Apple has announced that, by next March, all apps for sale in the Mac App Store will have to be sandboxed.

This will make it very hard for any of those apps to do anything naughty, intentionally or accidentally, but one would hope the curated nature of the Mac App Store would take care of that for us anyway. However, the downside is that it will vastly limit the legitimate capabilities of software to that which Apple decides is a good idea, and that’s going to be dangerous. The App Store is already a very important market, and it’s likely to become moreso; insisting on the sandbox for those apps will effectively limit the capabilities of the entire Mac ecosystem. Frankly, I’m about 75% convinced that Apple is so in love with the implications of “curated computing” on iOS — ie, the model where they, not you, ultimately decide what software you can run on your phone or tablet — that they intend to bring it to the Mac over time, with baby steps.

If that’s true, it’s going to run a lot of people off, Heathen included.