More specifically, the radio in an iPhone can almost certainly be made to operate outside of licensed/compliant limits by tweaking the software. Should they be forced to allow that but still held accountable when their device is noncompliant?
Yes, absolutely. The responsible party is the operator of said equipment, and if they tinker with it, it's up to them to be compliant with FAA/FDA/HHS/etc. regulations or face proper legal reprecussions.
> More specifically, the radio in an iPhone can almost certainly be made to operate outside of licensed/compliant limits by tweaking the software.
See above. We can already do that today with WiFi chipsets that can be made to use frequencies that are illegal in a certain country. It's on the operator to ensure compliance. Alternatively, device manufacturers are free to use components that only work in a certain frequency spectrum - but that wouldn't prevent an operator from using them in another country.
We already solved those problems long ago.
no, because there's this weird concept that seems to be foreign to the modern software folk - Ownership.
Owner is held liable for that, not device manufacturer.
Not in places with regular inspection and mandated insurance. I.e. most civilised world.
I can see an argument for this. Nothing forced Apple to design their hardware this way: they could have built licensing/compliance limits into the hardware itself. But they didn't want to do that because they wanted to use the same HW for all markets, and different governments have different rules about which frequency bands are allowed. Of course, this then brings up the question: if they did make slightly different HW per-market (perhaps with 1-time fuses), what happens when someone brings their iPhone from one country to another and they've modified it to ignore any new region restrictions (Apple could still use SW to force new restrictions, though they can't allow anything new because of the HW restrictions) and it's broadcasting on an unallowed band?
Anyone who claims it’s an intractable is using it for a different purpose -/ either trying to keep their sweet monopoly - or wishing they could sue apple.
I mean, routers have worked like this for ages. OpenWRT has an entire page about tweaking your radio settings, and what could happen to you if you do. Why would Apple be held liable for something you did to your device?
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/transmit.po...
Because Apple is worth trillions of dollars