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Comment by jeffjose | Hacker News Reader

After years of making fun of Linux folks for having to "know everything about the computer" to get things working, Mac folks seem to be embracing the culture these days.

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I can't speak for everyone, but for me there's a big difference from wanting to know everything about the computer and needing to, particularly when I'm not at work.

These days setting up a Windows or Apple system means fighting lots of relatively confusing dialogs and options to avoid using cloud services, etc. Modern consumer operating systems want to analyze every bit of your activity they can get their grubby mitts on and you really have to fight them and say "No thanks!" about 15 times on a modern phone and less, but still a lot, on Win/Apple.

I care about privacy, like most people, but I am able to control mine far better than the typical, non-technical computer user. I am reaching a point where these operating systems are becoming untenable for day to day computing use. They lure you in with "everything just working" including the privacy invasive "cloud" features. Increasingly these things are using ML to mine your behavior. I can run Linux. I don't even mind paying for a privacy with a little bit of my time and convenience. I don't want to look back 25 years from now and say "I really wish I had not given up this bit of privacy". Alternately, I am hoping when I look back I can say, "It was worth the relatively small time sacrifice to avoid these things."

(Not confusing for technically savvy folks, but still, pretty hard).

Yea, you might be confusing Windows and Macintosh there (or iOS and Android). It's trivial to setup a Mac, there is one dialog to collect crash data you can opt out of, and you don't have to use iCloud. Apple would like you to use iCloud but doesn't make you, doesn't want your private data, and is committed to protecting that data.

Windows is a little more frustrating, and I don't think Microsoft has the same level of privacy commitment as Apple does, but I also don't think it's that far behind.

Google is a special case, they are an advertising company and have virtually no revenue streams outside of that for Android. I'm sure they'd like to protect your privacy too if they could still serve super targeted ads to you, but they have no way of doing that.

Sierra got a lot worse. That was the end of the line for me. App store, difficult to disable System Integrity Protection with no alternative APIs to replace lost functionality, etc. But, yes Apple is the best of the lot. Android phones require a lot of battle to tame by default.

iOS is by default the most secure phone OS, etc. (Secure Enclave is nice and you know it is available on all iOS devices newer than X) But it is a walled garden that is too tightly controlled in terms of what is allowed.

Still if you enable iMessage it gets murkier. Siri, cloud backupiCloud keychain (which is good, but not for me). Lots of small pushes to remote services.

Sarcasm detected, but this is only a tiny fraction of Mac users. 99.9% will just go to an Apple store, buy a Mac and are sure that everything from power management to Wifi works.

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