This very much depends. Are there technical ways to restore this? Something like a jumper to make the flash storage writable. This would be possible with access to the firmware source code. So yeah, they can fix it themselves. Who is responsible? If the device is bricked after this: the company.
Build locked up products? Die.
Build in fuses? Better make those chips accessible by providing the plans to build them, otherwise refund your customers and die. Now everyone can build them, this won't be a monopoly and everyone wins.
It doesn't matter if they care about this. They are too dumb to do anything about it anyway. They still can get to take advantage of this. Most notable would be that stuff like "bank apps only through play/apple store" would be much harder to pull of.
Woah, how are there not the bloody remains of the bosses strung across the streets? That would happen to me once, then I would be in literal prison. Seems like a nicer place than THAT anyway.
What are some of your friends hobbies? Sometimes it just takes time to evaluate the people around oneself. A hobby to keep the friend occupied while also offering the friend a platform to talk about could help.
Books? -> Read in front of others (maybe to them?) in some discussion rounds (book club?).
I guess they don't like sports in teams, but what about sports in parallel, like biking groups? Driving through the mountains with some people.
Computers? The CCC, makerspaces, stuff like that. Go over on a visiting day, introduce yourself and talk/build/program.
Those meeting's successes heavily depend on the chemistry between the people involved, which can change overtime. Either they get to know each other better and begin to understand each other, or the friend meets different people in the chosen place.
If nothing works, then it can be repeated in a different club/city. There has to be someone interesting around for them.
That sounds like a cool idea. What are the plannings around this? Do they meet at a bar, a restaurant, some community hall? Are there people overseeing this? How much do they interfere? Are there transports organized? Is there food and drinks? Are they offered free-of-charge, at-cost, or with profit? Is alcohol involved? Coffee? Do they mix the groups?
The kind of control we are talking about are different. You look at the law, in which I have only little trust, while I look at the ability to manipulate the hardware.
So no, they do not have control over the hardware, they just don't care that much. They do care if they are inconvenienced in any way, say by a service that disallows some parts that were previously offered. They don't understand and don't care, but they do win from some more control over their stuff.
I already live without any of the services you mentioned, I suspect most of Lemmy do. Well, not without YouTube (for me), I guess, but that gets more and more replaced by stuff like peertube.
Millions of Americans would still only occasionally visit those things if they had more options to plan their recreational time. Those options are mostly limited by less free time available while also having less money available. In that regard, and mostly limited to that regard, was then better than now.
All power to the users. And I do mean ALL. Complete control over cellular modems for one. Control over every little bit of hardware in the consumers hands.
That includes warranty promises, that includes schematics, source code for firmware, everything. For all current, past and future devices.
Not an american, but bottling something up means more like keeping something inside oneself. Like a wish, or trauma.