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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.

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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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One of the first things help desk scammers do is convince people to turn off antivirus and/or Windows Defender on their computers.
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You can still have that. Make unbreakable the default, and add an "admin mode" toggle.
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As I noted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47369155 that wouldn't stop the people that need the protection.
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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.

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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?".
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Just wanting to be a gatekeeper doesn't cover measures like SIP that don't make them anything and presumably took immense man-hours to implement.

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.

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It's also because U.S. carriers don't like people hooking up arbitrary devices that can run arbitrary software to their network. In the civilized world, you have a device that talks GSM/LTE, you're golden as long as you don't violate any transmission laws. But in the USA carriers are still doing device allowlisting because I guess they want to bin QoS and don't want pro-grade traffic going over consumer accounts, nor the added expense of support for consumer accounts with exotic hardware that "might" break the network.
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