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What Happened To Running What You Wanted On Your Own Machine? (hackaday.com)

submitted 1 week ago by cm0002@lemmy.zip to c/privacy@programming.dev

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When the microcomputer first landed in homes some forty years ago, it came with a simple freedom—you could run whatever software you could get your hands on. Floppy disk from a friend? Pop it in. Shareware demo downloaded from a BBS? Go ahead! Dodgy code you wrote yourself at 2 AM? Absolutely. The computer you bought was yours. It would run whatever you told it to run, and ask no questions.

Today, that freedom is dying. What’s worse, is it’s happening so gradually that most people haven’t noticed we’re already halfway into the coffin.

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[–] buddascrayon@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

There will always be a niche market for independent PC builders. This article pertains more to the smartphone market which have extremely proprietary hardware. I suspect that with Google locking down android, a niche market for non-Android/iOS phones will emerge.

Just look at the LibrePhone project and GrapheneOS announced a partnership with a major phone manufacturer to design a phone around their specifications.

So long as there is a market for such things, alternatives will exist.

Though, the caveat here is that the price of phones not produced with a partial purpose of collecting user data will be quite a bit more expensive than the mainstream phones that give discounts just to get their phones into the hands of consumers on whom they make most of their money trading user data out the back end.