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tristortoday at 8:15 PM1 replyview on HN

I'm not sure who the author is, but the fact they choose to be stymied by SSV (which can be disabled) to avoid investigation down that path, which is similar to the path enthusiasts do with Windows to build tools like Tiny11, NTLite, and distributions like Atlas, feels intellectually lazy. Asserting that macOS is not UNIX (it is, quite literally, including the most recent release Tahoe) and then arguing with folks who corrected them in the comments, makes me think the author wasn't really interested in answering the question they put forth and instead were trying to mystify readers to shut down exploration and curiosity.

It is entirely possible to gain an understanding of those processes running on your computing system and to decide which process you don't want to run at startup, this is regardless of the desires and intents of the maker of the computing system, as long as you retain control of the hardware. Many of the Windows optimization tools at various points even involved community made binary patching. There's no basis to claim that it's not possible to understand or take actions, it's just that the Mac community has a different set of priorities and focus areas than other computing communities, so nobody in the community has yet invested the effort to do so.

You could summarize this blog post as answering "No" to the question in its title, without actually exploring the question to determine if that's a true answer. It's not a true answer, and won't be until we completely lose control over our own hardware.


Replies

sbuktoday at 8:23 PM

Howard Oakley has been writting about macOS internals for a long time, and 99% of the time, his essays and articles are excellent. This is not one of them. Don't be put off by this one article - the site is a goldmine.