> It was also dangerous for your PC: as soon as people ceded the ability to led their parties control what we run on our devices--such as by "only firmware signed by Apple can run on my phone"--we lost this war.
If that's how "we lost this war", then it was lost before it even started. Even before Apple released their phones, it was already the case that phone firmware came only from the phone manufacturer. That is: phones come from a different lineage than PCs, and were never as open as general purpose computers ended up being.