> There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.

This - this line is the part of your argument I find fairly bullshit.

There is nothing stopping Apple from making the same device, but giving you the keys to install your own software on it. Hell - They can even bury it in the settings, or lock it down through a provisioned profile so you can help your mom by turning it off if you're worried.

Instead - you're arguing that apple should abuse their position to keep other competition locked out. Because you think it makes you "safer". I don't think it makes you safer. I think it makes life easy for you, at the expense of everyone in the long term.

You have fallen - hook, line, and sinker - for the marketing of the richest company in the world, telling you "trust us - we'll keep you safe". You should ask more questions about why they need to do it this way. Why keeping you safe involves abusing their power.

That's the same safety China promises with their great firewall. Trust us - we'll keep you safe, happy, and ignorant.

Maybe that's a good deal to you - I think it's a shitty trade.

> There is nothing stopping Apple from making the same device, but giving you the keys to install your own software on it.

They do, at the app level. As a developer you can install whatever app you want on your own devices, even apps which would never be allowed in AppStore or TestFlight (although still not with all the entitlements Apple’s own apps can get.)

OS level, your point stands.

Even then - apps which might want to do things like send multicast packets (very useful in lots of home automations situations) can't do it, using the developer program, without going through approval on the store.

You utterly do not own those devices. Apple sells a house where they kept the keys to all the locks, but people think it's ok "because they'll keep me safe and unlock my doors when I need them to!".

Nevermind the risk is mostly a marketing boogeyman in the first place.

You can do this only if you pay Apple $99 / year and deanonymize yourself with billing details. If not, you have to reinstall weekly, losing your local data.

> There is nothing stopping Apple from making the same device, but giving you the keys to install your own software on it

You... don't think you can install your own software on MacOS?

His 80 year old mother isn't using MacOS. She's on an ipad or an iphone - where I do genuinely think I can't install my own software.

They're both perfectly fine general purpose machines - except apple holds the keys to the engine, and only hands them out when they approve of the use case.

I think it’s useful to remember why so many people jumped to iPads, because we did that experiment for a couple decades. When people have the ability to install arbitrary code we know they will, and will click through almost any warning if they’ve been promised money, games, or porn. I think the sandboxing approach is getting closer to where you could potentially safely have third-party stores but I think that would still leave a lot of abuse if it allowed VPNs or content filters, full screen use, background operations, etc.

I don’t love where that leaves us but it does make me wonder whether a better compromise would be something like regulation requiring third-party app installs but with some kind of business liability & registration requirement so e.g. Epic could set one up but fly by night scammers couldn’t easily set something up and spam AARP members.

They didn't jump to a completely new category of device because of the toolbars and malicious software.

They bought them because it was a new category of device (and extensive marketing from Apple - although I don't mean to discount the product with that statement - very solid phones, but also very excellent marketing). If anything - the early tech adopters moved to the iphone because it was more open than the existing phones at the time, which were definitely not general purpose computers. The iphone got us halfway there - I'd like to see us take the last few steps.

> Why would anyone spend $1000 on a computer from Apple if it’s not what they want?

Because marketing.

Then again, maybe the truth is that what people really want isn't the best tool for the job but the best-marketed tool for the job, and they spend their money accordingly.

Apple explicitly advertise that their computers are locked down. It’s part of their marketing. If people didn’t want it, this wouldn’t work.

Except that Apple's computers aren't locked down. That canard really needs to die. iPhones and iPads are locked down. Macs aren't. I can run whatever the I want on my Mac, and I do.

I have never seen this 'locked down' advertising, care to share an example?

> Nothing is stopping people learning about computers.

Hell, it's easier and cheaper than ever. You can run Linux in your browser on an iPad, just by visiting a URL. Or shell into various free-tier VMs, for... free. Maybe a one-time cost for an SSH/Mosh client if you're on iOS I suppose. Swift Playgrounds and a hundred other learn-to-code apps and sites exist. And that's if you're "stuck" with a locked-down device running iOS—you can pick up cheap but pretty damn powerful second-hand x86 computers with money earned from a shift or two at McDonalds and do whatever you want with them. Practically all libraries have lots of computers now (and see again that you can run Linux in a browser, or remote into VMs from the browser, if you're concerned about how locked-down a library computer might be). I routinely end up with free or nearly-free surprisingly good computers (even Apple ones!) without even trying.

