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Comment by rchaud | Hacker News Reader

> Instead we mainly use them for selfies, porn, and memes.

Don't you see the warning in the writer's words?

All the marketing for iOS and Android talked about a computer in your pocket allowing for all kinds of creation. Then they locked everything down to the point until there's no computer left, just a $1000 passive consumption machine with a nice camera. Actual computer-phones like the full-Linux Nokia N900 failed. The selfie machines won.

Commercial products leveraging AI are headed the same way. For every GH Copilot there will be 100 SaaS products offering better ways to maximize engagement with your blogspam or write a better VC deck.

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I agree they are not true general purpose computers anymore, but I think the point was that this passive consumption machine can still be used for consumption of educational material. It has never been easier to get access to learning materials. You also don’t need a CS degree to still use them for learning programming.

That’s not what we do though, let’s be honest here. The traffic speaks volumes. Everything goes to bullshit and porn. And because of that, that’s where the money is.

Not everything is corporates’ fault.

You can do a ton of creating things on iOS. People just don't. It's not remotely because the devices are "locked down," it's because consuming content is easy and satisfying.

Creating content is easy too, tons of people do it. AI is still a nascent technology so it's not involved in the creation as much.. yet.

Mobile Garage Band is actually pretty good from what I can tell, for an example.

> Then they locked everything down to the point until there's no computer left, just a $1000 passive consumption machine with a nice camera.

This is nonsense. Have you seen Obsidian.md and its plugin ecosystem for not just writing but a (ahem) bicycle for the mind?

Have you run VSCode against a remote code-server from the park, coding all day on 5G and still having a pretty full battery?

Have you use Affinity's content creation suite with the Pencil 2?

What about M365 Office?

All this works on a full size full quality keyboard with a touchpad and 13" touch screen on an iPad that also cheerfully works with a USB-C cable or dock to also drive an external 4K screen with stage manager, full two screen windowing manager, and other things like hardwire Ethernet.

You can do much of that from an iPhone 14 Pro Max as well. Obsidian.MD and M365 Office both work fine with a full size bluetooth keyboard/charge stand, along with mobile Xbox cloud gaming with a Razer kishi controller and Plex of my own content at home, over HDMI to a hotel TV.

https://www.cultofmac.com/721704/why-you-should-add-a-second...

A computer can write, run and deploy code inside of itself. No remote desktop or SSHing required; no system gatekeeper telling you what code you can or can't run. Apple and Android fail these conditions.

Everything you are describing besides Affinity suite is remote software running on a dumb client. Not exactly the lofty visions of the future that these companies allude to in their marketing. 10 years after the first iPad, the current crop of commercials literally call it "not a computer".

AFAIK nothing stops you from doing that on Android, and yet the situation is no different.

Android has (through FDroid, as Google Play Store no longer permits it) Termux, The Only App Which Does Not Specifically and Precisely Suck[tm] (though as before, Einkbro is increasingly stiff competition).

Termux offers an arguably rich Linux userland, with over 2,500 packages (2,581 listed as I write this). That's still a small fraction of the total number of Debian packages, which now exceeds 57,000, but the tools which are available are a highly useful set and includes numerous scripting languages (Perl, Python, Ruby, Node.js, etc.) and compilers, along with several repositories associated with those tools. All told, Termux is far more than a toy.

But ...

... it's still hampered by numerous Android limitations:

- No root access unless your device is rootable (and rooted).

- No multi-user capabilities or security.

- Limited to the default Android filesystem limitations (including being locked out of most of the filesystem), and limited filesystem permissions capabilities.

- Subject to Android's process-management and process-reaping "features", which mean your shell session(s) may be killed off at any time.

- Limited on-board keyboard support. Even with an external bluetooth keyboard there are quirks and issues.

I can do, and do do quite a bit with the system. It remains limited and crippled in numerous ways though I can often avoid the sharpest of edges.

There's no full-fledged equivalent on iOS, and many years of attempting to provide even a fraction of Termux's capabilities (through ISH) seems to be running into even steeper headwinds than Termux has had to deal with.

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