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Comment by Andrew_nenakhov | Hacker News Reader

What good are performance and battery life if you don't get to decide which apps you are permitted to run on this device?

Does the recent removal of apps [1] from russian appstore ring some bells?

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval...

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> What good are performance and battery life

For the average consumer — everything.

I'm kind of torn between the two opinions. I wish my iPhone would be able to run anything I want to run. I also recognize that nobody forced me to buy this iPhone.

Mobile phones are mandated to have emergency calling functionality. Maybe in the future we'll have some "general purpose computing as a human right" law.

> For the average consumer — everything.

> I'm kind of torn between the two opinions.

I am not torn. Because of us two, apparently only one lives in an authoritarian country. When your computing device blocks you from accessing anything not praising the current regime, it kinda devalues the user-friendly interface and manufacturing quality. Shiny chains are still chains.

Well, that’s a different kind of issue. Should politics have anything to do with mandating which technologies have the right to exist? The Internet itself enables global surveillance by sufficiently funded actors, but it also makes this conversation possible. I like my internet, I don’t want it to go.

I also welcome tech companies trying to extract every tiny bit of performance from the silicon that powers computing today. It may lead to developing something incompatible with existing solutions, but surely no regime on this planet is to blame here.

Assuming we are talking about the desktop, you can run whatever you’d like. The App Store is just one avenue for software distribution on the Mac. The situation is of course different on iOS.

> Assuming we are talking about the desktop, you can run whatever you’d like.

Only sometimes. Have you ever tried unlocking a Pixelbook to run a different OS?

It needs a custom cable and significant RE efforts by the community.

Sorry, I thought the question was a critique of macOS, not the Pixelbook, and I offered a clarification that macOS is actually pretty open and you can run whatever app you like, in most cases.

For the moment. You also can't run any of the iOS apps (an advertised feature of macOS on M1) if you disable SIP, so this isn't really a true statement logically speaking.

For what it's worth, another option for disabling the write-protect is to temporarily remove the battery.

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