> Nothing is stopping people learning about computers.
Hell, it's easier and cheaper than ever. You can run Linux in your browser on an iPad, just by visiting a URL. Or shell into various free-tier VMs, for... free. Maybe a one-time cost for an SSH/Mosh client if you're on iOS I suppose. Swift Playgrounds and a hundred other learn-to-code apps and sites exist. And that's if you're "stuck" with a locked-down device running iOS—you can pick up cheap but pretty damn powerful second-hand x86 computers with money earned from a shift or two at McDonalds and do whatever you want with them. Practically all libraries have lots of computers now (and see again that you can run Linux in a browser, or remote into VMs from the browser, if you're concerned about how locked-down a library computer might be). I routinely end up with free or nearly-free surprisingly good computers (even Apple ones!) without even trying.
Resources, including entire books, available for free and on demand—and almost any information relating to computers is free if you're willing to sail the high seas and hoist the Jolly Roger, which is exactly what learners did back in the "good old days", too (but we pirated software, not books, mainly because the books were rarely available in digital form and we had worse ways to read them than we do now, even if they had been available).
But hey - I'm free to send multicast packets from that iphone on a network I own, right? Because part of the learning is the doing things with the skills you learn later.
I'm free to install software I write on that iphone, right?
I'm free to sell the software I write using those skills to those other people, without risk of Apple arbitrarily shutting me out, right?
Or much more malicious, moving me down below their own shitty version, right?
All of those things - the things someone who goes to the trouble to learn about computers might want to do - I'm free to do those?
My point is that broadly speaking, learning computing is something like 100x more accessible than it was in the "good old days", and that mostly holds even on an i-device.
I couldn't (practically) develop for my NES, either. But it'd have been rad if I could at least write software on it that'd run somewhere else. Or in a sandboxed environment on the NES, also allowing me to share it, even if the capabilities were a slightly nerfed. Way the hell better than nothing. ("Well yeah but you could have bought a Commodore 64"—OK, cool, sooo.... why are we worried about iOS devices when the same 'so get a different device' counter applies there, and also you actually can learn a great deal of computing on them?)
Meanwhile ordinary computers are practically free. Like you can probably go beg around and make a couple Reddit or Craigslist or Facebook posts (use the library computer I guess if somehow you live in the developed world and don't own or have access to any other Web-capable device?) and land one (maybe not a great one, but hundreds of times more powerful than what many of us learned on) for $0 in a matter of weeks, at most. Or scrape together $100 or so and go to Goodwill. Not $0, but it's very cheap. Your library probably even has free computer classes. So might your community college. Learning how to "really" use and program a computer is vastly more accessible now than it's ever been, and i-devices aren't harming that a bit.
They might not be harming the learning (I'd argue they are) - But they are unquestionably harming the practice.
You keep harping back to some bullshit hand-me-down machines, as though that's what my customers will want to carry in their pocket. As though that's the ideal machine to implement software on - and I'd argue you're just soundly avoiding the real discussion by mentioning them (perhaps intentionally, given your fascination).
Trust me, I fucking have those machines, they're great for some things (they run my home network, they run my home cluster) - but they're not the things that people walk around with. They're not the computer in everyone's pocket. They're not the laptop my potential user-base is working on at work.
Doesn't it strike you as somewhat sad and pathetic that you're arguing that folks who want to do general purpose computing should be relegated to cast off devices, or be subject to the whims and mercy of the richest company in the world? Begging for the scraps after Apple shoves their own products right to the top, cuts off and strangles any real competition, charges racket money to allow users to even install your damn software, prevents you from using the devices they claim you own?
Pathetic. Locked down proprietary systems that trap folks in what they believe is a benevolent dictatorship. At some point you'll look around and realize you're being robbed blind. You claim to value learning computer skills, without realizing the learning has NO value without the ability to use those skills. And if you can only use those skills when Apple lets you... who's really in control?
Hell, it's easier and cheaper than ever. You can run Linux in your browser on an iPad, just by visiting a URL. Or shell into various free-tier VMs, for... free. Maybe a one-time cost for an SSH/Mosh client if you're on iOS I suppose. Swift Playgrounds and a hundred other learn-to-code apps and sites exist. And that's if you're "stuck" with a locked-down device running iOS—you can pick up cheap but pretty damn powerful second-hand x86 computers with money earned from a shift or two at McDonalds and do whatever you want with them. Practically all libraries have lots of computers now (and see again that you can run Linux in a browser, or remote into VMs from the browser, if you're concerned about how locked-down a library computer might be). I routinely end up with free or nearly-free surprisingly good computers (even Apple ones!) without even trying.
Resources, including entire books, available for free and on demand—and almost any information relating to computers is free if you're willing to sail the high seas and hoist the Jolly Roger, which is exactly what learners did back in the "good old days", too (but we pirated software, not books, mainly because the books were rarely available in digital form and we had worse ways to read them than we do now, even if they had been available).
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