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Comment by pedrocr | Hacker News Reader

It would be a potentially smart move by Apple to allow installing other OSs in iOS hardware. The market share grab part of this segment is mostly gone so they probably wouldn't lose much and it would help with their arguments about the App Store and other iOS restrictions. They could say that in iOS those are the rules but if you want to do something else with the device you own you can install something else. It might even win them some customers. They would win my business if I could install an open-source OS under my control on a phone like I do on my laptop. LineageOS is not even close unfortunately because of poor hardware support.

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That doesn't really match up with the ethos of Apple or why people buy their products though, so it doesn't make any sense for Apple to allow or endorse this.

Correct, it doesn't make a profit for Apple to sell devices, rather than just renting them. That's why it shouldn't be up to Apple to decide whether a device sold belongs to the buyer, or still belongs to Apple. If I buy it, it is mine, and I have the moral right to put whatever OS I what to on it, regardless of Apple's ethos.

"Correct, it doesn't make a profit for Apple to sell devices, rather than just renting them."

I've seen this argument again, but this is a redefinition of sell vs rent.

Apple sells the device with specific capabilities. You might want it to have others, but that's not the same as renting. If you don't like it, buy something else.

You do get to do "whatever you want" with the device AS provided. You can stomp on it, melt in in a fire, or whatever, and Apple wont ask you for the device back. That's a sale.

"I wanted another version of the device, one that is unlocked, and Apple doesn't sell me one" doesn't mean Apple doesn't sell you what it says on the tin.

They're selling iPhones, locks and all, not generic devices to have different OSes loaded.

I think it's more akin to selling a coffeemaker that only works with manufacturer authorized coffee beans. It's a coffeemaker and it may not produce the same quality coffee with other beans but it's perfectly capable of producing coffee from any beans you feed it.

That said, Apple has no incentive to work towards enabling this. Both Apple's profit and customer's expectation are in the vertical integration that Apple provides.

(I'm not in anyway saying iOS is not restrictive or that they shouldn't do it. It's just that there's no pressing reason for them to work towards achieving it.)

What's more, they have a pressing reason to not do it. The entire iOS devices ecosystem brings clients exclusively to the AppStore and its apps. They also have a network effect for purchasing more simply for device/OS interoperability (think iPhone + Watch). By allowing the installation of a general purpose OS they are giving up a chunk of the profit from those apps and they cut down their own user base, thus making the ecosystem slightly less valuable as a whole.

One option would be to allow the installation of an alternative OS only after the device is out of support at least for an image win but this might not justify the effort.

I hope this gets regulated in the future so manufacturers are forced to remove any locks preventing the installation of 3rd party software (even make resources available for developers) the moment they stop providing "adequate" support.

> I hope this gets regulated in the future so manufacturers are forced to remove any locks preventing the installation of 3rd party software (even make resources available for developers) the moment they stop providing "adequate" support.

I would personally prefer one step further and force to remove all locks if the customer asks it, it's their device, they are free to do whatever they want with it, it's both the right approach morally but also for environmental issues.

> I would personally prefer one step further and force to remove all locks if the customer asks it

They could but it would cost more than most users bargained for. Most likely a manufacturer would offer you the open device for the price of the device plus the expected loss of value from connected services (maybe something on top just for good measure), or a locked "subsidized" version that can or has to run only as we see today, and that will cost as much as one does now. And they could easily make a case for this even in court.

But once the support ends it's more or less implicit that the manufacturer abandoned the device and no longer expects profit (or expenses) related to it and keeping it locked is a harder case to make.

And I get a manufacturer's desire to profit from their own devices. But once they abandon them I see no other reasonable legal or moral claim a manufacturer can make. They should issue a final update that removes any protections, and make all relevant drivers and documentation freely available (or even for a modest one time fee) even if this means some binary blobs and a bunch of docs for how to interface with them.

I'm not sure if the reference was intentional, but there are (or, were?) coffeemakers that only work with manufacturer authorized coffee beans. Keurig infamously added a protection mechanism that required "special" coffee-pods to function.

This was, however, seen as outrageous, unlike the current state of smartphones, for better or for worse.

