> Except for a handful of very over-priced models that I can't afford to buy, our computers are increasingly designed to be little more than advertising platfor

> Except for a handful of very over-priced models that I can't afford to buy, our computers are increasingly designed to be little more than advertising platforms and vehicles for maximizing the cloud revenues of their true owners. I don't quite get what the author is talking about. There are some concerns about what proprietary BIOS firmware does, but otherwise pretty much any PC on the market can run whatever software (including the OS) the user installs on them. Or can the author only afford a smartphone?