Resources, including entire books, available for free and on demand—and almost any information relating to computers is free if you're willing to sail the high seas and hoist the Jolly Roger, which is exactly what learners did back in the "good old days", too (but we pirated software, not books, mainly because the books were rarely available in digital form and we had worse ways to read them than we do now, even if they had been available).

But hey - I'm free to send multicast packets from that iphone on a network I own, right? Because part of the learning is the doing things with the skills you learn later.

I'm free to install software I write on that iphone, right?

I'm free to sell the software I write using those skills to those other people, without risk of Apple arbitrarily shutting me out, right?

Or much more malicious, moving me down below their own shitty version, right?

All of those things - the things someone who goes to the trouble to learn about computers might want to do - I'm free to do those?

My point is that broadly speaking, learning computing is something like 100x more accessible than it was in the "good old days", and that mostly holds even on an i-device.

I couldn't (practically) develop for my NES, either. But it'd have been rad if I could at least write software on it that'd run somewhere else. Or in a sandboxed environment on the NES, also allowing me to share it, even if the capabilities were a slightly nerfed. Way the hell better than nothing. ("Well yeah but you could have bought a Commodore 64"—OK, cool, sooo.... why are we worried about iOS devices when the same 'so get a different device' counter applies there, and also you actually can learn a great deal of computing on them?)

Meanwhile ordinary computers are practically free. Like you can probably go beg around and make a couple Reddit or Craigslist or Facebook posts (use the library computer I guess if somehow you live in the developed world and don't own or have access to any other Web-capable device?) and land one (maybe not a great one, but hundreds of times more powerful than what many of us learned on) for $0 in a matter of weeks, at most. Or scrape together $100 or so and go to Goodwill. Not $0, but it's very cheap. Your library probably even has free computer classes. So might your community college. Learning how to "really" use and program a computer is vastly more accessible now than it's ever been, and i-devices aren't harming that a bit.

They might not be harming the learning (I'd argue they are) - But they are unquestionably harming the practice.

You keep harping back to some bullshit hand-me-down machines, as though that's what my customers will want to carry in their pocket. As though that's the ideal machine to implement software on - and I'd argue you're just soundly avoiding the real discussion by mentioning them (perhaps intentionally, given your fascination).

Trust me, I fucking have those machines, they're great for some things (they run my home network, they run my home cluster) - but they're not the things that people walk around with. They're not the computer in everyone's pocket. They're not the laptop my potential user-base is working on at work.

Doesn't it strike you as somewhat sad and pathetic that you're arguing that folks who want to do general purpose computing should be relegated to cast off devices, or be subject to the whims and mercy of the richest company in the world? Begging for the scraps after Apple shoves their own products right to the top, cuts off and strangles any real competition, charges racket money to allow users to even install your damn software, prevents you from using the devices they claim you own?

Pathetic. Locked down proprietary systems that trap folks in what they believe is a benevolent dictatorship. At some point you'll look around and realize you're being robbed blind. You claim to value learning computer skills, without realizing the learning has NO value without the ability to use those skills. And if you can only use those skills when Apple lets you... who's really in control?

>>There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.

I just don't understand this argument. Never did and I don't think I ever will. If apple allowed you to install custom apps, it would change NOTHING for your 80+ year old mother. Literally nothing. Her device would still be just as safe and secure as ever before.

At the same time, almost everyone in my family over the age of 60 who uses a non-Apple device has their devices completely sodden with crapware (and probably worse), to the point where they periodically have to taken them in to some sort of computer "repair" person to have them serviced (i.e., the garbage removed).

Some people apparently need help making judgment calls about what is and is not safe to install on their devices. I feel like Mac OS might strike the right balance here: you can install anything you want, but the OS throws up speedbumps if the app doesn't have the right signature, is not from the App Store, etc. These protections can be easily circumvented, but they send a signal that you should think twice about doing so if you don't really know what you're doing.

I agree with you - MacOS is the correct model to follow.

Apple lets you install custom apps on Macs, it’s just iOS devices where it’s a pain.

