> To me the blog author is primarily focused on the issue of _control_, i.e., being able to control the hardware that he purchased as opposed to letting a company control it, e.g., through pre-installed software, remotely installed "updates", default settings, etc.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with the OS being an UNIX or not. It's a bit weird to see the allusion to UNIX to be fair: Howard Oakley is deep enough down the rabbit hole that I would expect him to know that History is full of proprietary and closed UNIXes.

NB. The blog refers to (a) the "Unix purist" and (b) MacOS not being Unix. Arguably, (a) is more important, irrespective of whether (b) is true (IMO it's ambiguous)

For example, the "Unix purist" might refer to someone who identifies with the "ideals" associated with that OS, e.g., relatively small, portable to potentially any hardware, free to study and modify, etc. And (b) might refer to MacOS not conforming to those "ideals" (despite having a limited license to use a "UNIX" trademark)

At this point, (b) is ambiguous; what is "Unix". It might mean different things to different people

Ironically, Apple took the "Unix" parts of MacOS from open source, non-commercial "UNIX-like" OS projects such as NetBSD and FreeBSD that are not "Certified UNIX"

NB. I do not use a graphical layer or "terminal emulator". I only use textmode

> MacOS is proprietary

Some of the drivers are. The core is open source, though. macOS' particular choice for its graphical user land is proprietary as well, but AT&T's UNIX had no such equivalent, aside from some experiments, so that doesn't make sense to use as a point of comparison. Not to mention similar systems in the UNIX-esq space, like SunView, NeWS, VUE, NeXTSTEP, etc. were proprietary too. That has always been par for the course in the world of "graphical UNIX". The so-called "Linux desktop" is the aberration.

You can, of course, run an open source graphical user land, like Gnome, instead on top of macOS' UNIX-y fashioned bits if you so wish.

All of the commercial Unix operating systems were closed source.

The first open Unix-like is 386BSD which predates Linux. It was said that if 386BSD didn't get mired in a lawsuit, Torvalds would have used it and Linux would not exist.

To beef up the historical comparisons, "creates their own workstations on RISC-derived processors" is also (historically) a sign of a (commerical) UNIX, too. It isn't to jarring to mentally replace "macOS Tahoe" with "NeXTSTEP 26".

The compliance trope that a point-in-time-assessment can't be used to support a claim is kind of a lazy take. The certification explicitly states macOS v26.0 Tahoe.

While it's true that it wasn't always truly UNIX compliant, they put in the hard yards to become so (albeit to avoid a $200M lawsuit from The Open Group) [1]

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-goes-into-making-an-OS-to-be-Unix...

Im sorry, but i dont buy that. Unix certification has nothing to do with number of processes running or "efficiency"! The OS must be SUS compliant, i.e have all the core interfaces in place, all the correct utilities (awk, grep, vi, sed etc) and theres something about header files, filesystem requirements etc. even if the macOS submitted for certification is super trimmed down, it does not matter as long as its a true subset of what is shipped to consumers.

MacOS is certified UNIX i.e its "UNIX", like it or not. On this point the article is just wrong.