If I purchase a car from Ford, then yes, they have no right to tell me how to drive it.
If I lease a car from Ford, then they absolutely have a right to tell me how I can drive it. It's not my car - it's their car. Most car leases do stipulate how you can drive it. At the very least they have a restriction on the number of miles you can drive.
If someone has purchased a copy of MacOS from Apple, then I agree that they can do whatever they want with it. The thing is, no one purchases MacOS from Apple. They only lease it from Apple. That's why Apple has a right to decide how it's used.
there's a disconnect here though because ford offers you the option of direct purchase. you don't have that with macos. i'd be willing to bet people who use hackintosh would be willing to buy a key and do things the right way if apple offered, but they don't so they find alternatives. it's the same kind of argument used with media piracy: make something easy enough to buy and use legally, and people will spend money on it. make it convoluted and require hoops, and those same people will find workarounds
I'd be willing to bet on that too. I think offering a license key to put MacOS on whatever hardware you want would be really popular. I'd probably buy one myself.
That said, convenience is a good argument for why things like media piracy and hackintoshes happen but not an argument at all for whether or not those actions are morally justified.
I don't have a fiber in me that feels bad about having a Hackintosh. I'm an Apple customer. There's two MacBooks in my home. And going by the poll on tonymacx86 [1], >60% of the voters do own a Mac. Why would Apple want to come after these people, apart from legal trademark protection faffing?
I'd say I have more of an incentive to buy a Mac if I can run it on all of my computers. If I ran a Linux distribution on my desktop, I'd buy a nice Windows machine and load it with the same OS.
The problem is that Apple does not sell the hardware that I and a lot of people want to have. I think I paid around 1000 euros for my computer in raw parts. I think I could pay like 1400 euros for a same kind of machine if it had an Apple logo on the side and had guaranteed updates, which my computer doesn't. But I can't pay that. I can't even pay double to get that kind of a computer. It doesn't exist.
If Ford switched from selling cars, to only leasing cars... and there was any sort of lock-in to a Ford ecosystem, you would have something pretty similar.
If Apple wants to claim it leases MacOS with the sale of a Mac, that's fine but it's horrible anti-consumer and If they ever attempted to enforce it, i'd expect legislation to knock it back. It's probably already unenforceable in much of the world.
If it's truly a lease, it should also have a time limit when it reverts ownership back to Apple... surely otherwise it's just a one-off payment for permanent rights to use MacOS.
But on what principles would the legislation be based? You can't just declare something anti-consumer and call it a day. Apple charging more than other companies for their computers can be considered anti-consumer - should that be illegal too?
The point of legislation and regulation in this instance would be to balance the needs/desires of both the consumers and the company. Saying that Apple's only option is to give consumers full rights to do anything with their software goes too far in the direction of the consumer in my opinion.
this comparison isn't particularly interesting, because you're comparing dissimilar things. a leased car is a physical item that has inherent costs in manufacturing and distribution. bits have asymptotically zero cost there. a leased car has to be recovered and released or sold. this doesn't apply to bits. etc.
the "concept of ownership" is a bit too reductive given the contextual differences at play, because the context directly impacts practical matters like harm, customer autonomy, etc.
If I lease a car from Ford, then they absolutely have a right to tell me how I can drive it. It's not my car - it's their car. Most car leases do stipulate how you can drive it. At the very least they have a restriction on the number of miles you can drive.
If someone has purchased a copy of MacOS from Apple, then I agree that they can do whatever they want with it. The thing is, no one purchases MacOS from Apple. They only lease it from Apple. That's why Apple has a right to decide how it's used.