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Comment by gjsman-1000 | Hacker News Reader

"I suspect that non-App Store apps for the Mac may be seeing the twilight."

What about MacOS 11 makes you think this? Literally almost nothing of consequence has changed since Catalina in OS security. Gatekeeper hasn't gotten tighter, you can still disable SIP, homebrew works great.

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The move towards "iOSing" the OS.

It won't be GateKeeper. It will be policies. They won't make it obvious at all, because they know how unpopular it will be.

Let's see what the future brings. I'm not thrilled with it (for example, I have one app that I've written, that uses ffmpeg[0], and ffmpeg no likee sandbox).

[0] https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_MediaServer

But once again, the only "iOS-ing" that has happened so far is the theme. Yes, the theme looks more iOS-like, but that's about it. There are almost no technical differences whatsoever underneath since Catalina and almost no security changes.

I know Apple fairly well. They have...control issues. They want as much control as they can get, over every aspect of the experience.

It can get stifling, but I actually support it, and it's one of the reasons that I have always had faith in the company.

The HIG (Human Interface Group) used to be nicknamed "The Blue Meanies" in the 1980s.

IIRC, the Blue Meanies were simply the System 7 core developers, not a HIG-specific group.

I recall them as the HIG group. I first encountered it at MacHack, in 1987, or so. There were a couple of HIG engineers, there, and they referred to themselves that way.

The reason was, because they insisted that app developers follow HIG guidelines.

Are you sure? The story I've always heard is that the Blue (Mac OS) vs. Pink (Taligent) team split originated in a planning meeting around 1988, and the "Blue Meanies" were core members of the Blue team.

Maybe. I just remember people referring to them as "Blue Meanies" because of the characters in The Yellow Submarine[0]. They were the ones that hated music and creativity, and folks didn't like HIG telling them they couldn't have fuschia scrollbars in their new, five-thousand-dollar color Macs.

But that said, I think you are correct[1]. The last MacHack I attended (maybe 1989?), Dean Yu hadn't yet been hired by Apple, and was infamous for writing system-crashing inits (Kill Dean's Inits!). I think he wrote the "Energizer Bunny" init that could have the EB running around every computer on the network.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Meanies_(Yellow_Submarine...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Meanies_(Apple_Computer)

Apple is the chef, and the Mac user is the frog...

Apple just started the burner to low, changing the UI only.. next phase will be to add just a little more restriction over time until one day it is iOS and most user (the ones that did not leave) did not even notice it happened.

That is how the game is played, slow methodical change.

Because they're focusing on the arch change. And the big change to end users for the arch change? iOS apps run unmodified in catalyst.

"The move towards "iOSing" the OS."

People have been claiming this for literally a decade+ now. The death of macOS is perpetually imminent.

> The death of macOS is perpetually imminent.

The same for PowerPC processors, Intel processsors, and now ARM processors.

Remember when the first rumors of Apple switching to ARM surfaced? I think it was about five years ago.

To be fair, Apple has been on its "deathbed" a hundred times, in the last three decades. I have been programming Apple since 1986. I have seen quite a bit.

To be fair, they nearly did bite the bullet until Microsoft stepped in with that loan (for entirely non altruistic reasons on their part of course).

This is true. I think they also brought stock. I wonder if MS hung onto any stock? It would have been a pretty good investment.

And we have made strides in the decade towards that then in the years prior.

Sip and custom delivery of software are increasingly difficult.

It's remarkable how overwhelmingly negative the comments on HN are to everything Apple does. The top comment is always some "this is the final straw...I'm leaving the platform" screed (if you look back, those people have usually made that declaration a dozen times), and everyone who claims anything contrary is pushed to transparent.

HN needs to go out and take a walk and get some perspective. What a bunch of sour assholes.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I have been writing Apple software since 1986. I have stuck with them through a lot of abuse.

They just turned 1.5 trillion. I don't think they are losing a whole lot of sleep over it.

Did you miss the big announcement that arm macbooks will run iOS apps unmodified?

Do you think you'll be able to run an non apple signed kernel on aarch64 macbooks?

I guess we'll find out a couple of weeks once the DTKs ship.

Maybe? The Intel DTKs had a very different boot process with a normal BIOS instead of EFI.

People have been saying that MacOS was going to be App Store only eventually for over a decade.

Mac App Store was announced in October 2010 (and released Jan 2011) so that's not yet possible, hahaha ;)

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