In what ways are desktop Windows boxes as closed as Apple? I would say there are many many things to fault Microsoft for, but closing down the OS has never been one of them (though that is gradually changing outside the EU, to be fair).
MacOS is only licensed for use in Apple branded hardware, as I understand it. Even running it in a VM could be problematic if that host isn't running MacOS.
So your issue isnt the openness in terms of being limited on what you can do on it, and more that you want it to be bloated with drivers for millions of various pieces of hardware like Windows, got it.
> and more that you want it to be bloated with drivers for millions of various pieces of hardware like Windows, got it.
MacOS is bloated anyways; they might as well use that bloat for something important like backwards-compatibility and not zombie-code left over from the PowerPC era. That's just an objective failure, on Apple's behalf; they break software support more often than Microsoft and even Linux at this point. A professional OS really has no excuse to break someone's software and leave it broken. Even Microsoft gets that.
So... yeah, you know what? I do want it to be bloated with drivers, because whatever they're stuffing it with right now clearly isn't working. I don't trust Apple to write or maintain a long-lived successor, I demand third-party alternatives I can maintain myself. Give me more options for writing and delivering software, or else I am going to continue ignoring MacOS as a build target for the foreseeable future.
True. However I can (and have multiple times) migrate from machine to machine without needing to reinstall everything.
My work MacBook was pulled from an original Air from something like 2015, to a 2017 Pro and currently my 2019 Pro.
So I’ve got apps installed on my Mac that have been installed damn near 10 years ago.
Ditto my home 2015 Pro was later on migrated to a M1 Air. Hell, I’ve still some 32 Bit Steam games that still somehow run on my Air (least Steam tells me they’re 32 bit).
We could play this game ad-infinitum, each finding a level of supposed “openness” but the basic facts are that neither Windows, nor MacOS are truly open.
If you want open, then Linux is always going to be in the answer somewhere. Not MS Windows. And not Apple MacOS.
When using the terms “open” and “closed” with operating systems, one is traditionally talking open the source code.
As such both Windows and MacOS are closed source.
As for “opening up the OS” both are pretty gosh darned flexible and extensible wrt other features.
However being based upon a BSD core, MacOS has had access to the Unix command line natively since forever. For Windows one used to have to rely on CgyWin before the virtualized WSL platform came to be.
Whilst MacOS has the somewhat opaque ~/Library for storing user settings and data, it pales into comparison to the massively Opaque Windows Registry.
I’ve had had very few issues fixing app install issues with my Mac - with Windows I’ve had more than one occasion where I’ve had to do a complete reinstall of the OS due to the Registry being totally hosed to the point I couldn’t reinstall apps again.
I don't think when someone is talking about a "closed device" they usually mean "closed source". I at least took it to refer to whether you can run whatever software you want on that device+OS, and how easy it is to do so.
I think Windows is up there with the open source OSs (Linux, BSDs, etc) on regular PCs are at the same end of "run anything you want from wherever you want it", iOS devices are at the other extreme of "only run things approved by Apple", Android devices are pretty closer to iOS because they make you jump through hoops and potentially lose access to various functionalities to install certain things or gain root access. Modern macOS, as far as I understand, is somewhere in the middle: you have to jump through quite a few hoops to install certain kinds of software, and a few aren't permitted at all I think (unsigned kernel modules?).
I think the keynote here is the closed/open hardware.
You can run Windows almost on any hardware. So it is much more open in general.
You can equally run almost any imaginable software on both operating systems (if we ignore the performance), but you have extreme difficulties to run macOS on most hardware.
