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.
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.
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.
I had the opposite experience going from a OnePlus 8T stock to Lineage OS. Having root means being able to reduce the amount of apps and wake up — no google play service was the key. This was a while ago but I went from 1-2 days of battery life to about 4-5 days. This is with light use, screen on time was equally draining with both setups.
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.
> 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
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.
> I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve.
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.
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.
Don’t mix up IoT devices that are running the single app that does one thing, and user devices, where there’s a zoo of applications written by a third party. It’s not that free software such as embedded linux are incapable of being low-power, no, as the op correctly pointed it’s about managing and limiting what user space applications can do.
> 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.
Something seems to be funny with your computer's setup. On my feeble i5 laptop with 16GB, Excel starts in about 3 seconds to the point where I can start doing stuff.
If it's a corporate device, it's usually some anti-virus abomination (or other security-related software) that steals 90% of the resources.
> 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.
Yes, but it seems you have a misconception of the computers we've used in our spaceships. Most people are not familiar with how little compute was involved in our spacecraft.
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.
In efforts to save the punchline - I would move to change 'a spaceship' to 'interstellar jump calculations' but I fear the actual ram required would also be small.
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.
> If you're a Linux sysadmin type, it's nice to stay in the same environment as your vms, kubernetes, docker/podman containers, etc.
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.
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.
Just my opinion here, after ~4 years of using it at work and daily driving Linux for personal use, including development, for a decade:
- 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.
OK, so this seems like a list of gripes about MacOS.
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.
Honestly I'm tried and didn't expect this thread to blow up like this.
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.
> 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.
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.
Not OP, but here are just a few things I do currently on my Android (phones and tablets):
* 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.
> Use (true) Firefox w/ extensions or other browsers
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.
Thanks for writing it up. I agree with all your points. I stopped myself from replying further to the other commenters - they don't seem to be interested in an actual meaningful calm discussion.
Running goddamn Emacs for one. Running the software I need for work like Python with a full suite of packages and Wolfram Mathematica. Remapping freaking keys and their behaviour. The possibilities are endless!
Nothing, it’s never anything real and just some fantasy of what they could have if someone else put in an incredible amount of work to achieve something nebulous they got the impression of from a sci-fi book.
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.
Run a web server exposed through a Cloudflare Tunnel. Write code in one program, compile it in another using a shared filesystem. Write mods and extensions for programs which expose an API or just patch their files if you can figure out how to reverse them. Run programs like ffmpeg or yt-dlp directly on a CLI.
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.
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.
I'm a heavy Terminal user and run everything from local LLMs to full stack dev (react/python). I dibble and dabble in Blender, Unreal, and Logic Pro. I aimlessly browse the web looking for recipes, 3d printing files, shopping, HN, whatever. I'll occasionally spin up Age of Empire II locally or play some quick games via GeForceNow. I'm in full control of my Synology and Qnap NAS servers and the shit ton of media that's on it.
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.
The specific examples in the thread, AFAICT, are about iOS, not macOS, and the person you're responding to specifically mentioned Macs. It's very hard to find examples of "things you cannot do on an Apple Silicon Mac due to Apple-imposed restrictions that you can do on a PC" that aren't pretty esoteric. (Unless you want to argue that the inability to plug in a better third-party GPU is due to Apple-imposed restrictions, which is debatable but defensible.)
A 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.
While my main driver is a maxed out MacMini hooked to an Apple Studio monitor, at least once a week I pack up and store my MacMini and plug an iPadPro into my large monitor for a few days.
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.
exactly. The real shame of these devices is they're 99% of the way there but that last inch of running x script requiring you to whip out a form-identical device that has been blessed with the ability of running uncertified code is maddening to say the least
perhaps 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
I'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
(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)
I 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.
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."
From 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
For me, it's always been the lack of a power-user-friendly windowing/workspace scheme. You can approximate a tiling window manager using yabai or similar solutions, but it's just not the same thing.
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.
.. macOS is ad-ridden? perhaps I'm already brain broken, but beyond like a few ads for icloud pro for time machine or whatever when I'm already poking around in relavent settings, I never see ads. it feels extremely unobtrusive.
the other points are not relevant to me, so I suppose it makes sense why I don't care, but iirc apple's `container` OCI runner is highly optimized for the M series, did you have significant issues with it?
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.
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.
