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Comment by ok123456 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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