| ▲ | People are using iPad OS features on their iPhones(idevicecentral.com) |
| 74 points by K0IN 13 hours ago | 71 comments |
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| ▲ | Ezhik 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| Can this be used to enable multiple display support on iPhones/non-pro iPads? Would be pretty damn cool if so. |
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| ▲ | LeoPanthera 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I have an 11" iPad and the screen still feels too small to use windowed apps. It gets very cramped very quickly. I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless. What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not. |
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| ▲ | rock_artist 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It might not be super practical on the device display. But with external display and keyboard/mouse this becomes much more usable. | | |
| ▲ | 650REDHAIR 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Honestly a dex competitor would really help keep me in the Apple ecosystem. | | |
| ▲ | runjake 14 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | File a Feedback request to make the “external monitor support” available on iPhone and iOS. This is essentially the equivalent of Dex for iOS. The more people that file, the more likely it is to happen. | |
| ▲ | wjnc 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro. They are sitting on a golden cash flow and not willing to revolutionize computing again (as the iPhone did). Just as a N=1, I would rather pay a recurring fee in the Disney-Netflix range to Apple to get more liberty in usage from my machines. But I think they don’t dare to go those routes, because they need the broad market base and cannot extract the current cash flow from a smaller base, while setting expectations that the Googles, Samsungs can copy. Industry leaders dilemma. Apple currently settles on market differentiation via physical products. | | |
| ▲ | Topfi 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Historically, cannibalizing has always been the right choice when it comes to such things. That was a major point of the first iPhone, that it was a full replacement for your iPod, which was instrumental in its success. All this thinking does is cloud ones judgement and let competitors succeed. Not saying you are wrong, this may be the reason Apple operates nowadays, but I maintain it is shortsighted. | | |
| ▲ | wjnc 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | We agree. Two bits floating in my mind: I'm in management (different sector, totally different scale) and deciding to move forward against a market as a market leader is a really scary decision. We did and changed our proposition against a trend in the market. The market mostly followed our lead. Thats what we hoped for, but sure couldn't count on at the time of the decision. So we had to make sure to have all stakeholders involved in the risk - What if most of our customers just left? Then suppose you are in management for Apple. The stakes are massive. How would you communicate this shift? The other one is: You should take the strength of your opposition into account when making bold moves. Android / Google / the brands fabricating the products I would say (no need for the old debate) are market followers. They are good at following and produce more technical diverse products, minus the margins. If you do not expect your opposition to make the bold move first, but do expect them to follow your bold move, I would argue you should be less likely to play bold moves unless you know they cannot follow you. So game theory I think also favors the status quo for Apple. | |
| ▲ | nerdsniper 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | That said, the iPhone was more expensive than the iPod, and replaced 1 Apple device (plus a device made by someone else like Nokia) with 1 alternative Apple device. This had an expected increase in revenue per customer. Replacing the MacBook + iPad with an iPhone + some dock accessories might reduce revenue per customer. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > With the power of M-chips, this would cannabalize MacBooks via iPad Air / Pro. Only for the truly low end. The thermals alone are a serious difference, you can't expect an iPad-class device to support the same power dissipation as a legit MacBook. | | |
| ▲ | close04 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | The MacBook Air is a legit MacBook and not that much heftier than the iPad. With how powerful and efficient M chips are, they could work out just fine for a lot of people despite the more constrained thermals. They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. And to be fair, Apple has a much stronger position with a wider moat then they did back then. So they can afford to give more time to the competition to compete. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > They're not doing it today because current Apple leadership doesn't have the same incisiveness as the one back when they were sacrificing their most successful product on the iPhone altar so the competition can't. Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs. The more important thing that Apple would have to sacrifice is the App Store cash cow and users not having root rights. On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that, but on a machine I actually want to do work? No way in hell. | | |
