I would argue this is 100% false. They are general-purpose computing devices! The only reason why people think they're not is because they're locked down.
Apple got away with it so Google did the same. Yet there's really no reason why these devices should be locked down the way they are. It should be much easier to take control of our phones than it currently is and I'd argue that with the recent EU decisions regarding app stores we're about to get just a tiny little taste of what these general-purpose computers in our pockets could be.
If we arbitrarily classify things based on what we desire instead of how they are brought to market, we might as well stop classifying things at all.
As for 'general-purpose computers in our pockets', they exist, and they are brought to market as such for about two decades. They did however not turn out to be useful or viable.
Blackberry phones were sort of similar, but as enterprise-first devices they always had a reputation of being mostly a work email device, not personal. They still had filesystem access and microSD expandability though.
They didn't have a "glass slab" style phone until literally every other phone had been like that for years and years. They were also late to the game with cameras, IMUs, and other hardware features that we've all come to take for granted.
My guess: They listened too much to their enterprise customers. Enterprise customers have very, very specific needs that are essentially the opposite of "general purpose" that would translate into useful features for anyone else.
They didn't even try to innovate!
What the market was saying in 2008 was it didn't actually give a shit about BES, didn't give a shit about BBM, software keyboards were fine if they didn't suck, and real browsers on phones were important.
Instead of really listening to the market RIM just kept making the same devices as before. The iPhone and even early Android phones blew the doors off BlackBerries. By the time RIM decided to join the rest of the world it was too late. They were releasing devices in 2010 that couldn't compete with iPhones and Androids from 2008. The BlackBerries were up against the iPhone 4 by 2010, they were a joke in comparison.
I went from a BlackBerry Pearl to the first iPhone. Even in the admittedly early state of iOS 1.0 it was vastly superior to the Pearl. It wasn't even funny how much better of a device it was. Every iPhone after that just increased that gap over whatever RIM was selling.
Huh? Apple chips are not Turing-complete? Or are they "not general purpose computing devices" because Apple would like us to believe so?
HTML+CSS is considered Turing complete [0], but we wouldn't call that a complete GPC environment.
[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2497146/is-css-turing-co...
Apple is selling a system made of a combination of hardware they make and the software running on top of it.
It's just a combination of hardware and software running on top of it
In a sense they have been doing that to themselves by not knowing how it works, or how to write code, which already restricts them to things other people made.
They then further restricted themselves by migrating most of their work to mobile devices that run software that only the vendor realistically can be in charge of (mostly due to NDAs for the IP Cores like baseband and SoC, but the amount of kernel patches you get with Android hardware is insane... good luck trying to get a recent kernel for those).
As a result, there are mostly behaviour based problems that remain, most technical problems have disappeared. That is an effect (and limitation) that we cannot deny.
They tried, but completely failed competing with the jaws that were a) Apple taking all the profits at the top and b) Android taking the rest of the market
These smartphone providers had to compete on both fronts and it was too much for them (even for Microsoft).
The iPhone in 2007 was like alien technology compared to anything released before then (and I was a skeptic).
We could re-qualify mobile phones as general purpose devices (which technically they could be but in reality they are not), that would make the parallels much closer, and we could also have the service ecosystem made non-optional (it still is optional) to make it a bundled requirement, that would make the parallels even closer.
Other than that, the landscape and context have drastically changed, especially when it comes to presence, attention, personal attachment and the abuse of all of that (addition, mass media consumption, personal information that gets stolen or mined, attacks on devices that have a real world impact). So even if we were to make it just a browser war it wouldn't really be the same.
It's a shame Palm, RIM, Microsoft and Nokia are no longer playing the same game, it would have been interesting to see what their take on the market would be. Considering all of their hardware and software had the exact same model (release it as an appliance, all software and in some cases all traffic goes through them), it would have allowed more people to have some perspective.