Comment by pjmlp
6 months ago
We do, game consoles, video players, blue ray players, before phones, PDAs were already like that.
Also during the 8 and 16 bit days, all home computers were vertical integrated, outside external expansion ports the only way to upgrade either the software or hardware was to buy a new computer. Sounds familiar?
An improved experience required a whole new package.
The only exception was the PC clones market, that only happened, because IBM failed to prevent it, and they did try to regain control with the MCA design that naturally failed after the pandora box got opened.
Ironically with desktops now being a niche market, we are getting back to those days.
For videogames I seem to remember a pretty big lawsuit... [0]. I seem to remember this being a thing and a few times.
While I agree with video players (including blue ray), and PDAs, these weren't ever general purpose machines. People could hack them to do more things, but that was much more in the true sense of the word "making it do what it was never designed to do". Nor were many game consoles, though they are now. There really weren't that many protections in them either tbh. Definitely not on the scale today. I don't like it, but I also don't think we should act like these things are perfectly equal.
But, so what? Does that change my point? I don't think my argument only applies to phones. The reason I used phones as the talking point was because the article we're in a thread talking about and a phone is a general purpose computer that now everyone has in their pockets. I do think we should be careful to not undermine ourselves. How can we get things to change if we're also just saying "that's the way it is"?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/06/if-you-used-to-r...