to stay in the same environment as your vms, kubernetes, docker/podman containers, etc. You also get nice eBPF tools.
    - Nursie 11mo ago
      Sure, it's definitely nice to have a consistent env, no particular argument there. It's more "where are the barriers/locks?" that I was interested in
      - esseph 11mo ago
        Well, I can't really put Linux on most Macs. That's a barrier to me. Apple doesn't want my money, because Apple doesn't want to sell me a laptop. Apple wants to sell me a curated experience with multiple components in their ecosystem.
        undeveloper 11mo ago
        On M1 / M2, asahi linux has decent support. People daily drive it.
        esseph 11mo ago
        Yes there has been some initial work done, but it's not exactly a mainstream daily driver suitable for deploying in a production environment.
- maccard 11mo ago
  > But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. Skipping the "handheld" bit of this just for a second. You can run an (almost entirely) open stack on your hardware, and do so on an i9/9800X3D with 256GB RAM, 5080, and MultiTB of NVMe storage. But it doesn't realy matter for 95% of users, because the hardware is already way faster than they need and the bottlenecks are on the server side and on shitty software architecture. I have an i9 with 128GB RAM for work, and Excel still takes 30+ seconds to load, Teams manages to grind the entire thing to a halt on startup, slack uses enough memory to power a spaceship... Running those apps on my desktop is pretty much the same experience as running them on my 10 year old macbook.
  - dylan604 11mo ago
    > slack uses enough memory to power a spaceship... Which spaceship though? Not sure spaceship is the model you're looking for, as all of the ones I'm familiar have had a very locked down limited amount of memory. Apollo had something like 4Kb of memory. The space shuttle had 1MB.
    - JoblessWonder 11mo ago
      Yeah... it almost seems like a brag instead of an insult. I wish my programs used only enough memory to power a spaceship!
      - volemo 11mo ago
        “My program suite is ported to x86, x64, ARM, and Apollo Guidance Computer” :D
    - maccard 11mo ago
      Yes you're correct. It seems like you got my point though. Slack often uses more memory than my IDE + compilers combined, to display the chat history of 60 people.
- vessenes 11mo ago
  Curious - what do you do on your Linux (or FreeBSD natch) box that your m1 couldn’t?
  - bigyabai 11mo ago
    I'm surprised that anyone has to ask, anymore: - Locked, proprietary bootloader with no guaranteed Linux support - No official Vulkan drivers, DXVK broken without downstream patches (unlike every other GPU I own) - Every Docker solution runs worse than WSL (somehow) - macOS is ad-ridden and genuinely intolerable - APFS is borderline useless relative to EXT4 and NTFS, doubly so if you collaborate at work
    - spicybbq 11mo ago
      What I get from this is a description of how it is locked down, but not really an explanation of what you wish to do but cannot.
      - bigyabai 11mo ago
        I'm so sorry, can you attempt to infer based on the clues I've left you?
        deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
        spicybbq 11mo ago
        Maybe try having a conversation instead of being so defensive.
    - vessenes 11mo ago
      So, gaming and x64 native docker? I presume collaboration at work means some sort of remote mounting of filesystems -- is `brew install samba` bad in some way? Re: ads - this is genuinely my complaint with Windows, but I thought I was getting a pretty ad-free experience in Mac, what am I missing?
- ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
  I recently sold my 1TB M1 Cellular iPad at a loss and picked up a 2019 Intel MacBook Pro for exactly the same reason. I don't even need GNU-freedom, regular MacOS is fine. I just can't live with a iPadOS anymore. edit: you can pry locked down iOS from my cold dead hands. Love it exactly because it's a walled garden.
  - c-hendricks 11mo ago
    Having trouble understanding your edit. Start with a laptop, you believe they should be open. Remove the keyboard so it's only a screen, you believe they should be opened. Shrink that screen down, and now they should be locked down?
    - monerozcash 11mo ago
      The walled garden is very pleasant, you really have to put in exceptional amounts of effort to get malware on your device.
      - c-hendricks 11mo ago
        Sure, maybe the person I replied to has that same line of thought. Why do the same restrictions bother them on a bigger screen is what I'm getting at. What if the iPhone supported more traditional desktop resolutions when plugged into a display, you'd be staring at a screen with an Apple UI and more desktop/tablet like amounts of screen real estate. What of the walled garden then.
        ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
        Apple's heavy handed vision works for me in the phone format. I've spent my years messing with android ROMs and don't want to go back. I would love plug-in display type functionality for my phone, but not at the expense of leaving the walled garden.
        monerozcash 11mo ago
        In my case, I use bigger screen devices with somewhat exotic productivity tools that would not necessarily fit well in the walled garden. On the other hand, an ultra locked down macbook would sound pretty ideal for day-to-day browsing, handling financial tasks, work communications and so on. Really everything except the software development tasks I work on. On the other hand, I do almost everything over SSH already. I guess I really could easily live with a completely locked down base MacOS install without any issues. Even Terminal.app isn't too bad anymore.
- runjake 11mo ago
  > But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. I sort of don't have to imagine, because somewhat viable options like this exist (eg. GrapheneOS). The issue there is that I'd still rather use a more polished handheld device (iOS) than jump ship and get those extra features. And wondering what GrapheneOS would be like with all its power, plus the polish of iOS is pointless fantasy, because it likely won't ever happen. My guess, based on experience, is that eventually, iOS's quality will degrade enough that I'll find Android or GrapheneOS more attractive.
  - volemo 11mo ago
    > eventually, iOS's quality will degrade enough that I'll find Android or GrapheneOS more attractive. Tbh, with the quality of the latest iOS I’m getting pretty close to that point. Looking at Ubuntu Touch right now.
- deleted 11mo ago
  [deleted]
- StopDisinfo910 11mo ago
  That’s pretty much Google current bet. They are slowly enabling first party support for Linux app on Android while connected to a screen in a desktop mode. It makes a lot of sense considering high end SoC are now more powerful than the M1.
- einsteinx2 11mo ago
  > I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with. Your M1 has supported Linux pretty well for years now… Install the Fedora Asahi Remix and give it a try.
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 11mo ago
  Missed an opportunity there to say that you can use the Ferrari only on a track, while you can go on any road with the Civic!
jajuuka 11mo ago
I imagine we might seen some of these features in a iPhone foldable since it will have the space to take advantage of these features.

