Hacker News Reader

Comment by rgawdzik | Hacker News Reader

If the iPad Pro becomes a replacement for laptops (say for children/teenagers), the fallout will affect tinkerers. On a iPad, children don't get a terminal, can't run their own programs, and need to convince their parents to spend $x in order to get a linux machine that has a Von Neumann architecture.

In the worst foreseeable case, desktops/laptops become so rare that they costs tens of thousands of dollars. Children interested in programming will then have a massive barrier to entry.

Really another form of making Stallman's 'Right to Read' a reality; instead of licensing debuggers, you make all mainstream OS's a non-Von Neumann architecture.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/the-death-of-the-von-neuman...

View on HN

> In the worst foreseeable case, desktops/laptops become so rare that they costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Seeing the price of a Raspberry Pi is 25 dollars, what would make the price of a RPi skyrocket to thousands of dollars?

Note that this is looking at 10-30 years into the future (so this might be RPi v30). Most low volume (< 1k units) hardware products are expensive due to development costs. When you need to hire 10 engineers to make a computer, but only have 100 customers, your customers foot the bill.

I don't understand the concerns about the iPad crushing desktop computing, or iOS eating OS X. The tablet market is shrinking, and Macs are still growing. Apple is fighting an uphill battle with the iPad Pro.

http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-q4-earnings-2015-10?IR=...

This is simply not true. Pythonista is a full-on development environment for the iPad and iPhone, including an interactive terminal. If you prefer Lua there's Coda. There are also graphical programming environments available aimed at younger children. The iPad is a fantastic platform for learning to program.

Using "von-Neumann architecture" to describe the property that most computers have, but iOS devices don't have, that the computer can be used freely and easily to create an app that will run on the computer is probably the most unfortunate choice of words I've come across in months.

I don't see how that's a possible forseeable case, even if there is no such thing as a "personal computer" any more: tablets still have SSH software, and "tinkerer-level" cloud VM instances will still exist and cost no more than $5/mo.

> and "tinkerer-level" cloud VM instances will still exist and cost no more than $5/mo.

So you are at someone else's mercy how much and what to tinker with.

No? You could buy your own server rack and stick it in your basement if you wanted. Server hardware isn't going away. But that's usually more expensive than renting a cloud instance—not because server hardware is expensive (you can get used servers on ebay for prices competitive to used gaming PCs)—but because cloud instances are so cheap.

Assuming Apple will always allow programming apps and don't have a change of heart; it's their walled garden.

Even if all you have is the ability to load web pages in Mobile Safari, you can still just set up a websocket SSH gateway on your server and then serve an SSH-over-HTTPS client to the device. You'd have to kill a lot of the modern web to create a device completely incapable of being used (as a thin client/glass terminal) for tinkering.

The whole "iOS thing" fosters consumer culture in the field of computing like nothing else before. You don't start programs, you "launch apps". You don't see files or processes, you see only beautifully polished tiles. The basic granularity of your computing experience becomes the "app".

On top of that, each app lives in its own context and can hardly be "pipelined" with other apps to achieve something creative. It's the death of creative computing.

I think you're right that the appification of computers will have a significant effect on tinkers. I contest that most users never cared about what's going on under the hood, the appliance either works or it doesn't.

Even as a web developer, it boggles the mind to understand why browser context menus have "View Source" on by default, rather than a developer mode switch. This sort of stuff hits me hard. Like dead pause/break keys on laptops, wireless switches on the chassis. Nobody is actually paying attention to what they're building.

Tinkerers will just jailbreak.

depending on a security exploit in order to use a device ?

Sounds like a good plan !

DRM circumvention and the tools to do so are in general illegal. In various countries there are exemptions for non-copyright-infringing purposes. Jailbreaking tablets was illegal in the US before 2015, software helping with jailbreaking may still be illegal and given the climate around DRM and such, I wouldn't count on jailbreaking to remain a legal possibility in the future.

Plus jailbreaking iOS devices really is hard and exposes you to risks such as bricking your device or mallware. You can also lose your warranty, because Apple says so.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com