I never understood this sentiment, if people choose to pay their way into a walled garden, why should they still care about hardware ownership/repairabilty, etc.?
It's a trade-off. I buy MBPs for the great form-factor and OS, not for the walled-garden shenanigans. If those shenanigans can be somewhat reduced, the trade-off balance looks better.
I don't mean to me facetious, but I am genuinely curious: why should you get to have it your way? You are attempting to buy a product they do not sell.
After you buy your hardware it's yours to do with as you will. If these hacks result in the ability to load whatever you like on the T2 and intel proper then why not? Hackers like to hack. A lot of programmers are also hackers (in the traditional sense, not the negative sentiments that the press gives it)
Then perhaps they should sell it, and stop ignoring people who want it?
Benign neglect (not creating limitations) is not the same as active interference (actively preventing) and Apple is much more on the side of active interference. They could simply do nothing (which is cheaper). They choose not to, at which point we get to question their motives.
In the end your question reduces to "why do you want anything at all that someone doesn't already make?" and that doesn't make alot of sense given that new products come out on the market all the time.
Why would I not? Why should I accept everything companies do without ever complaining? Am I not allowed to tell the fishmonger that his fish doesn’t look that fresh to me? In the same way, I’m free to tell Apple their fish would taste better with some adjustments.
First sale doctrine says if I buy something, I now completely own it and I can do as I please with it, even if it goes against any of the former owner's wishes or intent.
I'm a happy iPhone, iPad and Mac user but have also jailbroken some of my old iPhones before so they could be used by family in China.
In the arguments about opening up the iPhone and forcing Apple to allow third party app stores and allow side loading I'm on Apple's side. I think Apple should decide what products they design, how they design them and what features they should have. If I like the feature set, I'll buy the. I do not think it's reasonable for other people to dictate to Apple what code they should write and how it should work, health and safety or deceptive marketing aside. The ability to side load apps would be a software feature that needs to be designed, coded, QA tested, secured etc. Who gets to make all those decisions? I don't think it makes sense to force Apple into doing these things if it doesn't want to do them. You don't like the inability to side load? Buy another phone.
On the other hand once I own a device, it's mine. If I have the ability to jailbreak it, or hack it, or do whatever to it that's my business, not Apple's.
Would the current side loading capability, requiring a hard link to a Mac and an install of XCode, satisfy those calling for a side loading capability for consumers? I doubt it, but that's my point. Who gets to decide what satisfies any such requirement? Building in the features to support third party app stores is even more of a can of worms.
"if people choose to pay their way into a walled garden, why should they still care about hardware ownership/repairabilty, etc.?"
I don't like the walled garden but i still brought a iPhone because iPhones get updates for really long time(3 years minimum). Iphone SE(1st gen) released in 2016 got the iOS14 update.
I'm in the same boat as well :) . I keep a mac laptop for work/consulting stuff and otherwise have a linux box and several rpi's for my linux hacking hobbies :)
We don't live in a world with a robust operating system market where people can pick and choose the perfect option for them. You have three choices and they are each going to be a mixed bad of good and bad features for almost everyone.
Mac hardware traditionally holds resale value. The T2 chip threatens to turn that hardware into a brick once resold. So beyond that jailbreaking ultimately makes the user's data more secure once Apple repairs and releases a fix (likely only going forward with new hardware) the jailbreak will cure the problem with aftermarket bricks for hardware with this T2 chip.
It's not an intentional anti-resale feature, but it does make repair a lot harder, because it locks (or at least, can lock) specific hardware components to the motherboard. This means if something on the laptop breaks, you can't repair it without the T2 chip knowing about it and potentially refusing to work. Apple has at least told their authorized repair partners that failing to register the repair with Apple may brick the device should Apple choose to further lock down unauthorized repairs in future firmware updates.
The T2 also has a particularly wonky approach to disk encryption. It uses a key management approach where neither you nor Apple control the actual key material. This means that a dead T2 takes your data with it and there is no recovery. In pre-T2 MacBooks, Apple had a lifeboat connector which could be used for data recovery from the soldered-on SSD. They got rid of this with the T2, because there's no point - only that specific T2 in that specific motherboard is ever able to decrypt the data.
Data recovery - in an era where you have to go out of your way to keep your data out of the cloud, backups are easier than ever and can be done wirelessly - this is going to be your major objection?
