[moleperson]

I really despise the idea that we should let the manufacturer decide what's best for us with no out based on the premise of protecting people who don't know any better. As technology becomes an increasingly integral part of our lives, people need to be able to think for themselves and understand the consequences of how they interact with software.

Also as someone who's grandmother started her own software company and was a programmer since the days of punchcards, I find these "what about grandma" appeals very repetitive and kind of insulting.

[highwaylights]

> Also as someone who's grandmother started her own software company and was a programmer since the days of punchcards, I find these "what about grandma" appeals very repetitive and kind of insulting.

Your grandmother sounds like a genuinely very impressive person, given that it would have been a much more difficult career to forge as a woman in the timeframe from punchcards forward, even up to the present day.

Respectfully, I don't believe you are insulted. I think you know what was meant by the above, and chose to be insulted.

Your overall argument is also not wrong, but kind of irrelevant. This is HN - everyone here is a tech enthusiast. We are not Apple's target market. Removing the guardrails would cost them revenue and headaches.

Whether or not companies should be made to allow arbitrary software to run on devices is a different question entirely, has no clear and simple answer, and I'm not sure who would have the authority to make that happen.

[the_other]

On the other hand, my grandma could barely use a DVD player, and definitely didn't want to learn to set one up. But when the industry bullied her into getting DVDs by making VHS too flimsy to last more than 10 years and then ditching it... she got us in to fix her problem.

"Grandma" doesn't mean "grandma" in these discussions, it's a placeholder for "people not driven to learn the details of all of their tools". Which is most people. Some people do "people" or "animals" or "geology" and not "technology". Your grandma sounds ace, btw.

[Axsuul]

Not all grandmas are like your grandma and at the same time not all needs are like yours.