[xp84]

> If they approve, the settings open, then the user has to find the specific little toggle and enable it. Another security prompt then done. Why isn’t this at most 2 prompts?

Answer: Because modern-day Apple has subscribed to a particular brand of mitigation for the "noobs will always click 'Allow' especially if you ask them to first" problem. The mitigation is that Apple just dumps you on step 2 of a little 4-5 step mini sysadmin adventure where you prove, every time, that you're sophisticated enough to deserve an exception to the padded-cell walled garden mode they've sealed off 'for your safety.'

As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.

What's my solution to prevent grandma or a 10-year-old from clicking "Allow full filesystem access and keylogging" to an executable she downloaded from facebook-security-center-and-password-verification-cgi-bin-ab383 dot xyz? IDK, that's their problem, but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.

[comboy]

> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this, but it comes off as deeply disrespectful to me as the user that I can't disable this.

You seem to have understood the problem. But then you didn't follow. If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on.

Of course it is not perfect, but their approach here is really decent. And also, if you find yourself needing to go through that often I think that's not a good sign security-wise.

[wolvoleo]

Their approach is not decent. There should be some kind of master key to get full admin access. Leaving al the keys in the hand of a mega corporation is asking for trouble.

It's gone so far that even tech people now think that having root access to a mobile device is somehow scary. Well guess what that root access is still there for the manufacturer. It needs it for stuff like updates. It just shields you from having any kind of input or visibility on what is going on.

And once you've given up your admin control to the mega corporation, your government is going to be next. They'll be demanding backdoors and regulatory bullshit like age verification and snooping backdoors. Even today the EU launched yet another chatcontrol proposal. Eventually they'll manage to get it through when they've paid off enough representatives.

Keeping full control is the only way to prevent this.

[butlike]

Doesn't the government already have root to whatever machine via the NSA? It's the downstream government, the state-level governments that are squeaky wheels with the age verification and other nonsense.

[wolvoleo]

I'm in Europe not the US. But NSA and their likes are a very expensive resource. They're not going to use that for small fry cases. Also, any evidence they obtain is not legal for any purpose so it has limited use.

And even NSA backdoors could be discovered more easily if we had full access to our phones, obviously.

[fsflover]

You can have the full access to your phone. See: Librem 5.

[wolvoleo]

There's nothing you can do with that in daily life if you need apps. Also, purism is American.

And yeah you can root other phones too but then you end up getting blocked in apps, that's the problem. It should be none of their business that my phone is rooted.

Imagine office refusing to work on windows because I logged in with an admin account?

[jahller]

you really underestimate the will of people to not change anything that annoys them about their OS. they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe.

[Sharlin]

Agreed. It just doesn't occur to most people. To even come up with the idea that maybe there's a setting for something, never mind searching for a tutorial on how to change it, you already have to be a power user for some values of "power".

[carlosjobim]

The grandma is going to follow the video on how to disable system security because scammers are making these videos and she think she has a virus.

Not because she wants to install brew or something.

[Sharlin]

Good point.

[projektfu]

This is evidenced by the people who constantly dismissed the Wi-Fi pop-up on iOS. Which is just about everyone I know with an iPhone.

[xp84]

Which pop-up do you mean?

[projektfu]

It's a setting that iPhones had for a long time, where they would prompt you to join the nearby WiFi networks. I don't currently have one, so I don't know what it's currently like, but a large number of people would pull out their phones, start doing something, dismiss the pop-up, and continue, many times in a day. Probably they almost never actually used it to join a WiFi network at all. You could turn it off in settings but they didn't.

[MoonWalk]

"they will click 1 million times a popup away before even considering that it could be resolved indefinitely by an option change. i think Apple's system works well to keep the average user safe."

I find this reasoning backward. I have been saying what you just said for years, in defense of NOT making changes a giant pain in the ass for knowledgeable users. The vast, vast majority of people will not imagine that there's an option; much less go looking for it. Therefore if the user goes digging around in Settings, everything should be there all the time, with no further hassles required.

