Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mitchty | Hacker News Reader

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> Apple loves privacy and hates freedom. It sure looks like the only thing they actually care about is their financial interest.

Hates freedome how? This statement is overbroad.

In a nutshell, I would rather support Apple as they're primarily a hardware company that has stated their privacy interests align with mine. As opposed to me supporting an advertising company that happens to sell phones and produce a mobile operating system that seems tailored to do the opposite.

The fact that I can't install my own OS is entirely tangential to the overall company goals of Apple versus Google or even Samsung. Focusing on a phone platform to behave as if it was the PC platform of the 80's reminds me of the for want of a nail proverb.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_Want_of_a_Nail

Focusing too far down on "freedom" from the gnu perspective will just put us into territory we can't cover at all realistically right now.

Besides which, I just want to use my phone, not spend endless hours fucking around with it to install all manner of stuff.

> Hates freedome how? This statement is overbroad.

In the sense that their devices are not free.

> Besides which, I just want to use my phone, not spend endless hours fucking around with it to install all manner of stuff.

The fact that you don't want to use it that way is hardly relevant to the question of freedom.

Listen, i'm not saying they should spend a bunch of time engineering a solution to support this use case. I'm not saying they should aid people in doing it in any way. But that's not all they're doing. They actively expend resources to thwart people controlling their own devices. It is their corporate policy not just not to support this behavior, but to make it technologically impossible. That is the key point.

If Apple had just said "if you modify the OS, you void your warrant and you're on your own - we offer you zero support", i'd be totally fine with that. Personally, i'm not interested in modifying my device at all, i'm happy to leave it as is. But to go out of their way to make it impossible to do that? That's anti-freedom, no matter how you slice it.

The fact that they make it hard is what guarantees that there's a large pool of people with stock iphones. And this pool is too big a market to ignore, which is why I can have good apps, even from companies I don't trust, and deny them permissions I don't want to grant.

I think Apple understands this. The freedom you desire has ecosystem effects which I don't want.

You may quibble about precisely how hard is hard enough. Maybe they could loosen up a little bit, walk some middle path, and satisfy both of our desires. Maybe. Has anyone done it? Apparently people will sign anything you ask them to in order to play farmville. And every jailbreak seems like a security hole I'd rather not have.

I see no reason to think that making this possible would alter their ecosystem at all. It would always be a small minority of users. A small minority that developers could always just ignore. Developers on Android don't bother to think about custom Android kernels, unless they're specifically targeting that user niche.

I'm not too sure what exact freedom this minority of users is after. Does granting the ability to load a custom kernel require zero engineering effort from Apple? Including doing it in a way which won't leave the door open for the FBI, and whoever else, to break in?

It requires substantially less engineering effort than they've put into making sure people cannot do those things.

They are just preventing several potential headaches in their view. If I build something and I don't want end users to do X with it, I'm entitled to do that. If the user doesn't like it, the user can go elsewhere. Those are the terms I set as the vendor and you are free to not engage, you have other choices.

In short, you are still free to not buy their hardware.

Absolutely true. Just as you are free not to use Google and Facebook if you don't want your data collected. Not trying to say they don't have every right to do it.

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