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Comment by recoiledsnake | Hacker News Reader

iPad has or had a monopoly in the tablet market, but where are/were the cries for an open bootloader? Where were the complaints to governments?

Motorola and HTC phones/tablets ship with locked bootloaders while leveraging the hard work of F/OSS developers for free. Not to mention the Nook tablet/Kindle Fire which ship with a locked bootloader who get a free pass.

Note that this will be the same set of people who will slag Microsoft for malware getting into the system and will recommend switching away from Windows because it is insecure.

How about forcing Apple to allow users to load alternate OSes like Windows 8 or Android on the iPad?

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I'm not sure what you've been reading that I haven't, but I've seen plenty anti-Apple and anti-Amazon and anti-X cries precisely because of their lock-in attempts. From what I've read, the fact that Microsoft keeps doing it just means they won't learn their lesson, and Apple et al. doing it just means they're more evil than Microsoft in this respect. It's also a warning flag that as much as MS tries to win over the OSS crowd they still have some issues to work out.

The law getting involved and being applied arbitrarily or just to MS though is very silly.

> I've seen plenty anti-Apple and anti-Amazon and anti-X cries precisely because of their lock-in attempts.

As an X Window System developer, I often get confused when people use "X" as a placeholder. I thought, "but X doesn't lock people in...".

People have hacked iPads and iPhones to run Android. And nobody actually uses it because there is no hardware back button, etc.

When hardware and software are a cohesive unit it's hard to run something generic on the hardware, or run the software on some other hardware. That is not the case for Windows, Linux, and Android, which is why people feel differently about that ecosystem.

Windows 8 ARM tablets won't have back, home or menu buttons either.

People have hacked iPads and iPhones to run Android. And nobody actually uses it because there is no hardware back button, etc.

That must explain the lack of penetration of Android tablets! (They have no back button either)

Do they have a home button? I'm sure the answer varies but in general you need the hardware and software to agree on some things. That is my point. Even if the software is flexible such as Android 4 that will display the buttons if necessary, or use hardware buttons if they are available.

AFAIK Android was basically unusable on iOS hardware, using the sleep/wake button in an odd way and other things that do not work well.

Do they have a home button?

Nope. Only volume and on/off. At least that's what the Galaxy Tab has. As you pointed out, new versions of Android allow emulating whatever buttons the device doesn't have on screen. And the newest phones basically don't have any, relying entirely on the screen.

AFAIK Android was basically unusable on iOS hardware, using the sleep/wake button in an odd way and other things that do not work well.

This sounds like the port was botched. Nothing you said explains why it couldn't work. In fact the oppposite: you've already illustrated the button layout is irrelevant.

iPad was developed by a single company. Apple built the hardware and software. Apple didn't force a manufacturer through licensing terms to lock down the bootloader to stop the manufacturers customers from loading an alternate OS.

The thing that people don't like is the fact that Microsoft is saying through their licensing agreements with a manufacturer that they have to lock the boot loader down so that the manufacturers customers (Asus, HTC, Samsung customers) are not allowed to load an alternate OS.

Apple produces their own hardware, and the various locked Android devices are not being locked down by Google.

>Apple produces their own hardware

Samsung and Foxconn and a lot of other suppliers make the hardware. Apple does not own the factories.

That's irrelevant. Apple sells you the hardware; when you buy an iPad, you are buying an iPad, not a tablet computer that happens to be bundled with iOS. There is no expectation that you can use it as a general purpose computer.

When I buy laptop, I am buying a computer. Full stop. If the vendor wants to bundle an OS, great, but I expect to be able to change it. It's far more offensive not to be able to run Linux on a mainstream laptop than not to be able to run Windows on an iPad.

>When I buy laptop, I am buying a computer. Full stop. If the vendor wants to bundle an OS, great, but I expect to be able to change it.

Maybe it's time to change your expectations? Why is Microsoft liable for your expectations? Why not only buy laptops that meet your expectations?

>It's far more offensive not to be able to run Linux on a mainstream laptop than not to be able to run Windows on an iPad.

ARM laptops are nowhere close to mainstream. They cannot run any Win32 applications. MS is starting from zero here.

"MS is starting from zero here."

No. Microsoft is starting at one hundred eight billion.

Samsung is the factory contractor for the A5, Apple designed it and Apple owns it outright. Foxconn assembles Apple products and provides some off-the-shelf parts. Apple does not levy such licensing restrictions against another company's own product to run only Apple software.

For the purposes of this argument, they do. Apple is the client; they buy the manufacturing.

Whereas with Microsoft, the factories are the clients of Microsoft OS's.

Let's revisit this in a year and see. My prediction is at that point Google will be producing the most locked down Android devices. Motorola's we-will-prevent-you-from-needing-support practices shoehorn perfectly with Google's we-don't-do-support practices. It's a marriage made in heaven.

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