It is. At work some of us got a reusable pod to reduce waste. We were closely following it. It was also much easier to explain why that's bad to my non-engineer coworkers than explaining why iOS's complete lockdown is bad or even get them to care.

It is outrageous in a very literal sense. The whole reason people are mad is because they know that Keurig is allowed to do it and have basically zero power to make them stop.

I agree -- I meant it in contrast with smartphones, where it's seen as totally normal to have no escape hatch to run your own software.

Most "normal" people see that a coffeemaker putting "DRM" on your coffee is ridiculous, but that outrage never really extended to digital devices for some reason.

>for some reason

Ignorance. If people had no real idea how coffee was made either, you wouldn't see much outcry over locked-down coffee pods either. "You want to grind your own beans? What an eccentric nerd! My coffee maker works perfectly with the manufacturer pods, why would I ever switch?"

I think that most common apps nowadays being "free" contributes to this. "How can there be an Apple tax if the app is free?"

Whereas the coffee is something they can buy at other shops, and it's pretty easy to compare.

Well they do. Buy a different coffee maker.

>I think it's more akin to selling a coffeemaker that only works with manufacturer authorized coffee beans

Isn't that kind of the concept behind those k-cup type machines?

Well last time I got angry down votes for saying this. But you are really renting if apple can lock you out.

My non technical wife managed to lock herself out of her device and icloud with no recourse as I didn't preserve the reciept.

So now we have a device but it is just an unusable brick. So are we the owner or renter?

I let an iPad sit on a shelf for a few years. In that time, Apple removed the account it was registered under, so I can't log in to it at all.

That's a restriction on the account.

For the device you can always erase and start from scratch.

I cannot unlock the device at all, and I cannot erase it and start from scratch.

You can't if it's stuck in "Activation Lock" and you can't logon to the Apple ID. I have one of these situations. A perfectly good device is effectively bricked.

That means that they've lost both the iCloud (Apple ID) account AND the device password...

Well, at some point, they device might as well be bricked.

Otherwise device theft would be much higher (since they could use it, whereas now they can't), plus of course if lost/stolen people would have access to the data.

This is a good feature but normal users are getting locked out constantly. IMO a good middle ground is if you forget your password or lose access, you can start the process of a factory reset which triggers notifications to your apple account and your email telling you to cancel it if the device was legitimately lost or stolen but if nothing happens after a week your device gets reset.

That is actually a good suggestion. Getting locked out of your own device and then trying to prove ownership seems too much hassle.

I wonder how many device are rendered useless due to this "security feature".

Personally I know of 5 mobile devices which have been bricked by this security feature and I do not know anyone who has had anything actually stolen (including things like wallets with no protection).

Also to note that there is no proving ownership to get around the lock. You either have the password to log in or it’s bricked. You can go to apple or google with proof of purchase and they will not / can not unlock the device.

We weren't after unlock. We wanted to erase and reuse the device. AFAIK Apple genius can do that in-store if you show the proof of ownership.

There are online services which claim to do this if you can prove the ownership.

Thanks a lot for the tip but my point still stands.

I was never into Apple and after this my wife decided to move away too so we don't care anymore.

>Well last time I got angry down votes for saying this. But you are really renting if apple can lock you out.

Only in the same way that you're "only renting" a safelock if you can lock it and are not able to open it (e.g. by forgetting the lock, or having some key inside).

>My non technical wife managed to lock herself out of her device and icloud with no recourse as I didn't preserve the reciept.

That's a security feature. If there was a recourse then locking the device (when you're done using it for the moment) would be security theater.

> That's a security feature. If there was a recourse then locking the device ....

Oh come-on a thousands of Harrys working in Apple store can unlock.

Not things secured by the secure enclave and set to mathematically unlockable.

Million of "Happys working in Apple store" couldn't unlock your FileVault disk for example if you don't have the password / key etc.

Please don't misread. This is not about who can read the encrypted drive. It is more basic than that.

Apple locked us out of device we paid for. We just wanted to use it again completely wiping it off. Random Harry working for Apple can do that but we as legitimate owners can't.

So with respect to owning vs renting argument, How I am owning the device?

The problem here is that if you want to modify those aforementioned locks, you will be subject to legal persecution. Companies like Apple have been lobbying to enact laws that makes device circumvention illegal. That is the problem.

