There are two issues that are coming up here: sandboxing and paid upgrades. They are quite different. As a consumer I am completely for sandboxing for myself and for other consumers. In a world where malware is increasingly a problem sandboxed apps will become the norm. That's the reality we live in. Sandboxing being a requirement means that I can fairly safely install anything from the (future) Mac App Store. The OP…
> In a world where malware is increasingly a problem I don't see that as the case. There is malware out there in torrent land, sure. But if you acquire software from reputable sources (like a paid app store, referral from a friend, heard about it on a forum like HN, package repository), malware just isn't a concern. If you put malware on an app store, the world will notice, its rating will tank, and people will stop…
The only reason your sources are "safe" is because they are not the popular ones.
Malware goes after the high volume targets. If your OS has 2% of the market, yes, your binary packages are probably relatively safe.
But the situation is different for the Microsft's, the Google's (Chrome will no doubt be targeted as it gets more popular) and, eventually, the Apple's.
Apple was always safe because it was not the OS of choice for most of the population. It was niche. If you haven't noticed that is changing.
It's funny because some of the stuff I'm working on is, by design, "sandboxed", but I never think of this as it's most valuable "feature".
Sometimes we do not see the obvious. I'm sure in my case I'm missing something, and I think in yours too. Malware is ++huge problem. And there's no solution on the horizon. If your OS relies on people outside the OS developers contributing "apps", which users prefer to download and install as opposed to reading code and compiling themselves, then your "app store" is vulnerable.
A friend of mine recently got a virus. The kind that starts emailing all your contacts. I've seen this happen to family and friends repeatedly over the years. Nothing has improved.
When I mentioned it to him, his comment to me was along the lines of "Yeah, it was especially difficult to deal with because it was a Mac."
It's not easy to get at the innards of anything Apple makes, expecially these days when they are trying as hard as ever to prevent you from understanding how it works. If something goes wrong, you're fsck'ed. Unless of course "Customer Service" can help you. But when you become the next MS, there is no such thing. Customer Service, the human kind, does not scale.