> It was also dangerous for your PC: as soon as people ceded the ability to led their parties control what we run on our devices--such as by "only firmware signed by Apple can run on my phone"--we lost this war.
If that's how "we lost this war", then it was lost before it even started. Even before Apple released their phones, it was already the case that phone firmware came only from the phone manufacturer. That is: phones come from a different lineage than PCs, and were never as open as general purpose computers ended up being.
I mean, those were by and large fixed function devices and while phone calls are certainly a form of communication they aren't really networked devices. And... while it was technically possible to update the software on them, most people never did.
There were only a scant handful of years where there even existed phones where this could matter... but now this same mentality is being applied to every new category of device--all of which acting as general computing devices--based on these precedents.
If that's how "we lost this war", then it was lost before it even started. Even before Apple released their phones, it was already the case that phone firmware came only from the phone manufacturer. That is: phones come from a different lineage than PCs, and were never as open as general purpose computers ended up being.