Let's leave the general computing devices for people who actually need that power, just like the early days.
With that attitude, eventually the impact of economies of scale will end up denying us the ability to afford those devices or to use them how we see fit.
The problem GP refers to is this: making computers is expensive, gets cheaper with economies of scale. But economies of scale are capital-intensive, so they exist only where there's a market for it. The market for people requiring general-purpose computation is small and getting smaller, while the market for constrained computing is only ever bigger. Which means at some point the capital-wielding companies will just leave the market, and the prices of new general-purpose computers will go way, way up.
On top of that, computers today gain most of their value interacting with other computers. Once the mainstream usage - like your e-mail or your bank - gets neatly packaged in sandboxed, trust-computing-enabled environments, the utility of your general-purpose platform will plummet. A dark but entirely possible scenario is that it eventually becomes illegal to use general-purpose computers to connect to such services, because "security".
I could picture a CPU design that had a boot key or other restricted features set by blowing fuses (or similar tricks) during packaging. The "developer" unit leaves them unblown.
If they're selling 10M "regular" units per year, and 5000 "developer" models over the product lifetime, you have to amortize the cost of special-casing the production line for a short run, and stocking and supporting a second SKU, over a relatively small sales volume. It could well be more expensive than the few cents of electricity per unit to blow the fuses in a standard unit.
How about making _general_ computing devices more accessible via UI/UX to the _general_ public? That doesn't seem like such a crazy idea.
This seems to be getting worse, for example Google and its financial institution partners have decided that general-purpose computing and payments aren't safe together. Google Pay suddenly started refusing to do contactless payments on my rooted phone.
It doesn't matter how much you improve it's ui/ux... if it's not a desirable feature to the general population, few will ever use it.
While I agree with the sentiment, and some of the complexity is not essential, the adage still applies: "everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler". At some point, "general computing" means there's some irreductible complexity that cannot be made simpler without the device ceasing to be general purpose.
That's pretty much what the iPad is. A general purpose computing device but easier to use and with tighter security than a PC. At some point you end up sacrificing versatility for accessibility to the masses.
This article explains it well: https://hisham.hm/2020/12/10/smart-tech-%e2%80%94-smart-for-...