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Comment by mgh2 | Hacker News Reader

Curious, why do you "resent" your money going to Apple?

Because they're hostile to general purpose computing.

General purpose computing is a concept that computer scientists appreciate. The vast majority of consumers buy products based on their cost/benefit of their features and overall experience, not ideology of their technical construction.

You won't see too many people who decide to hand wash their dishes because they can't find a dishwasher with an unlocked bootloader. It either satisfactorily washes the dishes or it doesn't. Most people buy phones the same way.

Your comment has nothing to do with what you’re replying to. He’s explaining (at someone else’s request) his own consumer choices. He can make his choices and the people you’re talking about can make their choices.

And I can point out that I think that opinion is just as silly as resenting my dishwasher for lacking a JTAG port on the front panel. iPhone's aren't Stallman's college mainframe. They are consumer products.

General purpose computing was the default from 1990 - 2010.

Apple killed it by turning computers into "devices" and "platforms". And now Google is killing the web.

Fuck these two companies. They're too big, too unilaterally powerful, and their greed to control knows no bounds.

Yeah, it's true, you can't buy a general purpose computing device from Apple anymore. Apart from the Mac.

What could you buy before, apart from the Mac?

Perhaps we need a definition of GPC?

You have to go back a long time, but just the Apple II[1] technically, and maybe the Newton, but both would be less general than a pre-App Store 2007 iPhone because Safari is such a difference maker.

[1]: I, III, Lisa, too, but I mean you get the gist,

Enlighten me, what could you do an Apple II that you can't do on a modern Mac?

It has a real UNIX terminal. I can write code in nearly any programming language. There are thousands of packages that I can install easily with Homebrew. It feels general purpose to me.

If you’re asking me that question I think you misread my comment.

This is a list of general purpose computer platforms Apple has made in the past in addition to the Mac. The Mac may be the last one they’ll ever make as open and general purpose as it is, which is a damn shame considering what they showed off with their Vision Pro announcement and press demos.

The disconnect is that you're thinking about computers for their ability to do computing. Most people don't care about whether their computers are good at computing, but are instead trying to accomplish some other task. In fact, the more that the 'computer' disappears, the better in their mind.

The part that worries me is that Apple is stifling young people's imagination for what computers can do.

how are they stifling imagination? You can still get a compiler and text editor like always. Those two things were all we had back in "the good old days" of so-called general computing.

A few examples from my own childhood. Some freedoms were good and some are bad, but my mom said they were all worth it for what I learned:

· My dad made a custom boot script that gave me instant access to my favorite games.

· I sent a computer to the repair shop for weeks after figuring out how to change the computer to use an unsupported screen resolution.

· My Palm Pilot had several video game emulators.

· Our Windows 95 computer got the Ripper virus from my friend's 3.1 machine. It replicates if you boot the machine with an infected floppy disk connected, but it doesn't affect 3.1, so he had no idea his was infected.

They don't care until they need to do something that they can't do because their platform doesn't allow them to do it. There's no reason why compilers couldn't run on phones. Modern phones are more powerful than computers were even 15 years ago. And yet you can't do the things on a modern phone that you could on that computer from 15 years ago. At least you can't do it nearly as easily because of artificial limitations.

> And yet you can't do the things on a modern phone that you could on that computer from 15 years ago. At least you can't do it nearly as easily because of artificial limitations.

This may be a con for enthusiasts, but these artificial 'limitations' are exactly why Apple has been successful with the mass market. 15 years ago, computers were plagued by drive-by downloads, malvertising, and other crap. People in the early 00s spent millions of dollars paying repair technicians to uninstall toolbars, adware, and other junk software they were duped into installing.

But Apple, Google and co do the same thing themselves. Here's an example from Android:

Mom gets a new Android phone.

The phone asks if she wants to back up pictures she takes (it even used a weird word in my native language that I had never heard before).

She selects yes.

A few months later Google tells her to upgrade her subscription plan for Google Drive, because her Drive space is full. If she doesn't upgrade then scary things will happen!! (They said she wouldn't receive emails anymore.)

So she comes to me with it. It's an annoying process to delete the photos, especially when you're trying to make sure it only deletes it on Drive and not locally.

A week later she comes to me and says her drive space is full again, because the phone will keep pestering her to turn on cloud backups.

I have no faith that Apple doesn't pull some similar types of tricks. People who don't handle computing devices well will fall for all of these prompts about this and that. The alternative is that they never update their phone and don't understand why things don't work anymore.

I don't understand what you mean.

They make an awful lot of their money selling what I'd assume to be general purpose computing devices.

I run mostly mostly open source software on mine. Almost everything made for the linux ecosystem is also available packaged for MacOS or can be trivially built on MacOS.

What more are we talking about here?

