You can semi not buy into the apple ecosystem at the moment. Purchase a 2nd hand iphone and then run this Docker based OSX system:

https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX

It's fine for personal projects using something like usbfluxd to talk to your iphone from the docker container. I wouldn't rely on it to do commercial work.

The cheapest second hand iPhones that run the current version of iOS (but are right at the tail of any support) are on the high side of the price range of what I’ve ever spent on a new, primary phone that I expect to last me at least several years. (And although it’s not as common as the alternative, I’m hardly alone in not spending much on phones; now laptops, on the other hand—.) I don’t want to spend more on a device that I might use once every few months.

You can buy a used SE (2020) for only about $150 and that'll probably be supported for another 4 years.

I've spent more than that from shopping at Costco on an empty stomach (rookie mistake).

For Canada, it looks to be hard to acquire a used one for less than $250-280 CAD. So about $200-$220 USD.

Still a solid choice. I find it hard to imagine there's any android phone that can beat this phone for the same price (used or not!), OS support, camera quality, speaker quality, CPU speed & task switching speed, overall responsiveness, etc.

Ability to install a free software distribution, side-load software, run a plethora of Linux apps through Termux, fix the screen if you happen to break it without the thing complaining about "non-genuine parts", build, run and distribute software for the device without needing to pay a third party for the privilege of doing so, hook the thing up to a keyboard and display to use it for real work, install a full firewall blocking outgoing as well as incoming traffic...

Oh wait, those are all things you can not do with those iOS devices. Since these happen to be things I do it seems that iPhone won't be myPhone. Also, why don't these friggin' iOS devices support Ogg/Vorbis? I just added a transcoding option to Spodcast [1] to allow those poor souls using such devices to follow Spotify-hosted podcasts through RSS. None of my devices had any problems with Ogg/Vorbis but it turns out iOS simply does not support it. VLC on iOS does as do some other apps but those are not podcast players. Bad Apple.

[1] https://github.com/Yetangitu/Spodcast

I would change (back) to android in a heartbeat if the hardware was actually on-pair and I knew that I don’t have to basically throw away my phone in a few years.

I almost went with the new pixels as that is one of the few android phones actually having a non-locked bootloader (to not have to deal with Google’s privacy violations on my probably most used device), but the many bugs and hardware issues I heard about (plus the terrible support!), as well as not having it sold in my country made me stay with apple, even though GrapheneOS is a spectacular project I wanted to use.

So don’t make it seem like a trivial choice - the fact is, we have basically only 2 options and both suck for different reasons. (Unfortunately, the third one of linux phones are not truly usable as of now)

I'm still using the first Android device I bought in 2010, an Ainol Novo 8 Advanced tablet. I bought it back then for my wife to use while preparing for her specialist exam because of the high-res screen which made it a good fit for reading PDFs. It still works fine for that purpose, it still plays movies just fine. Someone is still releasing "new" software releases for the thing (where "new" means "new rehashed Android 'Gingerbread', but still). After that I bought a Motorola Defy phone which is still in use as well. Then my whole family jumped on that train when they got similar phones, all of which are in use in some way or another. Even my daughter's phone which she left in her pockets when she put her clothes in the washing machine and was washed a full cycle still works - I had to replace the ear piece (cost: $0.50 so I bought 10) but for the rest it kept up. Since the Defy (released in 2010) never went beyond Android 'KitKat' (4.4) I had to get a newer device in 2019 when the Swedish electronic ID provider "BankID" ceased support for that release. Had they not I would still be using a Defy as "daily" phone since the things keep up remarkably well. Now I'm using a Xiaomi Redmi Note 5, again running a custom ('Google-free') distribution like I've always done. I do not know for how long I'll keep on using this device but I see no reason to change as of yet.

