[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.