People willingly buy blatantly proprietary systems, then publicly muse why they don't have freedom to do with them what they want.
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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It would technical possible for Apple to have dual boot, and you could boot macOS when you connect to an external display. But I guess it would not be good for business
Not even dual boot. The core OS is the same. Just have two UI. One for phone one for desktop.
Apple will never do this because they sell hardware.
That wouldn't be even needed. Just add back macos features to iOS and iPadOS
It would be quite nice if they added some MacOS features back to MacOS instead of trying desperately to turn it into a mobile phone OS.
That said, Sequoia is so objectively awful it finally gave me the kick I needed to nuke my MacBook Air and install Asahi, and I'm genuinely really impressed. The only shame is having to waste 80gb of disk for a MacOS partition that I'll never use, but otherwise it's actually good enough to be a daily driver.
That’s what they’re doing. They clearly would prefer people to move to iOS, that smells a bit like MacOS, as it’s a damn sight more profitable to both sell you hardware and software 30% cuts.
- Phones are computers.
- Phones are the most popular personal computers in the world.
- Many people only have a phone and no other computers.
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“right to root” would prevent so much eWaste.
I would love a variant that is like, if you stop delivering security and minor fixes/backports to a device, you have to give access to root or better even to the bootloader.
better yet, open source it when it gets abandoned.
full on, no excuses. all board schematics, source code and documentation.
shit, require it from the start.
The problem is that it allows users to detect when they're connected to a phony cell tower like the ones police and ICE use to intercept communications, and we Can't Have That.
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They have been since the beginning.
That's literally why I got an OG Motorola Droid.
I said to myself "I can have a full computer in my pocket!"
I went to the Verizon store to buy an iPhone when the droid first launched, the rep said "you don't want that phone, check this one out" and showed me the droid. So glad I didn't get roped into that ecosystem.
I still miss CyanogenMod dearly...
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The whole point of the article is that the new MacBooks are running on iPhone hardware. And that therefore there's no reason for you not being able to install MacOS on your iPhone. Even your old droid was locked down and you were not able to install a real OS which would have given you the freedom to run what you want without restrictions
I remember one time I had a coworker sit down next to me with her MacBook, iPhone, iPad and iWatch and that was an "aha!" moment for me. She had spent like 5x more than she would have if 1 or 2 devices could do all of those things.
It wasn't locked down. I rooted it, installed a few OS's, it even ran Linux.
I understand the point of the article. I'm saying since the very beginning, the only limits on what smartphones can do, have been what software 'they' want you to run.
A CPU is a CPU. Some are faster or slower, but they can all do anything.
This. But Marketing has been very good at saying "this: phone, that: computer. not same thing". So many times I heard "Oh but how do you want to do that on a phone?". It's not a phone. It has never been a phone.
The only difference is UI. I operate my phone in my hand with my thumb, not on my lap or on a desk from a keyboard.
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Im surely not the only one who thinks this article is ai generated? it spams the exact same structure and has the typical smells
I will risk dying of laughter if THIS is what finally pisses off the Apple cult.
There are "pissed off, not the same, Jobs wouldn'ta dunit" sentiments for almost every new product by Apple.
So I don't think anything will change much.
Anyway, this is a return to roots. They were, you know, a mainstream consumer oriented company at some point. With an implicit but almost explicit claim that "we don't do the crap others do".
I'm optimistic. It's quality attacking quantity. We've had a personal computer market with quantity winning over quality every damn year since about 2003, and it has been getting worse and worse. If the pendulum is starting to move in the opposite direction, it's very cool.
And yes, megabytes of RAM are quantity.
But admittedly I'm a couple weeks' old convert.
We have been complaining about this shit for YEARS.
And yet... you still... never mind. Not worth it.
I’m annoyed at the state of Apple’s app ecosystem. MacOS is worse this year than it’s been in a long time and I’m not updating on Macs that I control.
But have you used a windows pc recently? It’s like banging rocks together. Somehow, they keep finding ways to make it worse every year. Or month. So yeah, I’m using a Mac because it’s the less terrible option.
(And good luck getting your IT people at work letting you put Linux on your laptop.)
So I've recently started using a Mac mini, and it's very good. But I'll agree that I don't like Liquid Glass. I'm using, eh, a 1280x1024 dinosaur display over an hdmi-2-vga adapter, so can't confirm nausea from it, but sore eyes are a thing.
(And good luck getting your IT people at work letting you put Linux on your laptop.)
What am I gonna do? Stop myself?
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This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos.
Has there ever been a time when computer geeks weren't consider a weird group of outsiders?
BTW, I was raised on MS-DOS and it didn't help my computer literacy one bit (heheh). I still can barely navigate my computer in the CLI, much less build anything or do anything cool from some internalized "mental model" of how a computer works. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of toddlers running around with Arduinos and doing all manners of mind blowing shit.
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