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Comment by fennecfoxen | Hacker News Reader

Dude. We know how the iPhone works. It's easy to see Apple starting to bring the same sort of model to the MacBook. We're not blind. We can see where this is going, even if it's not there yet, and make reasonably informed guesses about what it's going to be like.

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A phone and a laptop are two different things, and it makes sense to lock down one in a way that it doesn't make sense to lock down the other. There is no indication that Apple doesn't understand that.

What I see with App Store sandboxing is a way to allow people to more easily try and buy apps without worrying what those apps are doing to their computer. I'm very careful about downloading and trying apps on my Mac because I don't know what files they're going to leave around on my computer or worse. Sandboxing in the App Store is a great way to make that situation better.

A phone and a tablet are two different things, and it makes sense to lock down one in a way that it doesn't make sense to lock down the other. There is no indication that Apple doesn't understand that...

Except a tablet is just a big phone...

Well, you can also just watch the derivative? When's the last time the OS had a major feature that was aimed at developers? I remember the early OS X releases coming out with advance after advance. The rumored ZFS integration was the peak of this awesomeness... At least dtrace was integrated.

The last thing I've seen is transparently compressed files; not exactly exciting. I think we hit the peak around the leopard-snow leopard range.

XCode 4.x. Still crappy, but way better than Xcode 3.x. LLVM. Continuous improvements to the Obj-C 2.0 runtime like tagged pointers and Automatic Reference Counting. Versions, iCloud, and associated APIs for document persistence. MacRuby framework.

You mean like the TONS of new APIs in Lion? Like the new majorly-overhauled XCode? The new LLVM/Obj-C features like ARC?

If the App store becomes the only way to install applications, then its back to linux for me. I don't really see that as a horrible dystopian future. Even if Windows 8 hardware gets locked down, there will always be a market for linux boxes. Unless the government mandates otherwise, in which case we've got bigger problems.

"Dude. We know how the iPhone works. It's easy to see Apple starting to bring the same sort of model to the MacBook. We're not blind. We can see where this is going, even if it's not there yet, and make reasonably informed guesses about what it's going to be like."

What does that have to do with my point? He said Mac is already becoming more restricted "like a appliance". I said that that hasn't been the case for the last 10 years of OS X and is not the case even now. The only counter-example that comes to mind is the removal of the Input Manager haxie capability (a GOOD thing).

TL;DR: You argue about what "might happen in the future", while I replied to someone complaining about something that happened already.

P.S Who uses "dude"? A 15-year old?

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