I have the most powerful smartphone_
Let’s check the weather now.
The iPhone has become an extraordinary object. Not extraordinary in the Apple-style-marketing sense of “thinner glass” or “more cinematic funky stuff”, but in the deeply boring engineer-approved sense of absurdly efficient silicon and terrifying performance (per watt that’s amazing), and the level of integration that would have been considered science fiction less than a decade ago. The irony is that, for all this power, most of the time my Orange iPhone 17 PRO is busy doing things a less than €150, 5+ years old phone could already do perfectly well: notifications, messages, maps and the occasional, weather check, to confirm, that yes, it is still raining outside.
This is not a hardware complaint, hooooo no! On the contrary, Apple Silicon is a small piece of jewelry. A fanless MacBook Air or a Microsoft Surface on a Qualcomm APU can now run local LLMs! Jeez! I could quickly iterate on ideas and do real computational work that previously required a loud, heavy desktop computer (or a cloud bill). On the other side, the iPhone Pro, carries a chip that could easily do anything we need like a computer, from Office to coding to gaming with RT (and guiding a satellite, but that’s probably bullshit), yet its primary “Pro” functionality remains firmly attached to its camera. That’s so stupid, come on! Really! Of course, it’s an excellent camera, to be fair, but still a camera. In my own case, when I actually do sports, fly, ski, or move at any speed that could damage a thin piece of aluminium and glass, the iPhone stays safely in a pocket while an Insta360, fastened with duct tape a proper fixing system to my helmet does the real work.
This is where the thought experiment begins.
Imagine for a moment, a device, that does not exist, and almost certainly will never ever: the iPhone DEV. No triple-lens camera island, or cinematic modes, nor a funcky ProRes mode (did you use it?). Possibly no camera at all, or just a symbolic one, because hey, you have to, for the decorum. What it would keep however, is the same CPU + GPU +NPU as the iPhone Pro. The same memory and the same cool performance per watt. The difference would not be in the hardware but in what you are allowed to do with it.
The iPhone DEV would greet you with a kind of warning screen, so aggressive, it would make nuclear power plants look casual. Red text with multiple confirmations a bit like when you switch a repo on GitHub from private to public, for those who see what I mean (hello AWS API keys are you here?). Legal language implying that *with the voice of Darth Vador* the cosmos itself may collapse if you proceed, mouhahahahaha *end of the voice of Darth Vador, unless you want it*. Then, once validated, it would grant something heretical > the ability to treat the iPhone like a tiny computer (Yeah, like Samsung!!!). A terminal with Local execution, a Python script ready to be started, and why not local ML waiting to be experimented with. Explicitly unsupported, completely optional, and very clearly not meant for everyone. A device for people who know what they are doing and accept responsibility for it. A device that will probably never sell that much.
This is, of course, a fully utopian idea. Not slightly utopian. Deeply, recursively, multi-dimensionally (with all the n-dimension you want) utopian. Because nothing about this is blocked by technology, security is not the real issue; Apple already sandboxes everything, and it does that so well. The core constraint is philosophical and economic. The iPhone is the crown jewel of Apple’s ecosystem, the Queen on the chessboard. Open it too much and the App Store toll booth starts to look less inevitable. Once people can compute freely, even a tiny little bit, the question “why do I need permission?” becomes very very clear.
Apple already solved this tension on the Mac. MacOS offers freedom, with warnings and gentle but persistent suggestions to consider using the App Store instead. The reason? It works because the Mac is not at the center of the Apple’s revenue universe. The iPhone is. That’s also why iPadOS cautiously inches toward MacOS while iOS remains locked with religious devotion. This is not an accident or a failure, nor a “yeah, it will be a bad UX, the screen is too small, blablabla, blablabli.” (probably a bit true), it is mainly an economic optimization.
And yet, the mismatch grows. We are entering an age during which local AI, and private on-device inference actually make sense. The hardware is ready and more than ready. What lags is not software capability, but permission. The one-page keynote slides that list faster chips and prettier effects feel increasingly like the old console wars, when “more bits” was the headline long after it stopped meaning anything. Today the interesting question is not how powerful the device is, but how much possibility it gives to its user.
The iPhone DEV will never exist, and it’s probably better like that. I believe strongly in that. It would sell poorly, confuse the narrative, and threaten a business model that works extraordinarily well. But imagining it is useful. It exposes the real bottleneck in modern mobile computing, and it has nothing to do with transistors, batteries, or thermals. It is about trust, control, and what we believe users should be allowed to do with the machines they carry in their pockets.
Until then, I will continue to carry an orange supercomputer disguised as a camera, use a cheap Android phone when I need an embedded computer in one of my demonstrators and run Python-based experiments on my PC (MacOS/Windows/Linux). The future of portable computing is already here, it is just carefully locked behind very good marketing.