A shorter version of this would be "the short life span of Android devices is highly exaggerated". As a bonus you get a mostly surveillance-free device, apart from the overt surveillance which comes with having a radio beacon in your pockets that is. Put the thing in flight mode and you're fine. In this respect Android devices running custom Google-free firmware (an important caveat) are the Linux PCs compared to the bolted-shut "No serviceable parts inside" Apple Mac and the increasingly invasive Windows world. Even the discussion around them is similar:

- Linux is not ready for the desktop... but I've been using it since 1993 on the desktop, from 1996 on exclusively.

- Linux does not support your hardware... while the opposite is true except for the newest hardware which can take a few weeks to months before support arrives.

- Macs just work... until they just don't work and the vendor tells you it's your fault, or the new release suddenly removes support for half of your software.

- Linux is not suitable for gaming... tell all those people running their games on Linux because they run faster/better than on Windows

- Linux users have to spend more time tinkering to get their machines to work... until it becomes clear that the tinkerers tinker because they see it as a pastime while others just install a distribution (in a few minutes) and use the thing as a tool.

- etcetera.

Even shorter because that wasn't very short either: Android devices can be used for a long time. So can Apple devices. Take your pick based on your wants and needs, ignoring the falsities being spread by the true believers.

I’ve yet to see anyone distributing music only in Ogg Vorbis save for some backdoored Spotify thing.

Ogg is unfortunately not a mainstream codec. 10 years ago, SomewhatWellKnownMusicTrackerThatShallNotBeNamed supported Ogg Vorbis. They discontinued support due to lack of interest and seeding (this was before the French authorities raided them and caused the tracker to be shut). To me, when that tracker stopped supporting Ogg, that’s when it died. Even the music nerd pirates thought it wasn’t worth supporting.

As I understand it Vorbis is the codec and Ogg is a container.

Vorbis was popular with video game developers who didn’t want to pay for MP3 or MP4 licensing but outside of that nope.

Spotify’s probably the most (only?) prominent Vorbis user out there… but they probably hardly count since everything they distribute gets wrapped up in their proprietary DRM.

Yes. Opus "replaced" Vorbis, and has several advantages over older and common formats. Many popular streaming and voice-related apps and platforms use it as codec.

Bandcamp does this for all of their paid and free downloads. They also do FLAC.

Bandcamp doesn’t do it exclusively and I wonder if they’ll keep supporting it.

I don't see why they wouldn't, it's one of their selling points and they offer about a half dozen different codecs and containers.

Hope so.

Anyone who does will have Apple users complaining in no time.

Here in Japan, brand new iPhone SE (2020) is sold at $200 without contract. It seems that careers have too much stocks or quota so they need to sell them. I expect they are going to be exported.

Where do you see them being sold for that cheap? Cellcos?

Every electric shop like Yodobashi, and some cell career shop. Tend to be sold in weekend/holidays.

Technically it should be sold for everyone in $190 (22,000JPY), but some shops don't want to sell without contract. Govt make a regulation that limits discount for new contract to 22,000 JPY and careers must sell phones without contract. So shops should set non-contract price to 22,000, to sell for 0JPY for new sign up.

IOSYS has really cheap secondhand simfree iphones

Yes it's also easy way to get cheap new open box one.

The used ones there are usually good as new, Japanese have dislike for used things, so they don't really put out the ones that are really damaged or have lots of scratches.

Please tell me where! I'm seeing 250 on backmarket.com.

If you don't daily drive an iPhone and you don't want to buy into Apples ecosystem, why do you want to develop for their ecosystem (which of course requires $100 a year to do so)? Genuinely curious cause I see a lot of people with this sentiment, is it for work related purposes or something? Or testing of web work potentially?

I have some sideproject apps that I built with Flutter that I use on my Android phone, and I would make them available on iOS if I didn't have to pay any money to do so.

You still need to pay the $100/yr to get the app out to anyone else's iPhone using TestFlight or an enterprise app store. You can build and test on your own iPhone (or an emulator) for free but that's the limit.

But that's exactly the type of thing why iOS apps tend to be of higher quality than Android apps. The whole "I do the bare minimum to support your platform" thing isn't going well with iOS users.

