[PaulHoule]

It seems to me that "general purpose" was a big driver of PC's and phones.

PCs are good for word processing, games, scientific computing, tracking satellites, etc.

The appeal of a smartphone is that it replaces a dumb phone, a walkman, TV set, video game console, watch, and many other things.

[notTheAuth]

General purpose won as it was realized monolithic chips that did it all were infeasible due to manufacturing technology in the past.

Overtime the political story about market winners took over, and technology development became mired in MBA bean counting to extract wealth, as it became clear the public would happily consume what was fed them via PC screens like we did TV.

None of these textual objects or CPUs will mean anything in the future. Manufacturing technology will evolve to provide “end to end” computing gadgets, black boxes that need user interface code at most, to contextualizing outputs. We’re subsidizing a process of technical evolution at scale.

Describing this all through the words of contemporary political discourse is missing the point.