It’s very insidious what happened with the mobile market. PCs started out open because they predate the idea of locking users out of their own hardware. And traditionally there has been a lot of resistance to that because desktops and laptops are seen as general purpose computing platforms.

However, when smart phones started coming out they were treated as appliances. And the companies locked users out of them from the start. Now it’s just become accepted practice in name of security and protecting the users from themselves. It’s an absolute tragedy that it’s practically impossible to buy an unlocked phone nowadays that you can install whatever operating system software you want on. What’s worse is that this is starting to leak into computing as well with stuff like surface and chromebooks.