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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

What makes a computer general purpose?

Is an XBox 360 a general purpose computer?

Mass market adoption for general purposes, relevance in people's lives. Many EU citizens manage their entirely digital life from their phone, I do not know of anyone who uses an XBox 360 to do that.

Not that I would be opposed to game consoles also falling under this legislation.

It would be a shame if the way to get a closed ecosystem was to remove functionality to meet some arbitrary threshold.

Shame for whom?

Every computer is general purpose at its core. But some computers ship with software/firmware that restricts the purposes accessible by the end user.

> But some computers ship with software/firmware that restricts the purposes accessible by the end user.

Which is a necessary evil if you're shipping the hardware of that "computer" at ultra low or negative margins in order to make back the investment on SW sales.

Otherwise, the air force will buy boatloads of PS3s for a computer farm and scalpers will use PS5 for crypto mining and Sony would go bust from these hardware sales.

Apple is in a different position as it makes crazy margins even on hardware which is arare for hardware manufacturers.

Good thing we know that Apple already makes significant profit on every sale of their hardware.

Yeah, it's almost as if some more healthy competition in the market would help instead of Apple being a monpopoly on mobile along with Google.

Hence why we need regulations to break Apple and Google of their high horse.

Selling hardware at negative margins is not a "necessary" evil; it's just a business model that some manufacturers choose to impose on consumers, and then we end up with things like DRM-encumbered printer ink cartridges.

Personal computing/general tasks being done on the device vs one purpose. Like there's not just the ability to talk on the phone and message. People use it as their sole computer, apply for jobs, pay for things, research things, etc.

A computer that touts to have an app for most things in life ?

I would love if it applied to game consoles as well.

Would you buy an XBOX for business use? IT? devops?

Would you buy an iPhone to run shell scripts and game emulators on?

Actually, yes. If the iPhone was an open platform that could open it up for many use cases involving shell scripting and such. As for game emulators I already run several on my Android phone with great luck, so that is indeed a valid use case.

An iPhone is just a tiny pocket computer. There is no technical reason preventing an iPhone from running shell scripts and emulators. The only reason why it can't do is because Apple controls what apps you are allowed to run on your phone.

No, but I also wouldn't buy a iPhone for a devops machine.

you obviously haven't seen Mr. Robot.

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