I didn't say they invented the walled garden. I said Apple made it acceptable and successful for general purpose computing. "I can't use Firefox on my phone" doesn't quite have the same ring as "I can't use Firefox on my Switch".
Ask yourself who was the adversary for this DRM model? Game console lockdowns were built to target publishers. Mobile lockdowns are squarely targeted at users. Both are bad but the implications, magnitude, and overall consequences are very different, IMO.
> I said Apple made it acceptable and successful for general purpose computing.
So why did Windows Phone fail as a walled garden?
I'd say that it was because of Google's fraudulent promise that Android would be the platform that allowed users to run anything they liked. Google traded false promises of "openness" for market share.
(As well as Google using it's internet video monopoly as an anticompetitive weapon to prevent Windows Phone from having a YouTube client)
Why did Windows RT fail in the tablet market if walled gardens were so acceptable?
It turns out that users were perfectly capable of rejecting walled garden platforms even after the iPhone.
Your average person who wants to use Snapchat, if given a choice between a phone that runs Snapchat versus one that doesn’t, simply chooses the one that can. (Windows Phone never had Snapchat.)
Same with Photoshop. Neither Windows Phone or RT had any software support. It’s like buying a game console with no games — what’s the point?
No regular person even knows what a walled garden is. It’s not a decision factor.
By that logic, Windows RT/Windows Phone should have succeeded since they supported running versions of Microsoft Office and the other platforms did not.
Microsoft's Xbox walled garden predates the iPhone by over half a decade.
Apple didn't invent walled gardens, and consumers are not forced to buy into walled gardens.
Microsoft attempted to create Windows Phone and Windows RT on the original Surface tablet as walled garden platforms and consumers rejected both.