> Apple has gone in the direction of net appliances
I agree that, with "Apple Silicon", they have left behind anything that could reasonably be traced back to the "openness" of old desktop computers.
New Apple systems are locked down from the silicon up, and you only get to do what Apple lets you do. As the Star Wars quote goes, "Pray I do not alter [the deal] further".
Sure, some people have managed to boot Linux on the ARM cores of the M1, but it's about as useful as pitching a tent in a corner of a stadium and declaring it useable housing. There is so much on the SoC that's closed and out of reach that I can only see the effort as misguided.
That's what I've heard about UEFI, TPM and Windows Vista too, yet people are happily building their own PCs and merrily running all kinds of software and operating systems on them. Others are buying heavily locked down iDevices [1] and are happy with them too. ยด
People that want openness and the freedom to tinker with their own devices will always find a way to do so, moving away from systems that inhibit their efforts (or just breaking them open, getting people interested in reverse engineering, an invaluable skill even as an open source developer). Others that don't care will continue to not care and buy the system that best fits their needs.
I think it's almost an egocentric worldview to demand that everybody use an open system even if they have no desire to make use of that openness whatsoever at best, and see it as a security/complexity risk at worst.
[1] By the way, both iOS and Android can run a full Linux userspace today!
> iOS [...] can run a full Linux userspace today!
Presumably you mean iPhones/iPad/etc hardware rather than the iOS operating system? Although I guess there are VM tools for iOS now?