The argument for Windows is that you pay for Windows, and used to pay for Netscape Navigator, but now you have to get Internet Explorer if you want Windows. You can't say that you want to pay e.g. $160 for Windows without Internet Explorer and then $40 for Netscape, your only option is to pay $200 for Windows + Internet Explorer. It's tying. It's not really about whether you can remove it, it's about whether you can not pay for it when you don't want it. Notice that they quite successfully bankrupted Netscape with this.

The inability to remove it is just the dodge Microsoft attempted to use to claim that they're inseparably the same product, and was clearly a load of self-serving nonsense. Operating systems had system dialogs before there was any such things as browser engines.

The dynamic looks weird from the frame of reference of the modern browser market because the answer the market found to Microsoft's tying was to "pay for" the browser by allowing the vendor to choose the default search engine. No surprise then that the browser that ultimately supplanted Microsoft's was the one from the biggest search engine company. But that workaround came with negative consequences, e.g. Google now crippling ad blockers in Chrome.

And the tying problem is still there even if markets with low marginal costs are often weird. Okay, so the way we pay for browsers now is by letting the vendor choose the default search engine, but now we have Google paying Apple billions of dollars to be the default search engine in Safari, and Apple quashing Firefox ad blockers on iOS, instead of that money going to Mozilla or Ladybird or anyone else who has to compete by making a better browser instead of "competing" by tying use of their browser to an operating system, with correspondingly fewer resources and market share for competing alternatives.

> What next? Do you want to unbundle the built in drivers?

Making Asahi Linux get there by full reverse engineering actually is kind of a dick move? Intel publishes hardware documentation.

And it seems pretty obvious that Apple is tying their OS to their hardware and vice versa. Is that even supposed to be ambiguous?