Hacker News Reader

Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

I think the worry is a locked bootloader.

That and Apple being able to introduce security via obscurity means we'll probably never see a non-Apple OS on the platform.

It's already quite difficult and unideal to install a non-Apple OS on a Mac, aside from Windows via Bootcamp. Not being able to install a custom OS is a long way from "not owning your hardware". Apple OSes are part of the sum package; if you don't want that, you aren't the kind of person who's buying Apple hardware in the first place.

3-4 years ago it wasn't difficult at all to replace macOS with pretty much any EFI-enabled OS. Moving to a proprietary ARM CPU/GPU will probably result in not being able to write applications unless it's using Apple's toolchain. If you have no say over what software you can run on your computer, you no longer own that computer.

We really haven't seen such a large technological separation like this. At least back in the old days you could still run what you want.

macOS moving to the iOS route where you have to jailbreak your device to get any sort of usability out of it is not a space I want to participate in, and yet it seems that's how the entire Apple line is moving. They're almost the complete opposite compared to Microsoft these days.

As long as developers continue buying Macs for building non-Apple-native software, there will be ways to get them to run whatever you want, because that's required for a dev machine. If Apple ever decides it no longer cares about selling Macs to developers, well, I guess that's a possibility but it would be incredibly stupid, because that's a significant fraction of their current market.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com