>It is one of the manipulation techniques used to convince people they should trade freedom to use their devices however they want for notion of security.

No, it absolutely is not. It is a 100% genuine trade off, and you are being deceptive out of your own personal interests if you lie and claim it isn't. The ability to do anything necessarily means the ability to do bad things, and the more power is available the more work, knowledge, and metaknowledge is needed to both make full use of it and avoid pitfalls.

Software lockdowns prevent power users like the typical HNer from doing useful and valuable things. But they also help ensure that non-power users (who, remember, may anything from doctors to engineers to diplomats to farmers, brilliant experts in their own fields key to society just not in computers) cannot even be social engineered into getting themselves too deep in trouble. And this is obviously, objectively a real problem, and one frankly the tech community brought in part on ourselves with constant "the user is at fault, the user is stupid" stuff for decades. But why SHOULDN'T users just be able to go easily find anything they think looks interesting and give it a whirl, and have a reasonable expectation that it'll meet certain isolation/privacy/payment standards, and if not that it'll get automatically removed and the developer banned? And even for power users, lockdowns can help shift the power balance away from developers and pool user buying power through a point so that devs are forced to obey certain basic standards whether they like it or not.

Of course, software lockdowns also destroy valuable innovation, and they create a single point of pressure that is in turn prone to abuse or (likely worse in theory and more prevalent in practice) pressure from even more powerful entities. The likes of China, the EU, or if things go bad enough the US can force censorship onto a vast array of people and devices via iOS in a way that they can't with traditional systems.

On the hardware side, lockdowns make repair more difficult/centralized. But they also prevent hardware hacks, and have proven make theft vastly less economic.

IMO, I'd like to see a single point, buy-time option to opt for the ability for an owner to load their own root keys for software, hardware, both, or neither. Personally, I'd go for software and not hardware: the devices are very reliable, I'm not a hardware hacker myself and in my own model I'd prefer to run the risk of buying replacement kit rather then even think about hardware subversion. For my parents and grandparents I'd strongly push them to continue with "neither" which should be the default. I'm sure many on HN would like both. Maybe some (particularly in countries where official repairs are much harder) would even prefer to keep the software side of things locked down for malware but as a practical matter allow repairs.

But it's intensely frustrating to still see techies who apparently never dealt with family support or Help Desk or whatever in their lives blithely repeat 1990s/early-00s memes about PEBKAC/PICNIC/lusers etc. The BOFH was a ton of fun to read but it's realworld application has limits. I don't feel bad about not being skilled at small engine work, or pharmaceuticals or whatever.