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!"
this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2026
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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
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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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...
Yah. It had customizations nobody has anymore.
I am actually very, very, very seriously looking at post-market OS since it is mainline Linux on a phone.
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- 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.
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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I will risk dying of laughter if THIS is what finally pisses off the Apple cult.
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.)
(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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People willingly buy blatantly proprietary systems, then publicly muse why they don't have freedom to do with them what they want.
It’s easy to get mad at people for not knowing the things we know. It’s incredibly frustrating. But then they know things we don’t. Turns out there’s way too much stuff to know and we can’t all know everything.
Modern life is unbelievably complicated and everyone is failing to manage that complexity to a level that would satisfy all the idealists. In light of all that, I find it hard to blame them for it.
I don't know how many normies you talk to, the vast majority of Apple product owners I meet wouldn't even know what a proprietary system is, let alone what makes Apple exceptionally bad for it. If it isn't for jewelery, many of those people are also just buying Apple machines because there is a perceived and real quality gap between them and other options. They think there's just two major OS's to chose from and a Chromebook if you're poor.
Its true though, it is funny and annoying when people who understand what an Apple product is buys it and then acts surprised that it functions as advertised. I think most of these articles are written by people who are trying to warn average people and make sure the issue is platformed.
I think your missing the point of the neo. Prices are going up everywhere, but Apple has a lock in on the parts used to make that neo from older contracts.
So while everyone is selling shit based on the current landscape, Apple can take an older cell phone chip and ram and make an entire laptop out of it. The pricing pressures are different and they will sell like crazy because the consumer market just wasn’t important anymore…until Apple wanted it.
Love or hate Apple, this is a very good thing for the consumer.
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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
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.
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yep
You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
I mean, a .tar would have made sense as example here; unzip is also a tool ("app"). And not merely for convenience, the format is not simple. Unlike tar, which you could dd to "unpack".
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On the MacBook Neo, I can even opt to not use MacOS at all and instead install Asahi Linux if I so choose (assuming Apple continues to allow custom kernel booting as it has in M-series Macs).
The author is jumping the gun a lot there. The Asahi team recently started getting the M3 support kind of working, but still need to reverse engineer the new GPU and various other things that make them different from M1 and M2 laptops. It will be years until we get anywhere close to support of the Neo.
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