[horsawlarway]

> There is nothing terrible about Apple making devices my 80+ year old mother can safely and easily use.

This - this line is the part of your argument I find fairly bullshit.

There is nothing stopping Apple from making the same device, but giving you the keys to install your own software on it. Hell - They can even bury it in the settings, or lock it down through a provisioned profile so you can help your mom by turning it off if you're worried.

Instead - you're arguing that apple should abuse their position to keep other competition locked out. Because you think it makes you "safer". I don't think it makes you safer. I think it makes life easy for you, at the expense of everyone in the long term.

You have fallen - hook, line, and sinker - for the marketing of the richest company in the world, telling you "trust us - we'll keep you safe". You should ask more questions about why they need to do it this way. Why keeping you safe involves abusing their power.

That's the same safety China promises with their great firewall. Trust us - we'll keep you safe, happy, and ignorant.

Maybe that's a good deal to you - I think it's a shitty trade.

[skissane]

> There is nothing stopping Apple from making the same device, but giving you the keys to install your own software on it.

They do, at the app level. As a developer you can install whatever app you want on your own devices, even apps which would never be allowed in AppStore or TestFlight (although still not with all the entitlements Apple’s own apps can get.)

OS level, your point stands.

[horsawlarway]

Even then - apps which might want to do things like send multicast packets (very useful in lots of home automations situations) can't do it, using the developer program, without going through approval on the store.

You utterly do not own those devices. Apple sells a house where they kept the keys to all the locks, but people think it's ok "because they'll keep me safe and unlock my doors when I need them to!".

Nevermind the risk is mostly a marketing boogeyman in the first place.

[lern_too_spel]

You can do this only if you pay Apple $99 / year and deanonymize yourself with billing details. If not, you have to reinstall weekly, losing your local data.

[CiaranMcNulty]

> There is nothing stopping Apple from making the same device, but giving you the keys to install your own software on it

You... don't think you can install your own software on MacOS?

[horsawlarway]

His 80 year old mother isn't using MacOS. She's on an ipad or an iphone - where I do genuinely think I can't install my own software.

They're both perfectly fine general purpose machines - except apple holds the keys to the engine, and only hands them out when they approve of the use case.

[acdha]

I think it’s useful to remember why so many people jumped to iPads, because we did that experiment for a couple decades. When people have the ability to install arbitrary code we know they will, and will click through almost any warning if they’ve been promised money, games, or porn. I think the sandboxing approach is getting closer to where you could potentially safely have third-party stores but I think that would still leave a lot of abuse if it allowed VPNs or content filters, full screen use, background operations, etc.

I don’t love where that leaves us but it does make me wonder whether a better compromise would be something like regulation requiring third-party app installs but with some kind of business liability & registration requirement so e.g. Epic could set one up but fly by night scammers couldn’t easily set something up and spam AARP members.

[horsawlarway]

They didn't jump to a completely new category of device because of the toolbars and malicious software.

They bought them because it was a new category of device (and extensive marketing from Apple - although I don't mean to discount the product with that statement - very solid phones, but also very excellent marketing). If anything - the early tech adopters moved to the iphone because it was more open than the existing phones at the time, which were definitely not general purpose computers. The iphone got us halfway there - I'd like to see us take the last few steps.