[cyberax]

> It's not about running arbitrary code

But it is. Microsoft just doesn't want home users to run Hyper-V, without paying for a (slightly) more expensive Windows Pro license. Home users still can download free VirtualBox or whatever other solution they care to use. They can also upgrade to a Pro license in-place, by paying $100.

This is all perfectly normal.

iPadOS is completely different. Apple does not _allow_ users to run any non-trivial system-level code. If Apple doesn't want you to access virtualization on iPad, you're out of luck. There are no easy workarounds.

[derefr]

No, I mean, "not allowing you to run arbitrary code" is just a side-effect, not the design choice. The design choice is market segmentation.

In the Windows case, they can enforce your inability to install/enable Hyper-V on Windows Home through simple measures like protecting system files from modification.

But in the iPadOS case, the only way to really prevent you from running a macOS VM, is by preventing you from running any VM.

Due to the Turing-completeness of virtual machines, there's really no lesser measure they can take. You literally cannot create a piece of software that can run arbitrary VMs except for if the VM is semantically macOS. Whatever signal you would look for to blacklist macOS, an adversarial VM creator can mask by modifying the installation. (At an equilibrium point of such a game, the "adversarially-created macOS VM" would end up looking more like a Hackintosh rootfs than like a Mac rootfs — but it'd still look and feel and work like macOS, and that's all users would care about.)

[cyberax]

> No, I mean, "not allowing you to run arbitrary code" is just a side-effect, not the design choice. The design choice is market segmentation.

It absolutely is a design choice. Apple wants to control all the code that runs on users' devices. Market segmentation is merely a side-effect.

[coldtea]

>Apple wants to control all the code that runs on users' devices. Market segmentation is merely a side-effect.

You have cause and effect reversed

[cyberax]

No, I don't. iPhones don't segment anything, yet they are locked tight.

Apple would have liked to lock down macOS, but it's just not feasible (for now).

[coldtea]

>iPhones don't segment anything, yet they are locked tight.

Of course they do. There's market segmentation between iPhone tiers, between just using the iPhone as a computer (connecting it to a monitor and running macOS on it), differentiating iOS from the much less tightly maintained Android ecosystem (for which "walled garden" is a feature felt as "less hassle, less malware, more secure, mostly just works"), and several other things.

[_aavaa_]

Their stranglehold on app distribution is absolutely a design choice, and it's done to continue harvesting a 30% tax of as much as they can get away with.