I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again. Years ago I worked for Apple retail when Bootcamp was a thing and it was "unsupported" and not only was it behind security switches, but you had to go out of your way to download and set it up.
I had a customer come in one morning steaming mad and demanding a refund for her new macbook. She was mad because (to paraphrase) she has been told that she wouldn't have all the problems and crashes her windows machine had and wouldn't have to deal with viruses and a host of other windows specific issues if she used a mac. But after a few weeks she was still having all of the same problems. The more she described the issue, the more it sounded like she'd never even bought a mac, but here she was with a 3 week old macbook in a box. And beyond that, she described having some hardware issues that had been corrected with a firmware update months earlier. The first boot and software update should have corrected all of that.
So I asked her to show me some of what it was doing. She took it out of the box, switched it on and it booted right into windows. And then proceeded to dump a ton of malware popups all over the screen just as she'd said. It turns out, she did indeed buy the macbook 3 weeks earlier, and then gave it to her "computer smart nephew" to setup for her. Well Mr. Nephew apparently decided in his infinite wisdom that is aunt didn't need macOS, she just needed an expensive windows machine. And so he'd downloaded bootcamp, shrunk the macOS partition to the smallest size it could be, and then installed windows and configured the machine to boot into windows by default. She'd never used macOS and didn't even know it was there, and so had never gotten the firmware updates for the hardware, and was of course having all the same problems she had in windows normally, because she was still using windows, only this time without any malware software because "macs don't need Norton".
The end result is I showed the customer what had happened, got them squared away with the mac OS side an asked them to give it a try for a few weeks with a personal guarantee we'd return it if she still didn't like it. She became one of our best customers. But the moral of the story is twofold:
1) Not everyone who uses tech makes the decisions for how that tech is configured
2) "no support" is a good way to ensure that those #1 people hate your product
What a great story.
I wonder at what stage of Idiocracy lore we’re at, to require locked down software to “protect” people from “smart nephews”.
The more I read from you people, the more I get amazed. I can’t believe how somebody would use such anecdotes with serious face against software freedom.
Who's "requiring" anything? Android is there if you want open smart phone computing. iOS is there if you don't. And at a near 50/50 split, that means both are about as close to continuously feature parity as you could hope for. Listening to all arguments over why iOS should open itself up when Android is right there for anyone that wants that sort of freedom feels like listening to a bunch of C programmers bitch about Rust's borrow checker or Java's Garbage Collector. Your "software freedom" goal is already here in the world's most popular smart phone OS and supported on more devices from more vendors than even the most "open" iOS version will ever be. But not everyone wants or needs to write code in C and not everyone wants or needs the sort of "software freedom" that Android is giving.
Ok, it's great that you want that, Apple clearly doesn't want to provide that for you any more than they want to provide you with Intel based macs, watches that run Linux, or touch screen laptops. No one has explained yet why Apple should be legally obligated to provide that for you. There's a lot of hand waving towards Apple having a monopoly on their own products, which is something of a tautology, but notably no one claims they have a smart phone monopoly or a smart phone OS monopoly because that's patently absurd given the sheer magnitude of the non-iphone smartphone market. Nor has anyone explained why they're not satisfied with getting those things from that non-iphone market.
This isn't like the late 90's computer era. Apple doesn't fine BestBuy and AT&T for carrying non-apple smart phones. They don't obligate Samsung and Sony to buy licenses to iOS for every phone they ship, regardless of whether iOS is installed on it. Heck, even though they're bundling the web browser with the OS you can't even reasonably make the argument doing so is giving them a monopoly in the web browser space.
Yes, and? The question asked was "how would a person [wind up with sketchy software installed] if it is behind a security toggle?". The answer I gave was that not every person that uses tech makes the decisions about setting it up, and that officially sanctioned routes imply support costs regardless of any disclaimers. Are you saying that if Apple had an official ability to root the OS that the number of people who wind up with unknowingly rooted would be the exact same as there are now when the only way to do that is with a jailbreak?
She'll change the toggle and then install it. It's obvious that a lot of HN users didn't live through the period of time where IE was overrun with toolbars for nearly every user because websites would walk people through how to override their security settings so that they could install all kinds of shit. BonzaiBuddy, Yahoo Toolbar, MacKeeper, etc... they all walk people through how to turn off the security settings needed to get themselves installed.
That's the whole problem. People don't know any better so they follow the instructions to get what they think they want. They don't know what they don't know.
Banks can and will block transfers that they believe are fraudulent. They specifically train their customer facing employees to stop customers when they feel like the customer is being scammed. And people have been demanding that banks do even more to help prevent fraud. And if you think Apple's restrictions are invasive and overbearing ... banking regulations and restrictions make Apple look like a freedom loving hippy.
You can definitely tell who has and has not done some for of tech support sort of job interacting with the general public, in these kinds of discussions. "But the user would NEVER do..." oh my god, not only would they, they would in large numbers, it wouldn't even be some super-rare occurrence. Nobody who's done that kind of work would type those words in that order.
I was in such a role in the exact time period you're writing about. At the time, most computer users were still at least kinda enthusiasts, if not particularly well-educated on their new toy. It's no accident that ordinary people got seriously interested using computers for important things in their lives when smartphones came around, and especially the iPhone—phones are like computers that are 80% less rage-inducing utter shit, as far as normal folks are concerned. "Real" computers are horrible for a majority of people. Notoriously horrible, like, listen to people talk about how they interact with "real" computers and their attitudes toward them; they don't trust them at all and often hate them, to them they're like expensive bulky frustration-machines that barely make any sense, don't do very much (the pieces of crap can't even replace a pocket camera, what a joke), and break entirely at random and frequently.
And I don’t give a crap. If it’s so bothersome for you - don’t do it. Just say no.
People complain about shit all the time, shall we now remove all advances of humanity?
