It's not about "design", because the iPhone is perfectly capable of running arbitrary code, it just refuses to do so if you're not Apple.

The situation is such that the legal owner of the device has less power over it, post-sale, than the company that made it.

That reason alone, the imbalance of power, should be enough to support abolishing those restrictions, preferably by law.

To be clear: this is something that should be beyond market forces, and it should apply to anything that is sold to consumers and can run code. The end goal should be that no user remain less powerful, in terms of code execution and access to content, than the manufacturer.

Of course Apple doesn’t want people to use their device in a way that’s not how they designed it. They’re very anal about the user experience, they don’t want kids to install ArchLinux on their grandparents iPhones, and have the grandparents complain that their phone is shit. I get that.

Conveniently, the way they designed the phone allows them to charge 30% of every transaction that happens on the device…

But that’s beyond the point. The point is that the iphone is a capable device, that probably can run macos, and it’s a waste that we’re not allowed to.

A NAS is just an example, here's a better one; I love to use my old phones as wall mounted displays and controls for home assistant, or as remote music players plugged in to some speakers that I can hook into in music assistant. Some of my old phones are more than capable of this hardware wise but are locked to older versions of android and can't run anything built for a newer version, so they end up as ewaste intstead.

I think my next phone is going to be a fairphone or something for this reason.