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Comment by clusterfish | Hacker News Reader

"A general purpose computer is a computer that is designed to be able to carry out many different tasks."

"There's an app for that"

Seems pretty straightforward that they did. Them doing their best to lock down the ecosystem for profit does not make the device non-general-purpose.

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There is literally no legal distinction whatsoever between general-purpose devices and non-general-purpose devices. I don't know where this legal myth on HN came from, but there's no law anywhere saying Apple has to be one or the other, or that marketing has anything to do with what a device should be allowed or not allowed to do, nor does the law define these terms anywhere.

Nobody's saying that this has anything to do with legality under current laws. Neither does whataboutism that this is usually in response to, for the record.

The part of the “general purpose computer” that Apple does not display in its iPhone marketing is the “computer” part including the original “there’s an app for that” commercial. Arguably also the “general purpose” part in that a general purpose computer will run any calculable task, and App Store + OS policies prevent this or at least make it difficult and the messaging around this also comes out of their crack marketing team. Feet to the fire, Apple would probably call iPhones pachinko machines before they ever called them general purpose computers in any part of their marketing.

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