Oddbean

In his defense, the device he's advocating for isn't produced by an advertising company with documented deep state connections, but rather, a company that has actually stood up in court against demands that it install backdoors to circumvent its user privacy measures. Can't say I'm fond of either option, at least, with the stock OS, but either can work in a limited scope provided you're aware of the limitations.

I'd tend to agree, particularly after the PETN terrorist attacks carried out by the Zionist forces. But there are shades of grey; while Apple will almost certainly get out of the way for a deep state request, even if they'll push back on normal law enforcement, their business model doesn't rely on collecting, packaging, and using your personal data in order to craft a profile of you in order to target you with advertising. The difference in incentives results in a somewhat different result when you get to actually using the software. Even Windows historically hasn't felt quite as intrusive as Android/ChromeOS in that regard, though things do feel like they've been changing over the last decade or so there. If I had to pick hardware that was least likely to be compromised, and software to install on it, I'd honestly probably be looking at Pine64.org and one of the few Linux distros that is non-systemd and as barebones as possible, or possibly a BSD. At the end of the day its all about what trade offs you're willing to make, and what you're doing with the device. And even if you were to get something that would be as close to perfect as possible, simply not showing up on the radar of the more surveilled ecosystem is a flag in and of itself that makes you more interesting to target. I guess all of this just to illustrate that yes, I'm a paranoid crypto anarchist.

Can’t recommend Blink enough. It supports mosh which allows the iPad to restore ssh connections after having been backgrounded. Merry that with tmux and you can actually do some real dev work even if you didn’t plan to. https://blink.sh/

He's likely not being stupid; he just has more computers than you, so they don't ALL need to be general purpose. When all you want is an appliance, Apple's not so bad at providing it. Just never expect it to replace a full functioning system that actually welcomes you to use the hardware you own. The number one malware threat Apple protects against is called "User input."

I mostly feel that way, but to play devil's advocate, is the fact that your toaster doesn't ask you to configure voltage, resistance, and manually configure an adapter to the wall a bug or a feature? Sometimes people just want an appliance to be an appliance, and not have as much of a surface of things that can go wrong, or simply be misconfigured. It boggles my mind that these people exist to a degree that even their primary computer follows these principles, but it's not particularly surprising that for a device that they on use for a specific task, they'd rather it just not be any more complicated than it needs to be. Where Apple pisses me off though is somewhat the same place Roku TV's piss me off, in that they step in the way even of things I likely want to do in the limited scope of the appliance they've sold me. It's why I'll take an Amazon Firestick or a Google Chromecast over them any day of the week. But, I won't begrudge the fact that people like my wife exist, who really would rather not navigate through menus to get to what they want, even if it means they can't go streaming anything from fmovies and actually have to PAY for what they watch, AND see the ads that are packaged with it. I will just sit around and worry for their sanity.

(In Roku's defense, they do at least support screen casting, from most any device aside from Google Pixel products, which is a Google thing, not a them thing. I'd still prefer being able to install apk's or at LEAST having a web browser built into it though).

Yeah :) it is a great laptop replacement! I use mine all the time for excel. Very helpful tool for double checking my cell formulas fast too, especially in an exam setting, when I’m allowed to have one other device - I tend to second-guess myself. https://image.nostr.build/4663e990be154a94487379674c59af41776e563db85ae98c239c39921fefb9c4.jpg

Lenovo duet is just way better and cheaper and fits the bill of “laptop replacement” a lot more than an iPad does. For one thing : you have access to the file system. For another, the keyboard feels like an actual laptop.

So, Grandma's appliance to replace her computer. Got it. In fairness, throw a decent VNC client on there, hook up a keyboard and mouse, stop being annoyed by a little latency, and it may be a reasonable enough, though overpriced, thin client, allowing for you to actually get some work done, provided you've got a remote system or systems to be doing the real work on. Which I guess is what you just said, except that a web app is to remote access what driving a bumper car is to driving cars.

I think the disconnect some have here, Jack, is that if you have 8 computers, having one of them be an iPad that smoothly does its limited set of things with good battery life and zero time needed to be spent on configuration to do it isn't so bad. If you have one, or two systems, you're not going to have one of them be something that actively tries to prevent you from doing half of the things you have in mind at every turn, and treats like like a foreign threat to your own hardware to be protected against.