By the same logic, a lot of Apple's recent decisions are anti-user stupidity. For example, removing the "Get new mail" button from Mail. If my mom tries to log into her bank account and the site says "We just sent a confirmation code to your E-mail," she's going to go there and try to fetch mail. But nope... now she has to sit there and wait for it to poll the server at some unknown interval.

Apologists rush to say, "Oh but you can simply customize the toolbar and put it back." NO. Give me a break. Why on earth would the average user even imagine that you could customize the fundamental UI of the application, let alone figure out where to perform that task? It's so out of touch with real-world users.

[Wowfunhappy]

> If there was a way to disable this, first thing that the grandma would do is watch a video how to disable that and lose security from then on.

My grandma absolutely would not watch and follow a video on how to e.g. disable Gatekeeper, nor do I think she’d be able to if she tried.

Your grandma sounds substantially more tech savvy than my grandma. Good for her, she seems to know what she wants. Grown adults should be allowed to knowingly opt into an additional level of risk.

[moduspol]

She would ask a grandchild or neighborhood kid to fix it, and then it would be disabled.

[kbelder]

Should she be allowed or forbidden from doing so?

[moduspol]

I think it's reasonably within scope of the threat models considered by operating system creators.

[Wowfunhappy]

I still don't understand the threat. Is it that a user who is not "worthy" of more permissive security may nonetheless be capable of enabling more permissive security?

I can put that more charitably by thinking about it in terms of informed consent, ie does the user understand the risks involved. But if you're concerned that someone following a video tutorial or seeking out a friend has not consented, then I think your standard for what constitutes consent is ludicrously high!

And if it turns out that lots of people are consenting to something, that isn't a failure of design. You asked your users a question, and they gave you an answer.

[freedomben]

I agree with you, but then to me this is a great reason why macOS (and Apple products in general) just aren't made for me. And that's ok, that's the beauty of diversity.

[merlindru]

Could make it disable-able only from the terminal in recovery mode. That one would be too hard / bothersome to fend off most cases I feel like

[Moggie100]

Never underestimate the ingenuity of a motivated fool.

My litmus test for this sort of thing is Excel - I think we all can agree that Excel is used for way more than it should be, and the most complicated, unhinged uses of it are done by non-technical folks looking to get a task done through desperation.

[KoolKat23]

At that point it's a them problem.

[aquariusDue]

Yeah, it always seems weird to me how we deem most adults responsible enough to own a car and not drive into oncoming traffic or how people are allowed to buy actually dangerous tools from big tool stores without a second glance. And sure, there's safety training available and in the case of driving you gotta first prove you're able to follow the rules. But after that? You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.

With that in mind it ends up being weird to me in a way I can't articulate because after all I can speedrun losing a limb if you left me loose in Harbor Freight or speedrun losing all my money and becoming debt-ridden if you give me a laptop with internet connection.

Anyway, I know there's more nuanced discussion to be had still I sometimes wonder how would the ideal approach actually look like without requiring people to have a digital(ing) license before being allowed to connect to the internet.

[TylerE]

That isn't true at all.

To attack your specific example, cars have added all kinds of things that "hand hold" the user and keep them (and others) safe: Seat belts, air bags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, automatic emergency braking, back up cameras, lane keep assist, blind spot monitors, etc, etc, etc. (Oh, and guess what, per-mile traffic deaths are WAY down from a few decades ago).

[ToucanLoucan]

> You're on your own, only in computer land do the manufacturers and so on keep holding your hand trying to make sure you're not figuratively cutting it.

Well, firstly, newer cars are now equipped with tons of safety features like various kinds of auto-braking, various warning systems which monitor blind spots in the car, and driving aids like lane assist, lane monitoring, what have you. And then they also have advanced telemetry features that don’t keep them safe, but their insurance company hopes will identify them as bad drivers if and when they get into accidents so they can be denied coverage. These could be analogous depending how you look at it.