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.
I don't see why we cannot build an app that when connected to an external monitor switches to a "Desktop Environment". Maybe, even a hacked version of UTM[1] that exposes a fully functional OS on the monitor.
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.
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.
Two bits floating in my mind: I'm in management (different sector, totally different scale) and deciding to move forward against a market as a market leader is a really scary decision. We did and changed our proposition against a trend in the market. The market mostly followed our lead. Thats what we hoped for, but sure couldn't count on at the time of the decision. So we had to make sure to have all stakeholders involved in the risk - What if most of our customers just left? Then suppose you are in management for Apple. The stakes are massive. How would you communicate this shift?
The other one is: You should take the strength of your opposition into account when making bold moves. Android / Google / the brands fabricating the products I would say (no need for the old debate) are market followers. They are good at following and produce more technical diverse products, minus the margins. If you do not expect your opposition to make the bold move first, but do expect them to follow your bold move, I would argue you should be less likely to play bold moves unless you know they cannot follow you. So game theory I think also favors the status quo for Apple.
That said, the iPhone was more expensive than the iPod, and replaced 1 Apple device (plus a device made by someone else like Nokia) with 1 alternative Apple device. This had an expected increase in revenue per customer.
Replacing the MacBook + iPad with an iPhone + some dock accessories might reduce revenue per customer.
But Mac sales pale in comparison to iPhone, and are similar to iPad numbers. So whatever revenue they would lose by not selling Macs with macOS, they could easily make up from additional sales of iPhones and iPads with macOS.
Besides, they've increasingly been expanding iPadOS to have more desktop-like features, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to offer full-blown macOS on these devices. It's not a hardware issue at all at this point.
> With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro.
Only for the truly low end. The thermals alone are a serious difference, you can't expect an iPad-class device to support the same power dissipation as a legit MacBook.
The MacBook Air is a legit MacBook and not that much heftier than the iPad. With how powerful and efficient M chips are, they could work out just fine for a lot of people despite the more constrained thermals.
They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. And to be fair, Apple has a much stronger position with a wider moat then they did back then. So they can afford to give more time to the competition to compete.
> They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't.
Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.
The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell.
But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with the caveats you mention. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen.
Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Or an iPad with keyboard since similar sized devices were historically used for portability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation.
> Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.
The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is just that and in my personal experience does very well even on shorter legs due to its weight distribution. Were Apple to go down the route of actually enabling Xcode, etc. on iPads, they'd likely invest a bit more into the ergonomics of course, but they are already there and not comparable to Lenovos efforts in that regard.
On the contrary, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to part with macbooks if they could retain their developers. But then you could probably kiss your binary freedom goodbye.
> What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not.
Technically, I don’t think anybody ever claimed they were 100% distinct. Apple, for instance, says (https://developer.apple.com/ipados/get-started/): “Powered by the iOS SDK, your iPadOS apps”, and they’ve touted the ability to build apps that ru on both iPhone and iPad.
marketing-wise, they clearly are separate, in the same sense as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_platform: “A car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components, over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of cars, often from different, but somewhat related, marques.”
The only difference is that here, Apple apparently ships all or major parts of the special parts for the iPad on iOS, too. Maybe they also do that vice versa? Can you enable the calculator app on iPad with this method?
They call it a different name. They want you to think those are two distinct things. They barely are. It's all to ensure that the EU doesn't get it's grabby fingers onto iPads too, as they don't have a big enough market to be forced to open up the app store. Please don't labor for free to improve the PR of a billion dollar company :)
Yet somehow some "tech journalists" are branding this as "how to flash iPadOS onto an iPhone". As you said, it's obvious that both iOS and iPadOS are compiled from the same source tree with different features levels enabled. The difference is purely marketing.
> I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless.
When there's a will you'll be glad there's a way.
People used to make do with "tiny" screens throughout the 1980s and 1990s: Bigger displays sure but smaller resolutions Han the iPhone. Doom came out in 320x200 ffs
When traveling I've had to do all sorts of tricks to use various services while away from home. Like my bank app which set an OTP to email or SMS, but if you swiped out of the app to go check the message, it would generate a new OTP when you switched back to the bank app. So I had to check my mail/messages on the minuscule Apple Watch screen. And that was the only time I ever used email on the Watch but I was infinitely glad that it had that option.
