It doesn't matter if they mind or not, the question is whether they can feasibly stop you. So far, the answer seems to be "not really".
Apple has feasibly stopped any modifications of iOS and their apps, for all practical purposes. These kinds of ecosystems will only continue to expand and to displace more open ones. We’re already at the point where arguably the most performant non-server hardware (Macs with the latest SoCs) is bound to a proprietary OS. Efforts like Asahi can easily be shut down by Apple with newer hardware.
LLMs are no help against proper cryptographic lockdown.
We're at an inflection point because hardware progress has slowed down and while the mobile duopoly does benefit from network effects, in the long run those are outweighed by missteps by the incumbents. See how Windows has been a monopoly on the PC market for ages, then they've dropped the ball, Linux has grown then Microsoft got their shit together somewhat in order to catch up.
I don't think open / general-purpose computing is doomed in the future or anything like that, as long as there is demand for it, someone will supply it.
And LLMs can also help you design your own hardware in the worst case:)
I’m pretty sure that it’s in favor of mobile gaming. The PC market is shrinking.
> And LLMs can also help you design your own hardware in the worst case:)
But not in manufacturing it. You’ll generally be even more disadvantaged in terms of hardware performance than open-weight models are compared to the proprietary frontier models.
You have very good points but I'd say this is somewhat of a fallacy. If you look at graphs for phone shipments and PC shipments, they're both somewhat declining between 2015-2025 (I'm focusing on this time period to exclude the current temporary component shortages). However, this doesn't mean they're becoming less popular in either usage or platform spending like buying apps, games and subscriptions. How can this circle be squared you might ask? Just about everyone has a phone or a laptop today. They're typically not first-time buyers, they'll be replacing their systems. Even if the number of devices shipped are decreasing today, doesn't mean the market itself has shrunk. Even if for some reason, all laptops became e-waste from next year January 1st, you'd see several hundred million sales next year for the replacement device, because the market is there.
For those consoles, that's not the case. (src: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/analyst-game-console-shipments...) Look at how Switch is the majority of shipments most of the time, and there are years where traditional consoles sell only a few million copies. Contrast that to the personal computer or the phone market where the numbers are in the tens of millions or hundreds each year. It's just not comparable.
>But not in manufacturing it.
LLMs won't build you a frontier fab that's for sure, but the point is that you don't necessarily need the latest'n'greatest with diminishing returns. An RTX 5090 is like ten times faster than a GTX 980 released 12 years ago. It doesn't run games which are ten times better. Similarly, something like the Galaxy S26 is ~7 times faster than an S6 around that time. Is it seven times better to use? Of course not :P
So the conclusion is that the performance the architecture you need to reach isn't an ever-racing frontier, you can make a new product (and in this hypothetical case, a product focused on openness) without having SOTA performance.
For a case of an "alternate" product like this, just see the Switch - much slower than "normal" consoles, good form factor, portable, and fairly cheap to produce. No one cares that it doesn't do 4K when undocked.
The Switch is popular despite its lowish performance, because of its ergonomics and ease of use, which is correlated with it being a walled-garden product, just like that’s the case for smartphones.
Now I’m very curious to look into this more in depth as I’m doing a fair bit of speculating. If I find any good info I’ll update this
A small pointer, it's hard to do interpret statistics because most people play on multiple platforms. Roughly 75% of gamers play on mobile, 45% on PC and 40% on console.
I'm not 100% sure about the numbers, just off the top of my head about looking at market research, updated numbers welcome
If I'm not mistaking Apple and other companies have avoided GPLv3 like the plague. And Microsoft won't sign your EFI boot loader if it's under a GPLv3 license.
The best anyone can do is send takedowns to GitHub / other websites hosting the code or downloads but it's trivial to upload them to random russian code forges or whatever.