Yes, this has the side effect of making them more money and allowing a walled garden to form, but given that the vast majority of users wouldn't do anything different with their phones if a shell was present, this is in my opinion not that large of an effect.
The snide around "clicking on links is dangerous" and locking down the bootloader is unwarranted, because for most people a phone is not a toy (or at least, not just a toy) - it has their communications history, their bank information, their passwords, any many more. And it's really easy to steal people's phones on the subway. This isn't about freedom of computing, this is about the fact that an iPhone in BFU is nearly as secure as a GrapheneOS phone.
There are many problems with Apple software. It's buggy, uses proprietary formats that you can't export, and interoperable with open standards. It's bad, and is the primary reason why I won't buy another iPhone, but Macs have that same problem. On the other hand, being cryptographically locked-down is an optional feature. If you don't like it, buy a computer without that feature. It's harmful to us, to tinkerers and people who want to see how things work, but the average person does not care at all and just wants to be able to open LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs without having their 401k get drained.
All of this to get custom fonts in their messaging app or some other little feature they saw on someone’s phone.
I started getting a lot of requests for help from people who had broken key functions on their phones or even bricked them entirely.
Even today there’s a culture of downloading Android builds from long forum threads on XDA developers and other forums and hoping they’re not compromised.
You can't. (Last time I checked.) The backup is encrypted in the cloud, and the only way to download it is to restore it to a phone.
Whereas I can just plug in my iPhone and get a full backup, complete with sqlite manifest, completely accessible. Text messages, photo library, everything.
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....
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 computing at a time where regulation is likely to begin encroaching on it, but the promise of the App Store is "pay a 30% tax and any app you download here will be safe." In my mind, at least, that's the promise, and perhaps one solution to the situation would be to erect consequences to breaking that promise.
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.
I have a pile of iphones without battery sitting in a drawer and It would be a really cheap way to run fun stuff.
The only thing that could be worrying is device theft, but a simple CLI tool for the initial device registration after firmware flash might do it.
At the same time I have multiple old phones laying around, Pixels, iPhones, Galaxy that are out of date, have cracked screens or worn out batteries.
Each one of these old phones have same or more computing power than a $300 mini-pc, but I can't use them because I can't just ssh into them and install an app...
Sad, really.
At the top end on a desktop power usage doubles for lower double-digit percentage gains. You can shave that off and not lose much. Laptops are a lot closer to phones than they are to desktops when it comes to power and thermal limitations*, so re-using a "phone" chip really isn't crazy.
* 100W power usage on a laptop is entering silly territory, but on a desktop that's the bottom of entry-level rigs.
Introducing the MacBook Neo.
Finally, the ability to allow you to unlock your phone bootloader or to run custom firmware has nothing to do with the silicon. It's a software choice. The trusted software could most certainly decide to disable these safeguards.
* A19 Pro CPU (the NEO only has the A18 Pro)
* 12GB of RAM (the NEO only has 8GB of RAM)
* 128GB of NAND storage for iOS (ok this is less than the NEO)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Studio_Display#Technical...
In the meantime before its repair, I shoved my SIM card into an old flipphone I had in the tech graveyard drawer. I've actually really liked the limited flipphone experience. It's a mental breath of fresh air to not have a time/focus black hole in my pocket at all times. It made me realize that I've had a pretty bad relationship with my smartphone in terms of how much time I wasted on it. I'm considering keeping the flipphone as my primary phone. Maybe smartphones do too much.
A laptop is more than the sum of its parts. Your phone overlaps with it on a technical level, but format is important.
For me, the iPad would have died if the Neo had a 12" screen. Only the iPad mini remains a useful form factor.
There is: https://puri.sm/posts/my-first-year-of-librem-5-convergence/