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HOWTO make an iPad that respects freedom

Danny O’Brien explains the simple step that Apple could take to make the iPad into a device that fosters unlimited innovation and freedom: ‘Imagine an iPad. It’s the same iPad, built by Jobs and Ives and the rest of Apple in absolute secrecy, beholden to no-one, built on proprietary MacOS and unicorns and last Xerox Silmaril’s gleaming. It has the same Apple App store, same SDK, same no filing system, same no multitasking, same whatever. Only buried deep in the Settings, buried under “Battery Percentage”, “Factory Reset”, there’s an option that says “Allow Third-Party Applications”. Its default is not to allow that. But you can flip it to say “yes”.’ (Of course, if Apple did that, competing iStores might come around that offered developers and their customers a better deal)

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