It's a bad faith argument. The presupposition is that Apple is inherently motivated to actively lock things down, because that's what they do with the iPhone. This glosses over that Apple has no reason to actually do so, only has reasons not to do it on the Mac, and has gone on record saying they won't treat the Mac as the iPhone. It's based on the notion that Apple would be against free booting a priori for some reason.
Mind you, not all bad faith arguments are unwarranted. I kind of get where it comes from. But it's important to recognize that's that what it is, and there's no reason to actually believe it.
> The presupposition is that Apple is inherently motivated to actively lock things down, because that's what they do with the iPhone. This glosses over that Apple has no reason to actually do so, only has reasons not to do it on the Mac, and has gone on record saying they won't treat the Mac as the iPhone.
What is the difference between an iPad pro and a MacBook? If Apple can get away with a 30% tax on all commercial software, and arbitrarily manage which applications are "allowed" - why would they not want to extend that to their laptops? If they still get people to buy and developers to develop?
> If they still get people to buy and developers to develop?
Well they won't get away with that at all, especially not in the long run as people abandon ship to platforms that do allow free development and tinkering. Apple is still a hardware company with hardware sales making up the overwhelming majority of their profits (over 75%). It would be beyond stupid to risk that just so they can live out a control fantasy, especially because they don't need to live out that control fantasy to make good money from the Mac App Store.
Well they won't get away with that at all, especially not in the long run as people abandon ship to platforms that do allow free development and tinkering.
Before the M1 Macs shipped, Apple's Mac revenue hit an all-time high of a smidge over $9 billion [1]. During a global pandemic and economic crisis.
The Mac will be 37 years old on January 24, 2021 and yet, it continues to gain momentum, not lose it. Between 1984 and now, not a year has gone by without the same narrative: Apple is doomed if they don't change their ways…
The M1 Macs are probably selling like proverbial hotcakes—we'll find out on January 27th [2].
People seem to forget that the Mac mini, the MacBook Air and the 13-inch MacBook Pro are the entry-level, consumer oriented computers in Apple's lineup. These machines are the opening act.
And even as stunningly fast as these machines are, especially on a performance per watt basis, we haven't even seen the take-no-prisoners, kick-ass professional Apple Silicon Macs yet.
We’ll probably see Macs from Apple that don't have the space and power constraints of the current lineup. If they cranked the current SoC beyond the current 3.2 GHz, added more cores and started at 16 GB of RAM… they would capture another huge chunk of the market, including a significant number of Linux users…
The reason people assume apple will prevent you from doing what you want with your computer, is because it’s the logical consequence of the strategy they’ve followed for the past 10 years over their whole product line. From phones, to cable, to messenging software. They’re into vertical integration and walled ecosystem.
Simply asserting this without evidence does not make it so.
If Apple truly had this strategy they're doing a horrible job at it. Mostly since you are free to boot (or work on doing so at least) NetBSD and countless other things on practically every Mac they've ever released, including the latest ones. They're doing a horrible job at communicating this strategy too, because they're communicating the opposite. For this Apple Silicon phase, it seems they've also missed a huge opportunity to finally execute on this strategy by spending a little time and money to develop the tools to do the opposite of that strategy and give users a way to boot unsigned kernels.
I just don't buy it, sorry. I don't even get why Apple would want to do this outside of sheer malice.
> Simply asserting this without evidence does not make it so.
Goes in both directions.
> Mostly since you are free to boot (or work on doing so at least) NetBSD and countless other things on practically every Mac they've ever released, including the latest ones.
Gatekeeper wasn't a thing either, until it was, indeed, a thing.
> They're doing a horrible job at communicating this strategy too, because they're communicating the opposite.
Surely that's the whole point of a trap?
> For this Apple Silicon phase, it seems they've also missed a huge opportunity to finally execute on this strategy by spending a little time and money to develop the tools to do the opposite of that strategy and give users a way to boot unsigned kernels.
Sure, because right now they're trying to sell the idea of M1 Macs.
> I just don't buy it, sorry. I don't even get why Apple would want to do this outside of sheer malice.
App Store, censorship, ... You could turn that around and ask why they would want to lock down their iOS devices, and why you think that those reasons wouldn't apply to Macs.
I've been hearing about this supposed secret Apple plot to lock down the Mac and take away third party software distribution and operating systems for a decade now. If this is indeed Apple's plot, then they're really slow at implementing it. Maybe they'll sort it out in another decade.
I mean, this is exactly the bad faith argument I was talking about right here. If you want to view this as smoke and mirrors until they "trap" you by all means go ahead, but it does shut this conversation right down.
I'm not sure how that means anything when it comes to locking down Macs. If you're trying to make a general argument "Apple is capable of doing bad things", that's of course trivially true but does not at all imply they're interested in locking down the Mac's bootloader?
