[nirvana]

A little thought experiment... some clever dudes manage to reverse engineer enough to "jailbreak" this, and then they put a little OS image on it and start hacking away... then a bunch of people say "hey, this is really cool! It's like Apple made a little raspberry pi for us!" but then even more say "but it's so limited, it doesn't have USB out, etc, etc."

And then dozens more just go on and on about how Apple "crippled" the device by not giving it USB and how this "proves" Apple just wants "control" and why did they have to jailbreak it anyway?

In the process of getting their panties all bundled up they never realize they're bitching about an adapter not being a general computing platform.

They're also proving Apple right-- it's engineered to solve a specific problem and provide specific functionality. Even if it were jailbroken from the factory, people would be complaining and demanding that it does other things... than what it was designed to do.

[lobster_johnson]

You're extrapolating everything into a very silly future-tense strawman that won't ever exist. Nobody will be complaining that Apple didn't put USB in a proprietary SoC intended for video transfer.

[larrys]

"And then dozens more just go on and on about how Apple "crippled""

Exactly. "Dozens". Apple isn't building products for "dozens". They are building for the people who literally stream into the Apple retail store (non techies who clamor for their products) at all times of the day when other stores sit idle. I can walk into the Apple store near me (and it's not in Manhattan but in a suburban mall) and while the other upscale shops are idle, say, Tuesday at 10am the Apple store is quite busy.