Apple, Hackers, and a Platform That Closed the Hood
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A Stratechery piece by Ben Thompson argues that Apple has increasingly restricted the ability of technically sophisticated users to modify, explore, and extend their own devices — a meaningful cultural and economic loss even if the choices are defensible on security and mainstream usability grounds.
The tension is real and historically grounded. The early Mac community was built on the assumption that curious users would open the machine up, literally and figuratively. The iPhone era inverted that assumption: the device is extraordinarily capable but deliberately opaque. Thompson's framing resonates with longtime Apple developers who feel the platform has become genuinely hostile to the kind of tinkering that built its developer community in the first place.