Surely there’s a difference between hardware being a locked down appliance and… well, a more generic computation device.

I think the argument is that Apple or even any company that makes Android phones could choose to have an open bootloader (and maybe some driver stuff) and normally that wouldn’t really offend any government, while also giving the users more freedoms.

Otherwise, what’s next, PCs that only run Windows and only allow Edge as the browser and force the telemetry on?