bossyTeacher 11mo ago

Apple will probably say that it locked down the features because they could brick the phones

isoprophlex 11mo ago
They locked it down because this way, it offers a superior experience to their revenue streams
carstenhag 11mo ago
On Android you can use split screen apps. Either some apps are broken (including some I was part of writing...) or it's really annoying to put in text when both apps are open. It's really just useless almost alway
- hagbard_c 11mo ago
  ...except when it is really handy to have so why lock it down? I use it quite often on a 6” screen - small by 'modern' standards - and would not want to see our disappear 'to protect me' or for some other bullshit reason. This, b.t.w., is one of the many reasons why I vastly prefer Android-as-it-was over anything from the fruit factory and probably also over Android-as-it-will-become. I don't want my hands to be held by some vendor who thinks I'm too stupid to cope with some complexity to achieve my goals and would rather I buy yet another overpriced trinket from them. It is my feet and my gun and it is up to me if I want to risk shooting the former with the latter.
- makeitdouble 11mo ago
  I end up using it a lot. I'm always fascinated at the threshold where people will decide something just won't happen ("useless") because it's not comfortable enough. I'm more in the camp of pushing the limits as far as technically possible if it means I'm neither walking around with a 13" screen at all time nor need to be home to be able to look at two things at the same time. So I'll be fine with readjusting a bit the window to input text if it means I can do the thing now instead of 6 hours later. At least I don't want Google to kill the feature just because it requires working around some quirks.

