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Apple must open iPadOS to sideloading within 6 months, EU says

(arstechnica.com)
380 points rezonant | 6 comments | 30 Apr 24 04:44 UTC | HN request time: 0.9s | source | bottom
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DCKing ◴[30 Apr 24 07:36 UTC] No.40208207[source]▶
The iPad App Store is perhaps an even more dysfunctional place than the iPhone in how much it holds hardware and use cases hostage to the manufacturer's vision. Just imagine how much more versatile the iPad Pro would be if only you could run Linux VMs on it in the moments you want to do anything remotely tinkery on an iPad.

Apple's hardware since the 2021 iPad Pro (with M1) has had the ability to do this. The iPads have the RAM (16gb on higher storage models), appropriate keyboard and trackpads, the works. Great hardware being held back by Apple's vision people weren't allowed to deviate from.

A straightforward reading of the DMA suggests that Apple is not allowed to restrict apps from using hardware features. Let's hope that means Parallels/VMware style VMs are possible without too much of a fight.

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1. MyFirstSass ◴[30 Apr 24 10:10 UTC] No.40209184[source]▶
Another thing is the issue of e-waste.

At some point i had multiple older iPads with perfectly great screens, and i wanted to use them as "hubs" for a home setup to control various things, another option was using them as secondary screens, or maybe just give them to a kid.

You couldn't, they were simply to old for the new IOS update, and almost all apps including browsers requires the newer IOS and update automatically without asking - essentially bricking them on purpose.

Anyway i ended up giving them to a "safe e-waste center" but i'm sceptical they'll actually be recycled.

I think locking down a device should be illegal especially e-waste considered, and if there's some reason not to, then it should at least be opened the day official support ends so the device can be used to watch videos/games for kids/whatever.

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2. manderley ◴[30 Apr 24 10:47 UTC] No.40209504[source]▶
Of course they were recycled, there are valuable minerals in these devices.
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3. pzo ◴[30 Apr 24 10:47 UTC] No.40209507[source]▶
Same, I wish once device stops being supported it should give easy option to be jailbroken and unlock bootloader. Such devices could be retrofitted for many other roles e.g robotics toy with arduino/raspberrypi, smart home, smart router etc.
4. bojan ◴[30 Apr 24 10:59 UTC] No.40209577[source]▶
As a counterexample, the other day I found my old Nexus 5, from 2013, running Android 6. While it was not completely straightforward, I was able to reset the phone and link it to a new Google account, and after several cycles of updates the entire Google suite seems to work, including Maps, and not slowly at that. I was, and still am, genuinely impressed.
5. MyFirstSass ◴[30 Apr 24 11:00 UTC] No.40209592[source]▶
Well, in my country there's been multiple scandals about waste handling where it was found very little ended up being recycled, the sorting people did in some cases created more pollution because it had to be transported and huge amounts ended up in big dumps of toxic assorted garbage either here or in some third world country where kids then make a few cents a day scavenging in the toxic piles.

So yeah, i'm sceptical. There's a reason it's called reduce, re-use, recycle as a very distant third as far as i've seen.

6. pquki4 ◴[30 Apr 24 11:34 UTC] No.40209852[source]▶
A story going in completely different direction --

I have a Sony Xperia phone from 2017. It has stopped receiving OS updates after Android 8, and I don't use it any more other than occasionally as a backup phone. A while ago, I discovered that people on xda are putting LineageOS (a custom ROM based on AOSP) with Android 14 on it, tried that myself, and it works! As slow as the phone is, it can run apps without any problem. This is truly amazing.