The teaser ads posted in New York showed an open lock and a headline: either "The best devices have no limits" or "Phones should be open to anything". They must have mystified a few people, but Apple fans had no doubt what they were about: Nokia was exploiting the furore over last week's iPhone firmware update. This not only plugged a bunch of security holes, it wiped out users' unapproved applications, and "bricked" some phones hacked to unlock them from AT&T.

How galling to see Nokia promoting its N Series phones with lines like: "Open to applications. Open to widgets. Open to anything. So go ahead and load it up. What it does is up to you."

But there was no deceit on Apple's part. Right from the beginning, its chief executive Steve Jobs had told Newsweek: "You don't want your phone to be an open platform," and that AT&T "doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up". (Except that AT&T encourages people to run apps on its other smart phones.)

It seems remarkable that so many people could either fail to get the message, or could somehow convince themselves that Apple didn't really mean it. The answer, I think, is that Apple has been a personal computer company for 30 years, and everybody knows you can run whatever applications you want on your own computer. The iPhone was launched at a computer event (MacWorld), it runs a computer operating system (OS X) and it does computer things like web browsing. How could it not be a computer?

Well, the fact is that Apple has launched the iPhone as an old-style locked-down system, just like it was 1999. Meanwhile the mobile phone industry is going in the opposite direction. That is partly because today's top-end smart phones are based on operating systems that originated in the computer industry, not the phone industry. Examples include Symbian (which came out of Psion), Palm, Microsoft's Windows Mobile and Linux.

Nokia has even stopped calling them phones. In its press releases, it says things like "the Nokia N95 is an all-in-one multimedia computer". Nokia also makes clear that: "Because multimedia computers have a programmable operating system, people can download and install software applications."

What seems odd is that Apple is going in the opposite direction. It has already dropped the Computer from its name, and is becoming a consumer electronics company. Yes, it still sells Mac Pro tower systems that can be expanded at will, but the bulk of Apple's computer sales are of relatively closed portables and the iMac, which is basically a large portable with the keyboard detached. The Mac mini and Apple TV designs, all the iPods and the iPhone show a company increasingly in love with sealed boxes designed for consumers, not for geeks.

Of course, this was always Steve Jobs's way. The original 1984 Mac - which succeeded Steve Wozniak's "open" Apple II design - was a sealed box with no expansion slots. It was intended to be an appliance, like a Maytag washing machine or drier. "And have you ever heard of a Maytag users group?" quipped Jobs (tinyurl.com/yu5x8l).

There's nothing wrong with this idea, of course: the number of ordinary consumers is very much bigger than the number of people who want to tinker with their systems. But Jobs may just have gone a bit too far in locking down the iPhone. This could mark the beginning of the end of the geek love affair with Apple.