The iPhone or iPad let you just be a user with very little cognitive load.
If you want to tinker with your handset even while you're spending your day or maybe even weekend tinkering with servers, that's a different story. Android's definitely the tinker's tartare.
If that "thing" wants to be the hacker's tartare, maybe it would give me access to its bootloader, show open drivers and not call me a "pirate" for circumventing their laughable restrictions.
It would also allow me to manipulate the Linux it claims to deliver the way I want it, the way 40 years of Unix culture taught me.
Apple's gadgets may be a hacker's nightmare, but Androids are far from being the answer.
Then are the updates. You can't just update to the next version of iOS when it comes out. You often need to wait many many months for newer versions to be jailbroken. There is always the threat that you will never be able to break the next version due to the security race between hackers and Apple.
The end result of all this, and I've seen this with every single jailbroken phone user, is that users who jailbreak don't often update, if they ever do. This is not a very ideal situation for something that should be available officially and by default.
And finally, you won't often find reputable software developers distributing applications that require jailbreaking. On Android, a good example of this is Skype. It's available through the market, but easy to install outside the market. It's also a top notch company and product.
jailbreaking atv2 units seems tobe pretty dead simple compared to the rest....
a weird one is remote hd sold for iphone ipad........ but requires a jailbroken atv to use with the atv, yet its sold in the app store. go figure.
There are plenty of other very profitable products that have less than stellar properties. For rather extreme examples: fast food, kitchy tourist items, low quality low cost furniture, and scams like power balance bracelets. There is a place for these products, no doubt, but nobody would argue that McDonalds is a great find dining restaurant. Ultimately profitability is quite orthogonal to the topic we are discussing.
Regarding your other comments, giving one example of one Apple device that is currently easy to jailbreak does not address my comments at all. As for this remote hd product you mention (it would be a good idea to give links for things like this in the future), if it does exist, it is certainly a mighty risky business. For one, Apple could pull their app store app at any time. They've done it before. Second, basing your product on a requirement to break the security of a device is not a wise move. Not only is jailbreaking unsupported, Apple actively tries to prevent it. They even tried to have it ruled illegal.
The example I gave for Android is quite different. This functionality is expressly allowed and supported by Google. I'm not sure if some carriers lock it out, but there are enough hand sets that are officially supported that it can make sense. Further, rather than working against the companies producing handsets and the operating system, Swype works with them and has been integrated into the base system of at least some Samsung products. There is no question that Android is more open in these regards and also more flexible.
Wether it matters to the majority of consumers is another discussion. According to this article, Wozniak thinks that it might not.
IIRC there's still no jailbreak for the iPad 2, even though it's been out for nearly a year now.
How would you feel if Toshiba didn't grant you root access on your laptop/mac/machine? It is as destructive, isn't it?
i am no fan of lockdown, but im also capable of making decisions about how i spend my money. i bought the gizmos because i like how they work. if someone wants something not on the market ..... gobuild it and sell it,right?