Comment by MBCook
13 hours ago
There are other reasons.
A big factor in the success of the iPad and maybe just some degree the iPhone, but especially the iPad, is that it’s “unbreakable”. All out restrictions mean it’s computer people don’t worry will suddenly stop working because they clicked to the wrong link. It won’t get a weird virus from their email.
That is a serious upside for a lot of consumers.
They could allow unlocking the phone by burying that option deep in the settings with scary warnings etc. Most people could use the device with the restrictions. The fact that this is not possible at all is greed.
If they did that, every influencer would make youtube videos and tik toks telling people how they should enable that setting to make their phone better or more powerful "for free", and everyone would just do it, especially the people who really shouldn't because they don't know any better.
No they wouldn't. We don't have to speculate about that; Android already has a toggle to allow direct installation of apps, and most people don't turn it on.
Many Android devices allow unlocking the bootloader and gaining root or installing an alternate OS without exploits, and there are quite a few third-party Android builds for supported devices. The process is not beyond what a person of average intelligence and modest computer skills could pull off with some patience and a video guide. Only a handful of tech nerds actually do it.
> everyone would just do it
Wouldn't it be better to solve that with education? Also MacOS gives you a warning when you're opening something not vetted by them.
The idea that it's some higher authorities responsibility to keep us safe quickly slides into losing freedoms we care about.
Would you also like all websites to be ISP-approved?
We could also have all social media filtered through LLM guards to keep us safe?
Maybe link our IDs to our online identity to protect our kids.
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Yep. Scammers have managed to get people to install profiles on their devices so they can run non-appstore approved scam apps.
One of the first things help desk scammers do is convince people to turn off antivirus and/or Windows Defender on their computers.
You can still have that. Make unbreakable the default, and add an "admin mode" toggle.
As I noted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369155 that wouldn't stop the people that need the protection.
The last 25 years of Apple has made it pretty clear that’s not “the Apple way”.
Yeah they could. They could do a lot of things people constantly ask about, like upgradable RAM. But there is no reason to think they will.
I feel like that same reason is why you see a lot of seriously tech-savvy people try to use iPads as laptop substitutes over and over even though they're obviously still not suitable for it for technical tasks. There's a lot of latent appeal in "okay, what if I just didn't have to worry about any of that ambient technical crap?".