LeoPanthera 11mo ago

I have an 11" iPad and the screen still feels too small to use windowed apps. It gets very cramped very quickly. I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless. What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not.

rock_artist 11mo ago
It might not be super practical on the device display. But with external display and keyboard/mouse this becomes much more usable.
- 650REDHAIR 11mo ago
  Honestly a dex competitor would really help keep me in the Apple ecosystem.
  - wjnc 11mo ago
    With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro. They are sitting on a golden cash flow and not willing to revolutionize computing again (as the iPhone did). Just as a N=1, I would rather pay a recurring fee in the Disney-Netflix range to Apple to get more liberty in usage from my machines. But I think they don’t dare to go those routes, because they need the broad market base and cannot extract the current cash flow from a smaller base, while setting expectations that the Googles, Samsungs can copy. Industry leaders dilemma. Apple currently settles on market differentiation via physical products.
    - Topfi 11mo ago
      Historically, cannibalizing has always been the right choice when it comes to such things. That was a major point of the first iPhone, that it was a full replacement for your iPod, which was instrumental in its success. All this thinking does is cloud ones judgement and let competitors succeed. Not saying you are wrong, this may be the reason Apple operates nowadays, but I maintain it is shortsighted.

asadm 11mo ago

Looking at the video, I can see why this was locked down. I wouldn't hand my mother that kind of complex UI.

crooked-v 11mo ago
What's really missing here is the mode where you plug the iPhone into a monitor, connect keyboard and mouse, and suddenly it's a functional desktop-lite in the same way that a basic iPad now is.
- asadm 11mo ago
  Android has it and I love it!
- nicoburns 11mo ago
  What's missing is the mode where you plug it in and it's a full desktop running macOS.
wiseowise 11mo ago
[flagged]
- asadm 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - yeasku 11mo ago
    [flagged]
amomchilov 11mo ago
Are you suggesting that the test for whether they should “allow” a feature is whether your mom can figure it out? Why?

ChrisMarshallNY 11mo ago

This is not exactly something that any old schlub will be doing. I don’t find many of these features useful on my iPad (to be fair, my Mini is my daily iPad), let alone, my iPhone. I can’t see myself doing all that work, for features I don’t want to use.

sroussey 11mo ago

The Medusa stuff is new and yeah, it’s in iOS as it’s the basis for the foldable.

ichicoro 11mo ago
Got a link with more info about the Medusa stuff? The OP is down currently...

znpy 11mo ago

I wonder if i could di the opposite: make an iPad believe it’s an iPhone. I don’t see no reason why i couldn’t use my iPad’s built-in modem to make and receive calls. I mean, i could just bring my ipad and my airpods around and be done.

halapro 11mo ago
An iPhone for $399? Preposterous
trvz 11mo ago
iPadOS 26 brings the Phone app to iPad, so you can do exactly that now.
- znpy 11mo ago
  That still requires an iPhone to be around though. Basically extra hardware that shouldn't be needed. So that's still BS.
kotaKat 11mo ago
Long, long ago there were some jailbreak hacks to pull this off. It was some funky mess with swapping modem firmware and pulling in the iOS dialer, if I recall. Closest thing you can get now is that they finally brought the dialer app to the iPad... I can sort of make calls now through my cellular iPad using my iPhone's voice account with the "wifi calling on other devices" feature.
badc0ffee 11mo ago
Assuming you're talking about the cellular modem - wouldn't you need to have a voice plan and a phone number, not just a data plan like you'd typically get for a tablet?

rcarmo 11mo ago

This would be a great thing to use with an external display when traveling, but of course it will never happen.

trvz 11mo ago
You can already use an iPhone a desktop computer, just not well: keyboards work fine, with AssistiveTouch you can get a pointer for your mouse, and by connecting iPhone to an external display it mirrors its display. Sadly, that includes the orientation and resolution. I've been hoping Apple will get eventually around to work this out, and the article shows it'd be easier than anticipated. I think it'll happen eventually. As for travelling specifically, it'd be easier to bring a MacBook than to bring a mouse and keyboard and portable display. The display could be replaced by a TV in your acommodation, but it's rare to be able to use that ergonomically. It'd be instead quite interesting in general for people who already only use little more than the browser.
- rcarmo 11mo ago
  Actually, I use my iPhone with a Remote Desktop app and a Bluetooth keyboard fairly often (as long as I remember to take my HDMI adapter when traveling). It’s perfectly usable for checking your corporate email in a hotel in a pinch, (it gives me a full widescreen desktop) although that has to be coded into the app (Blink Shell does the same thing).