| ▲ | Topfi 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Apple wouldn't just sacrifice the entry-level MacBook product category and I'm not even sure about that - the look-and-feel of a "display with attached keyboard" (i.e. Thinkpax X1 Tablet-style) is vastly different from a bottom-heavy Macbook with actual hinges. The former isn't really usable as a literal laptop unless you got some seriously long upper legs. The iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard is just that and in my personal experience does very well even on shorter legs due to its weight distribution. Were Apple to go down the route of actually enabling Xcode, etc. on iPads, they'd likely invest a bit more into the ergonomics of course, but they are already there and not comparable to Lenovos efforts in that regard. | | |
| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Much as I’d like to see Xcode on iPad, I doubt it will happen; at least, not with the current Xcode. Xcode is huge, it’s bigger than most games. A lot of that size, is an aggregation of tools, built up over a couple of decades. Replacing it with a rewrite, would be a major operation, but would probably be required, in order to work on iPad. | | |
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| ▲ | close04 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > On a iPad or iPhone I'm willing to accept that But that's it right here. It just takes boiling the frog slowly enough. The high powered M-powered iPads are already testing the waters of what people will accept for work (I don't think they're aimed purely at content consumption like the "smaller" iPads). I think Apple can afford to wait because they don't need to cannibalize anything today, and because the replacement isn't strictly a superset of what it's replacing, it comes with the caveats you mention. As soon as the market is ready to tolerate more lock-in, it might happen. Enough people do just emails/Teams/Office for work so plugging in an iPhone and turning it into a desktop with mouse, keyboard, and external screen(s) can tick all the boxes for usability. Or an iPad with keyboard since similar sized devices were historically used for portability. Most work devices are locked down anyway, no root, no software installation. |
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| ▲ | imiric 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But Mac sales pale in comparison to iPhone, and are similar to iPad numbers. So whatever revenue they would lose by not selling Macs with macOS, they could easily make up from additional sales of iPhones and iPads with macOS. Besides, they've increasingly been expanding iPadOS to have more desktop-like features, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to offer full-blown macOS on these devices. It's not a hardware issue at all at this point. | | |
| ▲ | stavros 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why would they spend a bunch of money to trade sales of one of their products for another? |
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| ▲ | jen729w 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Naked robotic core. |
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| ▲ | Someone 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > What this does do is reveal the fiction that "iPadOS" and "iOS" are separate. Clearly not. Technically, I don’t think anybody ever claimed they were 100% distinct. Apple, for instance, says (https://developer.apple.com/ipados/get-started/): “Powered by the iOS SDK, your iPadOS apps”, and they’ve touted the ability to build apps that ru on both iPhone and iPad. marketing-wise, they clearly are separate, in the same sense as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_platform: “A car platform is a shared set of common design, engineering, and production efforts, as well as major components, over a number of outwardly distinct models and even types of cars, often from different, but somewhat related, marques.” The only difference is that here, Apple apparently ships all or major parts of the special parts for the iPad on iOS, too. Maybe they also do that vice versa? Can you enable the calculator app on iPad with this method? | | |
| ▲ | eptcyka 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | They call it a different name. They want you to think those are two distinct things. They barely are. It's all to ensure that the EU doesn't get it's grabby fingers onto iPads too, as they don't have a big enough market to be forced to open up the app store. Please don't labor for free to improve the PR of a billion dollar company :) | |
| ▲ | ChocolateGod an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yet somehow some "tech journalists" are branding this as "how to flash iPadOS onto an iPhone". As you said, it's obvious that both iOS and iPadOS are compiled from the same source tree with different features levels enabled. The difference is purely marketing. |
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| ▲ | tombert 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I did an awful lot with my GPD Win 2, which was running vanilla desktop Ubuntu. The tiny display did require a bit of getting used to, but it was a lot of fun to have a tiny little thing that could fit in my pocket that I could write code while on the train. Screen isn't much bigger than an iPhone Pro Max, if at all, but I was able to adapt to the desktop GUIs without much trouble. | |
| ▲ | rado 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yes, on 13" it's just about right | | |
| ▲ | alentred 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ha, curious how preferences vary from a person to person. Even on my MacBook Air I am using apps in full-screen almost all the time. About the only time I drag windows around is when I need Finder (preview, drop a file, etc.), or when I plug an external 24" display :D | | |
| ▲ | stavros 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Same, no matter the display, I just use maximised windows. This also means that I can't really use a second screen. |
