Thanks for your reply. I feel there’s so much blurriness between our devices and the cloud that this distinction everyone is trying to make is nice in principle but pointless in reality. Additionally, feeling betrayed by yet another corporation is an all too common emotion. Apple is no different and not a lot better than others.
Jerry
Agreed. This reminds me of the right to repair argument. John Deer claims that they own the software on the tractor even though you own the tractor itself. The problem is that the software is needed for the tractor to run properly. We need our laws to keep pace with technology.
Software is licensed while hardware is owned. This is true on the iPhone and PCs and tractors. For right to repair, there’s also the question of who can access your cars telemetry data for diagnostic purposes. And who can gain access to your vehicles control systems remotely. This is more of an API licensing question than even a hardware vs software question.
Jerry
It is interesting, in 2019, I did a tour with Xing (a German equivalent to LinkedIn) of the Amazone factory near us. This was the factory, where they make the large fertilizer sprayers, the ones with the long arms that open up to take up 30-40M across the field, as well as smaller models.
I was talking to the general manager of the facility and asked him about the right to repair and John Deere. He actually didn’t know anything about their tactics. His question to me was, “why would we do something like that? It would just upset our customers and we would lose business!”
That’s not a surprising response from a hardware manufacturer. I don’t want to over-generalize, but my experience working for Nokia as head of their browser development taught me that organizations that start with success making hardware products have a difficult time treating software as anything other than a separate isolated component. The right to repair question is more complex than just a matter of whether small autobody shops have the right to access a vehicle’s data port when its owner brings it in for repair. Manufacturers are introducing the ability to stream the vehicle’s telemetry data to cloud-based servers, sometimes including GPS data. This ability opens up the possibility of real-time diagnostics and recommendations for repair service centers. This dynamic ecosystem has the very real possibility of crowding out the small repair shops while also introducing cybersecurity and data privacy problems. Not to mention access to a vehicle’s control systems via API. Software complicates just about everything it touches. 
Jerry