Posted by medhir 8 hours ago
Vendors keep them open today only because there is a historical exception, but make no mistake if the laptop computer was first introduced to the masses in 2008 you would be downloading apps through official stores and paying a 30% fee on all transactions and would only be able to do a tiny fraction of what is possible on them today.
To me the surprise isn't that the phone is locked down, but that Apple allows MacBook Neo to do so much. Just look at its iPad counterpart.
It's not unnecessary, they do it because they make money as gatekeeper.
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.
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.
I'm not arguing that anything get any more locked down than it already is, so your points (while possibly valid in a bigger discussion) don't make a lot of sense here in this discussion about a hypothetical "unlock phone" setting.
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 think the more accurate view would be an intersection of some of the company wanting to make money off gatekeeping and some of the company wanting to make quality devices that stay functional and malware-free even after you give to a deeply gullible grandparent for a while, and the former using the latter as a transparent excuse much of the time.
The MacBook Neo is a great example of just how fungible these categories are, at least as far as the SoC that runs them is concerned. I paid for my iPhone in full, there is no reasonable justification for why I can’t repurpose it / modify it as I see fit.