Which is similarly unacceptable, you own it, you decide what runs on it. Madness that it could ever come to this.
A curation service that forbids people from using competing services (or making their own decisions without any curator) is a monopolist trying to control a new market.
edit:
A manufacturer looses control of their product after the first sale[1].
If you don’t like Apple’s policies you are free to buy an Android device.
The free market is great isn’t it? It’s surprising what intelligent people can do without giving the government more power.
Alan Turing and Alanzo Church.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church%E2%80%93Turing_thesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_completeness
However, my use of the term is an explicit (my previous [2]) reference to these important talks by Cory Doctorow about the War on General Purpose Computing, which I strongly recommend watching/reading:
I wonder how difficult it would be to make a purely electromechanical decision table. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_table )
You can implement the entire relational model with about 8 operators and graph transformations, mostly distribution. You can add math functions as virtual tables, e.g. join against the times table to do multiplciation.
I wrote a paper on how this works, and while it was about ten years ago, I'm pretty sure you could do the algebraic transformations needed with just a stack, so I think you could do it with a finite state automata.
But see my response to myself.
[1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/t-sql/queries/with-comm...
The relational model is hugely expressive, and yet it is not Turing complete. So you have something that is plainly general purpose, but would be exempt from such a law.
That you can modify the relational model to make it Turing complete is irrelevant, it's already hugely expressive.
And that you'd typically run it on a machine that is Turing complete doesn't save you. If a manufacturer wanted to bypass that restriction, they'd design a system that is entirely dedicated to it.
They are general purpose computers; this does apply to most products with a processor. However, there are practical differences in what you can implement on an iPhone compared to a tiny embedded CPU with a few kB or MB of RAM.
> Apple isn’t selling a device that you can do with as you please
Transferring ownership of property is the very definition of "selling" something. If Apple want to restrict what people do with their device, they shouldn't be selling it. They can rent/license it, and a very different set of laws would apply.
> If you don’t like Apple’s policies you are free to buy an Android device.
I am also free to use the goods I bought in violation of those policies. That's what it means to own something.
> giving the government more power.
Who is giving the government which new powers? I'm talking about basic property rights.
So by that standard, an Apple //e with 128KB of RAM and 1Mhz processor wasn’t a general purpose computer?
Transferring ownership of property is the very definition of "selling" something. If Apple want to restrict what people do with their device, they shouldn't be selling it. They can rent/license it, and a very different set of laws would apply
So does the same rule apply to game consoles? My TV with an embedded Roku?
Whilst you might buy the phone, I believe you effectively "rent/license" iOS, no? Which means Apple are restricting not what you do with "your device" but "their OS". No ownership of iOS has been transferred.
(I know the two are intimately tangled and this is nitpicking but we're well into the legal nitpicking weeds here.)
You have a much greater ability to inspect any code / processes that run on a general purpose computer running Windows and the like. With an iOS device, you have it on trust that the app isn’t doing anything nefarious. In that context, Apple’s role as benevolent guardian as to what is and isn’t allowed makes more sense.
[1] "Which is similarly unacceptable, you own it, you decide what runs on it. Madness that it could ever come to this."