So the question is why would I as a consumer want to buy a least common denominator app using a cross platform framework that wasn’t actually tested on real hardware?

You can always uninstall it if it's crap right? It would be available to you as a choice, and now it's simply not available.

If the App Store becomes full of “checkbox ports” it’s going to be even more difficult to navigate than it already is.

Part of that is on Apple for not investing more in discovery, but copious numbers of low effort ports isn’t a good thing to have anyway. In the game world, bad ports of console games to PC and bad ports of games from any other platform to the Switch are one of the most consistent gripes — quite often the sentiment surrounding them is that they’d be better off not existing.

The app store has been full of "checkbox ports" since about 6 months after it launched

You're showing your cards as an android person ;-)

I agree with you, but nearly everyone on apple products will not. I get a (too me very perplexing) very similar respose when I ask things like, "why would it hurt people who want an Apple curated app store experience to allow a buried setting in the settings menu that allows sideloading for the few people who want that?"

For myself, it’s mostly web stuff with Safari and Safari on iOS that I’d really like to be able to test from time to time.

There's a ton of companies out there who have real iPhones, iPads etc you can rent by the minute through a web browser to test your code or web sites.

i.e.

https://www.browserstack.com/test-on-iphone

I'm just trying to find the one I use to test my emoji stuff, since Safari is the only one that displays emoji domains correctly.

Browser stack did not had the betas or the just released Safari versions, we had to depend on someone in our team risking upgrading to latest OSX to be able to debug with just released Safari that broke WebGL on desktop too. We do not target mobile users, we are fixing any bugs reported for Safari that are our code , but we only daily test with Firefox and Chrome because the developers and testers are using Windows or Linux(the team is in Europe)

Then macOS + Xcode + simulator would probably be the most cost-effective solution.

*(Small glance at QEMU)*

Yeah, because I can’t use macOS without violating its EULA or forking out even more hundreds of dollars for a Mac Mini. :-(

I am struggling to understand where you are coming from. Can you elaborate?

The cheapest second-hand iPhone that runs the latest iOS 15.0+ is an iPhone SE 1st gen (2016). Current prices on eBay indicate a price of $70.

There is not a single Android that has been supported for this long of a time.

You can run iOS 15 on an iPhone SE (2016). They're very cheap to pick up. Around $70.

Ahh my mistake, you're right.

[1] https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/supported-models-iphe...

Yep, I'm still using mine as my daily driver.

That’s my “low-end” test device.

I run iOS 14 on it.

Cost me about $100.

Second-hand iphones are expensive in asia. For example, that second-hand iphone SE 2020 you mentioned cost ~$350 here. That's more expensive than some locally-produced mid-range android phones.

At that point it would be cheaper to order one from overseas and pay shipping, I'd think?

Wow, I'm very curious as to why! Is it because they're imported, or because the asia-side emphasis is on export?

This also makes me wonder what the price dropoff across models is compared to the worldwide average. Is every model "oh wow" more expensive, or is there a gradient upward trend that tapers off the closer you get toward the iPhone 13 end?

Not sure why, but iphones simply has higher resale value compared to android phones with the same MSRP here. It's already that way from long ago even before the government ban import of used phones via IMEI whitelisting (Indonesia). If I had to guess, maybe because they're seen as luxury items, not just a simple smartphone.

its just trust in the brand. A 3 year old iphone has a high probability of still being a decent phone, fast enough, receiving updates, running latest apps... Also, most of all, you can expect another 2 years out of it if you're not too critical.

A random Android phone? Could be slow after 2 years, could be without software updates, could be filled with bloatware of a network provider that isn't actually yours. Could be you buy it and you'll need a different phone 6 months later. And even within the same model, there are huge differences. E.g. Samsung galaxy phones can have different processors inside, and varying amounts of bloatware installed.

iPhones are just a safer choice. Therefore higher worth

Import Taxed?