Additionally while there’s not much out there for tools, I think that’s less to do with it not being an issue and more to do with it being kind of impossible? That said a few tools have things like sensors that detect the presence of fingers near saw blades and will not only stop operating, they’ll usually destroy the tool in the process to ensure the operators safety, because fundamentally, more saws exist, more fingers do not.

Like despite loving track driving, I wouldn’t think that everyone tearing around in V8 monsters with stripped interiors and roll cages is a good idea.

[throw0101a]

> At that point it's a them problem.

Except when it becomes a reputational problem for the OEM: Excel sucks at X (i.e., don't use it for that) and Excel sucks can become equivalent in many people's minds.

Sometimes it is actually a problem of people 'holding it wrong' (as the meme/trope goes). And who gets the blame?

[KoolKat23]

I'd say, the reasonable person test, if the mistake sounds like one a reasonable person would make, then fine.

I guess sadly the press will gloss over all the intricacies for a few clicks.

I also feel that dumbing things down probably just exacerbates this problem as "reasonable folk" have no clue how you actually get from a to b.

[jmye]

*shrug* I bought my mom a specific laptop to prevent "them" problems. I'm sorry that you're mad that every laptop doesn't conform to your use case, but perhaps this is a good time to realize that not every product is for you, and not every product has to conform to your view of the world. Sometimes, you can just not buy things that don't function the way you want.

[KoolKat23]

Easier said than done. Economies of scale.

I suspect you're missing the entire point of my statement however, I also suspect your mother accessing a recovery boot mode intentionally is not on your list of concerns, if you're infantilizing her use to such an extent.

[mikey_p]

Did you know that Facebook actually has a message styled with color and different font sizes that pops up in the browser console when you open the inspector for Facebook.com with instruction not to paste things you're told to paste there, with a link to https://www.facebook.com/selfxss for more information?

[moduspol]

No, it would just become something you ask your tech-savvy nephew to fix for you. Windows is (or used to be) full of things like this.

[manwe150]

That’s likely not quite the reason. It is to make you have to pause to think if this is the action you want to take.

On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications. I almost never do. I was looking at settings recently and surprised how often I’d clicked yes by accident (maybe about 5% false click rate?)

[MiddleEndian]

>On the flip side, many websites ask if I want to allow notifications

One of the first things I disable on any new Firefox setup. I want zero notifications from websites (or in general, one of the objective improvements of Windows 10 over Windows 7 is that you can just disable notifications entirely, while disabling balloon alerts in Windows 7 was a huge battle that never fully worked)

[syabro]

but the damage of notifications is almost zero compared to keylogger IMHO

[mrpippy]

Right, that’s why you get a simpler yes/no dialog for notifications, and a conplex “navigate to this settings pane and click a separate button” flow for a keylogger

[setopt]

I’d like a dialog where you are simply asked to repeat a sentence like «yes, record my screen» or «yes, record what I type» into a text field to approve. Straightforward but still makes you think.

[rswail]

AWS Console has that, but it's infuriating that it has different prompts for different resources, it asks you to type "delete" or "confirm" or the name of the resource.

But like most of the AWS Console, each service is different in a unique way.

[Nursie]

Depends on what you allow and what your level of sophistication is.

My mother recently had "There are antivirus notifications taking over half the screen, do I need to click on them and renew Norton?"

She'd been somewhere and done something that had allowed an unscrupulous site to flood her with alerts directing her to give payment information to a scam site pretending to be antivirus renewal.

When I finally got over there (she doesn't live on the same continent) I went in and disabled notifications on all of her installed browsers.

As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

[swiftcoder]

> As far as I'm concerned the whole 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

It's a symptom of the whole "we converted our document platform into an application platform" debacle that typifies the modern web.

Notifications make no sense for the majority of websites, but if you use, say, a web-based email client, then you probably do want them.

[xp84]

> 'let this website notify you' feature is an antipattern and yet another example of browser overreach.

Yes and no. Prompting for it modally the way they do now is for sure wild, but for some webapps (e.g. Slack) it makes plenty of sense. I think Firefox used to have a UI they used for some things where they'd inject a non-modal bar with a couple of buttons inside the content area. This sounds like the right type of UI, maybe at the bottom of the viewport.

  site.com can send notifications when you're not on this site.  (Get Notifications from site.com) (Dismiss)

[greazy]

Notification requests add to decision fatigue, which can lead to bad things.