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| ▲ | Razengan 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > I can't imagine trying to do that on an iPhone. Surely it's useless. When there's a will you'll be glad there's a way. People used to make do with "tiny" screens throughout the 1980s and 1990s: Bigger displays sure but smaller resolutions Han the iPhone. Doom came out in 320x200 ffs When traveling I've had to do all sorts of tricks to use various services while away from home. Like my bank app which set an OTP to email or SMS, but if you swiped out of the app to go check the message, it would generate a new OTP when you switched back to the bank app. So I had to check my mail/messages on the minuscule Apple Watch screen. And that was the only time I ever used email on the Watch but I was infinitely glad that it had that option. | | |
| ▲ | tecoholic 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Exactly. I remember a post shared here a while ago, someone with just an Android phone developed some really cool Neovim plugin that became popular enough that people were pitching in to buy him a laptop. |
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| ▲ | tekacs 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is kinda wonderful to see - a peek into a world where we get to see the 'other side' of what would have been possible had Apple not locked our devices down beyond belief. Jailbreak stores have never felt like a particularly strong illustration of what's possible due to their tiny user market - I'd love to see what developers would do if even for a period we could use these devices to anything remotely like their potential. |
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| ▲ | frfl 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | There was a comment few weeks ago - I forget the topic, maybe it was the new M-series release or something - that was talking about how freaking fast these things are. And the comment was pointing out how locked down everything is and most of that power is pretty useless - I mean sure on device "AI" and faster apps...OK I guess. I'm not the target demographic for these things anyway, so my opinions are whatever. But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. I have an M1, which is like N-times faster than the laptop I write this on. Yet it collects dust because I'd rather continue to use this old dinosaur laptop because that M1 macbook is a locked down, very fast, shiny Ferrari, but I just want a Honda Civic I can do whatever I want with. | | |
| ▲ | miki123211 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes. I'm pretty sure battery performance would drop significantly if root was too easy to achieve. The temptation to run "that one more background service" would be far too much for most apps, both free and otherwise. To get good battery perf out of a device, you need to be extremely good at saying "no", even if that "no" comes at the expense of user freedom and features. Free software is usually extremely bad at this by design, although there are exceptions (Graphene OS comes to mind). On Apple devices, core system services are written by Apple itself. That puts pressure on the software development side to care about battery perf, as that is what users want (and what increases sales). If software is written by 3rd parties with their own business goals unrelated to device sales, I'm afraid "featuritis" and lower development costs would win out over efficiency, as it usually does in such circumstances. | | |
| ▲ | ChadNauseam 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > In practice, none of the free OSes are ready for 21st century, battery-powered, energy-saving devices, especially of the kind Apple makes. Well, except Android :P My phone runs a build of AOSP that I compiled myself. I can go change the source code to do whatever I want (and I do). It's pretty cool that that's possible IMO. To be fair, the drivers are closed-source | |
| ▲ | ragazzina 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Reading this comment, one would think Apple devices are very power efficient at the cost of running little in the background. In my experience, iOS has terrible battery life in the default mode, which is background app refresh enabled, and in general apps struggle keeping their state in the background, which is something that many people complain about on the internet. So the worst of the two worlds. | |
| ▲ | esseph 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | To get good battery life out of a device, having complete software and hardware integration is key. That's the PC blessing and curse, having to support all kinds of different CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, RAM, etc from many different places. When you just have to focus on a handful of hardware platforms and when you own the hardware and software, this becomes much, much easier. |
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| ▲ | maccard 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. Skipping the "handheld" bit of this just for a second. You can run an (almost entirely) open stack on your hardware, and do so on an i9/9800X3D with 256GB RAM, 5080, and MultiTB of NVMe storage. But it doesn't realy matter for 95% of users, because the hardware is already way faster than they need and the bottlenecks are on the server side and on shitty software architecture. I have an i9 with 128GB RAM for work, and Excel still takes 30+ seconds to load, Teams manages to grind the entire thing to a halt on startup, slack uses enough memory to power a spaceship... Running those apps on my desktop is pretty much the same experience as running them on my 10 year old macbook. | |
| ▲ | LeoPanthera 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > But really, imagine how much power these things have and if you could actually run a free (as in freedom, in the GNU sense) OS on them and really get access to all that power in a handheld device. Only if. Could you elaborate? What specifically would you do? Because I'm finding it hard to imagine what I'd do with an "open" iPhone that I can't do now, but it's extremely easy to imagine all the horrific security risks that would emerge in what today is most people's primary computing device, storing data about literally their entire lives. | | |
