You've paid your 500 bucks. They lock it down so that the 99.999% of people who have no interest in jailbreaking don't screw themselves up and don't get infected by viruses. If a fringe minority decides to jailbreak that, that's not a problem for Apple so long as it remains a fringe minority.
Seems like a win-win.
(Even Google's Chromebook strategy is good; a hardware switch.)
With this model Apple misses out on their 30% cut of app sales.
2) Why is it obvious that everybody would suddenly switch to not selling through the App Store?
I don’t think alternate app stores on Android are terribly successful. Maybe they are, I don’t know, but I haven’t heard about it. People stick to the defaults and what’s convenient and easily discoverable.
Such a switch would be relevant for very few people. There is no reason Apple couldn’t do it. It just wouldn’t be good or bad for them. They can be lazy.
This is fascinating. Do you have any sources?
This is by now an old quote (from January 2010 – how time runs) so things might have changed. There just isn’t any more current information. Nevertheless, if you look at Apple’s numbers it’s pretty obvious that they make the vast majority of their money by selling hardware. Music, videos and apps make the hardware more attractive, not a lot of money for Apple.
Apple pays support costs (facilities, labor, etc.) for everyone who brings in an iOS device to a store, and it's their best interest to allow their personnel to turn problems around quickly. If an in-warranty device is "broken," they can send the customer home with a refurb one within fifteen minutes (I've done this for a screen). An easy jailbreak means more devices will come in broken, they'll have to keep more replacements in stock, and they won't necessarily be able to turn customers away for it because there might not be a good way to detect a jailbreak.
Jailbreaking is also a security problem for enterprises. If a user can run arbitrary un-sandboxed code, there's no way the device's owner can trust it to receive sensitive emails, be wiped remotely, and so on.
Jailbreaking is more like rooting an Android than the unknown sources checkbox.
Yes, that is really, really stupid. Don't just take my word for it:
http://www.citmedialaw.org/legal-guide/circumventing-copyrig...
Note that this is different from saying that it is criminal. Under U.S. copyright law, not every infringement is criminal. In fact, criminal infringements are the exception, not the rule.
So, as far as I know, they did not claim what you say they claim. Unless you have a good citation to the contrary, that is.