iOS is a walled garden. (as are it's cousins for Apple TV, & HomePod.
MacOS is not.
If MacOS was a walled garden, I wouldn't be able to do my job with it.
Technically, that is true. But it is getting there. Apple makes more money, and importantly recurring revenue, from its services now than selling its hardware. The move to ARM processors is one of their strategic moves to further "close" their desktop platforms too. The only reason they don't do it outright right now is because they know people like you and me will immediately abandon the platform if we are stuck with only macOS and can only install everything from the App store. But we would be fools to ignore that the noose is tightening and, with M1 you are now stuck with macOS (unlike the older macs). The next iterations will close it down further ...
Yes, the line I've been hearing for the past 15 years or so.
Meanwhile Homebrew still works, I can still install non-App Store Apps, and Apple is publishing directions on how to install non-MacOS operating systems.
Literally the single difference their "Closing the platform" has made in my life has been getting prompted for permission to open various directories and services on the platform and much of that can be disabled.
> But we would be fools to ignore that the noose is tightening and, with M1 you are now stuck with macOS (unlike the older Macs).
Are we on the same conversation here? Did you read the article? Or the similar ones about people loading Linux on the M1? This is literally a thread about people who followed Apple's documentation on how to install a different OS on the M1 Macs.
You can't sell $10,000 Mac Pros and $6,000 displays with a neutered operating system. Nobody is buying the 16" MacBook Pro if they can only buy apps in the App Store. Overnight they would lose pretty much every (non-iOS) developer, most video editors, every podcaster and audio engineer, most photographers, every single scientist, most engineers, mathematicians, and many artists...
That would be an absolutely fantastic pitch in a management meeting. Who is left, accountants... teachers? A few schools? Not only would this be a massive hit to the Mac... likely lethal, it would also be a massive blow to iOS. Because much like every other developer on the planet iOS developers lean heavily on tools which cannot ever be found in the App Store like git, Python, Ruby (required for CocoaPods), and a million other Unix tools.
This has to be one of the most bone-headed, yet commonly repeated bits of anti-Mac nonsense out there.
shrug
There is zero sense or logic in these assertions, business or otherwise. It’s baseless nonsense.
Apple aren't preventing anything, they're just not helping us out either. Agree it would be nice for them to help out a little, but it's really not the same thing.
It's the same thing. (And the only reason they aren't yet outright preventing it is because it would be bad PR - nobody wants their desktop computer to be like the iPhone or iPad. But it will happen.)
You'd be surprised.
(Also, this exactly has been the proposition and allure of the Chromebooks - a computer that you can just wipe and restart again and it's like a phone or tablet device, and your data are synced in the cloud).
Apple has a computer which isn't locked down, it's the Mac. Apple maintains MacOS as a flexible/ pro platform because if they didn't, they wouldn't be able to sell $2000-8000 Macs to pro users who need that power and flexibility to do their jobs.
For Apple there is zero profit in neutering the Mac. Whatever profits you think Apple could make by forcing people to use the Mac App Store, would be dwarfed by the sales lost due to pro & power users leaving the system en-masse.
Linux users would buy M1, with the intention of running Linux, and if it doesn’t work, they can still run macOS.
I don’t see the risk to Apple, if they at least provided documentation for the M1.
They already describe how to do so, and the specification to merely boot is trivial anyway. Linux, OpenBSD (as in TFA), and others have booted already.
It's the details of the GPU and other such stuff that needs drivers (touchpad, etc) that are missing. And those are rarely well documented on the Intel side, by AMD and NVIDIA either, anyway.
This is just false.
iOS is a walled garden. The Mac is not by anyone’s definition.
You can run whatever you like on Mac Hardware.
You can run whatever software you like on Mac OS.
Installing MacOS on computers you haven’t licensed it for is just that.
It’s not free software. It is commercial software.
You are conflating the concept of commercial software with the concept of a walled garden.
Commercial software is the software for which developers get money. It can include free software, too. It has nothing to do with the license or the topic we are discussing. You are conflating the concepts here.
Walled garden in general is a convenient system, from which a user can hardly escape when the users wants to. This is exactly what Mac license does. Wikipedia has Mac OS as an example of a walled garden. I did not make it up myself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Walled_garden_(te...
The Wikipedia article does mention Mac OS, but does not, anywhere, use it as an example of a walled garden.
Here is the definition from the page you link:
“A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.“
This definition is simply not true of Mac OS.
A 2008 Harvard Business School working paper, entitled "Opening Platforms: How, When and Why?", differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects and gave example platforms.
Platform provider (hardware/operating system (OS) bundle), Mac OS: closed
Platform sponsor (design & intellectual property (IP) rights owner), Mac OS: closed
Tl;dr:
It's not a walled garden in all aspects, but it definitely restricts users in a significant way, depending on your use case.
Notably for some reason you chose not to include the part where they also say about Mac OS:
Demand-side use (end-user): open
Supply-side user (application developer): open
It is not a walled garden in any way that they define a walled garden.
Here is the definition from the page you link: “A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applicants or content. This is in contrast to an open platform, wherein consumers generally have unrestricted access to applications and content.“
It doesn’t apply to Mac OS.
Restricting installation of the operating system itself on other hardware just isn’t part of the definition.
No matter how much you selectively copy and paste from a Wikipedia page, it will not say what you claim it is saying.
Trying to say any restriction of use means a walled garden is akin to saying any software that isn’t completely free is a walled garden.
That just isn’t what the term means.
By the definition I quoted MacOS is an open platform. The provider of MacOS (Apple) doesn’t have control over access to applications and content.
