People have been saying this for years but there is no evidence. You do need to sign your apps in most cases these days but they don’t restrict you from downloading anything you want.

No evidence? Every release it gets slightly more difficult to download apps from non apple sources. If you download an app you need to know to go to the security panel, log in, and then click allow. It's only to get more difficult. Apple has so much to gain by pushing osx to be more like ios.

Not really. The Mac is increasingly a only professional tool. Apple needs developers and scientific users to continue to use the platform.

More importantly they are on record in detail as completely denying this idea and asserting that they want people to be able to install whatever they want, and have access to all levels of the system. This is why you can switch things like SIP off.

If you download an unsigned app you need that rigamarole, but it’s easy to distribute a signed app from your website, and a user who knows what they are doing has no real difficulty.

This reduces the chance my 85 year old mum will accidentally download malware while still making it easy for me to install whatever I like on my machine or, for that matter, hers.

And they document how to switch off that protection if you’d like as well.

Trying? It virtually is already.

Want to put out some software and not pay the $99/year Developer Fee and still have a simple install process for your users? Good luck with that.

Install Brew

Brew install whatever you need.

Apple is doing a decent job here. Art Student gets a very easy to use computer with a safe app store.

Comp Science student can compile and install whatever they need.

> simple install process for your users

Those are the pertinent words. Yes, folks like us have no issue going to Terminal.app and `brew install whatever`, but most "regular" users are going to baulk at that idea.

They even ship brew now, don’t they?