[klodolph]

This particular permission is pernicious, ponder for a picosecond the possibilities:

It’s used for writing keyloggers.

That’s it. It’s the permission that lets you write a keylogger. It SHOULD NOT be just a click away. It should require some extra song and dance, because this is an especially dangerous permission, and the extra friction is justified.

[xp84]

All the permissions are treated the same way though. Microphone access. Screen sharing access. etc. Yes, all could be used to spy on you in evil ways, but the replacement of a straightforward "Want to grant this app the following permissions?" with these stupid little spelunks through the garbage app that is Settings irritates me every time.

Apple should throw this whole thing out and replace it with first-launch lists of permissions, with toggles for each. This app 'Zoom' wants "Record the screen, microphone, camera." Then you're done and you don't have to keep searching for it in little lists and relaunching it.

[zuhsetaqi]

They are not all treated the same. Microphone and even Location or Local Network can be permitted direktly with the dialog.

[klodolph]

Honestly, I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with, I think it just kinda sucks and doesn’t do its job. Apple is kind of fixing it but there is a long way to go.

There have been alarm bells ringing in my head for a long time with all these settings, and the fact that they’re buried in the settings app gives me a lot of peace of mind. I’ll click through a lot of boxes and alerts and grant permissions that I shouldn’t. I’m SUPER glad that I won’t accidentally grant, you know, full disk access or accessibility to an app just by clicking on a box that appears at startup.

I remember back in the bad old days when I was constantly making extra user accounts just to run some program. Kinda sucked. Hard truth is, you sometimes want to run code that you don’t fully trust.

[xp84]

> I think the permissions model for desktop and laptop computers is way too permissive to begin with

Well, if you feel that way, they do make platforms that sound like a better fit: iPad, iOS, even Android kinda fits that mold. I would call them "toy computers" but that is my bias. It's not a real computer to me if I am not even in control of what code runs on it.

[klodolph]

Ah, I can see what you’re getting at. There is actually a system which is a better fit for me, which is the Mac. I can still run the software I want on it, and even though the security model isn’t tight enough, it’s improving.

Linux is also doable, but there’s extra work involved with setting up separate user accounts for running specific pieces of software, configuring namespaces for those processes, that sort of thing. But this is backwards. I’d rather start with a secure default state and have to configure exceptions. Back in the day I could get that from SELinux strict policies but it seems like those have fallen by the wayside.

[xp84]

Problem is, Apple are slowly turning the Mac OS into the iPad. You can't run software you compiled unless you jump through hoops to code sign it. That's today. In the future, it'll probably require Apple's developer subscription for them to "let" you run your software on "your" computer.

I still use a Mac too, but it is not on a good trajectory if you value having any control over your computer.

[tekne]

Have you considered Docker?

[kdheiwns]

The scary thing to me is how Apple makes you jump through hoops to install or use any sort of app, but when it comes to adding items to your login items, they don't even require you to grant permission.

Tried some little throwaway app and realized you don't need it? Sucks for you. It added itself to your login items and it'll start up in the background every single time you turn on your computer. And it won't even tell you. Thought you deleted the app from your Applications folder? If you didn't check your login items, there's probably some little script that deeply installed itself and it'll reinstall it in the background during your next startup.

Adobe is the fucking worst with this. Their Creative Cloud spyware keeps enabling itself and reinstalling itself so long as you use photoshop. And it'll constantly find ways to turn itself back on. Steam also adds itself to login items, which is fucking annoying because you'll reboot and be hit in the face with game ads. At least it respects your decision when you turn it off, but login items should be opt in, never opt out.

[bartvk]

I try to always install with Homebrew. Because then you can uninstall with the --zap option, for example:

  $ brew uninstall --zap aerospace

Usually it blows away everything associated with the app, including cached files, configuration in ~/Library and ~/.config, etc. Very useful. It'll leave a non-functional login item which isn't active and can't be active.

