Jailbreak stores have never felt like a particularly strong illustration of what's possible due to their tiny user market - I'd love to see what developers would do if even for a period we could use these devices to anything remotely like their potential.
But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if.
I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Your M1 has supported Linux pretty well for years now… Install the Fedora Asahi Remix and give it a try.
It makes a lot of sense considering high end SoC are now more powerful than the M1.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
It is my feet and my gun and it is up to me if I want to risk shooting the former with the latter.
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.
644? Isn't that creepy?
Why?