Exactly. I remember a post shared here a while ago, someone with just an Android phone developed some really cool Neovim plugin that became popular enough that people were pitching in to buy him a laptop.
I did an awful lot with my GPD Win 2, which was running vanilla desktop Ubuntu. The tiny display did require a bit of getting used to, but it was a lot of fun to have a tiny little thing that could fit in my pocket that I could write code while on the train.
Screen isn't much bigger than an iPhone Pro Max, if at all, but I was able to adapt to the desktop GUIs without much trouble.
I used to use the old old form factor iphones with a jailbroken tweak that would split the screen. It was surprisingly useful even just having those maybe two inches a piece. I could type while referencing something else.
Ha, curious how preferences vary from a person to person. Even on my MacBook Air I am using apps in full-screen almost all the time. About the only time I drag windows around is when I need Finder (preview, drop a file, etc.), or when I plug an external 24" display :D
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had the opposite experience going from a OnePlus 8T stock to Lineage OS. Having root means being able to reduce the amount of apps and wake up — no google play service was the key. This was a while ago but I went from 1-2 days of battery life to about 4-5 days. This is with light use, screen on time was equally draining with both setups.
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.
> 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
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.
> I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve.
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.
you could, literally 99.99% of users wouldn't.
Also, iPhones have 20% smaller batteries for the same battery life, but there could be multiple reasons (maybe combined even) for this.
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.
Linux has been running on low powered autonomous IoT devices for decades. I will hasard they are actually fully ready.
Don’t mix up IoT devices that are running the single app that does one thing, and user devices, where there’s a zoo of applications written by a third party. It’s not that free software such as embedded linux are incapable of being low-power, no, as the op correctly pointed it’s about managing and limiting what user space applications can do.
> 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.
Something seems to be funny with your computer's setup. On my feeble i5 laptop with 16GB, Excel starts in about 3 seconds to the point where I can start doing stuff.
If it's a corporate device, it's usually some anti-virus abomination (or other security-related software) that steals 90% of the resources.
> it's usually some anti-virus abomination (or other security-related software) that steals 90% of the resources.
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>.
> 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.
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.
Yes, but it seems you have a misconception of the computers we've used in our spaceships. Most people are not familiar with how little compute was involved in our spacecraft.
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.
In efforts to save the punchline - I would move to change 'a spaceship' to 'interstellar jump calculations' but I fear the actual ram required would also be small.
Yeah... it almost seems like a brag instead of an insult. I wish my programs used only enough memory to power a spaceship!
“My program suite is ported to x86, x64, ARM, and Apollo Guidance Computer” :D
> 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.
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.
> If you're a Linux sysadmin type, it's nice to stay in the same environment as your vms, kubernetes, docker/podman containers, etc.
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.
Yeah, I would never in a million years run anything on Ubuntu. It's not exactly known for stability and reliability.
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
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.
On M1 / M2, asahi linux has decent support. People daily drive it.
Yes there has been some initial work done, but it's not exactly a mainstream daily driver suitable for deploying in a production environment.
Just my opinion here, after ~4 years of using it at work and daily driving Linux for personal use, including development, for a decade:
- 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.
OK, so this seems like a list of gripes about MacOS.
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.
Honestly I'm tried and didn't expect this thread to blow up like this.
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.
Good for you, totally valid choice. I'm not saying you shouldn't use what you want, or even that Mac is best (or even that mac is best for me!)
I'm only taking you to task on the "locked down" assertion.
Not sure if this relevant here but OS not phoning home constantly would be nice.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Not OP, but here are just a few things I do currently on my Android (phones and tablets):
* 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.
> Use (true) Firefox w/ extensions or other browsers
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.
Thanks for writing it up. I agree with all your points. I stopped myself from replying further to the other commenters - they don't seem to be interested in an actual meaningful calm discussion.
Running goddamn Emacs for one. Running the software I need for work like Python with a full suite of packages and Wolfram Mathematica. Remapping freaking keys and their behaviour. The possibilities are endless!
On iPhone?
On an iPad. But sometimes, in a pinch, it can be nice to rerun a script to update some plots, so iPhone as well.
Nothing, it’s never anything real and just some fantasy of what they could have if someone else put in an incredible amount of work to achieve something nebulous they got the impression of from a sci-fi book.
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.
