A key difference between the Mac and iOS. https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2019/701/

This same panic has been going on since 10.6 with the introduction of the Mac App Store. How do you propose that you would be able to develop software on the Mac if you had to sign your executable every time that you recompiled it?

It's a bad thing that modern "security measures" somehow consistently manage to be as restrictive towards user freedom as possible.

So what would be the financial motive for Apple to force signing of apps and allow them to be outside of the App Store? What would be the financial motive of making system files readonly or introducing DriverKit to increase stability. Do you really want third party kext to be “free” to crash your entire system?

I think they would be crazy to do it and don't really expect them to anytime soon but they clearly could. The financial motive is exactly the same as the iOS App Store: get 30% of all app sales revenue and make the OS more secure.

Also, they don’t get 30% of all app sales. All of the biggest non game money makers either allow you to purchase subscriptions and content outside of the store or force you to.

And rightfully so! How is this not an obvious trend to you?! It isn't just Apple, it's cell phones and tablets with unlockable bootloaders, Windows S-Mode, Samsung Knox, Firefox extension signing that can't be disabled, and a great many other examples. It's the trend that's alarming, not the specific way macOS is configured right now.

> How do you propose that you would be able to develop software on the Mac if you had to sign your executable every time that you recompiled it?

By paying the Apple tax for a developer license and then just... signing your code every time you compile it? You already have to do this for Firefox extension development if you don't bother to run a dev or unbranded build. Alternatively, just run your (unsigned) compiled code in a VM.

> So what would be the financial motive ...

The financial motive is the glaringly obvious walled garden! It's the vendor's control over the device you purchased!

> Do you really want third party kext to be “free” to crash your entire system?

Obviously not; that is a bad faith interpretation of what I said previously. There are ways to ensure user security that don't remove control of the system from the end user. These options are consistently not chosen, by more or less all the major manufactures. I believe that the motives for such behavior are quite obvious.

You really think after selling computers for 43 years Apple is not going to allow people to compile programs without signing every time you compile?

How do you propose they are going to lock down scripting languages and programs built with .Net Cord and Java? Are they going to disallow any code on the Mac that’s built on top of a VM?

The financial motive is the glaringly obvious walled garden! It's the vendor's control over the device you purchased!

So are they now going to lock down outside vendors from creating whatever the new equivalent of kext are without paying a fee?

bad faith interpretation of what I said previously. There are ways to ensure user security that don't remove control of the system from the end user.

You mean by allowing advanced users of the Mac to turn off safeguards- exactly what they are doing now?

Btw, a lot of developers are saying that moving away from kernel extensions will make it easier to build Hackintoshes not harder.

While this is certainly technically possible, I think this presumption -- which I see a fair amount around HN -- is at the least somewhat dubious. There's an extremely crucial difference between the Mac and the iPhone/iPad that this argument downplays at its peril: the iOS ecosystem has never been open in this way; the Mac ecosystem has been open in this way for over three decades. Customers do not tend to react well to having things taken away from them.

What's the cost of not just individual users but whole companies moving off the Mac platform en masse? What's the cost of a press firestorm so intense it'll make the butterfly keyboard shitshow look like free passes to Disneyland? Are you sure so many users would just docilely acquiesce to "guess I'll have to re-buy all my software all over again, herp de derp?" Because for this plan to make sense, Apple needs to sell a whole, whole, whole lot of software to make up for every single person who decides this is the straw that breaks the camel out of the habit of buying $2500 laptops every three or four years.

The bottom line is that I don't think attempting to lock the Mac down to the point the iPad is locked down makes business sense. (I'm not convinced keeping the iPad locked down makes business sense in the long run, either. But that's a different post.)

If that's Apple's trajectory, why did they things like Hypervisor.framework (much more recent than 10.6's introduction of the App Store), which allows one to make unprivileged virtualization solutions, that can run any OS/application?

To me, it their motivation seems two-fold: (1) they want to carve out a niche for security and privacy. People are willing to spend a lot of money to avoid the data grab of Facebook, Google et al. And people are willing to spend money on a system that focuses on security. So, Apple have invested a lot in hardware security (T2) and software security (sandboxing, read-only system files, mandatory kext signing, user-space drivers).

And, yes (2) they probably also want to funnel more and more through the Mac App store for profit. The thing is, they can make macOS a walled garden system, while keeping the back door open for advanced users. My dad is protected by the Mac App store, application bundle signing, notarization, and sandboxing, he is not going to boot in recovery mode and run csrutil in the command-line. While I can in the use csrutil to lower protection a bit to be able to run DTrace. In other words, I don't believe that they want to or need to turn macOS in a complete walled garden: 90% of the users does not want to or cannot disable security measures, while at the same time keeping the csrutil around keeps the other 10% happy.

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I think the more serious danger for macOS was negligence. With key execs primarily using iPads and glacial development of macOS, the most imminent danger seemed to be that macOS developed into nothing else but an SDK/IDE for iOS development. But after the last WWDC, I am mildly optimistic that they have woken up.

One cannot have security while allowing apps to do whatever they feel like.

Being able to do that isn't just a nice thing to have, it is a downright mandatory ability any computer must have.

I rather have the inconvenience of using them, even if they don't prevent accidents.

Not being able to install any software you want on a device you own is not a small inconvenience cost, it is a great artificial limitation meant to take control away from the user and put the user at the mercy of the vendor who can then use it for other user hostile actions (e.g. forced obsolescence, a common tactic in the example of gaming consoles brought before).

And especially in this case, any "better" outcome is really small and short term (the user being unable to do much with their own device means they are also unable to install unwanted software) whereas the larger picture outcome is user hostile - a gradual loss of control and ownership to the goods you are paying for.

I rather have a store than a background application taking machine resources, to ensure that applications are safe to use and do not expose my computer contents to the world when connected.

Thankfully i'm not one. But that doesn't make me blind on such schemes.

Also that background application you mention, even though it isn't necessarily needed in all cases, it is still a better solution than a locked down system since it is under the user's control.

You're more likely to get seriously scammed in a browser than by an actual malware/virus.

https://www.autotrader.com/car-news/new-general-motors-featu...

As consumer, app stores are more than proven.

I cannot parse this, what do you mean?

> As consumer, app stores are more than proven.

I do not have any problem with app stores as long as they are not tied to a locked down OS. See Steam or any Linux repository front-end as an example of app stores that do it right.

But yeah, it's still a choice and Apple is not one of them.

One cannot have a general purpose computer while preventing apps to do whatever they were designed to do.

I don't want random applications to access $HOME just because they feel like it.

If the application was designed for accessing $HOME given its purpose, then I as user, will gladly authorize it.

As developer, and someone that in the past dealt with games and mobile development like J2ME and Symbian, I don't see a big issue going through app certification processes.

That's why Nintendo not putting a browser on Switch

It's appalling an entire WWW browser would be necessary for connecting to certain Internet access points, but that's the current state of things.

In any case, someone has already achieved arbitrary code execution through it, but it was sandboxed anyway.

Also this is an orthogonal issue, the console wasn't designed to have security exploits to start with.

At this point?? Here's my blog post from nine years ago, almost to the day. http://drupal4hu.com/future/freedom

> Microsoft can [...] make it so that any new app needs to be sanctioned. Apple, obviously can easily follow or even do it before Microsoft.