[skibble]

Oh please. Just because there’s someone shouting this in every such thread doesn’t make it automatically true. You can set up a Mac without ever connecting it to the internet and it will work perfectly.

These are defensive measures to protect the general user base from malware. Yes, using HTTP in 2020 is worthy of scrutiny, but not using every such incident as a new piece of armour for this tedious narrative. Apple’s entire platform offering is based around curation. If you disagree with it, there are many other platforms out there you can elect to use. The bitterness that flies around whenever Apple comes up around here is almost inexplicable.

[Tainnor]

> Yes, using HTTP in 2020 is worthy of scrutiny [...]

This is the understatement of the year.

It's one thing for Apple to "curate" their offerings and not allow you to do everything with their devices. It's quite another thing for them to pretend they're about "privacy" and then sending confidential information over the wire unencrypted.

When businesses use macOS, they might be fine with the "curation" and "you're not allowed to do everything" aspects (that everybody was aware of), but certainly not with something like this.

[jb1991]

> The bitterness that flies around whenever Apple comes up around here is almost inexplicable.

or more specifically, not so much inexplicable (as actually I think it is quite predictable), but rather it is just exhausting.

I'm never going to buy a Windows computer. Period. I'm probably never going to switch to Linux either. I don't go around shouting my reasons why I won't, and I think most Apple users behave this way.

But for a certain segment of the non-Apple crowd, yelling consistently about their opinions is an odd recurrence.

[AsyncAwait]

> or more specifically, not so much inexplicable (as actually I think it is quite predictable), but rather it is just exhausting

Weird how I feel the same about all the pro-Apple comments in every Linux thread, specifically to the effect of:

'Unlike Linux, macOS just works. When I was younger I used to play with Linux too, but now I do actually work I just need shit to work and macOS does that', followed by a bunch of outdated, showing knows nothing about what they're talking about shit about PulseAudio.

But when Apple completely and utterly screws up, to the point when you can't even launch non-Apple apps on a machine you paid thousands of dollars for, then people are all too sudden overreacting?

Funny how that works.

> I'm never going to buy a Windows computer. Period. I'm probably never going to switch to Linux either.

Good. And most FLOSS people don't want you to either. What is my problem is when people have crazy high expectations of FLOSS maintainers, but a trillion dollar company screwing up is filled under the category of 'shit happens' so to speak.

Especially considering Apple's a commercial entity that DOES NOT and WILL NOT care about you or what you think and does not need anyone's advocacy as they have a massive marketing budget of their own. Aside from that, there is a feeling in the FLOSS community that Apple's conducting a war on general purpose computing as we know it, which is not an unreasonable thing to be fearful of considering their influence.

> I don't go around shouting my reasons why I won't,

I am glad to hear that, but there's an awful number of your fellow Applers who are doing exactly the opposite.

> But for a certain segment of the non-Apple crowd, yelling consistently about their opinions is an odd recurrence.

Right, which is totally not a thing for the Apple crowd, is that it?

[jb1991]

Fair enough, I can see your perspective. Thank you. Although to take my position that I don't plan to switch which OS I use and thus claim that an entire community of developers don't want me, that was a bit of a low blow.

[AsyncAwait]

> to take my position that I don't plan to switch which OS I use and thus claim that an entire community of developers don't want me

I meant to say that we don't want you to switch to Linux if you're clearly happy with what you have already, not that we don't want [to have anything to do with] you, sorry if that wasn't clear.

[izacus]

What a bizarre post considering all the pro-Apple smugness we see in Windows, Android and Linux topics. To the point where some of them are almost outright Apple ads.

Almost as bizarre as loyalty to a single brand even when they stop treating you well.

[sbuk]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; there is smugness from all sides. There does appear to be a an awful lot more coming from the FOSS community, but perhaps that cognitive bias on my part, id suggest that what you see is the same.

[stinos]

This. I'm well aware some of the comments I leave on the net about certain products (be it applications, os, hardware, tools, literally anything) might come over as smugness (though I do my best to just state facts without putting an extra undertone in it) but at least I realize that; it's just a natural reaction when you see something you like getting bashed - especially if that bashing is not entirely just or even completely wrong. But it's baffling to see people not realizing they're being dragged down by cognitive error and it makes them blind. We're humans, we can be thaught to self-inspect, it's unfortunate this doesn't get done in education enough.

[jb1991]

> But it's baffling to see people not realizing they're being dragged down by cognitive error and it makes them blind.

I misread this initially and I suspect others are as well based on the downvoting. But I think what you mean is that impulsive and/or unconditional bashing is the cognitive error here, right?

[dontcarethrow2]

The thing that confuses me is the name of this site. Start up workers became hackers then get to be smug because they overspent $$ on a shiny turd?

I can understand smugness from those who contribute/maintain (what I understood by FOSS community), I don't understand the entitlement money brings.

[jb1991]

But that’s just it: most Apple users do not feel that suddenly they are not being treated well.