They definitely are selling generic devices.

Yep and people buying Office and Windows in the 90s were absolutely fine with what Microsoft was doing back then. Most OEMs selling computers with Windows on it were also fine with agreeing to not also sell Linux PCs.

Everything was going well for Microsoft until it wasn't.

Apple's iPhone has a 90% market share among youths in the US and a 50% market share of active devices in the general market. Their general market share in the US isn't going to be shrinking anytime soon. As they get more and more popular, the rules will change for them.

Out of curiosity, where are you getting the 90% from? I hadn’t heard that statistic before.

https://www.google.com/search?q=iPhone+has+90%25+of+youth+ma...

It's not correct to say that Apple doesn't make a profit on devices.

In fact, Apple makes a robust profit on every mobile device they sell.

This is in contrast to, e.g, gaming consoles, which are (at least were) sold below cost, with the profit coming from games.

Apple also won't stop you from installing whatever on your gizmo, legally I mean. With mobile, they do several things which make it pointlessly difficult, and I would rather they didn't.

In general, I kept reading in the past that Apple's sold HW (including MacBooks etc..., not just phones) has at least about 30% profit?

There is precedent -- e.g. Bootcamp -- Apple share price rose 10% or something when this was initially announced.

Commoditize your complement. That's what Google is doing with Android itself - flooding the market with a gaggle of surveillance-ready web browsers. But Apple could push back at an even deeper level by supporting user-loaded OS's, taking the Free community's focus away from the Android ecosystem.

The limited hardware combinations alone would be a boon to the Free community. Right now, I see Android as the Freer option, even though I've gone significantly out of my way to get there (Samsung Exynos + microG + fdroid). If I could do a similar amount of work on mainstream Apple hardware and end up with an OS that had no Google remnants, I can see my perspective changing quite readily.

Perhaps we'll see such a development when there emerges a Free OS that's a viable/cult-popular daily driver.

I'm not really sure how it would damage them though. Normal customers buy an iphone and it comes with the locked down ios as normal, now you just let people who know what they are doing mess around.

We can see from android, letting people install custom ROMs didn't really have any effect on the average user who will never try it. The hurdle of having to factory reset your phone to unlock the bootloader keeps normal people away.

I think Apple would have to publish "proprietary" hardware information to make this possible. Currently, people spend significant amounts of time reverse engineering the hardware to get software working with it.

On top of that, there's a cost of open sourcing besides revealing proprietary information--you generally need to audit and cleanup your code base (cleanup commit messages, code comments, etc) that could be, at best, embarrassing, or, at worse, reveal product flaws/bugs

Edit, looks like I was beaten to the punch https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25728930

I realized recently that Google Pixels are one of the only models of phones that supports flashing a 3rd party bootloader. I immediately bought a used Pixel 2 and I'm never buying a Samsung phone again for this sole reason.

This feature is a big deal because you need to do it in order to install Frida, which is a very useful reverse engineering tool. There are alternative ways to get frida running, but they are less convenient

I can guarantee that this will never happen as the whole point of Apple products is the hardware and software working seamlessly together - for the most part anyway.

That's a tough guarantee to make. Apple has already been putting in in some effort on their M1 macs to ensure that other operating systems can be booted, without compromising their bootloader's security. https://mobile.twitter.com/marcan42/status/13331260180689551...

While I don't think it's likely, it would be _possible_ for Apple to open this up on the phone side too

For each iOS device sold Apple can profit from selling services (iCloud sub, App Store, Music, TV+ etc) so allowing something like that would only result in loosing customers.

The customers Apple can win are those willing to buy a brand new $1K+ iPhone, switch OS and void (at least part of) the warranty. If they are not supporting a Bootcamp for Android probably is because they did the math and it was not worth it.

Just to be clear, "did the math" in this context would mean "made some guesses."

I would love to install Linux on my old (unsupported)iPad 2

It wouldn't be very useful without swap, and the device isn't meant to be used with swap enabled.

Those ipads could be perfectly useful as dumb streaming targets or dashboard displays.

> The market share grab part of this segment is mostly gone

That's why they are shifting to services and for that they need to have you locked in their OS.

Perhaps allow it on devices older than some age.

People would use that to install compromised versions of iOS with all the problems that entails.

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