I think literally this whole post is about doing stuff on your iPhone that Apple doesn’t want you to do. So maybe start with TFA?
Run a web server exposed through a Cloudflare Tunnel. Write code in one program, compile it in another using a shared filesystem. Write mods and extensions for programs which expose an API or just patch their files if you can figure out how to reverse them. Run programs like ffmpeg or yt-dlp directly on a CLI.
Ah sorry, my comment didn’t cover the 7 people that want to do software development on their iPhone.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ish-shell/id1436902243
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-shell/id1473805438
Are you trying to make some kind of point? Use your words.
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.
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.
> idk
Yeah, was obvious from the first comment
I'm a heavy Terminal user and run everything from local LLMs to full stack dev (react/python). I dibble and dabble in Blender, Unreal, and Logic Pro. I aimlessly browse the web looking for recipes, 3d printing files, shopping, HN, whatever. I'll occasionally spin up Age of Empire II locally or play some quick games via GeForceNow. I'm in full control of my Synology and Qnap NAS servers and the shit ton of media that's on it.
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.
You're probably happy. That's great.
If you read the rest of this thread you'll see specific examples others point out.
The specific examples in the thread, AFAICT, are about iOS, not macOS, and the person you're responding to specifically mentioned Macs. It's very hard to find examples of "things you cannot do on an Apple Silicon Mac due to Apple-imposed restrictions that you can do on a PC" that aren't pretty esoteric. (Unless you want to argue that the inability to plug in a better third-party GPU is due to Apple-imposed restrictions, which is debatable but defensible.)
If you read my other comment, you'll see Mac specific examples. Examples from my own experience over multiple years.
Connect screen and keyboard and turn it into a full desktop with desktop apps. Run VMs for insecure operations.
I have fantasies sometimes of a powerful phone that docks into a laptop chassis with expandable I/O like a framework
A 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.
While my main driver is a maxed out MacMini hooked to an Apple Studio monitor, at least once a week I pack up and store my MacMini and plug an iPadPro into my large monitor for a few days.
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.
exactly. The real shame of these devices is they're 99% of the way there but that last inch of running x script requiring you to whip out a form-identical device that has been blessed with the ability of running uncertified code is maddening to say the least
perhaps 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
Librem 5 is not too powerful, but it works as a desktop.
I'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
Have 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.
I 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.
> 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."
From 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.
I'd remove all the fluff that I'm not interested in.
One think would be: permanently installing my own apps, without paying for that option.
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.
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?
The walled garden is very pleasant, you really have to put in exceptional amounts of effort to get malware on your device.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
Curious - what do you do on your Linux (or FreeBSD natch) box that your m1 couldn’t?
For me, it's always been the lack of a power-user-friendly windowing/workspace scheme. You can approximate a tiling window manager using yabai or similar solutions, but it's just not the same thing.
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.
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
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.
I'm so sorry, can you attempt to infer based on the clues I've left you?
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?
.. macOS is ad-ridden? perhaps I'm already brain broken, but beyond like a few ads for icloud pro for time machine or whatever when I'm already poking around in relavent settings, I never see ads. it feels extremely unobtrusive. the other points are not relevant to me, so I suppose it makes sense why I don't care, but iirc apple's `container` OCI runner is highly optimized for the M series, did you have significant issues with it?
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.
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.
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.
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-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...
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
iPhone User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/welcome/ios
Mac User Guide: https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/welcome/mac
Turn off windowed apps on your iPad
https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635
> https://support.apple.com/en-us/123635
TIL.
Isn’t your mode toggle just turning StageManager in or off?
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.
It might not be super practical on the device display. But with external display and keyboard/mouse this becomes much more usable.
Honestly a dex competitor would really help keep me in the Apple ecosystem.
File a Feedback request to make the “external monitor support” available on iPhone and iOS. This is essentially the equivalent of Dex for iOS.
The more people that file, the more likely it is to happen.
Are the primitives not already there?[0]
I don't see why we cannot build an app that when connected to an external monitor switches to a "Desktop Environment". Maybe, even a hacked version of UTM[1] that exposes a fully functional OS on the monitor.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/uikit/presenting-c...
[1] https://github.com/utmapp/UTM
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.
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.
We agree.
