The degree of paternalism is astounding.
Yet look what happened to sales after they debuted the closed hardware and OS. At the end of the day the mass customer prefers devices that are easy to use and hard to break.
I'd personally love an iOS with a little more flexibility, but considering it's a device that knows so much about me I am OK with the trade offs. Things like Apple forcing[1] the location permission option "only while using the app" is awesome for the end user. I end up trying out way more software on iOS than OS X because I have a reasonable expectation that whatever happens I can just delete it in one standard operation.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/6/7/15757774/io...
I don't think the locked-down device had anything to do with this. You could hack the old iPods with custom firmware to do all sorts of fun things and those things were still the most popular devices on the market.
Apple's made a very opinionated choice in choosing what software to allow on the AppStore. On the Mac this isn't a fatal problem for developers due to the ability to side load applications. It’s the fact that apps can't be side loaded on iOS that causes the real damage (imo). But I also think Apple should be able to run their app store as they see fit.
Apple seems to be trying to figure out a way to have it all. They want a vibrant developer community without the all of the hairy cruft that comes with true choice, like viruses and malware. Again, imo, they lose something by forcing this choice down everyone's throat. They create too much friction for developers. There is that bottom-line terror every time a dev thinks about writing an app for iOS: will Apple allow this app to exist? To me, this is a horrible and limiting thing to have to even consider and the reason that in the long run Apple will have to give this idea up or see their platform slowly fade over time.
I'm torn, because I am glad that my Mom can be relatively safe when running her iPad with its limited selection of apps. But the idea that I have to think about whether or not an arbitrary person working at a huge multi-national can terminate my idea for an application is just too much freedom to give up.
Not sure what the answer is, but official app side loading would go a LONG way (for me) towards reducing that friction.
It used to be even simpler in iOS 8, but Apple complicated the process a little bit for valid security reasons: https://blog.lookout.com/ios-9-sideloading
The only friction is that the sideloaded apps will only work for 7 days unless you (or someone else like on ipasigner.io) have a paid developer account.
If you want to sideload your own apps, Cydia Extender is a great tool.
Sideloading does not exist on iOS except as a gimmick, an annoying workaround for people who really need it and are willing to spend a lot of time maintaining it, or an unsanctioned use of enterprise signing certificates that go against Apple's terms and can be shut down at any moment if they notice what's going on. (ipadsigner.io is the last one.)
The day limit is raised from 7 days to 365 days, and the max installed sideloaded apps is raised from 3 to unlimited. I agree with you that there shouldn't be limits at all, but the limits for the developer account are quite generous.
Sideloading on iOS works great overall, if you agree that even sideloaded apps should be required to be signed.
I'm not convinced. We all know the rules: "Don't take the piss".
Where the definition of "taking the piss" is determined by Apple alone and is subject to change.
Now, talking about MY devices, I don't think you should run whatever you want. That's why I like that there is someone making sure that whatever I run on my device from a 3rd party is safe.
If you have an iPhone, what anti-virus are you using? Exactly.
So here we are. With steps like this iOS is getting better at a very steady clip. We might even have Dropbox or even Github synchronisation built into Pythonista soon. Can't wait!
It's worth pointing out that I can still install whatever I want on my phone. Apple just protects its official distribution channel.
iPads aren't computers in the sense you're talking about. They are appliances that run a limited set of software titles to do a limited set of things that the manufacturer allows.
It's frustrating because they could be really interesting general-purpose computers. But they aren't, and never have been.
Give it a few more years, we're getting there.
> iPads aren't computers in the sense you're talking about.
Of course they are.
> They are appliances that run a limited set of software titles to do a limited set of things that the manufacturer allows.
No, that's just packaging and marketing.
> It's frustrating because they could be really interesting general-purpose computers.
For want of a single bit switch they are. And that's no accident.
> But they aren't, and never have been.
Of course they are. It was a conscious decision made by someone somewhere to not allow their use as general purpose computers, in other words something was added in order to take away the rights that you would come to expect.
This causes tons of these devices to end up in landfills at the end of their obsolete-by-design life-span and forces people into eco-systems they might not be using out of their free will if there was a choice to do so.
As I get older I feel I'm more and more in Stallmans' camp, I used to see him as on the money for the long term but that in our lifetimes it likely would not get that far. Now I'm starting to think that Stallman might have been an optimist after all.
There is an outside possibility that there will be a point in the future when suddenly old hardware that allowed you to run any program (just imagine!) will become very valuable.
Personally, I don't like this, either. I wish this wasn't the direction things are moving. But it is.
I'm not as pessimistic as you are about the future of computing, because I think there will always be a demand for general purpose computers — and therefore there will always be a bunch of companies selling them. So I doubt that we won't be able to get them, or that they will sell for crazy premiums — if they did, somebody would make them and sell them for less.
What I do think though is that the "general-purpose, arbitrarily capable" computer device segment is a small sliver of what it seemed like it was back in the old days when most computers were unrestricted.
I think 95% (or more) of the total "computing devices, including both general-purpose and locked-down appliances" market is happy with shitty locked-down devices, maybe even with ads and invidious tracking.
That's just the way it is. And it would be very hard to change that, because you'd have to change the people who are the market for these devices, and make them care that Apple doesn't allow software lets you see porn, or compile code, or learn about civilian casualties of US drone strikes, or any other thing that they don't want to let you do.
I don't see that happening.
So I think we are indeed headed for a world where the vast majority of computing devices are arbitrarily restricted, less-capable appliance-type devices like Apple's iPad.
That sucks for those of us who want unrestricted devices, because it means we become part of a niche market, one that isn't so interesting to the big multinational corporations like Apple with their huge budgets and economies of scale. So we can get an unrestricted, general purpose table computer, for example — but the hardware probably won't be as nice as an iPad, and the OS might have more rough edges.
It would be way better, for us, if computers really were inherently open by default, or if a most people cared about this stuff. But that's just my fantasy scenario (and apparently yours), not the world as it actually is.
* That word always makes me think of 19th century paupers dying of pulmonary tuberculosis.
That's roughly what stands between us and losing our ability to compute with whatever hardware we want, whatever we want.
Cory Doctorow had it right all along, I'm just surprised with how fast we are getting there.
http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/coming-war-general-com...
The PC landscape only happened thanks to IBM's mistakes.
None of those were locked down, none of those required manufacturer cooperation in order to run other operating systems or whatever application their users desired.
What about using MPW Object Pascal for doing Workbench MUI apps?
Ever bothered buying the developer manuals or SDKs from them?