I mean, don't threaten me with a good time.

The Wii U and 3DS are both excellent emulators for a number of different systems once they've been rooted, and arbitrary platform exclusivity (especially with Nintendo) is a huge issue for game access and game preservation, particularly for games on discontinued systems. Emulation/portability helps with all of that, even when it's not officially supported.

There are potentially console-specific economic reasons why we might not want to give people the freedom to root their own consoles without exploits, but importantly those are pretty console-specific. The economics of profitability for game manufacturers are pretty much the only good argument for letting consoles be so locked down, and I'm not 100% convinced even they are a good justification. But regardless of whether or not they're a good justification, they don't really apply to iPhones, products that aren't sold at a loss and don't base their entire model around recouping costs through software sales.

And absent those economic arguments, of course it would be good to allow users to load homebrew onto consoles and/or to install emulators that allow loading games from other consoles. It would be wild for anyone to look at forcibly, artificially tying games/software to a specific piece of hardware with a limited lifetime and limited availability, and view that as anything other than at best a necessary evil.

Unequivocal yes

If Playstation is a cheaper source of compute power than consumer hardware, the customer should be able to turn it into a compute cluster, as many people did (1). That doesn't mean Sony has to provide support or warranty for it, it means they shouldn't raise intentional obstructions in the way

(1) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

Yes, of course? It's ridiculously wasteful (both economically and ecologically) that you have to buy what's basically the same computer 4 times to access the full library of "current" releases.

Sony should have the choice of compiling a game that accesses all features of the hardware and software that other game publishers and Nintendo does, Somy should be able tk publish it under their own brand and simply make the business choice not to, and the consumer should have the choice of using it

The issue would be Nintendo shutting off access to a subset of hardware features except for themselves for no reason other than Sony not being able to publish a functioning game or other software

Of course. There is no such thing as a "playstation game" or a "nintendo game". It's just software running on computers which can technically run anything. Nobody cares about some company's artificial "platform". Creating these "platforms" should be considered illegal rent seeking.

You can already play unlicensed games on Nintendo and Sony systems.

And developers don't have to sell through the Sony or Nintendo stores; they can sell through their own store, or through physical retailers.

So, in other words nothing at all like the Apple app ecosystem.

> Imagine if an user of a Visa credit card must be allowed to use the same magnetic stripe on the Mastercard network. Do you support that? How is Apple doing anything different?

Erm, the EU has pretty much already done that. Payment networks must support competitors running over their terminals and network for a fair price.

Go lookup up EuroPay, didn’t quite pan out how the EU expected. But if you wanna start a new payment network in the EU, MasterCard must help you out.

A Visa card and an iPhone are such different products that it’s hard to know where to even begin describing the difference.

There's a duopoly (Apple/Google) in the smartphone market, that's not a healthy market.

> If that's a terrible idea (and I agree it is!) then people won't buy them, and Tesla would have to change.

What if it's a terrible idea, but is outweighed by other good decisions Tesla makes? Should they be encouraged to ruin things just enough that it's still worth buying their products? As long as the ppm is just above lethal limits, does it matter who is poisoning the well?