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).
> 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.