On iOS devices, you have to use a developer account to sideload the app and it only works for a short time, IIRC. I’m fuzzy on the details because the places where I’ve worked, it mostly just worked although the experience was way, way better on Android. At one point I was on a team that ran a system for deploying apps for sideloading, and for years I’ve been carrying both an Android and iOS phone, so I feel like I have a handle on these differences, but I also am missing out on some of the problems that our team already solved.

On macOS, you can download an app and run it. Depending on the provenance of the app and the security settings, you may get a message like “this app is from an unknown developer” with no apparent way forward. The solution is to right-click the app and select open from the context menu. When you open an app by right clicking on it, the OS gives you an option to open the app. This depends on security settings, but I think this is allowed by default.

There’s a lot of malware out there these days and I think it is good and correct that it should not be obvious how to run arbitrary software you downloaded. We know people will just click through dialog boxes to try and get where they’re going, which is way (for example) there’s no button to visit an HTTPS site with a broken certificate in most browsers these days. Some things should not come with instructions, because the risks are too great for unskilled users.

I believe the right click method for opening an unsigned app no longer works as of MacOS Ventura. It appears to work on your own computer but once someone downloads it and tries to run on a new computer, you can’t get around it through regular UI, I think.

It does still work, but you need to change the gatekeeper settings to allow it.

Clearly not true. A lot of spyware and malware masquerades as legitimate software.

And literally none of it would be allowed on the app store, just like it isn't now. Again, it would change absolutely nothing. Scammers would sooner convince his 80+ year old mother to tell them her bank details than they would walk her through the process of installing a dodgy app through sideloading.

> If apple allowed you to install custom apps, it would change NOTHING for your 80+ year old mother. Literally nothing. Her device would still be just as safe and secure as ever before.

Not it would not still be as safe.

Malware and scams would come with instructions to install their custom bad app.

“Install this custom Deals app to save money”

>>Malware and scams would come with instructions to install their custom bad app.

I would love a single example of that happening(on android)

Exactly this. People forget that most of hacking is social engineering.

All I can figure is these notions that it'd be fine and exactly the same come from the generation after all of us who experienced the horror of removing 20 "search bars" from every single one of our relatives' computers... and repeating every few months. And that's when they didn't manage to get outright viruses on the regular, which many of them did. They simply haven't seen how awful Internet-connected computing was for most people, at exactly the time when most people finally started to use computers at home (in the US anyway), which was right around the year 2000.

Or maybe we have 80+ year old relatives using Android and not having these problems.

"There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use."

There very clearly is something terrible about this level of control. You're arguing that there's also some benefit -- yes of course there could be. But the point is that there are also massive problems with this level of control, some of which pose existential threats in areas far more important than (entirely debatable) usability improvements.

These problems can be solved in other ways. You can do what I did and remove administrator access entirely. You can create a curated list of appropriate apps without the totalitarian aspect. You can let people opt-in to various levels of filtering and control over software without excluding people who want to ahem think different.

You're presenting a pretext, not a credible and necessary conclusion.

> Easily use

I am tech savvy. iPhones are not "easy" to use. It's a nightmare of hidden gestures to accomplish even the most basic things.

Yes, for someone who spend 8 hours / day on their phone you eventually learn the necessary gestures. But that's no different from Android or any other electronic device.

> making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use

only today, I was talking to a lady walking her dog, who's close to 80 (I don't ask her that), and she owns an iPhone. When my phone started talking, she commiserated that she's always getting woken up because the phone is making noise and she can't make it stop. I told her to keep it in another room like I do.

I have Android, but if I look it up : https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208353

apparently there IS a way. Either it doesn't work, or she doesn't know about it.

>There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.

in contrast to what other phone? Was your 80+ year old mother sideloading bootleg apks on her android after turning on developer mode? This is the reverse version of "but think of the children" except it doesn't even make any sense. In every one of these threads there's a mysterious influx of senile parents who apparently can be trusted with the call function of the phone and fend off every fake grandson phishing attempt but not the option to install software

This isn’t in contrast to Android. That’s just a matter of usability.

It’s in contrast to the openness of the platform people seem to be demanding from Apple. Current Android is obviously not open enough for them, so it’s not a valid as a point of comparison.

> There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.

You're right. It's also true that there's nothing terrible about making devices that Chinese dissidents can safely and easily use. Luckily there is no government that wants to limit your mom's freedom (unless she happens to be a Chinese dissident).