alt Hacker NewsThere 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.
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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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Curious - what do you do on your Linux (or FreeBSD natch) box that your m1 couldn’t?
> 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.
> 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.