[vagrantJin]

Pardon my rather simplistic view.

I'm a windows user primarily and linux user by choice. To my dismay, at my workplace I have to use MacOS because everyone uses iMacs which belong to the company and have no choice in that regard. This means MacOs is tied directly and non-trivially to my livelihood. My complaint of apple and what I percieve as shenanigans by Apple are due to that very fact that it is tied to my livelihood. Ofcourse you can say switch jobs because you dont like the brand the company uses and I will concede that as a somewhat valid point- but a reasonable person may look askance at the suggestion. We can agree it's a stupid reason to plunge myself into financial uncertainty. There is a non-zero chance that there are others in my position and who must exercise the right if not courtesy to complain.

> But for a certain segment of the non-Apple crowd, yelling consistently about their opinions is an odd recurrence.

There is a certain group which self identifies as fanboys which is their right and that group is not comprised of Windows or * nix users. This segment of fanboys I can assure is equally if not more vocal. Amusing if nothing else.

[jb1991]

Your "simplistic" view is perfectly valid, thanks for sharing.

I agree that it is a bit amusing at times.

[Tainnor]

That's such a weird complaint. I own an Android device and use Google services and yet, I'm perfectly capable of criticising Google and their practices (criticism that, I might add, is least as frequent on this page as criticism of Apple - see AMP et al.). I expect that especially on a forum such as this one, people would be able to make informed choices and understand trade-offs. To say "I use Apple/Google/Microsoft devices because the trade-offs work best for me" is completely reasonable. What I don't think is reasonable is to perceive any criticism of a big corporation whose products you happen to be using as a personal attack.

[jb1991]

> I don't think is reasonable is to perceive any criticism of a big corporation whose products you happen to be using as a personal attack.

I’m curious, what part of my wording suggested I was taking this as a personal attack? Things can be exhausting (annoying) without being personal.

[Tainnor]

I think it's mainly this part:

> I'm never going to buy a Windows computer. Period. I'm probably never going to switch to Linux either.

This sounds to me as if you were saying "since I won't be switching away from Apple, I find criticism of Apple tiring because it won't change my mind". Which seemed to imply to me that you were taking Apple criticism as an invalidation of your personal beliefs / preferences. But I don't think it should be construed that way. It's just criticism of a company.

I apologise if I misconstrued your position.

[jb1991]

No, it meant that just because I will never buy Windows does not mean I will go around bashing it. That’s why the next sentence said “I don't go around shouting my reasons why I won't”.

[totalZero]

You really have no way of knowing that particular users are part of the "non-Apple crowd" unless they explicitly say so. I expect that many of the louder voices criticizing Apple come from Apple users themselves, because they have skin in the game.

[jb1991]

Fair enough. A lot of the criticism I’ve seen are people who claim themselves to be Linux users, so I guess that influenced my impression.

[ubercow13]

So? You mean that it's exhausting to be reminded of the negatives of a choice you make?

The sentiment expressed is basically the same as in 'Your Computer Isn't Yours' mentioned in the article, which has already caused Apple to respond and enact change. That criticism directly caused real improvement.

>I think most Apple users behave this way

http://www.paulgraham.com/mac.html ?

[chongli]

The sentiment here and in the article isn’t what caused Apple to enact the change, it was the negative publicity timed to coincide with the launch of a new release of their flagship operating system. The incessant drone of “Apple owns its users and they’re basically slaves to their own devices” is what annoys people so much.

There is no such thing as a perfect computer. Every purchase involves tradeoffs, including Linux. I, personally, started out on Macs in late 1995 and then switched to Windows in 2002. A few years later I switched to Linux and then ran Arch until summer 2017. I switched back to Macs with a MacBook in fall 2017, just as I began university.

Why did I switch back to Mac after all those years learning Linux? Because I was tired of my computer breaking all the time. I wanted something that would just keep working and not randomly boot to the system console, unable to start the graphical shell, after an update. This tradeoff in stability came at the price of customization, something I was glad to give up anyway since I knew I’d have a ton of actual work to worry about in school.

[ubercow13]

I don't see the difference. Negative sentiment, once broadcast publicly and when diseminated widely enough or by the right people, becomes negative publicity, and that's what they acted on as you say.

Anyway I would hope that 'incessant drone' is often about more than customisation, it is because people are concerned about the impacts on general purpose computing a la Cory Doctorow [1]. Moaning about that being annoying is like moaning about the 'incessant drone' of climate change commentary.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUEvRyemKSg

[chongli]

I’ve been aware of Cory’s argument since he first began writing about it. It still hasn’t come to pass. I can still run a C compiler on my Mac and write whatever software I want to write. I can still install any other compiler or interpreter I like and write whatever code I want for it. I can still install any open source software I want.

Cory’s arguments ultimately boil down to a slippery slope argument. Apple says it is locking things down in order to protect people against malware. Cory says this will lead to a lockdown against general purpose computing (ability to run any software you want). This hasn’t yet come to pass, so it’s a matter of waiting at this point.

