I wonder if gaming consoles had a big hand in this? Going back to Atari pong in the early/mid 70's and I don't recall if any of the major players (Magnavox, Atari, Coleco, Sears) included anything close to schematics.
It was mostly the mobile revolution. Consoles were always considered something separate from computers. It was phones that normalized not only locked down OSes but surveillance as a normal thing.
I remember in the late 2000s hating everything about the mobile revolution and predicting where it would go. I was mostly right but wow did people ever think I was nuts. Tech groupthink back then was the literal phrase “mobile is the future” repeated like something out of a political talking points memo.
What I got wrong was underestimating how evil social media would become. I never imagined how addictive it could be made or how toxic the content would get, or how it would help re-mainstream a whole raft of horrible ideologies. The addiction factor and brain dead content machine really hit with mobile too, so it’s not unrelated. Something about that little screen that is always there and swiping to scroll seems to facilitate addiction better than a PC or laptop screen.
Agree with everything you said, but what bugs me most is that I like computers, and phones are computers but they're designed for people who don't like computers, so they pretend not to be computers. Worse, those same ideas have infected the desktop too.
The Atari 400/800 computers had available as an extra cost purchase (IIRC about $20 in 1984 dollars) a "technical reference manual" that included full schematics for the computers, a printout of the 6502 assembly for the ROM OS, and a lot of narrative describing technical aspects of the computers.
So for at least Atari, and at least with the 400/800 computers, they did release the information. For an extra cost, but it was released.
> Very large-scale integration (VLSI) is the process of creating an integrated circuit (IC) by combining millions or billions of MOS transistors onto a single chip. VLSI began in the 1970s when MOS integrated circuit (Metal Oxide Semiconductor) chips were developed and then widely adopted, enabling complex semiconductor and telecommunication technologies. The microprocessor and memory chips are VLSI devices.
> Before the introduction of VLSI technology, most ICs had a limited set of functions they could perform. An electronic circuit might consist of a CPU, ROM, RAM and other glue logic. VLSI enables IC designers to add all of these into one chip.
