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Comment by cube00 | Hacker News Reader

> why should I not be able to do so on my phone? Why would one computing platform be different from the other?

If Microsoft had its act together PCs would have been just as locked down as phones are today and we wouldn't be questioning a difference.

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Microsoft proposed locked-down PCs decades ago and got criticism from sources as mainstream as the New York Times. Everyone more technical than that, with the possible exception of corporate IT types flatly rejected it.

I'm sad there was so much less backlash to restricting user control on phones.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/business/technology-a-saf...

Microsoft sell locked down PCs today. Secure Boot cannot be disabled, nor new keys enrolled, on Windows PCs that ship with an ARM processor (yes they exist). It's as if Apple decided to lock down Macbooks when they switched to M-series. The only thing keeping PCs "free" is that ARM processors suck at the high end if you're not Apple, so it's seen as acceptable market segmentation. It's purely arbitrary though, just like it's purely arbitrary that you can put Linux on a Macbook but not an iPad despite having the same SoC.

They do, and 20 years ago a move like that would have also drawn widespread condemnation.

It's not as big a problem as it is with phones though because the vast majority of PCs on the market are not locked down in this way, and only a handful of PC applications (a few competitive games) use remote attestation to check for an unmodified Microsoft OS.

I think what you meant to say is if US regulators weren't asleep at the wheel phones would be just as unlocked as PCs.

Well here's EU regulators working with Apple directly to allow it. I honestly think that's worse, the EU government took the time to allow this directly. It's not just a case of the existing laws not being clear in this instance, it's the EU working with Apple to come up with this 'solution'.

5% tax on all digital transactions (still applies to Kindle ebooks too I'm guessing?) and all applications have to go through an Apple review process. That's ridiculous for a government to explicitly agree to.

Governments will agree to that because at the end of the day it gives them a party they can go to. In this instance if they want Apple or Google to remove an app they can. It gives them the ability to use that option whenever they don't like something it's not by accident. Its a win-win for them and Apple/Google. You are never going to get the wild wild west we have on the pc platform ever again.

The premise here is that there isn't a single government in the entire world which is more willing to protect its population than oppress it.

If that's the case then maybe we need to start considering what kind of alternate mechanisms can robustly mitigate the threat.

Stop buying Apple products

On mobile we have a duopoly, Apple/Google. While Apple has their platform on lockdown since day one, Google is slowly making its way there. Where does that leave the average users?

Non-average users like people from HN could support the third alternative, which eventually could become suitable for everyone. Sent from my Librem 5.

The dominance of Microsoft actually depended on openness.

The IBM PC commoditized hardware and software, which facilitated PC clones. When IBM licensed DOS from MS, it allowed MS to license a version to non-IBM computers too. Thus, IBM ended up commoditizing itself and became replaceable, with the MS OS as the new standard.

Apple can lock down iPhones because it's the sole provider of the software and the hardware.

They successfully did it, basically, if you read about Xbox's architecture. It's a really interesting look into how we basically wouldn't own our Windows PCs if they used that tech in their mainstream software and hardware.

If [shitty thing] had been normalized years ago, we wouldn't be questioning [shitty thing]'s existence today. I mean, yeah dude.

What the heck does this defeatist argument have to do with it???

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