Gigachad 11mo ago

Linked site is unusable. Screen is completely covered in ads.

bdcravens 11mo ago
If your browser supports reader mode, it becomes tolerable.
schappim 11mo ago
It was completely unusable on an iOS device with slightly increased text size.

AbuAssar 11mo ago

So iOS and iPadOS are the same thing…

hollow-moe 11mo ago
There's no way they would blatantly lie to the EU to avoid having the ipad marked as gatekeeper by adding it to the numbers of the iphone
jeroenhd 11mo ago
Wasn't that always obvious? Surely nobody actually believed Apple built an entirely separate OS for their slightly-larger iPods?
- Philpax 11mo ago
  I'm sure we all assumed that they came from the same codebase, but I don't think any of us were expecting the features to be shipped to both platforms and disabled at runtime as required. I expected a common codebase with the iPadOS features disabled at compiletime for iOS, and vice versa.

singularity2001 11mo ago

I wish there was a way to get rid of this new features on the iPad. Getting a split screen now feels incredibly clumsy compared to before

Ezhik 11mo ago

Can this be used to enable multiple display support on iPhones/non-pro iPads? Would be pretty damn cool if so.

brookst 11mo ago
I think the hardware is t there in A-series chips. But not positive.
- Ezhik 11mo ago
  Has to be software, given that the non-Pro iPads can mirror the internal display or play video full screen.
Ezhik 11mo ago
Update - YES. Misaka26, enabling Stage Manager through it enables external display support on my non-pro iPad.

bradgessler 11mo ago

I want macOS on my iPad Pro so I can plug my Moonlander keyboard into it and have a “laptop” that doesn’t destroy my wrists.

eddieroger 11mo ago
You can have that today. If you get a USB-C breakout for the dock, it'll treat the Moonlander, or any keyboard, like a normal keyboard. You can not destroy your wrists right now, as I sometimes choose to do.
- swores 11mo ago
  I’m pretty sure they are saying they want both that keyboard plugged in and MacOS rather than the limited iPadOS; not that they think MacOS is required to be able to plug a keyboard in.
  - bradgessler 11mo ago
    Exactly. iPadOS can’t run a Unix shell and docker, but macOS can. I don’t even want touch to work on the iPad running macOS. Just let me run my own input hardware against it.

NaOH 11mo ago

Actual title: How to Enable iPad Features like MultiTasking & Stage Manager on iPhone via MobileGestalt

throw0101c 11mo ago

I wish the iPad went back to being more iOS-like: something like multiple Safari windows, each with their own collection of tabs, is something I wish I could disable (both for myself, and for some of the seniors I'm tech support for). I have iDevices because I want simplicity and single-task-ness; I have Macs for multi-tasking. If Apple needs to satisfy both single- and multi-tasking iDevices users, there should be some kind of mode toggle.

deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
gyomu 11mo ago
Turn off windowed apps on your iPad https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635 https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635
- throw0101c 11mo ago
  > https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635 https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635 TIL.
runjake 11mo ago
You can disable or not use these features. Like gyomu said below, iPadOS Windows Apps is optional and opt-in. The default is full screen: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/work-with-multiple-windows-at-once-ipad08c9970c/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/work-with-multiple-wind... Select "Full Screen Apps". And you do not have to use Tab Groups. iPad User Guide link: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/organize-your-tabs-with-tab-groups-ipadf5a4dd79/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/organize-your-tabs-with... Unsarcastically speaking, I've been using these OSes for 2 decades plus but I still read through each OS's respective User Guides and still learn a ton every release. iPad User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados https://support.apple.com/guide/ipad/welcome/ipados iPhone User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios Mac User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac
11mo ago

timeon 11mo ago

This site, among other things, wants to: "Create profiles for personalised advertising ( 644 partners included )". 644? Isn't that creepy?

nottorp 11mo ago

Sad but unrelated: There seems to be something wrong with the Cloudflare server that's supposed to serve me (Bucharest, they say). I was trying to take a break and read something on HN. Clicked on 4 sort of interesting headlines, 3 got me the Cloudflare error (including this one) and one sort of loaded some navigation bar without CSS and content. Cloudflare offers a great service... until it breaks half the internet.

htk 11mo ago
I'm on the same boat. Several links on HN are not opening.