> there are a lot of folks reasonably asking if they can trust Apple to be in the loop of deciding what apps should or should not run on their Macs. My argument is - who better than Apple?
I was really torn on whether to up or downvote here...
On the one hand, no. Probably, statistically, apple will know better.
On the other hand, despite the above, if you want to call apple devices "owned" (vs "leased") then yes, the user must be the ultimate decision maker. They might want to delegate these things to apple (or someone else for that matter) most of the time. But they must have the possibility to simply run what they want.
I think we're seeing the "HN crowd" be so frustrated about this because it is a pretty transparently anti freedom thing to do, and HN folks do love themselves some freedom.
The user is the ultimate decision maker - the user gets to decide whether they want MacOS or not.
The only people talking about constraining this freedom are the ones asking for the government to regulate software distribution.
What you are asking for is for Apple to make a design change to their software to support your use case.
That is a very reasonable thing to want, and to reject Apple for not providing, but it has nothing to do with some ideology of what it means to ‘own’ something.
My car has software problems I don’t like - the digital speedometer only reads kph, whereas I live in a place where mph is standard. There is no facility for changing the software.
When I buy an Apple product, this is part of what I think Apple does to protect their customers' privacy - No matter what, not even if the govt says so.
Now suddenly, we're back to talking about whether we can trust Apple after they expressly told us not to trust ANYONE including Apple and why that was such a good thing.
Don't forget that Apple is a multinational megacorp, and is user centric only when it suits them. Consider Tim Cook speaking at the conference used by the Chinese government to promote internet regulation, saying that the vision of the conference is one that Apple shares, and also the handing over of user data and encryption keys to Chinese servers (encrypted, but still out of their control).
The problem isn't that they make decisions about what the device can and can't do before the moment of purchase. As you correctly pointed out in another comment they made the implicit choice to not ship it with the ability to make pizzas and everybody thinks that's fine.
The problem is that they (have the ability to) continue to make those decisions afterwards. You could have "known" an iPhone could run Fortnite at the moment you bought it and then after you received it in the mail discovered that they had decided you were no longer allowed to do that.
You could then say "well I bought it knowing they had the ability to change anything at any time" but I'm not sure I agree that you can give informed consent to a blank check.
It’s pretty easy to conclude that Apple will remove software the deliberately breaches their terms of service.
Epic knew it, and the chose to breach the terms of service on purpose to cause this effect. Epic intentionally triggered a contract term that they knew would result in their software being removed from their customer’s devices.
They were given an opportunity by both Apple and the court to restore their software to compliance and still get to continue the lawsuit.
This is 100% Epic’s responsibility.
They could have sued Apple without deliberately breaching the contract, but they chose to make their customers into pawns in their legal strategy.
So, if they started leasing their hardware to users, it would be fine?
I can see the argument, but at the same time, if they really did, I’m not sure I would agree.
I also am not sure that’s completely theoretical. Apple (almost?) has the money to do so (yearly revenues about $260 billion, cash reserves about $190 billion), and I think ‘the world’ is getting used to not owning stuff more and more. Many users already pay per month for their phones, anyways.
Personally I'd be very much more fine with them honestly stating: you get a compute resource, don't expect to control it, pay a monthly fee.
Would I sign up for that? Certainly not. But if that sounds unattractive, then they should just accept that when you sell something and the buyer owns it, you don't control over anymore.
I keep pushing this distinction in DRM contexts, too. It's kinda my personal soapbox. :)
The issue I have with this, is that anyone who is technical enough to install an operating system from source, must necessarily have an understanding what hardware they will be able to install it on. I’m curious if you have ever done this.
No such person would have any illusion about what Mac hardware they could use.
Everyone else, reasonably expects Apple to take care of the OS for them. Indeed that is arguably the selling point and key differentiator of the Mac.
It's not about freedom it's about the fact that those computers cost thousands of dollars and every year Apple wants more and more control after I already gave them a huge wad of money. I am not upgrading to Big Sur, I didn't upgrade to Catalina either, but not upgrading creates its own complications in the long term.
As someone who works in IT: not for most users. Certainly not for any of my relatives, as successful/smart as they may be in other fields.
Certainly have manual overrides for Alpha Geeks (to use O'Reilly's term), but even if a person is on the right-hand side of the Bell curve generally, that doesn't necessarily mean they can make informed software decisions specifically.
I'm fine with automatic seatbelts as long as there's a Terminal.app command I can run to disable them on an as-needed basis.
Then the fake tech support call center scammers just add having the user enter that command to their script. This is why 1TR became a thing, I imagine.
Likewise, I am a developer, a user, and I have fond memories of the old days of 2003 when I could download and run whatever I wanted on my Mac without any fear or security concerns.
Unfortunately, that world is no longer the one we live in.
One of the things I’ve learned about software security is the need to minimise the attack surface of your systems — don’t keep a database running on your web server unless you actually need it, don’t keep ports open unless they’re important, don’t install packages or dependencies you can do without — because everything has the potential for a zero-day exploit. Likewise for my own productive output: the only code guaranteed to be bug free is the absence of code.
For any computer not attached to the public internet, I agree that you should be free to run whatever you want. For anything networked? That’s anarchy, and although I would like the freedom of anarchy I experienced in 2003, unfortunately I don’t like the consequences of everyone else having the freedoms of anarchy in 2020.
I don’t have any fun, easy, side-effect free, solutions.
Should we also get rid of photoshop because users could lack
practice drawing and feel frustrated while trying to improve?
After all they could just google a couple nice images and be
done with it.
Mistakes in the modern world can have devastating consequences. It’s not as simple as your computer freezing up and becoming part of a bot net. Your files will be stolen, your accounts hacked, you will lose money. Most users would gladly take protection from that as opposed to “learning” by making mistakes (getting infected).
Users will never have the vast operational knowledge that most organizations do, and are generally very unsophisticated.
This is why there is no 'File Access' API in the browser, because it'd be like giving guns to teenagers, even with 'safety training' it would get out of hand.
So the issue then becomes one of 'power' as much as 'knowledge' of security, and of course all the peripherial abuse surrounding the 'security rules' that have nothing to do with security.
Involving 3rd parties, giving proper security notifications but still letting users have the final say etc. etc. there are definitely middle paths and reasonable choices we coudl make.
But there's just too much money on the table for the powers that be to look the other way, they will continue to infringe until they are stopped.
On the one hand, no. Probably, statistically, apple will know better.
On the other hand, despite the above, if you want to call apple devices "owned" (vs "leased") then yes, the user must be the ultimate decision maker. They might want to delegate these things to apple (or someone else for that matter) most of the time. But they must have the possibility to simply run what they want.
I think we're seeing the "HN crowd" be so frustrated about this because it is a pretty transparently anti freedom thing to do, and HN folks do love themselves some freedom.