> The financial motive is the glaringly obvious walled garden! It's the vendor's control over the device you purchased! While this is certainly technically pos

> The financial motive is the glaringly obvious walled garden! It's the vendor's control over the device you purchased! While this is certainly technically possible, I think this presumption -- which I see a fair amount around HN -- is at the least somewhat dubious. There's an extremely crucial difference between the Mac and the iPhone/iPad that this argument downplays at its peril: the iOS ecosystem has never been open in this way; the Mac ecosystem has been open in this way for over three decades. Customers do not tend to react well to having things taken away from them. What's the cost of not just individual users but whole companies moving off the Mac platform en masse? What's the cost of a press firestorm so intense it'll make the butterfly keyboard shitshow look like free passes to Disneyland? Are you sure so many users would just docilely acquiesce to "guess I'll have to re-buy all my software all over again, herp de derp?" Because for this plan to make sense, Apple needs to sell a whole, whole, whole lot of software to make up for every single person who decides this is the straw that breaks the camel out of the habit of buying $2500 laptops every three or four years. The bottom line is that I don't think attempting to lock the Mac down to the point the iPad is locked down makes business sense. (I'm not convinced keeping the iPad locked down makes business sense in the long run, either. But that's a different post.)