| It might meet some. Does it boot from external media? Can I use my own bootloader? Android or Ubuntu are both Linux. What about something like BSD or Plan9? To be truthful, my "requirements" include first and foremost, a great looking enclosure. There is a reason for that. I want be able to buy the enclosure separately. This is important. In my vision, there would multiple sources for boards that might fit inside. Not every user might want or need the same computing power or peripherals. Imagine, to take an example, if there were multiple RaspberryPi-sized boards. Then you could mix and match different available enclosures[1] with different boards. 1. We are seeing the market respond with many, varied enclosures for the Pi. There are lots of development boards for sale to consumers, and there are dedicated people porting UNIX OS's to run on them. What I don't see, generally, are reasonably-priced and attractive enclosures for these boards. The RaspberryPi may be changing this state of affairs, as the Pi enclosure market continues to grow. Separating out the parts of the device, from the enclosure to the PCB to the OS to the third party software is, you might say, like the UNIX userland philosophy of isolating functions to their own individual utilities. This separation allows more flexibility and more power, in the example of the UNIX userland by allowing the user to filter and redirect output and connect utilities together with pipes. What are the things Apple does well? Enclosures and graphics, in my opinion. (And controlling their users :) UNIX is not on the list. There are better UNIX alternatives than iOS. My opinion. Or, as in the article, you can wait and hope that iOS can be improved to be more like those UNIX alternatives. |
I don't understand being so hung up on the enclosure. Nothing's stopping you from fabricating new enclosures for Nexus 4s. You could even mass produce them, and repackage new Nexus 4s as a value-added service for people. You could, theoretically, buy up busted iPhones from ebay and repack them as Android devices - although it'd be much easier to buy one of the million fake iPhones from China, which are already basically reference Android devices.
On the UI side, Samsung was on the way to shipping their devices with an iOS clone around the time of the S2. If you want an Android experience which is very similar to iOS, you could even look at MIUI [1], which rips off a bunch of Apple's design philosophy.
In short, everything you asked for is already very possible, it's just that nobody is handing it to you on a platter. You could try to get rich enough to buy 51% of Apple, and redirect their whole corporate focus. Or you could pick an interesting project and start hacking ;)
1. http://en.miui.com/