emchammer parent
For those of us who used to fix PCBs and wire breadboards, it’s nice to see the traces are still there, like knowing where your food comes from, even if any hope of an analog baseband project is long past. Lightning is one of Apple’s hits.
Yeah, let's make more things the wrong way for the nostalgic aesthetic.
I'm old enough to have done that, and to really miss the old world, but an improvement is an improvement.
None of the stuff I grew up with is "hackable" anymore. None of the design constraints of small, sleek, performant, high battery life and secure are amenable to that.
Even (production) Linux has stopped being a hacker's paradise and is tightening the rope.
And that's what the iPhone is: a production phone.
You want some cool toys? Get Arduinos, hacker laptops, RPis, Arch.
It's all still out there, but not every device needs to have its guts out.
That being said I will always miss SoftIce, being able to look stuff up in memory, being able to look stuff up in network traffic... alas, it's gone, and the truth is we're better off for it.