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.)