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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
by 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 agoThere 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 agoMy 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 agoIdk, 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 agoYour 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.
- akho 11mo agoHave real ad blocking in the browser. (which would mitigate a lot of security risks by itself. I also note that people seem to do fine with desktop OSes, despite their outdated security models) Also, a working foss ecosystem.
- tartoran 11mo agoI'd remove all the fluff that I'm not interested in.
- prmoustache 11mo agoFrom what I understand iPhones support external displays out of thebox, so you could use one as your main computer and do any productive stuff like development, video/3d/photos editing, anything really you can do on a computer with the liberty to install open source tools, develop/open drivers for anything connected to usb or bt, etc.
- fsflover 11mo agoConnect screen and keyboard and turn it into a full desktop with desktop apps. Run VMs for insecure operations.
- WorldPeas 11mo agoI have fantasies sometimes of a powerful phone that docks into a laptop chassis with expandable I/O like a framework
- fsflover 11mo agoLibrem 5 is not too powerful, but it works as a desktop.
- WorldPeas 11mo agoI've used it as well as an x86 phone running macos and an ipad mini on a lark for a week, at this point in my life as much as I complain, imessage is basically the only secure communication mechanism I can get most people to use
- PrairieFire 11mo agoA future where we carry and manage just one device could be incredible. That said, today, even if iOS weren’t so locked down and more capable of that, I think I’d find myself frustrated. I run on device local llm’s on my iPhone and a heavily quantized 3b parameter model starts to cause the iPhones thermal management to heavily throttle after just a few prompts with light tokens, to the point it’s slower than 1 token per second for inference or response, and the phone gets hot to the touch. Maybe the rumored half iPhone half iPad device could be the eventual platform from which something like this emerges.
- WorldPeas 11mo agoperhaps that's what they're developing all these "private compute" servers for. Though I would be less than happy if Apple, the last (relatively) untaken hill of the SaaS enshittification wars were to go down that road. In the meantime I will continue to use my hilariously overpowered laptop as a SSH terminal to the machine I actually work on
- RulerOf 11mo ago> What specifically would you do? All kinds of shit. I'd make locking the phone while the flashlight is operating require pressing the lock button again to wake the screen with no exceptions, so the screen no longer shines in my eyes reducing the effectiveness of the flashlight, and stay palm input stops opening the camera. I'd hook screen time management of my children's devices—which I perform on my own device—into FaceID instead of requiring a stupid passcode. You don't have to go far to find areas where iOS could use some customization. But if it's Apple's code, the most useful adjustments are off limits. Jailbroken iOS was a fantastic platform for the first 9 major releases or so because it had that kind of stuff in it. Now it's "throw a suggestion in the box on our website and we'll ignore it in the order it was received."
- WorldPeas 11mo agoI already use a-shell to run python scripts that fetch media, news summaries, server dashboards etc. It's really a shame I can't actually do what I want like with android where I could make custom permanent free apps for myself and do what I pleased throughout the system, executing binaries that interfaced with the real fs or remuxing video, rsyncing to my server.
- timeon 11mo agoOne think would be: permanently installing my own apps, without paying for that option.
- miki123211 11mo agoIn 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 agoTo 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 agoReading 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 agoIf 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 agoSure, 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 agoWell, 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 agoOn M1 / M2, asahi linux has decent support. People daily drive it.
- esseph 11mo agoYes 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 agoYeah... 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 agoYes 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 agoCurious - what do you do on your Linux (or FreeBSD natch) box that your m1 couldn’t?
- bigyabai 11mo agoI'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 agoWhat 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.
- vessenes 11mo agoSo, 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 agoI 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 agoHaving 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 agoThe walled garden is very pleasant, you really have to put in exceptional amounts of effort to get malware on your device.
- c-hendricks 11mo agoSure, 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 agoApple'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 agoIn 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 agoThat’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 agoMissed 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 agoI imagine we might seen some of these features in a iPhone foldable since it will have the space to take advantage of these features.