Please. As for matching parts to the motherboard, they have a point when it comes to I/O devices. It’s probably way more cloak and dagger than most people will ever have to worry about but it’s not unheard of. Again, if you don’t want to think about such things and want a device that trades ease of repair for improved base security why isn’t that something that shouldn’t be a choice?
I’m generally pretty pro right to repair, but as with anything there are pro’s and con’s to all choices and I’m not fond of several of the right to repair arguments for government regulation being made. Apple is far from the only maker of computers out there. It is the only maker of macOS, but that still doesn’t justify people trying to dictate their business model - especially when many aspects of their business models are major reasons why I prefer their platforms.
The cloud is not going to replace local storage until low-latency, high-bandwidth internet connections become widespread and you can do iSCSI or similar with your cloud service. This is not going to happen anytime soon.
Until then, clouds operate on a best-effort basis, some of which rely on hacks or break common use-cases (I can't put a Git repo in iCloud for example, and it doesn't perform well with lots of small files, and accessing the iCloud folder from the terminal apparently has problems). Why is iCloud still not a supported target for Time Machine, Apple's official backup solution for macOS?
But isn't the repair being harder a net-benefit for the consumer? It's not like the repair is arbitrarily harder. It's harder because the repairs in question deal with the TouchID sensor and the SSD, like you said. I wouldn't want someone being able to access my data just by replacing a component on the computer that then bypassed all the security systems present on the computer. It's the same situation as when replaced displays on iPhones were causing issues because repair shops weren't moving over the TouchID sensor. The cost of that security is that I need to have my data backed up but that's a best practice anyways for anyone that values their data.
"You should have had a backup" is not an acceptable excuse for not having a data recovery mechanism. Furthermore, full disk encryption is not bypassable in the way you suggest. Your login password is (supposed to be) the key material for the encryption, which is stored off-device, preferably in your head. In other disk encryption systems that are not locked to a particular encryption chip, if you take the disk out of the machine and plug it into another machine, it won't be readable unless you have that password.
Furthermore, most people do not make this calculation in their head of "Okay, anything I put behind the T2 is Apple's property now so I'd better have unencrypted backups". They just buy the computer that works and says that it keeps thieves and snoops out of their data. Everything we're talking about with backups comes as a post-purchase surprise, usually AFTER the data is already lost.
That's a very disingenuous assessment of the situation at hand. Epic knowingly violated their developer agreement. There was no retaliation. There was the consequences that were written into the developer agreement that Epic agreed to.
Apple revoked the developer accounts that Epic uses, so Epic could no longer notarize their (unrelated, MacOS desktop) software. No matter what you think about the lawsuit, you have to admit that Apple used their position of power to strong-arm the competition, and went against their promises to end-users regarding notarization.
> Epic knowingly violated their developer agreement. There was no retaliation
I think you don't understand how this works. The agreement itself is the subject of the lawsuit and thus MUST be violated in order to show harm. Epic did it on purpose in order to sue Apple and whether you agree with that or not, it is the only mechanism the law allows to make the agreement itself the subject of the suit. And Epic does have a right to sue Apple for whatever reason they choose.
> macOS will deprecate older Macs 6-7 years after their release.
This is substantially inaccurate. Current versions of macOS run on nearly all Apple systems from 2012 (8 years old), with the exception of some 2012 Mac Pros. The limiting factor in most cases is GPUs -- macOS 10.14 and later require some GPU capabilities which weren't reliably available in 2012.
Catalina, released in October 2019, dropped support for MacBooks released before 2015, MacBook Air models from before mid-2012, MacBook Pro models from before mid-2012, Mac Minis from before late 2012, and Mac Pros from before late 2013[1]. Do the math and that is 5 to 7 years between initial release of the hardware and deprecation by macOS.
Probably comes down to definition of choice. Up thread someone else is describing how a particular macbook is the only hardware meeting their criteria but the OS is hobbling them.
I'd be interested in a real study that actually measured how often people are explicitly choosing the walled garden, and how often they're choosing something else that the walled garden "happens to come with".
My money is on the second option but AFAIK there's no study like this.
because they want a macbook, just disagree with apple on who should be able to fix it. the choice you mention doesn't exist, it's an illusion. you can't buy a macbook that apple allows you to fix yourself.
For the same reason some people will buy a BMW and swap out the exhaust or add a turbo with their own two hands. Because it gives them the combination of customization, challenge, and capabilities they want.