Two bits floating in my mind: I'm in management (different sector, totally different scale) and deciding to move forward against a market as a market leader is a really scary decision. We did and changed our proposition against a trend in the market. The market mostly followed our lead. Thats what we hoped for, but sure couldn't count on at the time of the decision. So we had to make sure to have all stakeholders involved in the risk - What if most of our customers just left? Then suppose you are in management for Apple. The stakes are massive. How would you communicate this shift?
The other one is: You should take the strength of your opposition into account when making bold moves. Android / Google / the brands fabricating the products I would say (no need for the old debate) are market followers. They are good at following and produce more technical diverse products, minus the margins. If you do not expect your opposition to make the bold move first, but do expect them to follow your bold move, I would argue you should be less likely to play bold moves unless you know they cannot follow you. So game theory I think also favors the status quo for Apple.
That said, the iPhone was more expensive than the iPod, and replaced 1 Apple device (plus a device made by someone else like Nokia) with 1 alternative Apple device. This had an expected increase in revenue per customer.
Replacing the MacBook + iPad with an iPhone + some dock accessories might reduce revenue per customer.
Ben Thompson of Stratechery talks about this all the time. It didn’t take courage to canibalize a $200 ASP iPod for an $800 iPhone.
But Mac sales pale in comparison to iPhone, and are similar to iPad numbers. So whatever revenue they would lose by not selling Macs with macOS, they could easily make up from additional sales of iPhones and iPads with macOS.
Besides, they've increasingly been expanding iPadOS to have more desktop-like features, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to offer full-blown macOS on these devices. It's not a hardware issue at all at this point.
Why would they spend a bunch of money to trade sales of one of their products for another?
> With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro.
Only for the truly low end. The thermals alone are a serious difference, you can't expect an iPad-class device to support the same power dissipation as a legit MacBook.
The MacBook Air is a legit MacBook and not that much heftier than the iPad. With how powerful and efficient M chips are, they could work out just fine for a lot of people despite the more constrained thermals.
They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. And to be fair, Apple has a much stronger position with a wider moat then they did back then. So they can afford to give more time to the competition to compete.
> They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't.
Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.
The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell.
> On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that
But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with the caveats you mention. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen.
Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Or an iPad with keyboard since similar sized devices were historically used for portability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation.
> Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs.
The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is just that and in my personal experience does very well even on shorter legs due to its weight distribution. Were Apple to go down the route of actually enabling Xcode, etc. on iPads, they'd likely invest a bit more into the ergonomics of course, but they are already there and not comparable to Lenovos efforts in that regard.
Much as I’d like to see Xcode on iPad, I doubt it will happen; at least, not with the current Xcode.
Xcode is huge, it’s bigger than most games. A lot of that size, is an aggregation of tools, built up over a couple of decades.
Replacing it with a rewrite, would be a major operation, but would probably be required, in order to work on iPad.
You can configure an iPad up to 2TB. I don't think storage if going to be the blocker
A 2TB 13" iPad with a Magic Keyboard is more expensive than a 2TB 14" MBP with double the RAM.
They may sell a capable enough iPad but it doesn't make a lot of financial sense unless they closed all the gaps.
Yeah, but it's not a monolithic code block.
I suspect there are dozens of tools, that are years old, have very few folks that know how they work, and probably only work on Mac.
Ah, you're consider the possibility of Xcode on ipadOS? I was imagining Xcode on an Ipad running macOS.
EDIT: I should have read the thread more closely.
Most of its size, I think, comes from the device emulator images.
I’m not sure of that.
It stores that stuff in a different container.
[UPDATE:] I just looked at the contents.
The single biggest component is the toolchains (Swift, SourceKit, etc).
The next biggest components, are the platforms (which may be used to construct simulator images).
These are all wrapped into the app, itself.
On the contrary, I'm sure they'd be more than happy to part with macbooks if they could retain their developers. But then you could probably kiss your binary freedom goodbye.
Naked robotic core.
> What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not.
Technically, I don’t think anybody ever claimed they were 100% distinct. Apple, for instance, says (https://developer.apple.com/ipados/get-started/): “Powered by the iOS SDK, your iPadOS apps”, and they’ve touted the ability to build apps that ru on both iPhone and iPad.
marketing-wise, they clearly are separate, in the same sense as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_platform: “A car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components, over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of cars, often from different, but somewhat related, marques.”
The only difference is that here, Apple apparently ships all or major parts of the special parts for the iPad on iOS, too. Maybe they also do that vice versa? Can you enable the calculator app on iPad with this method?
