Comment by AngryData

I very much disagree that consumers holding more hardware capabilities than they need is a bad thing. Replace computing hardware with mechanical tools, because they are basically tools, and consider if consumers be better off if wrenches and saw blades and machine tools were held more exclusively by business and large corporations. Would corporations use them more often? Probably. And yet it seems pretty clear that it would hurt the capabilities of regular people to not be able to fix things themselves or innovate outside of a corporate owned lab.

To me the #1 most important factor in a maintaining a prosperous and modern society is common access to tools by the masses, and computing hardware is just the latest set of tools.