Right now, I have a nearly uncrackable walled-garden iphone on my desk. And a mac laptop running XCode (learning about Metal programming), and at the same time running an Amiga emulator (tinkering with 68k assembly), and a windows gaming laptop next to it, and a breadboard on the floor with a pile of resistors and capacitors and transistors.

So what's the problem again?

Seriously.

When I was a kid I would have killed to have had easy access to things like Raspberry Pi's, microcontrollers, SGI workstations (which is what the Mac is these days), and a zillion free programming languages.

Instead, while I had full access to the family's PC and could learn C and assembly language programming on it (btw I had to pay for those compilers), and learned all about interrupts and writing to VGA registers, I still couldn't do anything super low-level like muck around with the boot sector because my dad needed it for work, the phone system was so locked down that you'd go to jail for "exploring" it, and I had barely any idea how to get started playing around with logic chips because there was nothing like Sparkfun, Adafruit, Hackaday, etc, and Radio Shack in the mid-90s really wasn't much help.

There is still room for improvement - yes it would be nice if all the tech we used was both hackable and secure - but geeks who want to tinker are living in a land of plenty right now.

I guess it depends on who "you" are. A lot of kids get exactly one device. Some have to share it with their siblings as well. So I do think it matters whether our most widely used devices are completely locked down or not.

It doesn't just matter for kids either. It also matters for democracy how many people only own devices that governments have complete control over.

That said, I do think the problem can be exaggerated. People tend to find ways around restrictions. It can even be a motivation for looking more deeply into how things work.

And not all of those workarounds are terribly expensive. Ironically, the most expensive devices are also the most locked down.

This is true, but RPi Zeros are so cheap and powerful that I think it's much easier for community organisations (schools, scouts, dedicated groups) to start hacking events. The kid who can't get a 10 USD computer and a phone and access to a shared laptop is the kid who couldn't access to shared desktop in the olden days. In those days entry level could be a month's salary for a professional.

For the households where every kid has their own laptop, a Pi is accessible.

And for those who only have access to single shared machine, the kid today has access to a VM. That means they have options the rest of us didn't have - I couldn't run Linux until I had a paper round, because installing Linux on the family computer was not going to happen.

Perhaps one clear advantage to the old world is that in the 1980s and early 1990s, anyone could write an operating system and eventually get something that could do everything their old computer could do. I mean the idea was tractable. It's not like today where even thinking about creating a web browser filled Microsoft and Opera with such dread they gave up.

To be clear: I don't think it's all rosy today. But I don't think it's all bleak either.

> It also matters for democracy how many people only own devices that governments have complete control over.

You are right that there's social implications here, but I think the social concerns are primary and not a consequence of the technical situation. We arrived at this situation because companies decided they own their customers when we have massive social problems mistrust and distrust. This has come on the back of a generation that learnt abominations like a company's only obligation is to its shareholders. If you want to build trustworthy business, you need to maintain the right culture.

One question is whether a low income but educated and dedicated parent can find a way to acquire some hackable device for a highly motivated kid. I think the answer is probably yes, with some exceptions in extremely poor countries.

But that's not the most likely scenario. A far more likely scenario is a kid that wants to modify the device they're actually using on a daily basis to make it do something slightly different. There are no parents involved, and it would be utterly pointless to hack some completely different device like a Raspberry Pi just because it's more hackable.

So I worry that widespread use of locked down devices and locked down distribution channels makes the path from consumer to power user to hacker to software engineer to entrepreneur far less smooth. Some people who could have been interested in being more than mere consumers are going to be left behind.

You are absolutely right that access to all sorts of devices is hugely easier and cheaper than back in the 70s, 80s and 90s. It's definitely not all bleak. It was a decidedly rich country upper/middle class affair at the time. But we're also having to live with restrictions that would've been unimaginable back then.

Just imagine Microsoft in 1995 attempting to restrict what software people were allowed to install on their PCs. Imagine what regulators would have said if Microsoft had tried to charge 30% on all software and content loaded onto PCs. Or what if Microsoft had been able to issue no-recourse lifetime bans on using any of their software and platforms?

The objection that Microsoft was a monopolist isn't really convicing given that they were replaced by a hugely more powerful and ubiquitous oligopoly that now runs the actual economy, not some tiny niche called "The New Economy".

Like how you can't get Facebook on the Play Store because it's only available on F-droid on Android, for example?

That's certainly... interesting.

Facebook is quite happy on the Play Store because it has weak privacy and disclosure policies, because Google has no interest in enforcing such things.

So there may be a good reason why Apple don’t want this to happen, given that essentially everything is on your phone these days.

There’s still Android

Yes, this is why the phones are locked by default. This is not at all why the phones aren't unlockable, though. They can be unlockable and still be secure. Apple just doesn't want to give you the choice.

Really secure data goes through a seperate device of which I have total control, but which I treat carefully (and less conveniently). It's a very comfortable trade-off.

Why can't I run Xcode on iOS or iPadOS devices? What's the technical limitation? These devices have the capability to render stuff on larger screens wirelessly, and one can connect keyboards to them. The limitation is purely artificial.

What makes it important for them to use Unix rather than something that works fine the way it is while maintaining some standard of UX?

If kids show an interest in computers, they can just install unix on some computer like a raspberry pi and tinker on that.

The concern is whether the device is a piece of paper or a television. A television can show much more complex images under the control of the average child, but it is purely for consumption. A piece of paper lets you display anything you can draw or you can turn it into a paper plane or do origami, but the realism of the resulting products is going to be much less, and they will be relatively static.

An iPhone is, by design, a television. Unix systems are pieces of paper.

Last time I used MacOS, it was a functional piece of paper and it worked as a television too, so there isn't really any dichotomy here. Any television could be built on top of a piece of paper and give you access to the base level too.

The concern is that the television is winning out: even though Android and iOS are built from pieces of paper, their maintainers only bless television-like interfaces. Frankly, I believe a major part of this is because they're built on top of Unix like interfaces, which is based certain assumptions that they don't want to maintain. So I certainly wouldn't say Unix-like is the solution.

The parents might not know better.

> Also, why should kids tinker with computers if they can explore art by painting or music by learning an instrument or literature by reading?

They should be given the chance to do so, as they should be given the chance to explore art or craft or a lot of other things.

> What makes it important for them to use Unix

I don't see how mentioning Unix is relevant here. They should be given the opportunity to play and tinker with the devices, not only the preplanned path with games on the devices, that is all.

When my kids reach the age that they need a phone, probably sooner than I want to admit right now, I'd rather have them use some restricted device with some level of security checks in place for apps, so an iPhone, than something that is totally open which would make them vulnerable to being phished or persuaded to install viruses, etc. "Best way to play fortnite 10, download here".

It's not either/or. Parents can be the guardians of their children's phone, enabling all the security Apple pretends to enable with a password.

The power of Apples marketing is astonishing.

However, I also spent a lot of time painstakingly copying BASIC games, line by line from magazines, then figuring out how to expand upon them for additional features. Gaming was just the gateway drug.