[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.

[jb1991]

I see you have cherry-picked a single malware attack from five years ago that affected a very specific and highly-populated region, and are using that as your single claim that iOS is less secure overall. But search after search I conduct, reading articles on this topic from the likes of Norton and various respected security researchers are tipping the balance in favor of iOS for overall security. It's not perfect but it is rather clear. The lack of fragmentation, and the centralized control and ease over updates, are all cited as key advantages in the iOS space in the war against malware.

Thanks for the info on XcodeGhost, I hadn't heard that before. But to stake your evidence on this one single event from over five years ago is not so convincing.

I appreciate your effort to dig up an example that is an exception, but we're talking about the industry overall here, worldwide, and in recent years.

[lern_too_spel]

That single event infected an order of magnitude more users that all the infections of Google and Amazon devices combined. I don't need to find any others. That single event also showed how ineffective Apple's malware scanning was because Apple relied on third parties to find the affected apps even after being given some examples. That process took even longer because Apple does not allow third parties to do this effectively.

> The lack of fragmentation, and the centralized control and ease over updates

As I said, if you're choosing a device to run, you don't select one at random from the set of all Android devices. You select one that receives timely updates. On the subject of ease of updates, Android is even better because system app updates do not require a reboot and instead happen silently in the background while the user continues to use the device. This is especially important for apps with large attack surfaces like web browsers, and this is why malware markets have priced mobile Safari exploits as essentially too cheap to meter.