[geofft]

I'm not characterizing the presence of the switch as freedom - I'm characterizing the existence of the choice "Do things the old way" as containing as much freedom as you previously had, and pointing out that a) such a choice exists b) the ability to make the choice is in the hands of the owner only.

You can't meaningfully characterize the 2002 Iraqi election as a loss of freedom. You can characterize it as a farce, sure. You can call it evidence that you had no freedom all along. (And if people want to say that the lack of user-enrolled secure boot has been a freedom problem with personal computers since forever, I will certainly agree with them.) But you can't meaningfully say, "We had more freedom before this election, and I want to go back to how things were." So arguments about giving up essential liberty and temporary safety just don't technically make sense. If you don't have essential liberty now, you certainly didn't have it before.

I also think that there will be some users who will choose freely to use macOS because they genuinely believe that's better for their computing freedom, and they're not manifestly wrong in reaching that conclusion (whereas I would be much more skeptical of someone saying "I voted for Saddam because I think he's going to do good things for the country"). As I mentioned there is no competent free software implementation of an OS secure against evil maid attacks, with secure boot and TPM-locked full disk encryption. You can, in theory, fiddle with tpm-tools and cryptsetup and shim (or coreboot?) and build something of your own; I've never seen anyone do it, and I've certainly not seen a distro that provides a one-click option in the installer to do it. macOS on a system with a T2 chip provides this out of the box. Windows with BitLocker does. Chrome OS does. (I suppose Chromium OS does, but doing binary builds of that seems at least as tricky as getting cryptsetup and tpm-tools working.) A user who decides to use a proprietary platform as a tradeoff for knowing that their machine is only running software they've chosen (even though their choices are limited) is not obviously making a mistake.

(I will admit that I have a Chromebook for secure stuff and a normal Debian stable laptop for everyday stuff, and I am considering the purchase of a Mac with a T2 chip, for roughly these reasons. I've wanted to figure out TrouSerS / tpm-tools for years but at this point it's clear I won't get around to it.)