Ian: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no...no, no, not at all. I, I, I just think that the.. uh.. their appeal is becoming more selective.

If I have two URLs pointing to my website and then I remove one, users can just go to the other one. I have not "locked down" my website or limited access at all.

The impact on user freedom is negligible.

But even if we decide this particular situation is in fact locking down, what I said is still true. Locking down is a subset of removing options, not synonymous with it.

Apple has been practicing incrementalism. Each small step by itself doesn't seem very significant. But the slow march continues, and the pieces add up. Current people with technical ability may be able to modify their behavior to work around it, but the technical bar has been raise slightly-- people without technical ability have one more small speedbump.

If you're right and Apple stops here, then sure, no big deal, and I'd be happy to be wrong. This isn't the hill I'd die on for the issue. It's the trend I don't like. If a few years go by without Apple locking down the OS further, I'd be okay with the status quo. Looking at the trend of the past few years though, it seems like Apple is slowly taking MacOS towards the iOS model.

If this was a typical increment in Apple's incrementalism, then even the sum total would be something you could ignore for a hundred years.

If the scope is too large any company will fail, regardless of budget.

Apple historically was always removing features that add bulk but are not necessary (although some people need them).

To give some examples: - with one of the MacOS releases they announces there are no new features in the OS, just a cleanup of unnecessary stuff - they removed support for 32 bit apps a year ago - personally I found it painful as some stuff stopped working, but I understand this was done to streamline the system - and so on

Sure it’s sometimes irritating, but otherwise you risk ending up with a mess that Windows is.

As a side note - since they switched from physical medium it was weird to me personally that there even is a standalone installer - why not make it a system update? This year they finally did the switch.