In my opinion it should be, it should be an abuse of Apple's monopoly on the hardware (including patents preventing someone else from building an equivalent device) to create a monopoly on the software.
Legally I don't think it is today though, and my understanding of the law is that it's precisely because they haven't advertised their hardware as open as you say.
I can't speak to where it stands in the current legal framework, but personally I don't think the vendor of any product should have any rights to determine how it's used once the customer has paid for it.
> Isn’t it common sense to not buy a toaster expecting it to be a server even though they both have circuit boards and technically can both compute?
The key here is control, not computational power. An ideal law, in my opinion, would be one which prohibits building and selling any device that can run code in a way which allows the manufacturer to have more control over it than the legal owner after the sale has been completed. I think this idea is actually great because it never limits how limited a device can be, it just prohibits it from being made in a way in which the OEM/maker can control it more than the end user/new owner could.
As an example, say you make a "smart toaster" with Wi-Fi and all that "good stuff" in it. If you just burn the firmware into the sillicon and that program has no way of updating itself, then you're good to go because both the company and the end user are stuck with the same level of control (In this context, "control" means "ability to make the computer parts run the code that you wish them to run")
If you include the firmware in a writable EEPROM, and no further checks for the update firmware besides checksums, you're also golden, because then both the new owner and you (OEM) can exercise the same level of control over it.
If, however, you decided to include signature checking using a public key burned in the sillicon, then and only then you would be violating this hypothetical law, because that creates a situation in which you, the OEM, can exercise more control than the device's legitimate owner after purchase.
So, to summarize, from the OEM's point of view under this law, less control is good, equal control is good, more control is bad.
I think this is what should be proposed as a new bill in U.S congress, although I have to admit the Open App Markets Act serves a great purpose as of right now for some specific devices.
I think it's reasonable that if your toaster has modifyable software memory, that if that modifiable memory is locked down cryptographically, that the toaster manufacturer be required to include that cryptographic key with purchase of the toaster, yes.
We've had all these debates. It was called "TiVo". It should be illegal for manufacturers to sell hardware with capabilities specifically denied to the owner. That's not when any sane person would have thought "ownership" meant prior to 1980.
Why isn’t a toaster a general purpose computer? There are toasters with wifi, touchscreens and other functionality.
As for your car question - why not? No one would buy such a crippled device. The problem would resolve itself.
If a car manufacturer sold a car without a steering wheel that self drove, perhaps people would buy the car in spite of the limitations. What they shouldn’t do, is buy a car advertised without a steering wheel and then complain that it doesn’t have one.
Come on, to assert that a "smart toaster" is not categorically different than a laptop or a smartphone is a bad faith argument.
I think market forces don't work well in cases where you have a lot of vertical integration, and increasing consolidation.
The "just don't buy it" argument only works in a competitive market with lots of offerings. What we have in the world of computers is more of a lesser-of-a-few-evils choice in virtually every technology choice.
It's an issue given that I'd be more interested in using a Mac if I could choose which graphics card I get to use instead of perusing a pre-approved list of B-rate processing units.
Technically, if you've got the know-how, you could code your own graphics acceleration drivers for nVidia cards on MacOS, it'd just be extremely hard and expensive to do so.
You’d run into the same obstacle NVIDIA has, namely that Apple won’t sign your driver so it won’t run.
NVIDIA isn’t morally opposed to Apple, it’s largely Apple that’s opposed to NVIDIA, for reasons like the cuda ecosystem and how it locks you into something that’s not an Apple product and how that would affect Apple’s leverage in future negotiations. Apple wears the pants, not their suppliers.
