>"because they want a walled garden"
I doubt most consumers would care if you could sideload apps on their iOS device or play PlayStation and Nintendo games on their Xbox. In fact most consumers would be all for it!
They buy these things because they find there's already enough value there.
You could absolutely make the case that users ought to be smarter, use technology as a power user, etc, but that's not the reality at the moment.
I... don't see this in real life? There have always been San Bernadino-emboldened Apple customers that love to dunk on Android security, but recently that's gone away. Trojan horses are making it through[0] Apple's manual review, NSO Group has working exploits more often than not, the US government has wiretapped Push Notifications[1] and Apple has seemingly slowed their persecution of organized hacking groups.
iOS is in a post-Pegasus world. Android was perceived to be vulnerable if you downloaded the wrong app; iOS was proven to be vulnerable if you received an SMS payload from any user. And Apple has admitted that they cannot even really detect it[2] anymore. Neither educated users nor common people are associating Apple with security, especially now.
[0] https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2025/02/20/apple-currently-only-able-to-...
That's ignoring the fact that literally zero average consumers are even targeted by these groups, nor do they have any perception of it. The average person is worried about exactly one thing: common consumer malware.
If our OSes were not polished glorified 1970s Unix and had real security isolation we could allow more freedom, paradoxically. But given that our security is awful, freedom for non technical users means the freedom to get spyware and malware.