"locked down" is a vague, moving target. The criticisms of pre-OSX MacOS was that it was an operating system for little babies, and not serious tech enthusiasts and power users. Also they were too expensive, and you can build a PC that is 100000x more powerful for cheaper. This literally hasn't changed.

Are you being sarcastic? This has definitely changed with Apple Silicon. Looking at hardware value, the M-series are way more competitive than the Intel macs ever were, and if you want to run an LLM locally, they are undefeated.

However, it is quite ironic that while the value of their hardware has sharply increased, their software has become the slop that everyone is complaining about.

Uh where’s the cheaper MacBook neo that is 100000x more powerful?