Prototype iPhones That Hackers Use to Research Apple’s Most Sensitive Code
> The phone boots into an operating system known as “Switchboard,” which has a no-nonsense black background and is intended for testing different functionalities on the phone.<p>I think the article confuses the meaning of "dev-fused" hardware, with what OS is actually installed on the phone. When I used to work at Apple, I always understood "dev-fused" to mean a device on which you could install unsigned builds of iOS.<p>Internally, Apple puts out new builds of iOS daily. The engineers building features on top of iOS need to install these builds, to do their work. A normal iPhone from a store won't take these unsigned builds, hence the need for these dev-fused devices. There are regular builds like what a customer would get, debug builds with lots of logging and debugging checks enabled, and even bare-bones builds like switchboard, for employees who are not UI-disclosed or work in factories. As someone building higher-level iOS features, all my dev-fused devices just ran a normal looking iOS, unlike what the article describes.<p>> Two people showed Motherboard how to get root access on the phone we used; it was a trivial process that required using the login: “root” and a default password: “alpine.”<p>Oh boy, that sure brings back memories!