| ▲ | frfl 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My usage of "handheld" was vague. I meant any portable device (laptops, but also including phones/tablets). If you're finding it hard to imagine what you can do with a device that _does not_ restrict what you can do with it, then you're likely fine in the Apple ecosystem, that's fair and okay. Some people aren't, you'll just have to take my word for it, I don't wanna write an essay here and you're probably not interesting in reading all that. Security risk is a common one that comes up. Google used that to justify locking down sideloading recently. Let me take the risk. I bought this device, I should be allowed to make adult decisions right? I'm not downloading stuff off Limewire or a shady website. I'm downloading stuff off of Linux distro repos or F-Droid. There's a lot more to be said about all this. Including the amount of e-waste created because a device is too old to be supported by manufacturers, yet people run decade(s) old laptops/desktops using free OSs because they can. Just my 1AM rambling thoughts. Hope some of it makes some sense. | |
| ▲ | akho 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Have real ad blocking in the browser. (which would mitigate a lot of security risks by itself. I also note that people seem to do fine with desktop OSes, despite their outdated security models) Also, a working foss ecosystem. | |
| ▲ | prmoustache 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | From what I understand iPhones support external displays out of thebox, so you could use one as your main computer and do any productive stuff like development, video/3d/photos editing, anything really you can do on a computer with the liberty to install open source tools, develop/open drivers for anything connected to usb or bt, etc. | |
| ▲ | RulerOf 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > What specifically would you do? All kinds of shit. I'd make locking the phone while the flashlight is operating require pressing the lock button again to wake the screen with no exceptions, so the screen no longer shines in my eyes reducing the effectiveness of the flashlight, and stay palm input stops opening the camera. I'd hook screen time management of my children's devices—which I perform on my own device—into FaceID instead of requiring a stupid passcode. You don't have to go far to find areas where iOS could use some customization. But if it's Apple's code, the most useful adjustments are off limits. Jailbroken iOS was a fantastic platform for the first 9 major releases or so because it had that kind of stuff in it. Now it's "throw a suggestion in the box on our website and we'll ignore it in the order it was received." | |
| ▲ | tartoran 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I'd remove all the fluff that I'm not interested in. | |
| ▲ | fsflover 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Connect screen and keyboard and turn it into a full desktop with desktop apps. Run VMs for insecure operations. |
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| ▲ | Nursie 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > M1 macbook is a locked down Sure, iOS is certainly restrictive, fully locked-down, app store only etc etc, and I'd love a full-fat firefox with its plugin system available on my phone. But what are you doing on a non-Mac laptop that you can't do on an M1 mac? I'm a big fan of linux and have used it as a main machine for many years, but use an M4 macbook as my daily driver at the moment (everyone else I work with does too, it's just easier). I haven't felt limited at all. I can build and install whatever I like, I have brew for my tooling needs... Yeah I don't see it with Mac. Unless you're actually needing linux and dockerisation won't cut the mustard I guess. | | |
| ▲ | esseph 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | If you're a Linux sysadmin type, it's nice to stay in the same environment as your vms, kubernetes, docker/podman containers, etc. You also get nice eBPF tools. | | |
| ▲ | Nursie 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure, it's definitely nice to have a consistent env, no particular argument there. It's more "where are the barriers/locks?" that I was interested in | | |
| ▲ | esseph 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well, I can't really put Linux on most Macs. That's a barrier to me. Apple doesn't want my money, because Apple doesn't want to sell me a laptop. Apple wants to sell me a curated experience with multiple components in their ecosystem. |
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| ▲ | Gigachad 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Linked site is unusable. Screen is completely covered in ads. |
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| ▲ | singularity2001 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wish there was a way to get rid of this new features on the iPad. Getting a split screen now feels incredibly clumsy compared to before |
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| ▲ | rcarmo 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This would be a great thing to use with an external display when traveling, but of course it will never happen. |
