Why does this have to be so hard? Just open your shit up, Apple. The majority of people will still use your walled garden. The rest of us will buy your hardware if you release drivers, etc.
As long as they don't maliciously comply, that would start a renaissance period, in my opinion. Suddenly, they'd be the good guys, instead of the worst offenders.
Everyone who wants to use the pure apple system can, everyone who wants to tinker can. Perfect world.
It is not perfect in the sense once the fence is off those who just want to be in walled garden and pay big money for it is not.
There is no perfect world for all. There could be a perfect world for each one. That is a difference. And yours may not be mine.
Just ask someone to compete with apple and get to the same level. Not killing one perfect world for many (most likely not really reader here it seemed) without creating a better tomorrow.
If you just think of tinker, before you know it china will take over say … or Russia … and we will have cheap but et-phone-home before you have a choice. Btw apple is dead. Cry your beloved apple then? No.
Ps. Just in case of doubt I hack my iphone and iPads if I can to do other things. It is my old device that is ignored … but not for all.
We already have this on Macbooks/Macs. macOS has SIP (System Integrity Protection) for example which you (Developers) can turn off to get full access. The average person does not even know this setting exists.
So the solution is quite simple.
I'm afraid Apple will frustrate the process though; Like, if you turn off "SIP" on iOS, they will disable Apple Pay, everything related to DRM videos (including Netflix, etc), DRM music (including Spotify, etc.), all App Store purchases, and so on.
Even though android is more open, it's not exactly in much better shape. It's nearly impossible to do anything useful with mainline Linux on most Android devices because the SoC vendors don't upstream anything since their entire financial model is sell new chip every 6 months.
The problem is that they're both way behind the state of the art.
If the day to day experience of the device is still bad I'm not going to be carrying one on me. It gets relegated to yet another thing I can tinker with on the weekend, just like my pinebook pro.
It depends on the perspective. If you're concerned about security fixes and people being able to submit patches for the broken shit drivers manufacturers provide, then we still need the source and relevant schematics.
Of course if all you care about is "it boots" then having a binary blob lying around and doing god knows what with your entire computing is a "viable" option.
Not so long ago hardware vendors sold hardware and provided all schematics along... because that's what hardware manufacturers are for?! Nowadays they're more like a service provider trying to lock you into weird things and it's certainly not for the benefit of us users and maintainers. I think the issue was explained at length in this blog post called "Ok lenovo we need to talk":
I don't know anything about these. But would opening up iPhone make it easier for authoritarian governments like China to install backdoors on your iPhone?
From a theoretical point of view, relying on security through obscurity is a bad thing. From a practical point of view, having obscured everything did not prevent people from finding many security vulnerabilities over the years.
Now, Apple devices are all manufactured in China so the relevant security services probably have access to all the schematics they need. Oh wait they don't need any shenanigans Apple is fully cooperating with chinese government and that's why they're so present on the chinese market, woops.
Slightly off-topic from the question, but if you're looking for authoritarian governments you don't need to look so far away from home, see also CoIntelPro/Snowden/etc (assuming you're from the USA). I agree authoritarianism and social control are a scale and we could do worse than Global North countries like France or USA, but we still have a pretty bad record of human rights overall and that should not be dismissed.