[bayindirh]

I like the app uninstaller included in Forklift. You open Applications folder, and delete an app. A window appears with all the associated files Forklift can find (which is extremely accurate, BTW), and you can uninstall everything you want from there.

For .pkg files, there's UninstallPKG which reads the package manifest and properly uninstalls it.

[xp84]

I would like to take this moment to rage against Apple for shipping that package installer, literally 25 years ago, and never once having apparently even considered a native, out of the box way to uninstall programs that were installed that way.

Speaking of packages, even more embarrassing, Microsoft Windows literally beat them to shipping a first-party package manager. I feel like Apple lives in a fantasy land that the drag’n’drop app install method from the classic macOS is some kind of platonic ideal — never mind that they can’t stop half the apps out there from going outside that paradigm and installing their crap all over the place.

[deafpolygon]

I get notifications that an item has added itself to your login items.

[volemo]

I do as well, but no app should be able to add itself to the login items: ask me or better have me navigate to the login items settings pane and add it manually.

[radicality]

I like the app ‘Lingon X’ I think is the name, to help with this. It’s a viewer/editor for all the startup and recurrent background tasks on your Mac. But also it has a feature to notify you of any edits/additions to the startup/background items that I otherwise wouldn’t have known about.

[ibejoeb]

That is a solution. But the underlying problem is that they didn't go far enough. There's no good reason to bundle arbitrary screen recording with window snapshots, or bundle arbitrary keylogging with hotkey activation. Just off the top of my head:

For previews, Apple could provide an API for this very common task. The OS can provide the images, and they could be sampled at refresh rate that makes it unusable for arbitrary recording.

For key chords, they could repurpose the emoji key, which is currently not available for external binding, to effectively allow capture only following that magic sequence. The OS should manage this centrally, allowing a program to define its commands and then delivering only the command without the specific associated keys presses. We get the benefit of centralized management with deconfliction, too, which is a real pain on macos as it stands.

I don't know if these solve every problem, but they solve some. There are probably better ways. Apple has plenty of smart programmers. The product team needs to let them solve the problems that they surely know bother their professional users.

[joshspankit]

For a long time, I’ve believed that the actual solution is to make the system transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious. Imagine playing hide and go seek in the salt flats

[tikhonj]

That seems ≈impossible in a world where you're running arbitrary, Turing-complete code. A modern consumer machine can do so many different things—often a bunch at a time—that there is always a massive amount of space to hide bad behavior.

There might be some way to design a system from the ground up to avoid this problem (some kind of declarative, capability-based security?), but retrofitting that onto an existing behemoth of a system does not really work.

[somat]

I agree, however the fundamental problem here is that transparent systems are on the far side of the axis from user focused systems, think about it, the whole point of building a user interface is to hide and remove choice from the user, to change the system from "A steady hand with a magnetic needle" to "point and grunt" the whole point is to build a shiny facade that hides the inner working of the machine. So while you and I and many other people like to see the machine, the inner workings whirling around in grandiose majesty. Millions of man hours have been spent hiding that stuff away keeping it from view, pretending it does not exist. And thus the transparency of our computing environments have suffered correspondingly to this focus on hiding things.

[hibikir]

From the time of very early viruses, malware has spent effort modifying the tools that make the system transparent to lie to you. So your approach demands that there must be things that are absolutely impossible to change. I have yet to see a system where that is actually true.

[refactor_master]

If I log into my system it's safe. If someone reads my password off my screen post-it and logs into my system it's quite thoroughly compromised. How would you demonstrate which of the two sessions are compromised, during the act?

[thfuran]

What does that actually mean?

[rmunn]

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonneville_Salt_Flats — the salt flats are extremely flat (as the name implies), and because of all the salt, no vegetation can survive. Look at the pictures: there are no trees, no grass, no hiding places at all. Anyone standing (or even lying prone) on the salt flats is visible to anyone else for miles around.

