To be fair those are actively being locked down in the west as well. Google has said as much and has been moving in that direction. Apple already does that and has since day one.

Extrapolating from there says we end up in the same place, except for us it's CEOs doing it with government backing, and in China's case it's the government telling the tech companies to do it out of the gate.

Is that really any different?

The Korean tech companies are doing the same as well if you look at Samsung.

My point being that you can't trust any western corporation any more than you can trust the Chinese government. None of them are in it for consumers, all of them are using us as pawns in their stupid little fascism game.

Printer companies do it, network companies have been caught doing all kinds of shit to exfiltrate data. At this stage, the war is already over and the vast majority don't even know one happened at all. We're officially at the stage of "If you didn't build it from scratch yourself, from the natural resources all the way to final product yourself, it cannot and should not be trusted." Sadly the average user isn't even going to notice, let alone rebel against it.

I have a feeling they'd lock them down and prevent alternate os installs.

Yea, I don't know why there's a debate on this. Companies in the west try to gain favor by being loss leaders while making others dependent on their tech. Then slowly turn the evil dial. Chinese companies don't seem to give a fuck if you find a root kit in their first release.

I just hope CCP sees what their open source AI models are doing for their goodwill and try to push their companies in that direction with other stuff. It won't last but we'll at least have some competition.

They probably won't but one can dream.