Not sure if having the public consciousness think of these devices differently would help to stop the gross freedom violations they impose. Even traditional IBM PCs are trending towards draconian lockdown to one OS with an extraordinary amount of proprietary code run in firmware and even in the CPU itself, much like how cellular modems (and SSD controllers) work.

It is more that the broad userbase doesn't care, and there isn't enough "putting money where your mouth is" to get good economies of scale on freedom respecting computer hardware, regardless of form factor.

So the lockdown of "phones" is more a symptom of broad technological illiteracy rather than a cause.