GP was saying that systems should be "transparent enough that a compromised system is obvious". I'm not entirely convinced that that's possible (On Trusting Trust should have taught us that compromised systems can create places for the compromise to hide), which means that the salt flats analogy is not a great analogy, IMHO. But at least now you understand the analogy.

[ileonichwiesz]

I don’t think the analogy was the issue. What does it mean for a system to be so transparent that it’s obvious when it’s compromised?

[joshspankit]

What I mean can be shown with an example:

Let’s say first that we know (some) users will inevitably agree to let malware compromise their system, no matter the popup or protections

A compromised system that’s transparent:

- Has only one way an executable can be started and, being designed as a “salt flat”, it’s easy to read

- Exposes all I/O and all network requests (to admins), regardless of driver abstractions

In this case, even a young enthusiast can look at a system and immediately see that it’s compromised, remove it’s ability to start or do work, and likely remove it from the system entirely.

The inspiration for this approach is a backlash against the absolute glut of places to hide in current user-focused systems. From multiple startup options, to services, to drivers, and in to the “hidden from the admin” executables that can be compromised it’s an ever-worsening problem that erodes user’s ability to keep their own system secure

[coldtea]

That what apps have permission to access/record what at what times they use it, shouldn't be hidden or scaterred across several Settings panels.

[volemo]

I can’t speak for the ancestor, but I think making every screen recording app prominently visible in the status bar would fit the bill.

[butlike]

I was thinking it would even go so far as to make the background red if it failed some heuristics.

[Wowfunhappy]

The solution is that you as the nerd should be able to prove your skills once instead of every time. This is why I’ve personally never had an issue with Gatekeeper—one `spctl --master-disable` and a trip to the Settings menu and you’re done. Why can’t TCC work like this?

[jeroenhd]

Making the prompts understandable helps a lot when it comes to preventing your grandma from installing a keylogger. I don't mind the setting not being obvious exactly because people who don't know computers shouldn't be tricked into toggling them.

But it is funny to see the daily barrage of permission prompts fly through when macOS made an entire ad ridiculing Vista for half the popups and permissions macOS requires these days.

[butlike]

I oftentimes think that as a nerd, it's easy to walk around like my shit doesn't stink, but then I realize I too have been the victim of clicking through popups mindlessly and probably have done some 'risky computing stuff' I'm unaware of beyond that.

As nerds, do we have a higher capacity to fix a mess than a grandma? Sure, probably, but that doesn't mean that we don't make messes.

[FireBeyond]

And then one that grinds my gears, perhaps more than it should: there's no way to change the default browser without explicit user action or consent.

But do that and the very next thing that happens when you try to open a browser or a link in an email?

"Your browser has been changed from Safari to Chrome. Would you like to use Safari or keep using Chrome?" and for a little salt, the default is "Use Safari".

[js2]

> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.

I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...

[jlarocco]

It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates.

At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.

[pjmlp]

The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC.

As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.

[thewebguyd]

Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap).

They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete.

Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.

[linguae]

Apple did openly court Unix users during the early days of Mac OS X. As a teenager during this era, Macs of this era were my dream machines due to Mac OS X, and I was so happy to buy an 2006 MacBook the summer after my freshman year of college with money earned from a summer research internship.

Here's a Titanium PowerBook G4 ad that says "Sends other Unix boxes to /dev/null": https://www.reddit.com/r/vintageunix/comments/b4kojo/sends_o...

Here's a snapshot of the software solutions page for the aluminum PowerBook G4 from November 2004, proudly touting Unix and even X11:

https://web.archive.org/web/20041126011836/http://www.apple....

Some quotes from the Power Mac G5 page (https://web.archive.org/web/20041126015955/http://www.apple....) from the same era:

"With the Power Mac G5, a researcher can now run both productivity applications and high-performance UNIX applications on a single system. Mac OS X Panther includes 64-bit optimized system math, vector and image libraries that take maximum advantage of the 64-bit G5 processor."

There was also a cluster in Virginia made of Power Mac G5s, which Apple also touted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(supercomputer)

[pjmlp]

Yes, as they were fighting for getting out of bankruptcy and were reverse acquired by NeXT.

