alt Hacker News> it's not the hardware but rather Apple's operating system software which is restricting what software applications can run on your device
I disagree - the restrictions also apply at the hardware level. The entire boot process is locked down to prevent people from running their own OS on the hardware. It's nothing like Macs where Asahi Linux exists as an option. If anyone ever discovered how to bypass the restrictions you can count on Apple to fix it.
With respect to allowing people to run their own OS, if you read my post in full, you’d see that we are in complete agreement.
But it’s pretty unambiguous that any restrictions are software, not hardware. It’s just lower level software that runs earlier in the boot/system bring-up process.