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Your phone is an entire computer

medhir.com

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Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#141

Post by bottlepalm »

medhir wrote: post #73
bottlepalm wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep I know, and now using a last gen A chip, I feel they are really rubbing our faces in it. Like Apple is saying, "Nice iPhone 17 Pro w/ A19 w/ vapor cooling chip you have there; you know you run a full general purpose OS on it, but we're not gonna let you, nanananana :p"

No exactly, Apple is playing in our faces, all while people continue to defend the “differences” of device categories and the subsequent justification of shipping iPhones and iPads with locked bootloaders.

Unless you work for Apple or hold significant stock then I don’t see the logic in defending this choice to hamstring the iPhone.

But even as an investor, I think Apple could bring a lot of people/money to the Mac ecosystem by getting them in with an iPhone lapdock.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#142

Post by throwaway27448 »

purplehat_ wrote: post #111
throwaway27448 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understood this stance more 10 years ago, but now we have many layers of fairly well documented exploit tactics and none of them rely on the app store. However forcing users to use an app store was supposed to benefit us has clearly failed. And, somehow, the indignity of being forced into paying apple a 30% tax for a market they wholly own never comes up alongside other paternalistic arguments....

Can you elaborate on "fairly well documented exploit tactics"? My impression is that most of these are either social engineering, for which we need to hire better designers, or complicated chains of hard-to-find primitives only accessible to state actors. There's definitely problems but the solution isn't to make the iPhone a general purpose computer. We definitely need to defend the existence of general purpose comp…

A 30% tax and no freedom to install what you want better come with protection from state actors lmaooo. Otherwise what could be worth such a heavy-handed (and under a rational state, illegal) method?

Especially when the app store is nos filled with gambling apps and social media built to exploit children....

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#143

Post by WorldPeas »

I'm glad they've made a more affordable and repairable laptop but I can't help but notice (in addition to what the author's said) they can put a cell phone into a laptop's body, but not a cell modem into a laptop. If the macbook pro max had a cell model that would go like hotcakes

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#144

Post by albuic »

purplehat_ wrote: post #119
Retr0id wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you make a bootloader unlock require a full wipe/rekey of the device, and make unlock status visible at boot, most of the "someone might unlock my bootloader maliciously" concerns go away.

Fair point, but that solution doesn't address the market for theft, so there's a tradeoff there.

And it is not stopping people from steal IPhones as they can resell parts as usual.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#145

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

cheschire wrote: post #117

I was talking with someone solidly in Gen X that described their desire to write out longer form documents by hand on paper rather than typing them up. The process of typing helped them work through the content better than typing. In an analogous way, I feel like I'm in that part of the millennial generation that is more comfortable doing things on a PC than on a phone. Sure I can informally browse airline tickets an…

My daughter didn't really grow up using a desktop computer, though she would see my wife and I do that often enough.

She prefers a phone, but has difficulty even doing most of the things you or I would want to accomplish. It is mysterious to her, because the phone makes it difficult and sometimes even nearly impossible, and so she acts like that is impossible. When the google screen only shows you two results, you give up if there's no clear answer in two results. When the phone screen shows 20 words on it, you think reading 1500 words is an ordeal. Cluttered pages not quite fixed with adblock can have the clutter ignored on a large monitor, but when there is no adblock and the screen is 3 inches wide, the clutter drowns out the signal completely.

Phones may be an entire computer, but they are a deliberately crippled computer that makes reading text input difficult, writing text input even more difficult, and makes thinking most difficult of all.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#146

Post by karteum »

Arcuru wrote: post #35

I seem to recall the Carriers having some pretty strict requirements on the devices that can connect to the mobile networks. Anyone know if that's (still) the case? I'm not trying to defend Apple here, I'm just curious if there would be some kind of carrier validation issues if you slapped a full desktop OS on a phone.

You can connect to 4G with your root-enabled Linux PC and a USB dongle or minipci module. Carriers don't care about your application processor, they only care about the baseband. In the case of a smartphone, you can have root access and still run the Qualcomm closed blob firmware that will drive the baseband

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#147

Post by MBCook »

joemi wrote: post #132
quikoa wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could allow unlocking the phone by burying that option deep in the settings with scary warnings etc. Most people could use the device with the restrictions. The fact that this is not possible at all is greed.

If they did that, every influencer would make youtube videos and tik toks telling people how they should enable that setting to make their phone better or more powerful "for free", and everyone would just do it, especially the people who really shouldn't because they don't know any better.

Yep. Scammers have managed to get people to install profiles on their devices so they can run non-appstore approved scam apps.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#148

Post by the_pwner224 »

microtonal wrote: post #130
tomComb wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pixels all ship with unlocked bootloaders.

Just nitpicking: unlockable bootloaders. The bootloader is locked by default. But you can unlock it without needing Google. Additionally, Pixels support a Linux VM and has a desktop mode (I'm running GrapheneOS, it may still be that these features have to be enabled through the developer settings).

> But you can unlock it without needing Google.

Well akshually.... the bootloader is initially not unlockable. You must connect the phone to the internet. Within a few minutes a background process will reach out to Google servers to check whether it was purchased outright or with a payment plan. It will only enable the bootloader unlocking toggle after this step. Phones bought with a carrier contract won't be unlockable until paid off.

In those initial few minutes (/ before you connect it to the interwebs), the bootloader unlock option in the developer settings & fastboot will be disabled.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#149

Post by evanjrowley »

darenr wrote: post #38

I use the Pixel, but the point is the same. Recently Google added the "Dex" like feature where I can plug in the phone to a monitor and use it as my "entire computer" - at first I was excited, I can go to a coffee shop and leave my laptop behind, but then I looked at getting a bluetooth keyboard, mouse, monitor - with battery, and it's now a worse experience. There are monitor/battery/trackpad combination products fo…

My excitement towards Dex is really about it being a stepping stone towards ChromeOS replacement. I only want that because Chromebooks getting the the Google equivelant of the Apple Fast Pair experience will lower the cost of a convenience that my professional life increasingly depends on. Important for people who have too many meetings, I guess.

Re: Your phone is an entire computer

#150

Post by EMIRELADERO »

kube-system wrote: post #133
d--b wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s only about the right to use your device as you see fit. It is kind of silly that people buy raspberry pis to run their NAS, while they trash ther infinitely more capable iphone every couple of years.

The iPhone is designed to be a good smartphone, not a good NAS. It is silly to expect anyone to compromise the design of a mass market product to support some esoteric MacGyvering entirely unrelated to the original product. Should we all expect Toyota to design their ECUs to be used as a NAS?

It's not about "design", because the iPhone is perfectly capable of running arbitrary code, it just refuses to do so if you're not Apple.

The situation is such that the legal owner of the device has less power over it, post-sale, than the company that made it.

That reason alone, the imbalance of power, should be enough to support abolishing those restrictions, preferably by law.

To be clear: this is something that should be beyond market forces, and it should apply to anything that is sold to consumers and can run code. The end goal should be that no user remain less powerful, in terms of code execution and access to content, than the manufacturer.

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