Yeah sure, let's just blast that silicon with some focused ion beam to overwrite the public key that the bootloader is signed with. It's that simple, right? Everyone could do it.

Just take a step back and think about how absurd what you just said was.

After market mods aren't easy to do in any industry. We don't force Ford to support lifted F150s or aftermarket radios.

You're basically saying "This is a dog, and I'm mad its not a cat and it can't be easily changed." When you can just get, you know, a cat.

Where do you get a mobile device that's not a walled garden? It's just that Google's is designed with a gate slightly ajar. Continuing with your pet analogy, it's as if you could only get a dog or a cat, and it only eats food made by one specific manufacturer. You can convince the cat to eat almost whatever you have, but the dog won't budge. Want a parrot or a hamster? Tough luck.

I wholeheartedly agree with the OP article. You made a device, then you sold it. You shouldn't get to control it after sale because you no longer own it. Plain and simple.

I don't care about manufacturer "supporting" something. I bought it, it's mine now, I'm on my own, and please don't get in my way of modifying the thing I bought because I have the right to do so.

You're positing an example but not refuting mine - again, tell me, how is a cat supposed to be a dog?

> I wholeheartedly agree with the OP article. You made a device, then you sold it. You shouldn't get to control it after sale because you no longer own it. Plain and simple.

Apple didn't just "make a device" though. They don't make just hardware - they make software w/ hardware. The product is the whole experience. Expecting them to change how they design their product for the masses (that LOVE THEM), because you can't do exactly what you want, is wrong.

> I bought it, it's mine now, I'm on my own, and please don't get in my way of modifying the thing I bought because I have the right to do so.

YOU CAN do what you want with it. If you were perhaps smarter, you could hack into it and make it do whatever you want. You can throw it right off a bridge if you want! Congratulations. But Apple IN NO WAY is required to make it EASIER for you to throw it off a bridge. Sorry.

My point is, Apple purposefully engineered the product to give them more access to it than you'll ever get. It took them extra effort to do this, it's easier to make a device/OS without DRM than with it. You can't exactly hack it because that would require millions of dollars worth of equipment and some very specific knowledge.

I'm not renting it. I'm not licensing it. I'm buying it.

> Expecting them to change how they design their product for the masses (that LOVE THEM), because you can't do exactly what you want, is wrong.

That would empower their users. Developers would be actually making MORE apps for the platform because they would have the confidence that they'll be able to get that app into the hands of users one way or another. I've seen some stories of someone doing a lot of work making an app only to have it rejected because its very idea didn't resonate with the review team. There's nothing they can do to bring it into compliance — countless hours of work were wasted.

In other words - the engineered a product that is much harder to break, is more private, and is harder to hack. All things most customers want.

> I'm not renting it. I'm not licensing it. I'm buying it.

I buy a cat. I can't complain about it not being a dog. I bought it. I didn't "license" the cat, I didn't "rent" the cat. But I still can't make it into a dog, despite the fact that I own it.

Go ahead, hack it, if you can. All the power to you. That's your right. You can't impose your absurd dev geek worldview on everyone else. That's just wrong. If you want, make a competing device. But you won't.

The App store doesn't need more apps. No one complains about lack of apps on the app store. Androids are flooded with crap apps - I'd rather keep it the way it is.

How, exactly, limiting what YOU can do with YOUR OWN device translates into more security? I want to see people ask "oh, if only I had no ability to install apps unless the manufacturer of my computer approves them". Haven't seen any yet. As they say, if someone hits you on the head every day since childhood, you would come up with all sorts of reasons why it's a good thing, and then miss it if they stop.

"But people might get scammed by bad actors." They can as well get scammed on the web which Apple devices are capable of accessing. Or over text messages. Or over phone calls. Or in real life.

Your analogy about cats and dogs is wrong, by the way. Being either kind of animal is an intrinsic property of it that can't be changed. You choose one or the other. It's not like someone took an "universal" animal that is initially capable of morphing into a cat or a dog, purposefully locked it into being a cat forever, and then called it an iCat sold it to you for $999.99. On the other hand, an iPhone is inherently a general-purpose computing device, that was purposefully and artificially locked into only running software that was pre-approved by Apple, thus limiting what its user can do with it (without owning an electron microscope, anyway).

Pixel phones come with an unlockable bootloader so...

That's what I refer to when I say about "gate slightly ajar". The thing is, you only unlock the bootloader that boots the main OS kernel, on EL1. There are more higher-privileged exception levels in an ARM CPU, and Google makes use of those to implement anti-consumer features like the dreaded SafetyNet or DRM. Your main OS is considered "untrusted", and you never get to run any custom code with highest possible privileges, a.k.a TrustZone — only Google and phone manufacturer do. Magisk is a dirty hack which will stop working whenever Google feels like flipping the switch to make use of their TrustZone firmware.

You clearly missed his point

This is the right answer. Apple’s not going to arrest you for jailbreaking your phone and running your own software. But they’re not obligated to go out of their way to support it either.

It’s not that they don’t go out of their way to support it. They actively try to stop it. All jailbreaking is, is gaining root privileges on the device. They could just add a little toggle button saying use at your own risk, we don’t support it.

By making it so hard to jailbreak and so hard to install apps not from the App Store, they make jailbreaking not the answer.

Their goal/feature/product, whatever you want to call it, is to create something secure enough that grandpa can’t get tricked into getting owned. Anything at all that allows people to disable security becomes an immediate threat for that type of user. If the side effect is that they prevent people from jailbreaking then so be it because they have no desire or obligation to support those users.

Yes, let's add a potentially system breaking switch to a consumer phone.

Believe it or not, the world doesn't revolve around the software geeks.