I suppose most of this is eaten up by the need to pay apple $99 per year just to run your own app on your own phone for longer than a week.
When I buy a device I want to know that I own it, but Apple keeps pushing the narrative that "we LET you use this device in ways we see fit". So basically the customer is just borrowing a device from Apple while paying the full price.
I'm a longtime Apple user but can't shake off this love-hate relationship with the company.
How much something costs is not what determines how much a company charges for something.
A company sets prices based on what will make it the most money. A company only lowers prices if they think doing so will generate higher total profits in the long run.
Apple seems to think charging $99 a year for developers will help its long term bottom line the most.
There are probably many reasons for that, some of them already mentioned in sibling comments - keeping low effort apps out, preventing spammers from constantly buying new accounts to bypass bans, reducing the workload for approvers, generating revenue from the fees, etc.
Prices aren't justified or not, you choose to pay them or not.
No, they do not. That is how you are interpreting their actions. It’s obviously not the narrative they are pushing, that would be utterly absurd. The narrative Apple pushes over and over is that it’s your device, and that what you do with it is private and stays with it. Outright saying the device is theirs and they only let you do what they choose would be incredibly stupid, and their marketing is not incompetent.
Mind you, this doesn’t mean your interpretation (which is shared by many people) is wrong. On the contrary, it has merit. But it makes no sense to say Apple is pushing it as a narrative, that’s not what the expression means.
I'd love to hear from individuals who worked at these companies whether it disgusts them as much as it does me, and ideas (from a business perspective as much as technical) on how a new platform might wrest control back into the hands of users/owners.
Money is nice, they can charge it and people will pay them. Would be letting their shareholders down not to charge it really. I'm surprised they haven't tried bumping it up yet.
Welcome to the world of having a small business. Be happy it's only $100. Your fees for cost-of-doing business is many times higher for a hot dog stand or any other thing you can come up with.
That vulnerability was a huge win. It just recently stopped, with the final vulnerable device (7th gen iPad) not getting the iPad OS 26 update.
There are literally home appliances with more customizable app development and deployment stories than iPhones.
There's some tools to automate "refreshing" the app, but that requires you have some other computer that pushes a new app every week.
The "1 week" restriction is usually fine when you're developing (as you typically are continually rebuilding and updating when actively working on an app) but is clearly intended to avoid being a way to sideload apps without the developer account "nearby".
[0]: https://us.ecoflow.com/products/river-2-pro-portable-power-s...
Also that's about 500kWh of power annually which averages to 50W. There is just no way iPhone uses that much.
[0]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2025/277/
[1]: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/06/18/apple-transcription-api...
A CLI for on-device speech transcription using Speech.framework on macOS 26
For every HN blog post of "I accomplished ___ despite a hacker-hostile platform, and now you can use what I built, and be hopelessly tied to the platform"... Baby Jesus Linus sheds a tear.
In this case, it's a bit odd, since the writer has an entire section, "Why This Actually Matters", of unusually good hacker and social values.
*see what i did there
And some of the times that it does, it's because someone earlier didn't think about values before establishing network effects that stuffed a bad-values thing while starving a good-values thing.
I have an iPhone SE that I've tried keeping plugged in all the time and its battery has turned into a spicy pillow three times, first with Apple replacing the whole device (since they won't touch it with a swollen battery), then using third-party replacement kits.
This isn't going to work for long if the battery is usually at 100%.
My #1 wish for being able to repurpose old phones is to operate without touching the battery, and/or keeping the battery at 50%. Newer Apple phones have an 80% limit option which is an improvement, but I'm not sure how much. And unfortunately the option isn't there on any but the most recent phones, even on up-to-date iOS.
This will of course require a Homekit hub.
Unfortunately it wouldn't work for my particular usage, which was keeping it plugged into an old but expensive smart speaker as a music player via its lightning port. A smart plug would turn off the speaker along with the phone... But I appreciate the suggestion, as complicated as it is!
I've seen hacks that replace the battery with a supercapacitor though.
It really seems like, if it weren't for the battery part, these phones could run for decades... but right now you have to replace the battery every couple years because it swells when constantly kept at 100% which it is not designed for.
Interesting. I've had a spicy pillow on a 2017 MBP, they fixed the poor thing, and while at it: replaced the cursed keyboard, and left some kind of tape to reinforce the loosened USB-C ports.
Unfortunately, they didn't do the thermal paste - I had to do DIY, which is something I will never touch again. It did pay off though, it's cooler by some 10°C under load, and runs faster too. It's still loved and in everyday use.
We don’t give enough credit to Apple for keeping these old devices alive and kicking.
I have a similar story wherein I repurposed my ancient OG iPhone SE and gave it a new life.
I'm not sure I follow. It feels exceedingly hard to find new uses for old iPads without doing a lot of heavy lifting. Has that changed?
Otherwise, it still functions as an epub reader as long as iBooks continues functioning, but it's lame that I can't really use it for much else unless I made it a hobby.
Apple would also gladly throttle your phone, see Batterygate.
When a battery is old and has low state of charge (under 25%), it is easy for a device to request more power than the battery can provide and BOOM, the screen is black.
Apple mitigated and avoided that experience for users by programming the phone to slow down when a user's old battery could not support the power needs of the device at full speed. It makes sense when you take the time to be informed about it.
I find incredible the idea of giving these devices another life. I wonder how hard is to host a sort-of vps on an abandoned android phone these days... I guess as long as you can put ethernet + docker you'd have a very capable device.
I'd never heard of a website hosted in any way on an iOS device... makes me wish it was an option.
I did also like the original iPhone SE mostly because of the size, but the haptics make the the iPhone 8, along with having a bezel, square screen, and home button.
Interesting. Apple throttles on cold too?
In my experience it would shut down on cold, but I don't think I noticed throttling. But then I don't run anything important enough to benchmark on a phone...
I initially intended to use it with a ReSpeaker speaker/mic system so that I could use it as a smart home assistant / Q&A bot since Google Home constantly frustrates me with its inability to answer questions that LLMs answer flawlessly but the mic/speaker on the phone is good enough. The only problem is the wake word functionality. I'm going to try Porcupine next and see.
I wonder if the new Android 16 terminal app would allow combining both.
However I did not love the writing style of this article. Lots of repetition. Asking questions to stress a funny point. Lots of repetition.
I don't mean to sound like a jerk, even though I've succeeded at it. The author is cool, what they did is just as cool.
Somehow you're also passionate about selling user data to hundreds of data brokers with no easy way to opt-out
It’s curious to me that OS X in VirtualBox is sluggish. Both VMWare Fusion and VirtualBox use virtualization…
It's silly and probably makes no sense at all based on how weak the model will probably be but it's a fun thing to think about.
"The emissions from production of computing devices far exceed the emissions from operating them" [...] "the European Environmental Bureau [7] makes the scale of the problem very clear. For laptops and similar computers, manufacturing, distribution and disposal account for 52% of their Global Warming Potential [...]. For mobile phones, this is 72%. The report calculates that the lifetime of these devices should be at least 25 years" https://wimvanderbauwhede.codeberg.page/articles/frugal-comp...
User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/137.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Any sort of automation in Home app besides 2-3 line demo is quickly turning into nightmare, you are locked in bunch of annoying limitations and devices are always costing more than open source alternative.
1. if you are on device, then use on device OCR (e.g. use Apple Vision directly)
2. if you are on cloud, then self-deployed OCR models
3. if you are on browser, then WASM/local self-deployed OCR models