i think they will. or worse yet they can make it without bios at all just device tree and all that garbage that phones do. then make it subsction based,filled with ai,cloud streamed only. no apps outside store. but thats too much orwellian stuff for now,i think what will happen is the locking bios thing for now.
what do you think?
Only if Microsoft acquires a major CPU chipmaker. There has to be a lot of vertical integration under one company, the way it is with Apple products. Otherwise there are other OS like Linux that comprise enough of the market to ensure there will always be an unlocked BIOS option.
Doesn’t matter, Microsoft already sell computers, i.e. Surface. One can still buy computers from other manufacturers. They can buy an instance of the entire stack (pretty much as Apple did) and there would still be alternatives.
I want to push back on this part:
In the USA, and other parts of the world, a small number of Billionaires are buying up everything. A small number of wealthy people could each own a part of the supply chain and for it on the vast majority.
For extra enforcement, add in a legal or cultural push for reporting or shunning violators through the media companies owned by that same group.
They make their own ARM silicon for datacenters, hypothetically they could just scale that down for consumer devices and there’s your vertical integration.
Conversely if Apple ever wants to enter the datacenter market, they could scale their M-series silicon up to meet that industry’s demands as well.