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Comment by vosper | Hacker News Reader

> Apple clearly does not want you to have a general-purpose computer

Can you explain the existence of the MacBook, iMac, Mac Mini, and Mac Pro?

They have been working on locking those down too, even before they announced the switch to ARM, which will continue this trend.

People have been this since Apple first launched the iOS app store. It plays well on message boards. So far, it has done a terrible job of describing reality.

They are boiling the frog slowly. The T2, app notorization and kext depreciation are steps towards locking the device down. Combined with the iPhone-ification of their hardware I see the Mac becoming more like the iPad than the iPad becoming a general purpose computer.

I'd call it a "not great" job at describing reality–Macs today are certainly more locked-down than they were five or ten years ago, but I think it would be unfair to compare them to iOS right now.

I'm gonna need actual examples.

There is nothing on my Mac that prevents me from downloading and running absolutely anything I want, or from writing my own software and running it.

By default, there are security guardrails in place that you have to turn off (one click!), but I 100% support measures like this. It means it's harder for nontechnical people get duped into running nefarious code, but creates no meaningful roadblock to people like HN readers who quite reasonably want to do whatever the hell they like with their computers.

Give it a few more years. They're working on it. They've already done Gatekeeper, SIP, removal of kexts, making the root partition read-only every boot even if you turn off SIP, etc.

What was that little storm a few months back where they turned on code signature checking on shell scripts? One could just imagine the final step is you have to have a developer license to run your own code.

Source? Can't find a HN submission regarding this, and the most I found via Google is this question on the Apple developer forums https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/127709.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273247

This has driven me insane in 10.15.7. If my ISP has intermittent connectivity, macOS starts beach balling. To prevent this I have to shut off internet.

The catch?

Shutting down the network requires suffering through multiple beach balls. Every single mouse click or key press invokes a beach ball. Everything goes away the moment internet is connected.

That's the story.

It's funny because the Mac was introduced with a 1984 theme about PC as a uniform experience controlled by central authority and here we are.

Epic Games had some fun mocking that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqTNO8LTggI

They restrict user with every new macOS release.

Nope.

What do you think MacBooks will look like in 5 years? From tomorrow they will already be able to run iOS apps.

Legacy stuff that they are currently eroding. They invalidated (or threatened to) developer signatures on Desktop/Laptop that were supposed to be 100% about security over an iOS business dispute.

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