>There are plenty of other devices out there that will run other software, you can buy one of those if you want to run other software - our devices are designed to only run our software, and we're only going to support tha

except in about a hundred million examples where the niche software that is running on the niche hardware has no viable alternative.

In The Real World when you have a component that breaks somewhere, and the manufacturer of the thing either fails to help or no longer exists you contract a third party to retrofit a repair module of some sort, or you do the work yourself to get the thing working.

How does this principle apply when the producer of the thing booby traps it with encryption and circuit breakers?

Software is special, comparing it to other industries never works well.