It is not a walled garden in any aspect, even by the definition you yourself provided.
Installing OS itself is restricted by commercial license. But the platform is open.
You are trying to make the definition fit, but it just doesn’t.
I cannot access my OS and all my applications after changing the hardware or using a VM. Do you call it “unrestricted access to applications”? How is this unrestricted if there are restrictions? This is not an open platform by the original Wikipedia definition, more so by my definition. One cannot escape from Mac OS after using it, because all apps will not work (without the legal OS). My SSD dies, I cannot event replace it. All I can do is to pay $$$ to Apple to help me.
No - why would you imagine that?
The article mentions MacOS and by it’s own definition the conclusion is that MacOS is not a walled garden.
It would be weird to think that merely mentioning an operating system in a discussion about walled gardens makes it into a walled garden.
> I cannot access my OS and all my applications after changing the hardware or using a VM.
This is obvious bullshit. Your application and OS still work just fine.
Nobody is telling you what you can and can’t run on the operating system, or on the hardware it is running on.
That’s what the Wikipedia article defines as a walled garden, and has nothing to do with the licensing conditions of the operating system itself.
As to needing to pay certain people for hardware repair, that is also simply not true, and is not relevant to the discussion about walled gardens.
There is nothing preventing you from having your SSD repaired or replaced by anyone with the capability to do it.
By your definition, Linux is a walled garden because you can only run Linux binaries on Linux.
See how this makes no sense?
There’s nothing wrong with you preferring GPL’d software. But that doesn’t mean that everything else is “walled garden”.
This is just bullshit (if one uses your wording). Every new Apple laptop comes with glued SSD.
> By your definition, Linux is a walled garden because you can only run Linux binaries on Linux.
This is absolutely not what I am saying. The problem is not in the compiled binaries. The problem comes when I want to escape the Mac OS walled garden. I can run Linux or Windows in a VM on any operating system and escape its ecosystem any moment in this way. All apps will work in the VM. Not so for Mac OS. I don't think you are even trying to understand my reasoning. Instead you are finding every possibility for a tangential reply having nothing to do with my point.
>It would be weird to think that merely mentioning an operating system in a discussion about walled gardens makes it into a walled garden.
Then please tell me what the example of Mac OS with word "closed" nearby is doing in that Wikipedia page? Does it indicate that Mac OS is an open ecosystem?
In the sentence “Mac OS is not a closed system”, the word ‘closed’ is near the words ‘Mac OS’.
I assume you don’t think that sentence means that Mac OS, is a closed system.
Generally, when words are ‘nearby’ other words you have to read the context to understand why they are there.
> Does it say that Mac OS is an open ecosystem?
Yes, it does say that it’s an open ecosystem.
In the parts of the table describing the ecosystem it has the word open in the rows for MacOS.
Obviously you can see that.
You are absolutely right. Let me quote it for you, so that you understand the context:
"Harvard Business School working paper... differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects and gave example platforms".
Then, in the table you can see that in 2 out of 4 aspects Mac OS is a closed ecosystem according to the published research. I am astonished by Apple fanboys who cannot accept flaws in Mac OS, even if it's clearly explained by respectful independent researchers.
>In the parts of the table describing the ecosystem it has the word open in the rows for MacOS.
All four points describe the ecosystem, not just those which you choose. Again, quote: "differentiated a platform's openness/closedness by four aspects".
The two on which Apple is rated as ‘open’ are the criteria which the article’s definition uses to determine whether a platform is a walled garden.
You are using a definition of walled garden to mean ‘any level of closedness’.
This is not what a walled garden means, and not what the article says.
If you want to use a private definition, by all means do so, but the article doesn’t have anything to do with your private definition.
For the third time - here is the definition from the article:
“A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media.”
The table shows that Mac OS is open when it comes to applications, content, and media.
The definition is clear, and Mac OS is not a walled garden by the definition. The table supports this conclusion.
Glued components are common and do not prevent repair - what has that got to go with anything?
An emulated VM obviously doesn’t allow a binary to escape the platform because of course you still need the platform, and the binary is still running on the platform so nothing has ‘escaped’.
As I say, your point is just about what hardware you want a license to run MacOS on, which is nothing to do with whether it is a walled garden.
You are just trying to make a definition of walled garden that isn’t what people generally mean so you can include MacOS within it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26230338
Windows and MacOS have the same entries in the table which means it’s not a walled garden as defined in the piece.
Seems to me like a whole lot of arguments about Apple involve changing accepted definitions of things or using different standards for Apple versus others.
Apple does enough things wrong and I'm perfectly willing to accept those things and understand when people are frustrated by those things. No need to invent whole new things or shift definitions just so you can complain about them.
Since I agree with you, I assume this is aimed at the comment I’m responding to it, and those like it, rather than me.
Totally understand why people might prefer Linux/ Windows/ Amiga/ whatever. People should just enjoy what they want.
It goes both ways. I'd add that atleast the "Apple-haters" have more of a standing in defending open computing standards and demanding Apple be open too.
Also - why does hating Apple give anyone any right to demand anything from them?
Why not demand more from people who are actually working on Open computing?
So you think ignoring facts and making nonsense gives you credibility so long as you hate the right people?
Maybe in your own head.
Apple _is_ a walled garden ecosystem. That has many obvious advantages, things just work, etc.
Personally I happen to not like it, but it's a choice folks have to make by themselves.
I buy my H/W from vendors that actually support running Linux (in my case) like Dell, Lenovo, and others.