Smartphones vs Game Consoles

Video game consoles are seen by most people, and marketed by their manufacturers, as appliances for playing video games. iPhones and iPads, on the other hand, are seen and marketed as general-purpose computing/communication devices. It's unprecedented for such a non-appliance to be locked down like this.

Game consoles are not general purpose computing devices. People do not buy Xboxes with the expectation of running Photoshop. But people buy smartphones with the expectation of being able to use smartphone peripherals.

The only reason PlayStation and Xbox aren’t general computing platforms is by choice. They are still computers with CPUS, hard drives and RAM. Users can watch Netflix, browse the web and consume content just like you would on an iPhone. I think this idea that because iPhones are “general computing devices” they should be held to a different standard is absurd. You can’t pick and choose how one platform operates while ignoring how other platforms have the same arbitrary restrictions.

The latest Xbox and PlayStation are literally just AMD PCs that support connecting a keyboard and mouse if you have one (and the Xbox running a locked down version of Windows ripe with APIs explicitly made to have general purpose apps run without rewrite from standard Windows even!) - the only thing not making them a general purpose computing device is the restrictions on what you can run. That the restrictions don't let you run general purpose computing isn't reasoning on why the rest

Game consoles should be considered appliances, phones as general purpose computing devices.

Whenever someone brings up this nebulous "General Purpose Computer" concept, I challenge them to articulate what makes a phone a general purpose computer, but not a game console. So far I haven't heard a convincing answer. They both have CPUs and typical computer architectures, and can run a wide variety of software. Surely the intention of both smartphone makers and game console makers is that their devices are not made for a "general" purpose, and that (so far)

So a “cell phone” is a “general purpose computing device” but a console isn’t?

Microsoft already made the claim that smartphones are general purpose computing devices, while a game console is single use one that justifies their walled garden.

What makes a phone a "general-purpose computing platform" that is also not true for game consoles? They seem the same to me: They both have general purpose processors which -can- run arbitrary programs, but the owners of their ecosystems choose to limit what is allowed to run on them. If one is a "general-purpose computing platform" then the other must be, and vice versa.

"It's no different than consoles" is a pretty strong statement to make unsupported. There are many differences. You can make a more direct comparison between say, an iPhone and a game console, but a general-purpose laptop or desktop has very many differences from a game console, and ought to.