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Comment by dimator | Hacker News Reader

Do you honestly think Apple is going to keep this true for Macs in 2 years? 5 years? 10 years? I think there is slim to none chance that they give a shit about the "openness"of Mac.

As far as I'm concerned, Mac openness is just a cat that got out of the bag, before anyone knew they could produce a _mint_ from rent seeking walled garden platforms. I find it highly unlikely Apple is not looking to correct this mistake on Mac, even if it's done so gradually that by the time the pull the trigger, no one even bats an eye.

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I believe they’ll likely keep this the case, not out of generosity, but because the most valuable thing Mac gets them is developers writing apps for iOS. This will only become more true in time unless there’s a sudden reversal of the trend towards phones and tablets over laptops. They may not care about power users in general, but allowing developers to run their own code to target their platforms is crucial, and there’s no mint to be made on macOS by fully locking it down due to the reduced marketshare.

I would not be shocked however if at some point they switched to developers having to buy special Macs to have this capability, and normal Macs would cease to be able to turn off secure boot and SIP and would require code signing/store distribution universally.

Given you need to be a bona-fide security researcher to qualify to gain access to a partially-unlocked iPhone[1] - I think you’re on to something: having DRM built-in to the lowest levels of the hardware means it’s possible for Apple to truly control the system.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/programs/security-research-devic...

Even Steve Jobs knew you needed "trucks" of computing. I'm generally fine with my phone being locked down, because I use it for straightforward tasks. I (and the many other developers who use Macs) need my laptop to be a "truck". If it stopped being that, I'd stop being a customer. But we're not at that point yet and I think Apple would be really dumb to go there and alienate a huge market.

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