Infants great

I doubt it is impossible but an infant is still a baby the way it is coded it probably needed that placeholder. Although newborns don’t really do much as things are too new it is still fitting they would be restricted generally they can’t support their own heads at that age after all.

I think it's impossible to free babies. They are literally objects so they can never be a sim.
It's only so much you can do with an object. An infant is very much a baby. It seems the infants we got are not even a year old yet and can not even roll over without learning. I think the way they did it opened up so much more opportunities to play with babies and watch them grow. If they just gave up a newborn sim there would be nothing to do with them. Nothing special like teaching them to roll over. Watching them crawl and giving them their own little quirks and personalities. Because newborns just eat sleep and go to the bathroom ?

Well, they did shorten the newborn life stage for infants though...

Would have been nice to have a pram to carry around the basinette babies and then upgrade it to stroller and carry infants and toddlers. The backpack thing is nice, but unless they adjusted the toddlers they are still rather slow moving and carrying them around on community lots is a pain.

Pretty much the point of infants to be a full lifestate since the baby is just an object, but what they showed and added into the stream with the update to babies is good. Better skin tones for them and they definitely look different in the face too. Better improvement compared to before.

I don't mind the newborns being tied to the bassinet as much now with the infants coming. I am thinking infant stage is meant to be 2+ months as they start to learn activities in real life around that age. 2 months is when they usually start pushing up with their arms and being able to start holding up their heads. Rolling over is usually around 4 months and sitting up with assistance, and sitting up on their own, around 6 months. Crawling is around 6 months as well. Pulling themselves up and learning to walk is usually around 9 months. But it depends on the individual child, some develop skills earlier, others later. My granddaughter started walking just before turning 9 months. She was a handful! LOL. I really love the way they developed the infants and can't wait to try them out!

The newborn stage never really bothered me. I appreciate the added onesies and skintones though. I'm still unsure how I feel about infants, but happy for those who are happy. I think they went the right way about this.

I'm cool with babies being tied to the cribs, with the addition of infants. We haven't had infants in any iteration of The Sims, so I'm happy to see content that is pretty much exclusive to The Sims 4. & infants in my opinion are close enough to newborns...as they can't do anything on their own, like walk & I think I read something where they cant even be fed in high chairs until they learn to sit up. So, it seems like infants are around 5-6 months old range...& since they're playable, I think how they've aligned babies, infants, toddlers seems cool for me. But I guess I'll have to wait until next week when its released to see.

Probably because there are babies in existence in some player saves and to prevent any chances from completely ruining the save. It’s probably easier to add the new lifestage

If you think of babies as newborns, you could point out that in the first few weeks of a baby's life, all they do is eat, sleep, poop and cry. Say you've just given birth at the hospital. They've been tuned up a bit so that you can do more cuddling with them, but as long as you can carry them around the house, them not actually being able to do anything is relatively realistic.