When I did iOS dev I could get by okay with an ipod touch, since I did not need cell or GPS testing. These are $200 new, $150 refurbed for the prev edition. The other route to go is a device farm service, IIRC AWS offers this nowadays.

That’s an iPhone 6S; I’ve seen them go for $100, or less with stuff like “battery runs out in 3 mins so must be connected to charger” which should be sufficient if you just develop.

Did you include low storage (e.g. 16GB) iPhone 6S and SE 2016 in your search?

I’m mostly just curious whether your primary phones generally cost less than those. It would be hard to find much for cheaper than those where I am.

Unrelated, but I find it interesting that storage size seems to affect second hand value so strongly. I mean that it looks like doubling would cost more than a few generations newer.

i bought an iphone 6s for this purpose for 50€. upon mentioning this to somebody i was also given a second one with a crap battery for free

An iPhone SE 1st Generation can be had for around $70.

What phones are you buying?

OK, I was looking at iPhone 6S, a glance at eBay Australia suggests they’re starting somewhere around AUD150. iPhone SE 1st generation looks to be starting at more like AUD120.

I spent around AUD150 on each of my first two phones. Last year I splurged on a PinePhone (around AUD300 including dock and shipping) which I hope will last me for the next decade.

> Last year I splurged on a PinePhone (around AUD300 including dock and shipping) which I hope will last me for the next decade.

I’m admittedly a pessimist but I’d personally be quite shocked if that happened. I simply lack faith that a small company can make a phone form factor device that can last / survive with that kind of lifetime.

Building devices of this complexity that can actually last seems quite hard.

Happy to be proven wrong!

The project makes it not super-obvious, but it’s just KVM underneath. Also it’s likely against the EULA to run on non-Apple hardware.

If the software can’t tell the difference, does it matter? And if the EULA is unenforceable in your jurisdiction, does it matter?

To the first: yes, because that doesn’t suddenly make it legal, just less likely to be found out.

To the second: I mean, if the EULA doesn’t matter then it doesn’t matter.

buying an iphone means it's still in the apple ecosystem. the problem is not the money but the hassle of having to buy it

So you don’t want to be in the Apple ecosystem. But you want to develop for an Apple product? How will you support the product when users encounter bugs?

I have had to support clients iOS apps and absolutely want nothing to do with the Apple eco system. We created dev accounts and bought a physical iPhone for the devs which we shared amongst everyon. An emulator would have been perfect in fact.

Meanwhile, Android Studio is free and open source:

https://developer.android.com/studio

it's a pain to build so everyone uses google's prebuilt binaries - which are non-free

I'm really not trying to be rude, but if you're a serious developer, 'security person' or otherwise, the cost of entry for apple is not a problem.

I know I'll get abused probably for saying it, but I mean come on. An apple device is what, one days worth of consultancy time? For a security researcher maybe an hour? It's the cost of business.

If you're priced out of getting into that particular game (I was too, once) then do something adjacent and switch once you're earning 10k a year and can afford an apple device, if you really want to work on apple devices..

I don't spend €500 on a locked-down device that I can't do anything with.

But if there's a nice open source emulator for €50 (or in this case, free?!) where I control literally everything, that opens up a world of possibilities.

Also, don't overlook students, countries other than the richest thirty or so, and income discrepancies within those countries in general (especially in the USA where the discrepancy (Gini index from the World Bank) is between that of Kenya and Bolivia). One might want to learn and not yet have that well-paying job, or do it as a side project for fun.

> what, one days worth of consultancy time?

Let's go for the iPhone 11 from OP, checking... that's €519 from the cheapest store in NL (huh that 500 euros above was a good guess). That's 2½–3½ weeks of work for this security consultant. (That's a long time to go without food and rent! :P) If you can pay me that many times better that I could afford this after one day of working, without having to relocate to some faraway country, then contact info is in my profile!

