>I was literally stocked by 2 people

Stalked? :)

> I'll give you an example - 1

I agree that Apple should provide a "hacker" setting that lets you step outside the bounds. They don't want to do this because so many non-techies imagine themselves as highly technical so they would press this button, mess something up and then shit all over the forums about how awful apple products are. Granted, Windows got to 95%+ market saturation with the latter approach, but Apple cares about imagine even to the point of shooting themselves in the foot over it. It's their right.

What irritates me are all the "they're just trying lock you in because they're evil!". There's no reason to believe they're evil. It's more likely they care about imagine to a point many might consider a fault.

> Imagine my surprise when I found out that I couldn't do tethering with my otherwise expensive 3G plan

iOS, and other OSes for that matter, send data back to the carrier when you use the built in tethering capabilities. Since Apple is perceived to have tight control of their market, carriers expect them to keep apps out that bipass this. Android is perceived to have a less tight market so even though the built in offering would have had the exact same restriction, you could easily pick up an app that didn't.

Currently, I sold my 3G iPad and use my iPhone 4 to do tethering. It's not blocked for me and I don't pay anything for it. This changed when they changed to "wireless hotspot" instead of "tethering" in the options menu.

>So they are basically controlling your device, deciding for you what you can and cannot do.

This is a carrier issue. I'd love to see someone make an open carrier (dumb pipe, that's what we all want!).

>because while the iPad is useful for browsing and stuff, I don't really "own" it and there's so much more it could do.

The iPad concept is that it's an appliance, not a general purpose computer. If you feel that means you don't "own" it, do you also not "own" your microwave since you can't do general computing on it's embedded OS either?

>And I have no doubt about it, the sky is going to fall, because the writing is on the wall.

And here's where you go David Icke. What writing is on what wall? Companies are trying to exploit us and maximize profits at our expense. Just as they always have. They've had us in much worse positions in the past and we've escaped. I'm confident that if phones become to restrictive we'll break out of it again. After all, I don't have to have a smart phone. It's convenient and really helpful, but I'm not going to be the monkey trapped by a banana in a bottle.

>You may not notice it right now, but remember that old anecdote about how you should boil a frog alive - slowly, otherwise it jumps out.

I think if you actually try this, you'll find that the frog will jump out when it reaches the right temperature regardless of how slowly you turn up the head.

>And the blame will fall partly on us, the developers that supported these closed platforms.

We support them because it's most profitable for us. When it's not, we won't support them. Simple.

>People also like to point out how Android is more popular because it gets promoted more by carriers - isn't it funny how openness is good for everybody, including carriers and phone makers?

Haha! Carriers don't give a shit about "openness ". They'd happily used a closed OS as they have in the past, so long as they get it cheaper than any alternative and have a mechanism to put their shovelware shit on it.