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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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