[DarkWiiPlayer]

Well... you can completely reprogram the device, if you have the tools and knowledge for it.

Apple has no obligation to make this process easy or even possible, and if the users still buy their products, they clearly don't care enough about these restrictions.

[alexvoda]

Not caring is precisely the problem. A problem that leads to erosion of ownership. And this leads to a form of communism. Apple, Google, etc. are in some ways similar to the state in communist regimes. They own everything but they promise to give you fair access until they don't.

[enos_feedler]

I don't think it is about "not caring". Apple cares intensely about the products they build taking into the needs of their addressable market. There are 1000s of product decisions made between inception and distribution into your hands. I don't believe that the one decision around open and free programmability of native OS-level applications has any association with ownership to them.

[alexvoda]

I am referring to the customers not caring about whether they truly own the devices they buy.

[chacha2]

How is a capitalist monopoly communism? These operating systems are the companies private property, they can do what they want with them.

The only way to prevent them is by abolishing their property and putting them in the public domain.

[alexvoda]

The software is the property of the companies of course. But the devices, once purchased are the property of the customer. However, the customer lacks full ownership of the device because the customer lacks full control over the device as long as the customer can not replace the software with other software regardless of the existence of that other software.

I own a PC I buy preinstalled with Windows because I can replace Windows with something else. As long as I can find spare parts I can make it work. Windows is just a part.

I do not fully own a device with a locked bootloader that can not be unlocked because once the vendor no longer provides updates I can not replace the broken part (software). The vendor maintains a degree of ownership over a device I purchased (applicable to phones, cars, tractors, etc.).

A capitalist monopoly is not communism. It is not what I said. I said the relationship between users and corporations (Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, MS, Tesla, John Deere, etc.) has a degree of resemblance to the relationship between citizens and the state in comunist regimes.