Apple has benefited immensely from developers building apps for their iDevices. Apple in their infinite wisdom decided that such apps must be developed on a Mac.

Making apps is not super profitable, most apps don't make enough revenue to support even 1 full time developer.

If they turn the Mac into a toy computer that developers can't use then it will affect the app ecosystem.

Besides the general hand waving that doesn't mean much ("make them more iDevice like", "you don't own your computer, they do") which doesn't say anything, the parent is talking about this particular decision.

As for "you don't own your computer, they do", what it translates to is: "The OS places certain restrictions that work and make it safer for the large majority of users, but might not give full tinkering abilities to everybody". Which you never have (full tinkering ability) in a closed source OS, anyway.

While "we bypass firewalls for our domains" can be thought of in the same vein ("we think it's better and safer for most users to work this way, and leads to less head-scratching why X Apple service doesn't work etc"), it's not exactly the same.

Apple can go towards the "no tinkering direction, it's a device that just works", without disallowing preventing user firewalls from blocking Apple domains (provided of course the user understands that by blocking them they get no iCloud and other services).

>Apple has been moving away form the professional / hacker market for a long time, they want to sell to normal consumers and could give a shit less about the pro or hacker market.

On the other hand, the pro market (video, music, graphics, office, programming, writing, data analysis, etc) shouldn't have workflow issues with what Apple did, and the hacker market is small (and has never been a target market).

> Apple said it decided it was better to offer iCloud under the new system because discontinuing it would lead to a bad user experience and actually lead to less data privacy and security for its Chinese customers.

Also very relevant that VPNs seem to be illegal in China.

And Apple forced the hand of Telegram to shut down the channels revealing the names of Belarus police.

Sadly, that's the flipside of our strategy of telling authoritarian governments that they should follow rule of law. China made laws that obligate data companies to share the data with the CCP. So Apple must comply. All according to the law.

Apple disables most of Intel's ME [0].

[0] https://support.apple.com/guide/security/uefi-firmware-overv...

Being somewhat aware of current affairs in Spain and having dealt with Spanish administrations' digital services and platforms in multiple different contexts, I would be honestly very surprised if they were able to unilaterally agree any kind of deep backdoor conspiracy with a large tech company–let alone effectively implement it.

Perhaps pfortuny is expecting the Spanish Inquisition?