This is really cool! I hope they get the GPU running. I would _love_ to run Ubuntu Touch or something on an iPhone. I wonder how much of the responsiveness of iOS is due to the hardware.
welcome to 2020.
It's 2020, more than a decade after the iPhone was released, and 99.9%+ of users can still only use Apple's App Store.
I don’t want to boot up Mac
If people want to sideload apps and such, which explicitly hacks around the system designed by Apple, why are they using Apple devices (which are notoriously locked down and restricted to "Apple's way") in the first place? Why not use Android or something else where that sort of thing is designed for?
Same kind of question for jailbreakers. Isn't the desire to jail break indicative that you want a more flexible platform? Why wouldn't you use something else besides Apple?
I ended up "jailbreaking" it because there were just so many things I wanted it to do that weren't possible with the stock OS and approved applications (adblocking, better keyboard layout, file system access, and mouse support among other things). Many of these have eventually been implemented to some extent or another, but at the time they were unavailable via the App Store but easily done via the Cydia store.
Since then, the iPad 2 aged out of usefulness and my need for a tablet has mostly dried up. Likewise, options for other higher-powered, well built, and lightweight laptops/tablets have expanded so I've not purchased any more Apple stuff for the reasons you point out. I basically "jailbroke" because it was the only way to get my device to do what I wanted it to do. Now that they exist, I just use other devices that don't require me to jump through those hoops.
Still, I wish there was a way to install some sort of lightweight OS on that iPad 2 (which is now sitting in a box somewhere).
At least in Android devices changing that parameter made them much snappier, although some apps would work, because they absolutely required more than one background process.
But your claim is verifiably false: https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-...
Which was a good thing.
The commenter unironically using Orwellian phrasing like "be sure of the integrity of the device" shows how far we've come.
You don't want to know that your phone hasn't had a rootkit installed on it by someone who borrowed it off your desk while you were in the office kitchen?
Not, say, disable flashing if the passcode protected lock screen is up?
I had a much more snarky answer before this one about how realistic this scenario is for most people, but I will keep it to myself.
Another reason is that Apple’s hardware tend to be very high quality. For example, on JavaScript benchmarks (which you may or may not consider to be a good proxy for general/single threaded performance), an iPhone7 performs comparably to the current latest Android phones. Also spare parts or replacements are easy to come by.
I’m quite unconvinced that the boot loader exploit demonstrates that the platform is so insecure that you shouldn’t use it. If you want to run a different operating system on a typical android device you would either not need to circumvent such security measures (which doesn’t mean that they exist or work) or you would use some exploit that didn’t get such wide press.
I guess an os thats not really supposed to be running might be less stable, but I would hope most OSes are stable enough to essentially never require reboots. (aside from power loss + updates)
And I've used unlocked bootloader devices before. My threat model allows for that exploit to be performed on me should someone desire it. The utility I gain exceeds the risk = f(likelihood, loss).
A (old) phone/tablet running Linux connected via USB/ADB/Network can be used as:
* (Additional) Webcam for your computer
* (Additional) microphone/Touch-pad for your computer
* (Additional) (status) screen for your computer/whatever_with_USB
* Security-cam/Digital-picture-frame for your whatever_with_USB
* (Additional) Network-available environmental sensors (light, temp, vibration).
* (Additional) Wifi/xG Network (scanning) device for your PC
If this doesn't make dozens of useful workflows available to you ... then I don't know, what you have been doing with computers before.
It's all software.