Comment by literalAardvark

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.