I also attended a marketing session at CERN, when they came to visit our IT department in 2003, when there were still people using Sun pizza boxes as their desktops (aka SPARCstation).

Anyone that has been around Apple long enough can recognise the old Apple (pre-OS X), on current Apple, now that they can be their old self.

Any good biography on Steve Jobs, like The Next Big Thing, Folkore or Cult of Mac, will show that underlying culture.

[xp84]

This rings true to me.

Mac when I got started on it in the 00s was really dependent on everything to do with creative - Photoshop, publishing, etc. It kept that for a decade or more, and added a ton of the software developers market in the 2007-2017 era. During that era, they at least made a show of seeing us as an important demographic. Since about that time though they've had so much success in the "mainstream" that it seems like if there is any decision where software developers would want X and it would be better for mainstream nontechnical users if Y, they go with Y every time, and often no longer even bother accommodating the "X" use case at all.

Silly point: Years ago, the iChat client that is the forefather of "Messages" on Mac let you choose a sound for an alert, and it would include whatever sounds you had put in ~/Library/Sounds. Today, it only offers the fixed list of canned alert sounds that shipped with the computer. Because why would a mere user even know what a wav or aiff file is? Why should the user get to choose?

[pjmlp]

Or even had they acquired Be instead.

Microsoft had "WSL" earlier, only badly.

The only reason I started with Linux at home back in 1995, was the half hearted UNIX subsystem on Windows NT.

Had they been serious about it I am sure GNU/Linux would never taken off.

As shown by Apple sales of folks buying POSIX instead.

[kalleboo]

I don't think Apple was ever really strong with the "idiots" market until the iPhone halo effect came into being, as much as they may have tried in their marketing.

That market always bought the cheapest machine (or "best value", by specs/$) they could find (or, if they were really an "idiot", the machine that Best Buy had the highest commission on), which would be a PC.

In the beige days, Apple's bread was buttered in the publishing market, once they moved to OS X, they got the "professional nerds who wanted UNIX but not doing sysadmin at home".

[coldtea]

>The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

I'd call the power user market that - the kind of idiocy that's more interested in the process than the results.

The actual target market was "people that have a life outside computers".

[valleyer]

I've had SIP disabled for years, across many updates.

[jlarocco]

Could have been something else then, but (in the past, at least) they would definitely reset some of the settings on every major upgrade.

[harrisi]

Ironically, my first thought was using Automator or AutoHotKey (there's a different one for macOS I think? But you get the point) to just identify those dialogs and click yes/allow/whatever.

Even though a bunch of the responses are "well you don't want a keylogger" when the first solutions I can think of are also (potential) keyloggers. :)

[meszmate]

It got restrictive enough that I jumped to Linux with Hyprland and just configured everything the way I actually want

[articsputnik]

True, I started with Omarchy, but then changed everything to my liking. It's so much nicer if you can change your OS by changing some dotfiles, and don't get distracted by all the nonsense of new features that macOS and Windows are adding. I wrote about my journey https://www.ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-arch-linux-omarchy/ and what I learned after 8 months: https://www.ssp.sh/blog/linux-omarchy-the-good-bad-and-fixab...

[marssaxman]

This is the reason I stopped bothering with MacOS, also. Linux just works.

[WillAdams]

Bring back the "Unix expert" checkbox from NeXTstep?

[osjdiwnfiwjfi]

> As a complete nerd, you'd think maybe I'd like that I can prove my skills like this

As a self proclaimed complete nerd I expect you to be insufferable about this—lo and behold...

Let’s not pretend these security practices have no use, please. This “I’m such a greybeard, screw modernity” playacting is so tiresome it’s not even quaint any longer.

[cmsj]

You can make the vast majority of them go away by rebooting into recovery mode, running Terminal and then executing:

csrutil disable

nvram boot-args="amfi_get_out_of_my_way=0x1"

I really wouldn't recommend doing either, but you do you.

[m463]

Wait until they add a captcha so AI can't do it for you.