Comment by kmeisthax

To be clear, Apple's authoritarian tendencies are directly downstream of Steve Jobs' authoritarian tendencies. Tim Cook's just continuing what was already there in 2014. It was Apple policy to lock down everything with code signing since the iPhone. Hell, I think it started being a company mandate around the 4th or 5th gen iPod.

The one thing Jobs didn't account for[0] was that iOS apps were going to take off and thus owning the signing keys to iOS would be extremely lucrative. Jobs' original iOS development mandate was "webapps only", at least until the jailbreak developers embarrassed him enough to change his mind. Even then, he genuinely thought 30% was going to just barely defray the costs of running the App Store.

The actual difference between Jobs and Cook is that Tim Cook isn't nearly as charismatic. Jobs had the "reality distortion field" - the ability to confidently lie so hard that the engineers believe the lie and actually make it true. It's the sort of authoritarian manifestation that Donald Trump is desperately trying (and failing) to tap into.

[0] In Jobs' defense the last SDK they'd shipped for portable devices was iPod games.