[ulchar]

I'm not so sure. They _could_ start from scratch, building the same feature set but paying extra attention to security in every possible aspect of design, do you now have a system guaranteed to be free of malware? Never. We are talking nation state actors here. Doing that would ignore the really great (if merely suggested) admittance that apple is making here: reducing the attack surface is the only way to mitigate the unknown unknowns of software security.

[nuts-n-bits]

Another reason "from scratch" is just crazy talk: If they start from scratch it means literally redoing all the libraries. The thought of apple redoing parsers for PDF, JPEG, BMP, PNG, XML, etc, doesn't really invoke confidence for me. They probably create more bugs than the working library has. Unless they do it in rust but even then some bugs inevitably remain.