Well, they certainly view phones as appliances, rather than general purpose computers. Personally, I’m fine with that

They view all of their products as appliances rather than general purpose computers.

They absolutely view phones as general purpose computers. It's why iOS is slowly turning into OS X.

Isn't it going the other way?

Not really. They are bringing features out on all of their platforms at the same time, now, so where is more feature constancy. Some iOS UI treatments have been brought to MacOS and some MacOS UI elements have been brought to iPadOS. But MacOS is not getting locked down the way that a phone is.

My UNIX workstation that I bought from them running a bunch of open source software installed with Home brew disagrees.

For me it's things like iCloud Photos having no API to access them and no reasonable way to pull them out or back them up. So very much a trap. Among other things.

I will fully admit this is a big problem with Apple. God forbid you have two iCloud accounts and want to merge (not just the photos) My sister has two from living in another country for a decade and me, our dad, her husband, and her gave up after hours and hours and multiple trips to the Apple Store. I see there are some software out there but it shouldn’t require it to merge what are essentially files, and who knows if they will merge everything. I think we’d have to download individual documents, maybe in batches of 10, from what I remember.

There was a thread on HN in the past few days linking this[0] post about a tool that seems to solve just that problem.

0. https://eclecticlight.co/2023/07/17/how-does-icloud-work-plu...

Thanks! I looked into it when that article got posted actually, and near as I can tell that isn't a solution to this problem - and that is fully intentional on Apple's part - because:

1) That article is for things in iCloud Drive, which is everything EXCEPT iCloud Photos. Though you can put photos in iCloud Drive (as files), they just won't be seen as photos, visible in iCloud Photos (or the Photos app), etc. without importing them on an Apple device manually into the Photos app. Where they'll then be synced into iCloud Photos.

The photos that are imported/stored in the Photos App on Apple devices also are not visible in iCloud Drive after being imported into iCloud Photos.

2) It only works on Mac/Apple devices. And only locally. So you'd need to sync to a Mac device, then backup the mac device, then hope it all works. No direct backup is available. So even if it did allow syncing iCloud Photos, it is a really awkward and brittle way to back them up.

3) There ARE APIs for iCloud Drive. But not iCloud Photos.

The web iCloud Photos interfaces also only does manual per-album level downloads (no Takeout or global download equivalent) of photos using the web interface), which stops working at scale VERY quickly.

Notably, Google Photos stopped providing the Google Drive interface to Google Photos shortly after Apple made this their standard operating procedure. So it's a common theme.

Though Google Photos does have APIs and Takeout, so it's lockin is less 'firm', and they're definitely less obnoxious about it. The Takeout data requires some significant massaging to get equivalent from what is visible in Google Photos though.

This is the kind of sneaky trap I've learned to be wary of, as Apple does this a lot for lock-in purposes with their hardware too.

I back them up on my Mac to BackBlaze and TimeMachine . They are just local files at that point.

Do you see all the photos in the photos app (and hence iCloud Photos) in iCloud Drive? Near as I can tell, they're separate and this is by design.

This impacts pictures or videos taken on phones, iPad’s etc by default; as they go into iCloud Photos, not iCloud Drive.

The photo library on a Mac can be in any local drive. You could put it on iCloud Drive but that would be redundant.

You iPhone or iPad take photos and store them in a local cache that syncs to iCloud. It is separate from iCloud Drive but the storage comes from the same iCloud capacity that you have subscribed to.

On your Mac the files are stored in a library folder that can be on any local drive. Those files can be backed up like any other file. Any changes you make to those files, like in the Photos app, are synced to iCloud Photos.

The photos in the local library are accessible but they are not really meant to be accessed. The meta data about the photos is stored in a database, not the files. There are original files, modified files, and thumbnail files.

If you want to you can export some or all photos to separate files and do what you want with them.

If you do your backups on the mac, do they include all photos in iCloud Photos?

Or only ones you manually export?

I do the backups from my Mac. Photos on that Mac is configured to download all of the photos in iCloud Photos. It is the source of truth for my photos. The photos are stored in a library directory as discrete files and the backup software has no problem backing them up.

It would be trivial to restore the whole set of photos. It is more complex to restore specific individual photos as you would need to know the file name of that photo.

If you want to generate an alternate photo store you can export some or all of the photos but that is not necessary for backups.

Seems like as long as they all fit, that should work. But does require a non-iPad/non-mobile device with enough storage, as iPad/iPhones don’t have backup mechanisms besides iCloud.

I don’t have a Mac laptop anymore, and my library was starting to get too big to fit on any one device. That’s when I realized they had no other way of accessing/moving/transferring/backing up, so I moved it out using some special photo backup software before I got stuck.

Lesson learned!

https://stallman.org/apple.html

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