I don't think so, at least not without the government imposing laws that effectively banned them.

The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations.

If restrictions on other devices become more and more severe it will eventually get to a stage where it will start to bite Joe average (It won't let him look at all those pictures of ladies doing things his wife won't, or it deleted them all because he broke some obscure clause on page 63 of the EULA).

At some point Joe runs into his nerdy friend who has a weird looking computer that can do all kinds of things Joe would love for his computer to be able to do. Supply and demand does the rest.

> The cost of building a complete computer with an ARM SOC (think raspberry pi etc) is coming down to a level where you don't have to buy your computers from mega corporations.

The Raspberry Pi is a SoC made by Broadcom, a US$7 billion/year company with 11000 employees. While admittedly this is a bit smaller than Foxconn, Lenovo, Apple, Acer, Asus, IBM, HP, or Dell, it still seems like it qualifies as a "mega corporation" to me. (The Raspberry Pi also has a circuit board and stuff, but the SoC is entirely capable of enforcing DRM on its own.)

I don't see that. Sure - popular "computers" are not fully re-programmable, but to say they will go away entirely is probably not true. There will always need to be someone that "makes the magic" and, IMHO, this cannot be done on a locked down device (nevermind the fact that developers wouldn't put up with a computer they couldn't debug).

As long as there are folks like you and I that wish to have a computer (as traditionally known) there will be vendors catering to our wishes.

I agree: someone "makes the magic". But what if it's like hydroponics and gro-lights were during the worst Federal excesses of the "Drug War"? Anyone buying a real computer (not an appliance) needs some kind of licensing and/or certification. Manufacturing real computers requires certified and licensed manufacturing and a different certification/licensing for design? The pace of progress would slow dramatically. Since fewer and fewer people get into programming, we won't have wild and crazy folks who try new and interesting things all the time. No Moxie Marlinspike. No Jeff Bezos. No Marc Andreesen. IT would become like making airplanes, hidebound, rigorously engineered by crank turning second-raters. It would never ever change, except in terms of marketing, like cigarettes.

This would be ideal for the status quo, and maybe even for a lot of consumers. It would certainly be ideal for the corporate interests, the few that survive.

And yet the airlines move a huge volume of people from point A to point B safely, reliably and inexpensively every day, at speeds and scale which would stagger the airline moguls of the 1930s.

Does that make airplane nerds like me who think the DC-3 is a good approximation of The Perfect Airplane (rugged, reliable, beautiful) sad? Sure it does. But all those passengers aren't sad. A DC-3 trip from New York to California was a bumpy, sixteen-hour flight with multiple stops for refueling. The same trip on a 757 is a smooth ride above the weather that only takes a few hours and has no stops. And it's cheaper too -- that 1930s trip would have cost more than $4,000 in today's dollars. The 757 ride costs around $550.

This is what happens when industries mature: they become safer, cheaper, and boring.

You say "mature", I say "reached the limits of efficient flight in 1963" (http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/10/12/can-we-build-a-more-...). We're nowhere near what we can do with computing, but we are with airplanes.

Safe, cheaper and boring may be an artifact of the physics of flight in Earth's atmosphere, combined with an intertwined US defense and aerospace industry. Why should we let corporate and government interests "unring" the general computing bell? Why should we let corporate and government interests stuff the genie of democratic publishing back in the lamp?

General purpose computing hardware got super cheap by way of the mass market, and mass production. General purpose programming got cheap and universally available by way of mass communication. In 1983 a C compiler on VMS cost some thousands of dollars. Today, GCC and Clang and Pcc are free, and they do optimizations that Tartan Labs could only dream about.

That's a hugely different path than the carefully-cultivated air travel industry took. I think you're underestimating the effects of the FAA and the DoD on how air travel looks today.

> But all those passengers aren't sad.

Have you looked at passengers on airplanes lately? I admit it's been a few years for me, but last I saw, airline passengers were, by and large, miserable. They can't wait to get off the airplane. They may prefer current air travel to not seeing their family or getting paid an order of magnitude less, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be happier with it if it were better. And it could be a lot better.

Just like the idea of making Raspberry Pi for as many children as possible to spur a generation of engineers, the idea that the most popular computers will be closed, will have the exact opposite effect. You don't need open computers to just be available in a tiny corner of the world, and expect big innovations from it. You need them to be available to as many people as possible.

Agreed. But in the DRM conversation, anyone having one means they can use their digital freedom to bypass DRM, the product of which could be consumed even on the hypothetical majority's closed devices.