Steve Jobs envisioned the Apple Macintosh as a personal appliance - locked down, no expandability. But with only 128KB or even 512KB, the computer couldn't do a whole lot. Once Jobs left Apple, management expanded the Mac's features.
When Jobs acquired Apple, his vision of computing appliances was restarted - iPod, iPhone, et al. They have a lot more functionality, but the iOS walled garden keeps enough of the users happy - at least in the Silicon Valley/USA.
Look at early 20th-century Sears-Roebuck shopping catalogs online - one of the pages showed a hand-sized motor and the various attachments one could buy to attach to it - want a blender - get the motor and the blender attachment, et al.
An early 20th-century motor-based ecosystem similar to the battery-powered power tools you see today.
Eventually the idea of a generic motor that gets specialized with whatever particular attachment you want was refined to combine a motor and each particular attachment into its own separate integrated device - no swapping of motor and attachment anymore. There are pros and cons to both systems, but the integrated specialized appliance approach won for the most part.
> When Jobs acquired Apple, his vision of computing appliances was restarted - iPod, iPhone, et al. They have a lot more functionality, but the iOS walled garden keeps enough of the users happy - at least in the Silicon Valley/USA.
This sentence is backwards. About the only users not happy with the iPad as computing appliance are the ones in Silicon Valley USA or drinking its "car makers should design for garage mechanics not for driving" koolaid. (Commenters here, for instance.)
If you accept the premise the best tech disappears behind "the job to be done" for users, if you acknowledge driving is not about tinkering under the hood, to run an errand a driver shouldn't need to even know how it works under the hood, and most drivers are better off picking up groceries or kids or traveling, not ever opening the hood, then you will have a better time making cars for the drivers who buy Apple because it's an appliance farther along the novel engineering utility curve, where tinkerability is for engineers, utility is for users, and most users are not mechanics.
See also this, on Apple's "brand promise" and the EU's DMA:
They sold about $30B in Macs last year. If you're going to claim they aren't general purpose computing devices, you're operating under a different definition than just about anybody else.
I mean Asahi Linux works really well on many versions of Apple Silicon these days, you're definitely moving goalposts if you're saying that a MacBook isn't a general purpose device.
Just to be clear, I was saying that MacBooks are general purpose computing devices. I was disputing that the level of sales of a device has anything to do with whether or not the device is general purpose or not.
