It's more a policy issue than a technical issue. But security-wise, malware on macOS is definitely not a solved problem. There are very real differences between

It's more a policy issue than a technical issue. But security-wise, malware on macOS is definitely not a solved problem. There are very real differences between the pervasiveness of iOS (and iPadOS) exploits and on macOS. As for reasoning: anything that costs money to do but doesn't get you any money in return is a reason not to do it. This can obviously be a direct effect or side effect: - If it is easy to run iPad apps on an iPad without paying for them, an entire sales channel is going to make a whole lot less (this isn't as much about the availability of free apps, but about the single pipeline for end-users) - If someone at Apple needs to work on supporting boot loader selection menus and recovery modes etc. that's someone who needs to get paid, and it's going to take a whole lot of iPad sales to cover that expense; when looking at other devices and markets, most of their life they run whatever software they came with and get trashed with that same software and replaced; no post-market OS involved - Perspective; some people might feel like their status symbolism is attacked if a device gets additional users, even if very few, that don't match their perceived user base - Legal might want to try and make the devices keep their appliance-like status, instead of turning them into general purpose computing devices; this is pretty similar to consoles and stuff like network equipment; most of them are general purpose computers with some job-specific add ons, you could run all sort of deviating tasks on them The only reason I might find reasonable is the end-user tunnel vision. As soon as a device gets some form of multiple personality disorder that makes a lot of things harder for everyone on the supporting side (including that family member that everyone always asks for help with their computer gets a BSOD, but also the helpdesk, in-store support, documentation etc.). It's also pretty easy to socially engineer someone into compromising their own devices, and that is a bad thing with bad results. We can't expect everyone to be capable and able to make informed decisions and know how their stuff works. A jailed experience on an appliance-like device yields far better results in that scenario. Ironically, this also puts a very big additional load on apple to get this 'as right as possible' when all the tools they sell must work consistently, all day, every day. For the end user, but also for business use. If some special function needs to be made available, and Apple is the only one who can enable that, they will feel that heat if it's something requested or standardised often enough. Take CAC support; if there is a sector that simply won't be able to use the product without it, Apple will have to make a choice; implement it and make money from significant sales, or don't, and miss all those sales.