I genuinely don't see the confusion here. It's totally feasible to make special purpose devices with general purpose HW and SW. In fact, it's totally feasible

I genuinely don't see the confusion here. It's totally feasible to make special purpose devices with general purpose HW and SW. In fact, it's totally feasible and common mainly because of costs. Just think about what happens if people classify devices according to your rules. Some fridges are going to be classified as a general purpose device because, guess what, they run Linux the general purpose operating system on general purpose ARM CPUs. > Tesla, Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, Samsung TV, Sony Camera They're not all intended to be used for personal computing. Are you going to replace your smartphone with any of these devices? > If I understand you right, you're saying it's fine for Playstations etc to be restricted in what software they can run I'm not "fine" with it, and I wish Sony hasn't done that. However, restrictions on a gaming console doesn't warrant the same level of attention as it does for a smartphone.