A lot of people look wistfully back on the good old days of futzing around with drama in their PC.

Time moves on. If you want computing to be an adventure, that’s what Linux is for.

Different people have different annoyance levels with security restrictions. Personally, I'm all right if Apple's security model makes things I rarely do -- e.g., install privileged system extensions like Rogue Amoeba's Audio Capture Engine -- difficult but still possible. I understand why other people might make different choices.

Having said that, I do roll my eyes whenever I come across the phrase "walled garden" when applied to the Mac in particular, especially when people stridently insist that the Mac is just a year or two away from being locked down like iOS. (I've been hearing that prediction for over a decade, and find it less likely than ever in the era of Apple Silicon Macs.)

You should thank those people. They made enough noise to prevent what was and is surely apple's long term plan.

That logic is a bit circular, though, and not very convincing. Apple is known for being opinionated and stubborn about their long-term goals. If they really wanted to lock down MacOS, they’d just have done it, developers be damned.

Or, that's just part of their sales pitch. You know, like how politicians dont like to be seen as wishy washy, its very likely Apple responds to public opinion just as much as anyone else.

Apple made no further moves to “lock down” iOS to force people to use the App Store after 2006. If Apple listened to public opinion, the iOS App Store wouldn’t be the shit show it is today.

Yes that long term plan hasn’t happen in a decade since people were predicting it with the introduction of the Mac App Store in 2011.

Any day now…

Still, it kinda is. You really have to go out of your way now to have full access to modify system files and even then you're not able to do just anything you want. Think of installing another OS on the SSD on Intel Macs with T2 chip, or choosing which iOS apps you want to run on M1.

So you have to be purposeful and know what you’re doing to potentially corrupt your Mac…the horror.

Have you ever thought by making it hard for you to corrupt your Mac it also makes it hard for malware?

Apple fully supports installing Windows on x86 Macs and there are plenty of guides on installing Linux on x86 and Mx Macs.

They have been warning about Apple requiring all Mac apps to come from the app store since 2011.

How would Apple ban you from running apps on a Mac?

If the Mac were a legacy, why are they spending so much effort on the Mac to bring them all to their own processors specifically designed for them?

I like to be in control precisely over how hardened I'd like my system to be.

If I wreck it, I know how to reinstall it and restore my backups, thank you very much.

And you can do that. Just turn it off.

I honestly thing the 'lock down' is so overblown.

Yes there's 'more hoops' - but you go through the hoop once. Seriously, if you're running a dev machine turning off 3, maybe 4, things once and never touching them again is hardly the biggest hurdle.

It's near-impossible to brick an M1 machine. You can always reinstall from a second machine using Apple Configurator.

This is actually an experimental advantage over PCs, which you can brick if eg you erase the BIOS and backup BIOS.

Try looking at it as a solution, not a problem. In dire straits you can actually recover the machine, vs having no other option like GP noted.

Normally, and for normal users, the recovery mode is just a startup key combo away to re-image the machine.

You know, all it takes to recover a hosed system on x86 is a flash drive. Because the bootloader on those machines doesn’t have to be a specially made macOS partition with a slimmed down macOS on it (hah! Those people are calling Grub2 bloated!) which must live on the internal storage.

Moreover, on x86, even if the internal storage is hosed completely, I can boot the machine off USB/Thunderbolt and have it live for years more. Try that with dead SSD in your new macbook. Talk anout e-waste problem and how „heroically” Apple is fighting it, too.

You can't boot it if you restored the BIOS wrong - it's usually on a writable NVRAM. The M1's initial bootloader is on immutable storage.

I muck with the OS and above all the time, and I somehow can’t remember I ever needed to restore my bios. No. Never. Really.

But M1 macs need the internal storage to work and be intact to boot even from external media. If the internal ssd on my intel mac or dell xps tablet (the soldered one, yep) dies, I boot from usb3.1 and keep on keeping on. The M1 Mac is a brick after that, except the new mac studio where the ssds are somewhat replaceable.

Understood, but I can't wrap my head around why they removed the internet recovery option. Until very recently I managed a large fleet of Macs and it's already happened twice that a user managed to break their system so bad the builtin recovery wouldn't work. Both didn't have another system to hand to do the DFU thing either. Internet recovery as it existed on the intel macs would have saved them a trip to the office.