Apple is trying to make a trusted computing platform (for various reasons) with the side-effect that activities that they do not feel like supporting (for various reasons, money and experience being the first that come to mind) are not available. It's not a hand-wringing evil person in a throne trying to think of ways to make people sad.
They've plenty communicated their intention to not turn the Mac into the iPhone/iPad. And besides which, it would be a disastrous product strategy to do that, from a company that's absolutely top-of-the-ball when it comes to product strategy.
There are entitlements on macOS that are not provided outside of the App Store, such as NetworkExtension API VPNs.
There is also no way to turn off the persistent, hardware-serial-number-based APNS connection to Apple, tracking the system from IP to IP whenever it's on, even when no apps are running.
You also can't wipe and restore a mac with filevault without an online reactivation from Apple, even if you have local bootable install media.
There are several concrete, technical advances toward the thing they are claiming not to be doing. macOS is indeed becoming more like iOS every release. It's not just unfounded paranoia.
There is also no way to disable your persistent radio connection on your cell modem (except for turning it off), and your network provider will know your location and radio tower etc as well. Same applies to your mac: you turn the appliance off and then the connection is off as well. You turn it on and it's connected again.
The matter of Filevault isn't necessarily a bad thing, for many people it's a highly desirable feature. I like the fact that iOS activation lock significantly lowered the value of stolen iPhones; I look forward to the same happening with MacBooks.
Sorry, that seems like a total non sequitur to me. What about that (an outage + a failure to correctly handle the outage on the clientside) suggests Apple is planning to lock down macOS like iOS, either in terms of hardware or software?
Or rather, maybe you'd like to explain what you think Apple would have to gain from doing something like that?
You cannot start any non-Apple applications unless Apple explicitly allows them and keeps a list of what and when you are running. Looks totally fine...
Again, I'm having trouble making the leap from this:
"Apple checks which macOS applications I run in order to verify that the developers credentials are still valid and not expired/revoked, but only for macOS apps and not executables in general, and you can still open apps that are not signed with a Developer ID using a manual bypass" (which is certainly not ideal but seems like a reasonable security compromise. There's no evidence they're keeping a list of this information anywhere.)
to:
"Apple will lock down macOS and make it utterly impossible to run any executable or even scripting code that hasn't gone through a strict review process"
Since you're unwilling (or unable?) to explain that leap without just spouting pithy 3-word comebacks, I guess we're done :)
I suggest you read the comments in the linked thread. Why do I have to repeat those who can explain better than me? It's pretty clear that the current state:
1) cannot be called "fully unlocked",
2) more locked than what people used to have, even on Apple devices.
It might be fine for you, but it certainly is potentially bad for privacy and freedom. Look up keyword "tor" in the thread if genuinely want to understand and not trolling.
Maybe you should go back and read the article that spawned this thread. Apple literally put engineering time + effort just to allow 3rd-party OSes to be run on their chip. That doesn't strike me as the move of a company that wants to lock down their OS.
You can disagree with the tradeoffs Apple decided to make in the name of security/privacy, fair enough. And you can certainly blame them for their mistakes (like not thinking to handle a case where their Developer ID verification servers were offline). But practically, these tradeoffs don't really hamper almost anyone's usage of the OS, and the few people for whom it does can disable them.
> They've plenty communicated their intention to not turn the Mac into the iPhone/iPad.
Of course not, because they need to differentiate. This doesn't mean they renounce their plans to further lock down macOS. Running non-appstore apps is getting harder and harder each year.
Apart from the fact they've actively stated (repeatedly, during their main presentations) that running arbitrary code on a mac will not be changing.
For a company that seems sometimes to go out of its way to not give any information on anything it doesn't make sense to clearly and concisely make that statement.
It's almost certainly not due to "gnashing of teeth." They've always marketed the MacBook line as a general computing device for power users. The idea that they would make it impossible for developers to use their primary computing product is ridiculous. They know how many of these things they sell to students, developers, etc.
Just a note - it's often very easy to measure the validity of your ideas by considering the economics of the ideas. Apple effectively neutering development on their premier general purpose computer would obviously reduce the amount they sold. The same isn't true for the iPhone, which effectively no one develops on.
It's also very clear that Apple sees the iPad Pro—not the Mac—as their vision for locked-down general purpose computing. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see a notebook iPad with a fixed keyboard, or a desktop iPad in the shape of a small iMac. These seem unlikely and perhaps absurd... but not nearly as absurd as locking down the platform Apple expects developers to use.
Apple gives the chance to disable these limitations to power users: "they should be disabled by default!"
Apple disables limitations: "temporary convenient oversight?"
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