Where are the parents? Who is giving kids phone instead of something else? Also, why should kids tinker with computers if they can explore art by painting or music by learning an instrument or literature by reading?

What makes it important for them to use Unix rather than something that works fine the way it is while maintaining some standard of UX?

If kids show an interest in computers, they can just install unix on some computer like a raspberry pi and tinker on that.

> What makes it important for them to use Unix rather than something that works fine the way it is while maintaining some standard of UX?

The concern is whether the device is a piece of paper or a television. A television can show much more complex images under the control of the average child, but it is purely for consumption. A piece of paper lets you display anything you can draw or you can turn it into a paper plane or do origami, but the realism of the resulting products is going to be much less, and they will be relatively static.

An iPhone is, by design, a television. Unix systems are pieces of paper.

Last time I used MacOS, it was a functional piece of paper and it worked as a television too, so there isn't really any dichotomy here. Any television could be built on top of a piece of paper and give you access to the base level too.

The concern is that the television is winning out: even though Android and iOS are built from pieces of paper, their maintainers only bless television-like interfaces. Frankly, I believe a major part of this is because they're built on top of Unix like interfaces, which is based certain assumptions that they don't want to maintain. So I certainly wouldn't say Unix-like is the solution.

Kids might not even know they have an interest in engineering (which is not the same as "interest in computers"). Back in 90s, a lot of kids, myself included, found out that we like that stuff because we were inadvertently exposed to it while playing our video games, and, later on, surfing the early Web. My first programming language was MS-DOS batch files, simply because it was readily available.

> Where are the parents? Who is giving kids phone instead of something else?

The parents might not know better.

> Also, why should kids tinker with computers if they can explore art by painting or music by learning an instrument or literature by reading?

They should be given the chance to do so, as they should be given the chance to explore art or craft or a lot of other things.

> What makes it important for them to use Unix

I don't see how mentioning Unix is relevant here. They should be given the opportunity to play and tinker with the devices, not only the preplanned path with games on the devices, that is all.

But they DO have the chance. They can boot some VM with Ubuntu or get a raspberry pi or a nodemcu and tinker away. They don't have to be able to tinker on EVERY device.

When my kids reach the age that they need a phone, probably sooner than I want to admit right now, I'd rather have them use some restricted device with some level of security checks in place for apps, so an iPhone, than something that is totally open which would make them vulnerable to being phished or persuaded to install viruses, etc. "Best way to play fortnite 10, download here".

For a communications device they will take into school, that they rely on for school work, communicating with parents and teachers, and with each other on social media and contains a lot of private information, that is probably the right choice. An open system with zero security and no guard rails is simply not appropriate for that use.

How about an open system WITH security and guard rails that can be enabled/disabled by, I dunno, the user who paid for it?

It's not either/or. Parents can be the guardians of their children's phone, enabling all the security Apple pretends to enable with a password.

The power of Apples marketing is astonishing.

And most kids given an Amiga or a 286 wouldn’t hack or code it - they’d just load up games.

Sure, but the possibility was there. I was given a ZX Spectrum clone and started coding, my brother only played games. I am not sure I would work in IT if that didn't happen. We were pretty much poor by today's standards and probably could not afford another such device, never mind that we would not know what to buy (as nobody in my family had any IT experience and there was no IT shop in our small town).

Exactly this. My brother only played games on our C64 and Amiga, while I did nothing but program on it.

Games were in some way 99% of my use of the Apple IIc we had, which was my first computer. Original Bard's Tale in glorious green screen. Good times.

However, I also spent a lot of time painstakingly copying BASIC games, line by line from magazines, then figuring out how to expand upon them for additional features. Gaming was just the gateway drug.