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Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

Well, this is the heart of the "appliance" model. iPads are appliances. You wouldn't ask about running custom code on your toaster or your blender, so you shouldn't ask about that for your iPad. Also all the common reasons apply: Security and Privacy, Quality Control, Platform Stability and Compatibility, and Integrated User Experience. All of these things are harmed when you are allowed to run custom coding.

(disclaimer: My personal opinion is that the "appliance" model is absurd, but I've tried to steel-man the case for it)

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> You wouldn't ask about running custom code on your toaster or your blender, so you shouldn't ask about that for your iPad.

Of course I would, and the only reason other people wouldn't is because they're conditioned to believe in their own innate powerlessness.

If you sell me a CPU, I want the power to program it, period.

I mean this sincerely, are you really an Apple customer then? I feel exactly the same as you, and for that reason I don't buy Apple products. They are honest about what they sell, which I appreciate.

Some arguments are that you shouldn’t be able to create appliances, only general purpose machines.

Ever notice people don't build their own cars anymore? They used to even up through the 60's. I mean ordering a kit or otherwise purchasing all the components and building the car. Nowadays it's very rare that people do that.

I'm old enough to remember when people literally built their own computers, soldering iron in hand. People haven't done that since the early 80's.

Steve Jobs' vision of the Mac, released in 1984, was for it to be a computing appliance - "the computer for the rest of us." The technology of the day prevented that. Though they pushed that as hard as they could.

Today's iPad? It's the fulfillment of Steve Jobs' original vision of the Mac: a computing appliance. It took 40 years, but we're here.

If you don't want a computing appliance then don't buy an iPad. I'd go further and argue don't buy any tablet device. Those that don't want computing appliances don't have to buy them. It's not like laptops, or even desktops, are going anywhere anytime soon.

> If you don't want a computing appliance then don't buy an iPad.

If you do want a computing appliance, then there's nothing wrong with having a machine that could be reprogrammed that you simply choose not to reprogram. Please stop advocating for a worse world for the rest of us when it doesn't benefit you in the slightest to have a machine that you don't control.

Stop being so damned melodramatic. I'm not advocating for a "worse world for the rest of us." There are a plethora of choices for machines that aren't appliances. In fact, the overwhelming majority of machines are programmable. Apple thinks the market wants a computing appliance. The market will decide. Meanwhile, you have lots of other choices.

> Some arguments are that you shouldn’t be able to create appliances, only general purpose machines.

I sincerely hope that you live as much of your life in that world as possible.

Meanwhile, I'll enjoy having a car I don't have to mess with every time I start it up.

This is a false dichotomy. There's nothing stopping anyone from shipping a device with software that works, but that can still be reprogrammed.

In a world concerned with climate change, we should see many of these 'appliances' as inherently wasteful.

On top of the ugly reality that they're designed to become e-waste as soon as the battery degrades.

Can you do that to your car infotainment system btw?

Why not?

It MUST (RFC2119) be airgapped from ABS and ECU, of course.

> If you sell me a CPU, I want the power to program it, period.

Uhhh, there are CPUs in your frickin' wires now, dude! There are several CPUs in you car for which you generally don't have access. Ditto for your fridge. Your microwave. Your oven. Even your toaster.

We're literally awash in CPUs. You need to update your thinking.

Now, if you said something like "if you sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the power to program it, period" then I would fully agree with you. BTW, you can develop software for your own personal use on the iPad. It's not cheap or easy (doesn't utilize commonly-used developer tooling), but it can be done without having to jump through any special hoops.

Armed with that, we can amend your statement to "if you sell me a general-purpose computing device, then I want the power to program it using readily-available, and commonly-utilized programming tools."

I think that statement better captures what I presume to be your intent.

> but it can be done without having to jump through any special hoops.

You are really stretching the definition of "special hoops" here. On Android sideloading is a switch hidden in your settings menu; on iOS it's either a municipal feature or a paid benefit of their developer program.

Relative to every single other commercial, general-purpose operating system I've used, I would say yeah, Apple practically defines what "special hoops" look like online.

I do actually want the ability to program the CPUs in my car the same way I'm able to buy parts and mods for every mechanical bit in there down to the engine. In fact we have laws about that sort of thing that don't apply to the software.

That may be your personal preference, but you should accept that 99% of people don't care about programming their toaster, so you're very unlikely to ever make progress in this fight.

99% of people don't care about programming anything, that doesn't make this gatekeeping right.

You aren’t wrong but businesses aren’t in the market to optimize for 1% their customers

It's not optimizing. It's opening. If I buy a $2,000 hardware I should be able to do whatever I want with it.

...buy Android?

I do. But I can also make remarks about other options especially when its a market leader.

Could apply this for anything complex and packaged.

I’m annoyed that I can’t buy particular engines off the shelf and use them in my bespoke approach, why dont car manufacturers give the approach that crate engine providers do?

Then I wish you the best of luck in your fight. In the meantime, don't drag me down or tell me that I'm wrong just because you, personally, don't want something that I want that also doesn't harm you in the slightest.

Yeah, if I have to program my toaster, I’m buying a new toaster.

I write enough code during the day to make me happy. I really don’t want to be thinking about the optimal brownness of my bagel.

the desire to program one's toaster is the most HN thing I've seen all day XD

I really wish I could program my dishwasher because it's not cleaning very well and if I could add an extra rinse cycle I think it would be fine.

Start by cleaning the filters

And engineer your own bagel setting without buying a bagel model? Dream on.

Lots of people ask about running custom code on other appliances. I think they call them hackers.

I think you're reinforcing Apple's point about how security is harmed by allowing custom code.

An appliance manufacturer isn't doing an entire press event highlighting how fast the CPU on the appliance is.

If its advertised like a general purpose computer, expectations should be met.

Agree completely. I think it's absurd that they talk about technical things like CPU and memory in these announcements. It seems to me like an admission that it's not really an "appliance" but trying to translate Apple marketing into logical/coherent concepts can be a frustrating experience. I just don't try anymore.

I appreciate the steel-man. A strong counter argument for me is that you actually can run any custom code on an iPad, as long as it's in a web-browser. This is very unlike an appliance where doing so is not possible. Clearly the intention is for arbitrary custom code to run on it, which makes it a personal computer and not an appliance (and should be regulated as such).

That's a fair point, although (steel-manning) the "custom code" in the browser is severely restricted/sandboxed, unlike "native" code would be. So from that perspective, you could maybe expand it to be like a toaster that has thousands of buttons that can make for hyper-specific stuff, but can't go outside of the limits the manufacturer built in.

If I could deploy to my blender as easily as I can to AWS, then I would _definitely_ at least try it.

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