Surely they aren't selling subscriptions at a loss to gain market share either.

They could allow unlocking the phone by burying that option deep in the settings with scary warnings etc. Most people could use the device with the restrictions. The fact that this is not possible at all is greed.

One of the first things help desk scammers do is convince people to turn off antivirus and/or Windows Defender on their computers.

If they did that, every influencer would make youtube videos and tik toks telling people how they should enable that setting to make their phone better or more powerful "for free", and everyone would just do it, especially the people who really shouldn't because they don't know any better.

No they wouldn't. We don't have to speculate about that; Android already has a toggle to allow direct installation of apps, and most people don't turn it on.

Many Android devices allow unlocking the bootloader and gaining root or installing an alternate OS without exploits, and there are quite a few third-party Android builds for supported devices. The process is not beyond what a person of average intelligence and modest computer skills could pull off with some patience and a video guide. Only a handful of tech nerds actually do it.

Perhaps we're making different assumptions, but a process that "is not beyond what a person of average intelligence and modest computer skills could pull off with some patience and a video guide" sounds quite a bit more complex than a mere Unlock option in iPhone settings. Also, the results are different too. The process you've described results in an Android desktop, whereas the proposed iphone unlock process would result in a full macOS desktop, which sounds (to me at least) much more desirable to have.

I stand by my speculation that if it were possible to do that on an iphone, it'd definitely be something loads of people would do, including a large amount of people who shouldn't open their device that way but do just because they watched someone on social media telling them to.

> everyone would just do it

Wouldn't it be better to solve that with education? Also MacOS gives you a warning when you're opening something not vetted by them.

The idea that it's some higher authorities responsibility to keep us safe quickly slides into losing freedoms we care about.

Would you also like all websites to be ISP-approved?

We could also have all social media filtered through LLM guards to keep us safe?

Maybe link our IDs to our online identity to protect our kids.

MacOS does more than just give you a warning when you're opening a program not vetted by them -- it prevents you from opening it, so that's not really a good example of education, and is in fact an example of lockdown.

I'm not arguing that anything get any more locked down than it already is, so your points (while possibly valid in a bigger discussion) don't make a lot of sense here in this discussion about a hypothetical "unlock phone" setting.

Yep. Scammers have managed to get people to install profiles on their devices so they can run non-appstore approved scam apps.

If they believe a sufficient number is locked in then they may consider doing this later.

If Claude Code is so much better why not make users pay to use it instead of forcing it on subscribers?

If these LLMs and tools create real valuable products, where are they?

Shouldnt there be dedicated youtubers showibg us thwir skillz?

Even if it would work good luck writing with a new style.

Given how Anthropic changes Claude Code and forces everyone with a subscription to use it (if you pay much more with the API you can avoid it). I think it's fair to say that Claude Code is not an asset but a liability.

Agreed I also like to see more support for MingW especially from open source projects. Not even a passing mention in this blog post.

If tooling really is an advantage why isn't it possible to use the API with a subscription and save money?

In my opinion it is because if you control both the model and the harness then you're able to tune everything to work together much better.

That's for the API right? The subs are still a loss. I don't know which one of the two is larger.

RAM got a little more expensive lately for some reason.