I don’t think climate change is an appropriate analogy. Climate change is a physical process which we can model and predict via the scientific method. It’s pretty clear at this point that if we maintain the status quo and don’t change our behaviour then catastrophe will ensue.

You can’t say the same thing about Apple. They’re a company full of people and you can’t predict what they’re going to do next. Plenty of people try, of course, but they’re wrong every year.

[jb1991]

> You mean that it's exhausting to be reminded of the negatives of a choice you make?

No, that’s not it all what I meant, and I’m sorry if it came across that way. I meant it is exhausting to see the same fairly shallow criticisms shouted on a regular basis. It’s a different product with a different philosophy and people don’t have to buy their products, and it’s exhausting just to see the same things regurgitated over and over.

[lern_too_spel]

From the side of a free software user, it's exhausting to see Apple claim over and over in its marketing that it values privacy and then to see its users on a site for tech-literate people parrot that marketing when it is clearly not true. Any time I see somebody fall for that, I will call them out. Any time after I call them out on that, if they say that reduction in privacy is to prevent the spread of malware, I will also call them out because Apple's malware track record in the mobile space is worse than its peers. I'm absolutely fine with people saying that their mobile processors are great because as far as I can tell, that's a true statement. It is the parroting of known false marketing claims that I will correct every single time.

[jb1991]

> Apple's malware track record in the mobile space is worse than its peers.

You'll have to back that up with a meaningful citation because all the evidence I've seen is to the contrary.

Here, I'll offer one example:

> Android devices 50 times more infected with malware compared to iOS.

https://www.pandasecurity.com/en/mediacenter/mobile-security...

[lern_too_spel]

Xcodeghost alone infected an order of magnitude more users than all the malware combined on Google and Amazon Android devices, despite there being an order of magnitude more users of the latter.

https://www.macrumors.com/2015/09/20/xcodeghost-chinese-malw...

Unlike Google and Amazon, who do both static and dynamic analysis of uploaded apps for malware, Apple relies on very basic code scanning and manual review, leaving infected apps up until they were reported externally.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/xcodeghost-ios-malware-leaves-...

Even worse, Apple does not let third party security research release apps on the App Store, making it harder for them to find and report malware to Apple.

So we have that iOS is worse than Google and Amazon Android devices as a whole. Users who care about security will not randomly choose from that whole set of devices but instead choose among those that receive rapid security updates. That subset makes the difference in security even more stark meaning that iOS users give up their privacy and get worse security.

[wil421]

It’s been like that forever. I can remember my friends dad had a Mac in the 90s. When I asked my dad he hated Apple and Macs with a passion about. He was an EE and hated the closed operating system. He was not even close to being alone either.

It really was similar to what I hear today from a couple people who I know that refuse to use an iPhone or any apple product. The Apple hating passion from people who have never used them is very real and has been for decades.

[devwastaken]

It is true, please provide evidence otherwise. Do you know that the 'safety feature' phones home every single app you use clear as daylight on any network you're on? Your ISP can log what you're using, what time, where from. Apple is supposedly big on privacy, yet this was handled by many engineers who thought it was OK to do. That's called hypocrisy. You should be calling out Apple too.

"Apples platform is based on curation" yep, here it is. That's the iphone developer Mantra. Except were talking macos. What you're saying is nobody can create and run applications without apples signature. That apple gets to control it all.

Whatever happened to developer freedom? The ability to create and share? That disrespect software development, that disrespects it's origins, and instead of seeing how hypocritical that is you create excuses for the company that chokes the life out of it.

These are terrible apologies for the world's richest company. You advocate against yourself by thinking "it's apples way or it's the highway". You willingly give up consumer control and make logical fallacies to ignore having to address the cognitive dissonance.

This is why right to repair is being chosen by voters. If you won't be a responsible consumer then the others who have work to do have no choice but to force apples hand.

[gspr]

So your retort to "Apple doesn't believe that you should own your computer" is essentially "if you just don't connect it to the Internet, they can't control you"?

[zepto]

If you you know what Apple believes, who else’s minds can you read?

[gspr]

I don't. I claim that if Apple does believe that, then OP's retort is bad.

[zepto]

Do you think Apple does believe that?

[gspr]

I haven't made up my opinion. Part of me thinks that if they had nothing to hide, they'd show their code.

[zepto]

That doesn’t scale.

If the solution was always just ‘show your code’, anyone could make up an allegation against them as a way to get them to reveal source code.

Also - arguing that if you’ve done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide, is a bizarre position to take in an argument about privacy.

If we were to apply it to Apple, we would need to apply it to everyone.

If someone actually produced evidence of Apple lying here, that would be a different matter.

Nobody has produced any evidence at all.

[andrewmutz]

> The bitterness that flies around whenever Apple comes up around here is almost inexplicable.

... Or Google, or Facebook, or Amazon.

When a community has so much resentment about all these different companies, it says less about the companies and more about the community.