Is Apples hardware not as customizable as other machines that run on Windows because their OS is built more specifically?

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Preface: I'm a student about to take a course in Operating Systems. I thought I'd do some prep by watching a series on YouTube first.

Throughout the course of watching about 10 of the videos in this series, I have learned that roughly the operating system's purpose is to serve as an interface for System Programs/Applications/I/O devices/etc. to communicate with the system's hardware.

This got me thinking about how Apple's hardware is not modularly customizable. How Apple users can't swap out hardware components as easily as users on a system running Windows OS. I began to think that most likely this is because the OS Apple implements is built very specifically with the original hardware their products come with to run as efficiently as possible.

Is there any truth to this logic? I'm basically just trying to apply what I've been learning to a "real-life" example.

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1 Answers

This got me thinking about how Apple's hardware is not modularly customizable.

It is quite customizable but not with their own hardware. The "hardware" that Apple is shipping is mostly x86-64 CPUs with a recent chipset like an xHCI, an AHCI and a modern PCI network card, etc. This is unless you have an M1 computer which is their most recent product based on an ARM architecture. They licensed the architecture from ARM ltd. and are manufacturing their own CPU. I think this is a very good and open decision from Apple unlike several bad ideas they had about their phones like removing the 3.5mm jack or using a lightning plug instead of USB-C.

If you do have an x86-64 CPU, the OS Apple built called MacOS can run on the computer. It is simply forbidden by Apple's license of use. The fact that their hardware is less customizable has mostly to do with screws and the way that the case is made than with the OS itself.

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