They call it a different name. They want you to think those are two distinct things. They barely are. It's all to ensure that the EU doesn't get it's grabby fingers onto iPads too, as they don't have a big enough market to be forced to open up the app store. Please don't labor for free to improve the PR of a billion dollar company :)
Yet somehow some "tech journalists" are branding this as "how to flash iPadOS onto an iPhone". As you said, it's obvious that both iOS and iPadOS are compiled from the same source tree with different features levels enabled. The difference is purely marketing.
> I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless.
When there's a will you'll be glad there's a way.
People used to make do with "tiny" screens throughout the 1980s and 1990s: Bigger displays sure but smaller resolutions Han the iPhone. Doom came out in 320x200 ffs
When traveling I've had to do all sorts of tricks to use various services while away from home. Like my bank app which set an OTP to email or SMS, but if you swiped out of the app to go check the message, it would generate a new OTP when you switched back to the bank app. So I had to check my mail/messages on the minuscule Apple Watch screen. And that was the only time I ever used email on the Watch but I was infinitely glad that it had that option.
Exactly. I remember a post shared here a while ago, someone with just an Android phone developed some really cool Neovim plugin that became popular enough that people were pitching in to buy him a laptop.
I did an awful lot with my GPD Win 2, which was running vanilla desktop Ubuntu. The tiny display did require a bit of getting used to, but it was a lot of fun to have a tiny little thing that could fit in my pocket that I could write code while on the train.
Screen isn't much bigger than an iPhone Pro Max, if at all, but I was able to adapt to the desktop GUIs without much trouble.
I used to use the old old form factor iphones with a jailbroken tweak that would split the screen. It was surprisingly useful even just having those maybe two inches a piece. I could type while referencing something else.
Yes, on 13" it's just about right
Ha, curious how preferences vary from a person to person. Even on my MacBook Air I am using apps in full-screen almost all the time. About the only time I drag windows around is when I need Finder (preview, drop a file, etc.), or when I plug an external 24" display :D
Same, no matter the display, I just use maximised windows. This also means that I can't really use a second screen.
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.
I'm on the same boat. Several links on HN are not opening.
Linked site is unusable. Screen is completely covered in ads.
It was completely unusable on an iOS device with slightly increased text size.
If your browser supports reader mode, it becomes tolerable.
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.
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.
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?
An iPhone for $399? Preposterous
iPadOS 26 brings the Phone app to iPad, so you can do exactly that now.
That still requires an iPhone to be around though. Basically extra hardware that shouldn't be needed.
So that's still BS.
Can this be used to enable multiple display support on iPhones/non-pro iPads? Would be pretty damn cool if so.
Update - YES. Misaka26, enabling Stage Manager through it enables external display support on my non-pro iPad.
I think the hardware is t there in A-series chips. But not positive.
Has to be software, given that the non-Pro iPads can mirror the internal display or play video full screen.
This would be a great thing to use with an external display when traveling, but of course it will never happen.
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.
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).
So iOS and iPadOS are the same thing…
Wasn't that always obvious? Surely nobody actually believed Apple built an entirely separate OS for their slightly-larger iPods?
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.
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
Apple will probably say that it locked down the features because they could brick the phones
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
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.
Some apps are buggy on iOS without split screen mode enabled, too.
I rarely use split screen mode on my Android phone but I am rather annoyed when I'm on iOS and I can't keep two apps open at the same time.
Some vendors do a much better job than others, though. Google in particular doesn't seem to offer more than the bare basics.
...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.
They locked it down because this way, it offers a superior experience to their revenue streams
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actual title: How to Enable iPad Features like MultiTasking & Stage Manager on iPhone via MobileGestalt
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.
The Medusa stuff is new and yeah, it’s in iOS as it’s the basis for the foldable.
Got a link with more info about the Medusa stuff? The OP is down currently...
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
This site, among other things, wants to: "Create profiles for personalised advertising ( 644 partners included )".
644? Isn't that creepy?
Looking at the video, I can see why this was locked down. I wouldn't hand my mother that kind of complex UI.
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.
Android has it and I love it!
What's missing is the mode where you plug it in and it's a full desktop running macOS.
Are you suggesting that the test for whether they should “allow” a feature is whether your mom can figure it out?
Why?
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