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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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."
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.
- The user interface and UX is pretty and all[1], but doesn't quite work as I'd like and I can't really do much beyond a few limited "hacks". Switching workspaces has a horrible and annoying animation I can't turn off. All applications windows are grouped together and for example some actions cause all of them to jump to the top. Top-level shortcuts are limited and I can't do the same things I can on Linux - eg, I bind Super+Enter to open a new terminal window, on MacOS I can kind get a janky version of that, but due to how the window manager works, it not as streamlined as Linux
- The whole notarization stuff and signing - I mean okay, security, great. But it's annoying and you have to pay Apple like $100(?) a year just for the privilege of developing software for their platform. When I did desktop app dev on MacOS, I had to do `xattr com.apple.quarantine` commands to turn off the security nonsense that prevented me from running our own app I or my coworkers wanted to test locally.
- I have a list of utilities/apps I need to install on a new MacOS machine just to get it to partially behave the way I want. Ideally MacOS should let me customize it directly with the necessary options so these extra apps aren't necessary. Nothing I'm asking is all that complicated - Linux environments provide it more or less by default with a few setting tweaks, even Windows behaves closer to what I want and I'm no fan of Windows.
- Recently I noticed MacOS was using bunch of CPU while idling - I traced it down to some background indexing scanning that was running constantly. I had to look up esoteric command line commands to stop it - which didn't work. I ended up disabling Spotlight almost completely to make it stop using my CPU every time I stepped away for a few mins.
Annoying stuff like this really puts me off of MacOS. Like I'm being forced to conform to their way of thinking and using a device. I'm an adult, let me decide for myself.
tldr; I just like Linux, it works, it's slick, I can turn-on/off, add/remove whatever I want. I'm not restricted to what some company thinks my workflow should look like.
[1]: I'm leaving out their "glass UI" blunder... what a horribly silly thing that is. Plenty to be said about that and others already have, so I won't repeat it here.
- 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
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.
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.
And I do all of that on my Mac. My 4090 rig is strictly for gaming with my son and my Proxmox Linux retired thin client rigs are for running my household on HA.
Please tell me what I'm missing out on by using a Mac OS device as my daily driver.
I would assume that an iPhone has similar amounts of unwanted background apps and would also be able to gain battery life instead of losing it if rooted. Obviously if you install spyware, you lose a lot of battery life. Funnily enough, I remember that a few years ago, people were surprised to find that uninstalling facebook increased battery life because it behaved much like spyware.
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.
If it's a corporate device, it's usually some anti-virus abomination (or other security-related software) that steals 90% of the resources.
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?
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.
I help sysadmin a few hundred servers, and given the choice I went with a MacBook because Terminal and SSH was good enough to admin stuff. MacOS is also pretty good with the business-y apps I have to deal with at times.
A colleague went with a x86 laptop and installed Ubuntu on it, and has regular issues with audio (Google Meeting, Zoom, etc), screen sharing (seems to be Wayland), etc.
At a previous job I had a Linux workstation under my desk and a Windows laptop, but with hybrid/remote I 'combined the two' into a Apple laptop.
* Use (true) Firefox w/ extensions or other browsers
* Sideload apps that aren't available in the store (this is increasingly common with open source projects that don't want the headache of dealing with app stores)
* Install my own apps (which I increasingly vibe-code since I'm the only user) and not have to deal with paying Apple or reinstalling every few days or week or whatever
* Write bash and ruby scripts to automate things on my device which often require interacting with system APIs (tmux is my platform for this on Android currently)
* Pin versions of apps that have enshittified or sold to gross companies that harvest data or switch to subscriptions models by copying the APK and re-installing it on new devices
* Install alternate/experimental graphical shells that are frequently innovative and interesting (though rarely useful in the long-term, but it's still fun)
* Option to use other ROMs such as Graphene OS
* Capture packets and proxy traffic to see what my device is doing (this has gotten pretty hard on Android now, but still something I want to do)
* Have an on-device fine-grained firewall to tightly control which apps are allowed network access
There are definitely other things I can't think of at the moment, but I'm not sure why you're being so hostile to GP. Saying that iOS devices are locked down and can't do a lot of stuff doesn't seem like a very controversial opinion, especially on HN.
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?
I'm almost certain that it's our Microsoft AD tenant.
Either way, kind of proves the point. We have plenty of power, the problem is <AD|antivirus|electron|PM touting their new UI overhaul>.
Yes, pretty much everyone on this forum is aware that any Electron app is going to use way more memory than actually necessary as a trade off for developing in that ecosystem.
They want a cyber deck, except good and useful and apple hardware.
I often find myself wondering why these people aren’t happily using some Android rom and are instead using an iPhone.
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.
I love using the MacBooks, but the OS just doesn't feel like it was designed for me, and that would be OK, but I have limited alternatives if I want all of the hardware to keep working.
Also, yes, gaming, but that's less important to me.
It's absolutely fine to have personal preferences on UX, customisability etc. This is why I swore off GNOME at the Gnome 3 transition and have never looked back, for example. If it doesn't work for you it doesn't work for you.
But it doesn't really support the assertion that you can't use the power of an M1 because of "how locked down everything is and most of that power is pretty useless".
Again, not trying to say "Thou shalt love MacOS!", but more that I don't think your points there really reflect something so locked down as to be useless. Just something with a UI you don't get along with.
People can use whatever they want. They're adults. I don't wanna debate. I just shared my random opinions.
If I had the choice, since I have a free Macbook laying around right now, I'd slap Linux on it and be happy - unfortunately doesn't look like Asahi Linux is quite ready yet for me to do so, few missing things. I ran Linux on a Intel Macbook (which I also didn't purchase, was given to me) for all of university and I was a happy camper.
That being said, would I buy a Mac voluntarily - nope. I'd rather buy a Thinkpad, install Linux, and I'm set for a decade honestly.
I would love plug-in display type functionality for my phone, but not at the expense of leaving the walled garden.
No longer true as of this year.
> tmux
typo?
I agree with you about side loading. Apple does not. I wonder if regulations can eventually force their hand.
Some of your other points (scripting, packet sniffing, general shell access and command line tools) are just done differently, and you'd just need new tools of the trade if you actually wanted to do it. Also, a bunch of the things you have mentioned requires unlocking the android bootloader and obtaining root privileges. You can do that to a large extent for ios (jailbreaking), Apple is just more competent about shutting it out than other companies.
No offense, but this is one of the most absurd things I have ever read on a hackernews discussion.
I bet if I could get root on iOS I would get even better battery life as I kill off services related to iCloud and other background processes I don’t want running.
> 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.
There is zero evidence that this is the case. In fact saying “no” to root allows more services and things running on the device than I may want.
It makes a lot of sense considering high end SoC are now more powerful than the M1.
So, I feel like I routinely experience what we are talking about in this sub-thread. Given a few VPS’s to ssh/mosh into for programming and a keyboard and mouse, this is a workable setup.
The one thing that always gets me to unpack my MacMini and set it up is that even with 16G shared memory on a iPadPro, I can only run local models in a chat-style app. On macOS, my LLM use is mostly embedded in experimental scripts and apps.
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.
Also, iPhones have 20% smaller batteries for the same battery life, but there could be multiple reasons (maybe combined even) for this.
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.
Your M1 has supported Linux pretty well for years now… Install the Fedora Asahi Remix and give it a try.