There's an old thing, from Bob Young, founder of Redhat, about proprietary software being like a car with the hood welded shut. Perhaps the latter will actually become reality.
>John Deere—the world’s largest agricultural machinery maker —told the Copyright Office that farmers don’t own their tractors. Because computer code snakes through the DNA of modern tractors, farmers receive “an implied license for the life of the vehicle to operate the vehicle.”
>Several manufacturers recently submitted similar comments to the Copyright Office under an inquiry into the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. DMCA is a vast 1998 copyright law that (among other things) governs the blurry line between software and hardware. The Copyright Office, after reading the comments and holding a hearing, will decide in July which high-tech devices we can modify, hack, and repair—and decide whether John Deere’s twisted vision of ownership will become a reality.
But in the end, farming will go fully robotic. In contrast with consumer cars, which will always require a human driver.
Always is a long time, brother.
How far is it from the reality now though? I buy cars with very high reliability (usually Honda) just so I don't have to deal with it.
I grew up fixing cars, motorcycles, and snowmobiles with my dad, but these days much of what we did is no longer possible to fix (or even necessary with the case of fuel injection).
Let's not call out Apple as some evil locked down hardware platform company. How user serviceable or after-market modifiable is a Model S? Tesla cars get over-the-air software updates and you sure as hell can't modify it yourself in any non-"illegal hacking" capacity.
They have always wanted to own and control both the hardware and the software, though.
Just because Teslas aren't very hackable doesn't mean it's a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audi_A2#Service_Hatch_.28Servi...
Joking aside, I do think that under Tim Cook, Apple has changed how it thinks about its products from being "beautifully designed premium products" to being "fashionable", and I'm seeing this trend more and more in Apple products lately, which I find a little worrying (for the company's core values and culture, too).