Seeing all these gives me the same energy of early days of jailbroken Android phones where one could become root and do whatever with the hardware… I stopped considering such tinkering because I got tired of finding those little tweaks and fixes on forums like xda every time something was updated. With the LLMs capable of automating that tool, I might find those old school way of mobile phones again…
You shouldn’t have to use LLMs to run your software.
Give it another 6-12 months until the big AI shops shut those capabilities down and running local ones becomes cost prohibitive.
Apple is too big for that. Hard regulation is the only way out right now. Maybe breaking them up too.
These clearly anti-consumer practices should just be illegal.
Last I heard even EU policy was ways off of that target.
Also: EU policy is very shcceptible to political tides. Sure now we love to scream sovereignty from the rooftops but that is guaranteed to change eventually.
They operate the factories manufacturing the phones. They have total say about their phones, and you have no say. Your almighty powers within the Linux terminal doesn't extend beyond it.
Note that earlier this year, a YouTuber did reverse engineer the Coca-Cola formula because nothing was actually stopping someone from doing it, all this time. You could be that guy for iPhones.
Just like Apple with their products, the table manufacturer decides the exact measurements and materials of the table. You vote with your wallet and purchase the product you prefer, or make your own if you are capable.
> Hacking isn't a human right.
Hacking is such a loaded term for "the right to use the thing I purchased how I see fit".
> Go buy a different phone if you don't like Apple's phones. There are a bunch to choose from.
This is beside the point (and may not always be true). The ability for the manufacturer of a thing I bought and ostensibly own to tell me how to use my property.
It's really not that hard to understand. The fact that it's a computer doesn't change anything.
I don't expect that to happen, but I do expect Apple et al to spend trillions of tokens hardening their platforms against users and red-teaming to find these sorts of holes before release.
The loss of your purchase is insignificant compared to the money Apple and Google make from their walled gardens.
Plus what other viable options are there in this duopoly?
Apparently there’s a popular 3rd option in Asia but is there any support for western apps? And how are you going to convince a million other people to switch?
Running local models is getting -cheaper- every month in spite of rising hardware costs due to intelligence compression innovations like Bonsai2.
I build operating systems for a living using only consumer GPUs at home.
If that would work, I'd be writing this on my iPhone Mini.
The local inference threshold has been crossed already. Its possible to achieve big model like performance through agent harnesses with local models.
Easier said than done. Because, "Apple can do no wrong" is the general public perception. Look at any wrongdoing by Apple - whether they were caught slowing down the phones, degrading cameras on purpose or even the lawsuit where they were caught spying on people's voice recordings. There will always be some NPC defending them as if the billion dollar corporation gives a shit about them.
That or "Apple is the only pro-privacy company in the world" despite there being an active lawsuit against them for the exact opposite.
So, I say: Vote with your wallet. Fuck them...and the fanboys.
If Murican lobbying/corruption tries to snuff AI that threatens the Hutt cartels, China will accelerate it.
As someone who's been jailbreaking since the iPhone 3GS (and held onto a iOS 17.0 device for the longest time), Apple has never bothered to detect jailbreaks and lock people out of iCloud and iMessage.
If anything, it's those sleazy security framework providers that provide jailbreak detection to apps and cause them to either lock people out of accounts and features, or crash entirely.
Some government-mandated audit processes (at least, that's what I understand here in Singapore) also require jailbreak detection.
Not entirely true. It absolutely has in the case of the Hackintosh. In fact many a year ago that’s what inspired me to get my first Mac, because every release of macOS made it harder and harder with custom bootloader and kexts to get around Apple’s active efforts to ensure you couldn’t use those unless you were on an actual Apple device, not just running their OS.
Several vendors sell Android devices that allow bootloader unlocking, Pixels being the most known.
Once unlocked, Magisk is the current and most used rooting tool.
The procedure is quite straightforward.
Does this actually happen? They did not do that in the good old days.
I do know that some apps try to detect jailbreaks and annoyingly refuse to let people log in. Banking and such.
There was a website jailbreakme you simple slid a slider and you were done.
From Wikipedia
August 1, 2010, exploited a vulnerability in the FreeType library used while rendering PDF files.
The unregulated market naturally coalesces into oligopolies or monopolies and doesn’t fix issues like this.
There was a glimmer of hope with the DMA but regulators are again asleep, emboldening Google to cripple app installation outside of their store and force developers to enter into a contract with Google to distribute from the developer's own website.
Don't sign into any of Apple services then! Just use it as a pure developer playground or create an alternate ID. Can't be looking for everything everywhere :-)
> we gave in to the “ecosystem”
Two things:
a) Why the would you never want to update an OS in this day and age ?
b) I understand the perspective of people insisting on wanting to be able to root their phone. But how about we take a step back and look at the reality of the 2026 security environment ? An environment where you have:
- Increasing volumes of increasingly sneaky security exploits on one side
- A phone with your 2FA apps, your banking apps, your email apps, your kids photos on the other
If I want to be root, I can do so on my desktop or a cloud VM or whatever.
But making root on a phone easy just seems like a recipe for disaster... if its easy for you, its easy for the bad guys too.
Because updates break the jailbreak. If Apple actually had a sanctioned way to let you do what you want with the device you bought there would indeed be very little reason to not update.
I don't know where you live, but where I am most banks insist on proprietary 2FA via their own app. Only (some of) the fintechs allow TOTP.
Yes you can get your codes via SMS, but I thnk we all know what a security mess SMS is. I would rather have the bank's proprietary app since at least everything will be going over HTTPS and also eliminates most of the vulnerabilities associated with SMS just by virtue of being an app.
1) They of course lack the resources
2) Often lack professional displince across all skills required
3) Mostly make for themslves or whats interesting, not whats needed.
4) The release schedule is laughable at best.
This is opinion. In my opinion, closed products are not good products. To me, openness and freedom trump subjectively better UX any day.
> as much as they enjoy self-righteously declaring their values.
Consider that in our society and software ecosystem, this is all but required to stave off the forces that would enclose the software commons that these "self-righteous" volunteers work so hard to maintain.
Great for professionally administered servers or expert power users. Not for much else. Until recently, esoteric use-cases like playing audio were catastrophically unsolved. And then those got better around when screen sharing, accessibility devices, and remote-assistance tools all broke because of another OSS schism. Installing and running an ordinary program requires choosing among a handful of ways of doing that (container systems, package managers) even on the same distro. And then if a graphical program wants to do crazy stuff like "open a file", well, the permissioning situation is "fragmented" to put it generously.
Gaming? Gaming works great on Linux now! ...because a corporation with centralized planning, KPIs, and incentives spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it.
I like Linux. It's been my daily driver for years, on and off. I use it for a living, I use it for a hobby. But that doesn't mean it's not a perfect example of every single one of the OSS flaws that GP listed.
I did actually discover a bug in iOS (related to photos which have failed to sync to icloud for the past four years) by investigating why there were over 23k empty folders in ~/Library/Containers/com.apple.photos.ImageConversionService/Data/tmp/, fwiw.
There are some orders of magnitude more iOS/iPadOS devices than macOS devices.
There's a bunch of ways we could debate ourselves about things Apple would or wouldn't do, but at the end of the day, Apple is going to do whatever is in it's best interest.