With today’s hardware I might have a different take - the 18 has more than enough hardware to be a laptop so maybe I’d use it for a docking mode. But my gut is I’d probably still want a laptop even then.
To me the upshot is : billions of development, software and hardware, have gone into the platforms - it’s hard to quickly make them significantly better.
iOS has come a long way since those days so a lot of the most common use cases of the past are no longer necessary. But the principle is the same - the hardware is a general-purpose computer but the software is locked down unnecessarily in many ways. Jailbreaking lets you do things that are outside of Apple's box.
Watusi was great, it let you disable the blue checkmark on Whatsapp. (Since been added as a setting)
I also used a tweak that let me auto-block certain phone prefixes that spammers used. Quite useful.
Was also useful that it allowed you to install multiple copies of an app (such as whatsapp), though no longer a need for that either.
The downside to jailbreaking was often the instability but that was also back when the phones were way less powerful. Today, armed with LLMs, I would love to have root on my iPhone again. I'd love to rip out Siri and replace it with Claude Code or something like that.
Who is saying this part?
Asking for an open device does not mean supporting malicious hacking of others. This is the single biggest false equivalence used by Apple and the rest of the industry to keep a closed ecosystem and restrict users' control over stuff they paid for. And people continue perpetuating it for some reason.
We're on the same side here. I daily a Pixel with LineageOS and root.
If I run software the OEM didn't authorize on a phone that I own and know the password for, that might be described as a "hack". Unless you're one of the horrible people trying to push OS-level DRM on everything, my doing that is a positive or neutral thing.
If a third party gets software that I didn't authorize to run on a phone that I own by tricking me into opening a malicious PDF, that's also a "hack". Almost everyone considers that a bad thing.
One does not imply the other.
In the abstract I’m a strong supporter of the idea that you should be able to use and modify a device you own as you see fit…but in the real world “ownership” is a whole lot murkier than the mental model a lot of tech people have.
I used to have my home screens fully customized but that’s a lot of work creating icons for hundreds of apps. Or even dozens.
2. run linux
3. run emulators
4. run VMs
5. install steam
6. make it a media server
etc
I’ve seen and used terminal applications from the App Store that seem to run a Linux VM locally, which would check off items 2 and 4.
It seemed like a silly party trick with no practical purpose, and required the terminal to reset things back to normal so the phone was useful again. Why does anyone want this? Surely there are better uses than what was demoed?
I used to jailbreak during the first few years of iPhone. I remember being able to drag out from the bottom right corner of the screen to have a launcher, similar to the Dock, but with more stuff. But over time, the iOS got more features and the argument for jailbreaking became less compelling. This is especially true now that so much sensitive information is in our phones… so I trust all this stuff that effectively has root?
The evidence of hack is the feature.