My first computer (bought my parents) in 1986 was an enhanced Apple //e with Duo disk drives and green screen monitor and a dot matrix printer. It was about $3K in all in 1986 dollars.

My second computer i got for a graduation gift was a Mac LCII with a 512x384 12 inch monitor a LaserWriter LS printer, an Apple //e daughter card, a 5-1/4 inch drive for the card and a copy of SoftPC. It was $4000 - in 1992.

People use to spend a lot more on computers back in the day.

Both of my computers were hackers playgrounds for me.

Your computers were tools for building... anything, and the manufacturers (especially Apple back then) actually educated, promoted and rewarded amazing things. This is a consumer device tightly coupled to the most restrictive ecosystem we've ever seen. Doesn't seem like a hackers' playground.

I paid $10 a month to distribute my little freeware on AOL in college so normal people could access it. I also submitted it to info-Mac archive via ftp.

I would have gladly paid $99 a year for the bragging rights of putting my app on the iOS App Store so anyone could get it.

I paid for a 65C02 compiler back in mid 80s using my allowance and paid for a Mac C compiler in the early 90s.

My parents were solidly middle class - a factory worker and a teacher.

The point isn't paying to publish apps, the point is that you can't hack into it if this is anything like iOS.

If this runs a version of iOS, we can't access the code that is running in it, we can't open a terminal, we can't use our programing language of choice. We can't use the actual device for building anything hacker related by itself.

We can make apps for it using an actual PC made for building, but only if it runs MacOS, ans using their proprietary language. The actual device is far from a hackers dream or plaything if its as locked up as the iPhone. But very cool device though, hopefully it brings VR into Mainstram outside of gaming

You can definitely hack iOS all you want to, use private APIs, do all sorts of things that are against the App Store rules, run it on your own device and publish the code to GitHub to let other hackers compile it and run it from source.

iPhone enthusiasts Stephen Hackett (his real name), hack into pre-release versions of iOS all of the time to see how it’s running from their computer.

Even that 1986 6th grade hacker that I was would never want to program on the phone. I fail to see the fascination with running a fully fledged IDE on a phone.

When I was programming on the very open Windows CE devices pre-iPhone, I avoided running on the phone as long as possible and used the emulator.

You can use any programming language you want that compiles down to ARM.

Great comment and replies. Thank you.

Do tell me how I can run my own home screen, directly access the filesystem, write my own device driver or tweak the kernel without voiding my warranty and risking bricking my phone using a jailbreak exploit, assuming one is available for my device.

This "you can build and directly deploy an app to a limited number of devices if you're on the developer program and have a mac, therefore you can 'hack iOS all you want'" meme is borderline dishonest.

> voiding my warranty and risking bricking my phone using a jailbreak exploit

Messing around with the kernel generally does run the risk of voiding warranties and bricking devices.

So?

So why are you mentioning it like it’s a unique drawback? It’s inherent to the activity!

For one thing, it isn't. I can do linux kernel dev on my desktop and laptop without voiding my warranty or risking bricking anything.

And most of the things I'd want to do with an iOS device that I'm prevented from doing wouldn't involve any kernel-level work anyway.

But more importantly that's the most pathetic justification I've ever heard. By that logic, since playing the piano is difficult we might as well sell pianos with all the keys glued together.

The truth of it is that Apple products are not designed for tinkering and they actively resist attempts to do it. To spend my time plumbing their internals to add value to a product that treats me an my kind as a sort of infection would be a pure waste. I'll do my hacking on Linux and use my iPhone for arguing with people on hackernews, it's fine.

> voiding my warranty and risking bricking

nut up. hacking has never been perfectly safe and has never had a promise of easy. if you want it enough, you can make it happen.

Piss off, I'll do my tinkering on a platform that isn't continually trying to prevent me from doing it, thank you very much. I'll use my expensive pocket bauble as the limited device it is designed to be. Just don't try and gaslight me into thinking it's in any sense a general purpose computer.

You do you. The rest of us do our tinkering however we choose based upon our own situation, as well. Some people only own the "expensive pocket bauble" (you know, economics are a thing) and they're still out there hacking on it rather than whining about the walled garden. We all know that there are other ecosystems that are more modification-friendly. We don't need to hear your over-qualified internet rant. hence the "nut up" comment. "void my warranty" sheesh. What point are you trying to make?

There are plenty of kids out there tinkering and hacking in the truest sense on iOS and macOS using one of their relative's dev accounts.

The argument is not that you'd run your IDE on the AR device (although there's people who will want to do that).

The point is that you can hack the device to run your software, or distribute your software so that it's easy for others to use it as well, but not both.

>I was would never want to program on the phone. I fail to see the fascination with running a fully fledged IDE on a phone.

Problem is, Apple isn't advertising this as a phone or "mobile device". They're advertising it as a spatial computer. And IDEs are probably my second-most-used computer applications after web browsers, so I want to be able to use them with the near-endless monitor space offered by this spatial computer.

You know, open-mindedness and being curious about new things is part of the hacker ethos. If you are dismissing something without even experiencing it, based on nothing other than preconceived notions about it, maybe you aren’t really a hacker in the true sense of the word? Just a thought.

I guess I’m also not a Scotsman…

Do you also want to run an IDE on the Apple Watch?

> most restrictive ecosystem we’ve ever seen

I get what you are trying to say, but this just isn’t true.

Not everything people build/produce is a program running on the terminal

The cost of deploying to App Store is negligible compared to the rest of the HW needed

The walled garden is much much vaster than anything we had in the 80s.

And $3.5K is less than a computer would have cost in 1981, adjusted for inflation.

The VIC-20 and TRS-80 both cost less than that, adjusted for inflation.

> 3.5k device that's locked down into some iOS like Apple walled garden doesn't sound like backers playground to me.

Some playgrounds have no fences, but also no interesting objects to play with.

Other playgrounds have boundaries far out, and comes with a huge combinatorial explosion of possibility.

This. I'd rather play with Lego than throw rocks at a tree.

In 5 years, it will be half that price and there will be half a dozen competitors priced under $1000.

Original iPhone was 599, an expensive phone at the time. Today 599 isn’t considered that expensive for a smartphone.

The price doesn’t have to come down as 3.5k is the modern day equivalent to the price of a laptop 10-20 years ago.

Price still has to go down to be mass adopted. Apple sell just ~25 million mac per year and probably most of them are just cheaper macbook air with price below $1.5. Even though their current macbooks are great and people see the value of having a laptop, it's a mature market but Apple still has only like 10% market share.

People wallet and their salary is not out of rubber - there is limit how much they can stretch their budget.

The tech will be back-engineered once the first VisionPro is out. It took Android smartphones a few years too before they were competent with Apple. Today, the best Androids are almost as good, if not better.

There will be multiple VisionPro competitors within half a decade and they’ll all compete on price and focus on mass adoption - just as it happens with phones and laptops.

It's true that it's a walled garden. But with everything the device has access to, cameras pointed at your pupils, cameras pointed at your surroundings, precise tracking of where you look (which the OS prevents apps from accessing), I'm not sure I want apps to have full permission to the hardware. The more "intimate" devices become, the less you can trust random apps. They still let you run whatever you want on your own device as a dev, which seems like a good compromise. But I'd never trust other people's apps with access to all that.

Disagree. HoloLens and oculus went with internal SDKs too complicated for most devs, and had official docs recommending Unity and unreal for development. This seemed stupid as those environments were not purpose built for this class of device (mixed reality). I think Apple has shown some serious wisdom here and am excited to explore their frameworks.