I think this is really flawed logic. Sandboxing adds some development cost, sure, but the implication here ("grievous strategic mistake") is that it's the key r

I think this is really flawed logic. Sandboxing adds some development cost, sure, but the implication here ("grievous strategic mistake") is that it's the key reason developers are building web apps instead of native Mac apps. That just defies common sense. Clearly the key reason Mac apps cost so much to develop is the platform-specific codebase they require. Mac apps have little in common even with iOS apps, so it's a huge cost. Against that baseline, adding sandbox entitlements is an extremely minor incremental cost. It's not like eliminating the sandbox would drop the cost of Mac apps by some huge factor. Developers are writing web apps because they can use a cross-platform codebase, plain and simple. That's why I am much more optimistic about the rumor that Apple will lower the delta between Mac and iOS codebases, letting devs leverage their iOS investments. There will always be a cost to adapting a touch-based app to the desktop, but there's orders of magnitude more efficiency to be gained there than in blowing away a whole layer of the security model.