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| ▲ | trvz 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | You can already use an iPhone a desktop computer, just not well: keyboards work fine, with AssistiveTouch you can get a pointer for your mouse, and by connecting iPhone to an external display it mirrors its display. Sadly, that includes the orientation and resolution. I've been hoping Apple will get eventually around to work this out, and the article shows it'd be easier than anticipated. I think it'll happen eventually. As for travelling specifically, it'd be easier to bring a MacBook than to bring a mouse and keyboard and portable display. The display could be replaced by a TV in your acommodation, but it's rare to be able to use that ergonomically. It'd be instead quite interesting in general for people who already only use little more than the browser. |
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| ▲ | ChrisMarshallNY 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| This is not exactly something that any old schlub will be doing. I don’t find many of these features useful on my iPad (to be fair, my Mini is my daily iPad), let alone, my iPhone. I can’t see myself doing all that work, for features I don’t want to use. |
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| ▲ | znpy 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I wonder if i could di the opposite: make an iPad believe it’s an iPhone. I don’t see no reason why i couldn’t use my iPad’s built-in modem to make and receive calls. I mean, i could just bring my ipad and my airpods around and be done. |
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| ▲ | halapro 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | An iPhone for $399? Preposterous | |
| ▲ | trvz 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | iPadOS 26 brings the Phone app to iPad, so you can do exactly that now. | | |
| ▲ | znpy 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | That still requires an iPhone to be around though. Basically extra hardware that shouldn't be needed. So that's still BS. |
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| ▲ | kotaKat 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Long, long ago there were some jailbreak hacks to pull this off. It was some funky mess with swapping modem firmware and pulling in the iOS dialer, if I recall. Closest thing you can get now is that they finally brought the dialer app to the iPad... I can sort of make calls now through my cellular iPad using my iPhone's voice account with the "wifi calling on other devices" feature. |
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| ▲ | sroussey 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The Medusa stuff is new and yeah, it’s in iOS as it’s the basis for the foldable. |
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| ▲ | bossyTeacher 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Apple will probably say that it locked down the features because they could brick the phones |
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| ▲ | carstenhag 8 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | On Android you can use split screen apps. Either some apps are broken (including some I was part of writing...) or it's really annoying to put in text when both apps are open. It's really just useless almost alway | | |
| ▲ | makeitdouble 7 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I end up using it a lot. I'm always fascinated at the threshold where people will decide something just won't happen ("useless") because it's not comfortable enough. I'm more in the camp of pushing the limits as far as technically possible if it means I'm neither walking around with a 13" screen at all time nor need to be home to be able to look at two things at the same time. So I'll be fine with readjusting a bit the window to input text if it means I can do the thing now instead of 6 hours later. At least I don't want Google to kill the feature just because it requires working around some quirks. | |
| ▲ | hagbard_c 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | ...except when it is really handy to have so why lock it down? I use it quite often on a 6” screen - small by 'modern' standards - and would not want to see our disappear 'to protect me' or for some other bullshit reason. This, b.t.w., is one of the many reasons why I vastly prefer Android-as-it-was over anything from the fruit factory and probably also over Android-as-it-will-become. I don't want my hands to be held by some vendor who thinks I'm too stupid to cope with some complexity to achieve my goals and would rather I buy yet another overpriced trinket from them. It is my feet and my gun and it is up to me if I want to risk shooting the former with the latter. |
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| ▲ | isoprophlex 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | They locked it down because this way, it offers a superior experience to their revenue streams |
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| ▲ | AbuAssar 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So iOS and iPadOS are the same thing… |
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| ▲ | asadm 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Looking at the video, I can see why this was locked down. I wouldn't hand my mother that kind of complex UI. |
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| ▲ | amomchilov 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Are you suggesting that the test for whether they should “allow” a feature is whether your mom can figure it out? Why? | |
| ▲ | crooked-v 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What's really missing here is the mode where you plug the iPhone into a monitor, connect keyboard and mouse, and suddenly it's a functional desktop-lite in the same way that a basic iPad now is. | | | |
| ▲ | wiseowise 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Nobody cares what would your mother, father, grandfather, 100 year old cousin, your brother’s slow toddler think about UI. Stop bringing that stupid argument up. Buy them a feature phone and stop plaguing smart devices. | | |
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