This is just disgusting. How in the world did our hardware get hijacked by MS and nobody anywhere did anything to stop it? Seriously! I can only hope that there's enough backlash to stop this mockery of consumer freedom to put things back to the way they are now.

Apple and smartphone manufacturers started the locked down hardware trend, Microsoft are riding their coat tails to achieve what they've wanted all along.

To be fair, these standards aren't controlled by Microsoft, but they've thrown their weight at the manufacturers to make sure the standards are implemented in a way which grossly favours them as the PC OS incumbent.

But they are using the recent success of Apple & co in consumer circles to diminish the appearance of their monopoly and make it look as if choices abound to the consumer.

Locked down hardware started long before smartphones and Apple were even thought of.

Yes, but Apple was the first to make lockdown an acceptable, or even desirable, thing for general-purpose consumer computing devices on a large scale. The idea was around, and implemented in a number of places (especially on phones), but Apple was the first to pull the marketing trick of getting the world to accept or welcome it in a domain thought of as computing rather than peripheral or special-purpose devices.