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> What you're describing isn't a modern power user OS -- you're describing iOS.

Hardly. Windows, Linux and OS X do not let you monkeypatch the entire system.

Actually, they pretty much do. Take for example Dropbox. Windows officially 3rd party applications adding overlays to icons which dropbox uses to provide sync status for items in the dropbox folder. OS X has no such feature or API for icon overlays. Through lots of trial and error, swizzling, mach_inject, and mach_override they managed to provide this feature in OS X as well.

> Through lots of trial and error, swizzling, mach_inject, and mach_override they managed to provide this feature in OS X as well.

And it's not unlikely that Apple will break them at any time. Apple won't even go through the trouble of making an announcement when they do so.

In fact, I believe they are doing exactly this in El Capitan. Under the umbrella of "Rootless", you will no longer be able to arbitrarily modify [1] some special blessed OS processes, like Finder.app.

Some discussion of the politics of this issue: http://atp.fm/episodes/128

[1] haven't read enough to know the exact mechanism, but presumably restricting some forms of IPC like Mach messages?

I'm sure they understood the risk when they did it.

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