[daemoon]

> How ridiculous is that!

Not as ridiculous as being well aware of the limitations of iPhones wrt to installing applications outside of App Store and still buying one. People should vote with their wallets. Me personally I do not mind the limitations, but if you do - don't buy it.

[munificent]

> People should vote with their wallets.

That only works in efficient markets, which, obviously phones are not. An oligopoly where the barrier of entry requires like a billion dollars to spin up new phone hardware, a new OS, and an app ecosystem is not a place where effective competition is going to occur.

[judge2020]

If we require sideloading via untrusted sources, then that's just flipping the situation on its head to where, now, people who do want a phone with a single authority screening the entire software stack (from the bootrom to third party app code) don't have a phone to pick from that will suit their needs. With such a law, it becomes impossible to enter into the market at all with a product for these customers.

[Spivak]

The phrase "vote with your wallets" should just be eliminated because it's completely meaningless. You're asking to "just" coordinate millions of people to do some collective action or to change their behavior.

Do you know what the tool for doing that is called? Government. Vote with your actual votes.

[rchaud]

Ironically, there's a big overlap between the "my vote doesn't matter" groups and the "vote with your wallet" groups.

[judge2020]

Vote with your wallet works in that, if someone made an undesirable product when right next to it at the Best Buy is a superior product, the inferior product sells zero units and thus the company loses millions or billions of dollars in sales. If both of those products suck, then why would consumers buy them and Best Buy stock them? Or is it that both of those products are invaluable and some people are just mad that the products have certain features (security restrictions) which they don't want.

[hajile]

Can you make an iPhone, just without Apple?

Nope

Their designs are protected at the point of a gun through patents and copyrights. Breaking those literally means the police will use force to stop you and to ruin and imprison you.

Take away these restrictions and you’d see an identical iPhone, but without Apple’s restrictions. I bet that phone would sell millions. That would actually allow voting with your wallet to be real.

Since the government enables these behaviors, it is also the only one who can actually reign them in. Unless these nearly perpetual lock-ins stop, voting with your wallet is impossible.

[judge2020]

So you want the result of Apple's tens of billions of dollars of hardware R&D, but without paying them for it.

[hajile]

There’s no fundamental human right to a monopoly of an idea. This is actively acknowledged in the language of the US Constitution.

If Apple actually delivered what was best for consumers, knock-offs wouldn’t matter too much.

My actual argument is that either we must regulate the idea monopoly we created or eliminate it by stopping the government protectionism.