I am not arguing you need to like where this has led, but you have people in sibling comment threads here arguing we need to push back on things assuming you will use a phone when the whole revolution has been getting most of the world online by making phones widely available.

PCs happened by accident.

Before the PC, people had TVs - devices not for creating, but for passively consuming content made by big corporations and the state. And we had games consoles - devices not for creating, but for playing games made by a medium-sized company, with strict approval by a huge company (who want a cut). Strictly censored to be age-appropriate, naturally. Pirate radio? Straight to jail.

Before that people had newspapers - media for passively consuming, intended for mass readership, written at the behest of rich newspaper barons with certain political opinions they're keen to push.

And after the PC, we have smartphones - devices not for creating, but for consuming content feeds, curated by big corporations, with rich owners with certain political opinions they're keen to push. A huge company eager to take a cut. A tiny screen, and a keyboard that puts curly braces three keypresses deep. Can't even debug a web page without connecting to a PC. And soon to be strictly censored to be age-appropriate.

The PC is really the outlier here.

All modern devices are appliances, not computers.

They perform the specific functions that they were programmed to perform, and do not allow arbitrary execution of calculations on the underlying hardware.

Many people, mostly folks who adopt the Apple ecosystem, see this as a positive thing that allows them to delegate undifferentiated decisions on security and ways of working to the vendor.

I am one of those people and hope that Android remains open so that people don't expect Apple open up their hardware, which will result in fragmentation.

Due to this the equipment manufacturers where never incentivized to have a "open" ecosystem for the CPU+modem combo. That's why there is no OS war on a per device basis, most phones supports 1 OS officially.

I see what you did there... and agree completely. If you don't have root, it's not yours. All my Androids (none from this decade) are rooted and I plan to keep them that way.

The yet-to-be-released Steam Machine is not subsidized and is unlocked. Steam is a OS agnostic digital marketplace, so it doesn't matter what OS you install on the machine.

Microsoft doesn't see a threat in allowing other OSes on their Surface hardware because the majority of their revenue comes from M365.

It's just market forces really. In the end, phones provide enough utility for the majority of users while being locked down. There's nothing stopping you from buying a fully-open phone, but there's just very little utility in it for the majority of users.

Few interested hardware vendors, discontinued after 4 years. "mixed reviews at launch, while critics and analysts deemed it to be commercially unsuccessful"

Windows 10 S was another attempt that "Similarly [restricts] software installation to applications obtained via Windows Store." Cancelled after one year.

Exactly the fate I wish upon closed ecosystems. The only question is why iOS is different. I am inclined to say it's the brand status that overpriced luxury goods have that draws rich people initially, making it lucrative and perhaps even a tad prestigious to be there, but surely it's more than that?

On the topic of Windows, it took lawsuits to allow OEM's and users to remove IE.

Open choice will always be an uphill battle.

So yeah, the society has largely accepted this. PC is the exception.