---

I do agree with your point in general I suppose. Yes, in many countries serious iOS developers and security firms that have more than one customer request for an iOS app review per year will easily be able to afford the necessary devices, and if needed wait long enough for a jailbreak to exist. But if I want to make an app for fun, and to even get started I need to invest hundreds of euros? In a platform I'll never use? Well, that's why the few small apps that I built are all Android-only.

The iPhone SE (2016) still runs the latest iOS (and I know people who happily use it), and I can get it on American eBay for about $100.

> I'm really not trying to be rude, but if you're a serious developer, 'security person' or otherwise, the cost of entry for apple is not a problem.

If the cost is so meaningless to you, you’re always invited to donate to the Patreon/ko-fi/GitHub Sponsors links of the projects that can’t afford an iPhone :)

I'm not an apple fanboy. I do have a M1, but I once spent 4 months porting KDE to solaris 10 x86 to run on a hp probook (and even got paid to do it)... I routinely try to exit the apple ecosystem but it always costs me pain and time, which hasn't been worth it for a number of years now. looks at drawer of ubuntu dell XPS's, ThinkPads running openbsd, etc etc.

I've fucking TRIED... :(

It's been linux and bsd machines as clients for work for almost 20 years.. And yet I keep having to go back to OSX for reliability.

At some point you have to just accept certain things are the cost of business..

Reliability? I run a Ubuntu on a Dell XPS 13, and Ubuntu on a custom i9 desktop with no reliability issues at all. In fact I spend less time fixing things than I used to with my Macs (which I used exclusively for 13 years). What reliability issues are you talking about?

Then it's not for you. No shame in admitting that. For other people, though, Macbooks simply also don't make sense. Wanna run that 32-bit plugin you use in Photoshop? You're out of luck. How about some advanced Docker development? Hope you don't plan on doing it locally. Hunted by your government for whistleblowing? Probably shouldn't use a laptop that can automate the process of ratting you out.

If you're a webdev or hipster programmer chasing the most lucrative Web3 gigs, sure, buying a Macbook is probably the kind of status symbol your peers will respect you for. At the end of the day though, they're all just tools with different uses. If you can use an ARM laptop for day-to-day work, then don't let anyone stop you from doing it.

What people dislike is your "every serious developer owns a Macbook" claim. It's the sort of thing you hear from West-coast Google engineers who look around their office of L3 Javascript employees for a sample size before posting a comment. It honestly doesn't reflect the myriad of programmers you'll encounter in the world; some of the most productive 10x developers and "security people" I've met are using systems that even I would consider asinine, like NixOS, QUBES, Whonix or OpenBSD. I don't knock them, though. We judge hackers based on their skill, not their salary range, clout, and least of all by the laptop they have in their backpack.

> If you're a webdev or hipster programmer chasing the most lucrative Web3 gigs, sure, buying a Macbook is probably the kind of status symbol your peers will respect you for. At the end of the day though, they're all just tools with different uses. If you can use an ARM laptop for day-to-day work, then don't let anyone stop you from doing it.

That’s a bit reductive. Macs are solid native mobile dev machines as well, with a good number of even Android-only devs using them. Lots of dev houses in the US use them for backend work (including Docker, despite the performance penalty), and the FreeBSD devs have been known to use them too.

I'm not here to take the piss out of your laptop of choice, but I'm also not here to write an exhaustive list of the uses for your Mac. The point that I'm working towards is that it's always a game of give and take. There's some people who a Macbook would be the perfect device for, who I will readily admit cannot use Linux or alt-systems to be as productive as they are now. Conversely though, there are a number of things that MacOS is laughably bad at, likewise there are a number of people who quite literally cannot use it as a daily driver.

The whole "this machine is more stable" and "my anecdotal opinion is x/y/z" nonsense is a non-starter for productive conversation comparing the systems. The upthread comment was warranted to call them out on Apple fanboyism; their statement was nonsense and exclusively backed by their personal experience. I've talked to enough "serious developers" to know that there are no perfect operating systems, and pretending like any one of them is king is just hubris incarnate.

