alt Hacker NewsThe reason (or, depending on your inclinations, the excuse) for trusted computing to exist is not to guarantee that I didn’t patch the bootloader of the phone on which I type my comment; it’s to guarantee I didn’t patch the bootloader of the phone on which your grandma logs in to her bank without her knowledge.
No, the reason is to let application providers decide which platforms you can run their software on. The reasons why they need that are diverse: DRM, preventing reverse engineering, shifting liability, "cheating" prevention - to name a few, but ultimately they're all about asserting control over the user, just motivated differently in various use cases. "Think of the grandmas".