>I'm not here to take the piss out of your laptop of choice,

>buying a Macbook is probably the kind of status symbol your peers will respect you for.

Make up your mind.

How are the two mutually exclusive?

You're saying you're not taking the piss out of the choice, and then also saying only [implied lesser] web and web3 developers buy them as status symbols for the sake of peer respect, which sounds a lot like taking the piss out of a choice.

I think it could reasonably be called a development platform, with all the software included in its cost.

10k a year? Where would one libe earning 10k a year? A tent in the woods?

There are countries were earning 12k USD a year puts you in the top 1%. Just to give you some context.

I live in one of these countries. There are lots of people who earn a lot less than 12k/yr but buy brand new iPhones. Why? Because their resale value is awesome. They lose very little value over the years, because a lot of people want to own one, so even used ones retain value. Even if it's something old like an iphone 6 or something like that.

If you buy an android phone, chances are you're going to sell it for a lot less than you got it for unless you're talking about a flagship that's not too old.

It's also a status symbol, and as such they're bought not because of their intrinsic value.

If I was earning 10k a year, I wouldn't want to buy an apple device new. A good return too would be incredibly expensive.

Thailand it seemed like the going rate for a dev in Bangkok was about $17k USD salary

Is it "buy into" if you use stuff like Browserstack?

I use their live devices (camera/audio feed specifically) although not sure how far you can go eg. app-level install. Looks like you can and use stuff like Appium.

At $49/month, it’s a fairly significant expense. Good if you’re using it for other stuff already, but not exactly cheap otherwise. (There’s also $39/month annually, but $468 is well past the cost of second-hand hardware.)

Yeah I was thinking about that, for example if you had one device but you wanted to back test versions of software is it easy to do that?

What I mean is like iOS/Safari 14 over 15

You can also buy into Corellium for this - I suppose the same idea but a closed "cloud" virtualization provider.

That sounded amazing until I clicked to the pricing and then to the FAQ about this "cores" concept

> newer devices, such as the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, require six cores

I'm not keeping up to date with apple phone numbers, but since OP speaks of 11 I take it that 8 must be at least a few years old. So "newer devices" here just means "any reasonable device".

6 cores is $295 a month on the cheapest plan. If you need it more than once every few years, it's cheaper to get a real phone used.

Thanks for the tip nevertheless! Can be useful in a pinch for sure :)

Corellium is more for low-level library and kernel debugging and situations where you need control over the boot process, the same kind of thing you'd use qemu for vs. the iOS Simulator in Docker-OSX or AWS Mac instances or whatever. For just running UI tests, AWS Mac instances or Appium/Browserstack/whatever is going to be way cheaper and more practical.

For low level debugging situations using real hardware is impractical or impossible as you need stolen debug probes (or to be part of the super exclusive Apple research program) and/or custom hardware.

Corellium is quite helpful even as an app developer when debugging things going on outside of your process.

Corellium can also bill you hourly at (IMO) much more affordable rates.

Wouldn't you need an Apple ID at some point?

And doesn't it phone home and report you?

Good questions. I guess for eventual publishing, the app repository fees need to be paid indeed. That only applies to development and not security testing though.

There are some cases like free-software where you wouldn't need the app store.

What's the point of making iOS software then? Just compile it for whatever platform one would run the emulator on. If I understand your comment correctly.

Two factor is a challenge with development (for IAP sandbox) accounts. I have to be careful to constantly not turn on two factor for test accounts. The iPhone will keep prompting me to opt-in, but I don't have several spare phone numbers or '2nd Apple' trusted devices for 2FA.

Apple's 2FA details: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/manage-factor-authent...

While I support 2FA usage, I wish there was a way to say 'I understand the risks and do not want 2FA on this account'.

2FA requires a phone number!?

Honestly why bother? For app dev Macs are basically free. Takes no time to break-even. Can even incorporate and expense-it.