I never understood this sentiment, if people choose to pay their way into a walled garden, why should they still care about hardware ownership/repairabilty, etc.?
Benign neglect (not creating limitations) is not the same as active interference (actively preventing) and Apple is much more on the side of active interference. They could simply do nothing (which is cheaper). They choose not to, at which point we get to question their motives.
In the end your question reduces to "why do you want anything at all that someone doesn't already make?" and that doesn't make alot of sense given that new products come out on the market all the time.
Kind of hard to have diversity/options if everyone keeps insisting all vendors do everything the same way.
The downvote button on Hacker News doesn't work like a dislike button by the way
Customers have a legal right to do basically anything they want with something that they own.
In the arguments about opening up the iPhone and forcing Apple to allow third party app stores and allow side loading I'm on Apple's side. I think Apple should decide what products they design, how they design them and what features they should have. If I like the feature set, I'll buy the. I do not think it's reasonable for other people to dictate to Apple what code they should write and how it should work, health and safety or deceptive marketing aside. The ability to side load apps would be a software feature that needs to be designed, coded, QA tested, secured etc. Who gets to make all those decisions? I don't think it makes sense to force Apple into doing these things if it doesn't want to do them. You don't like the inability to side load? Buy another phone.
On the other hand once I own a device, it's mine. If I have the ability to jailbreak it, or hack it, or do whatever to it that's my business, not Apple's.
Apple of course has an internal version of iOS that lets you do this.
I don't like the walled garden but i still brought a iPhone because iPhones get updates for really long time(3 years minimum). Iphone SE(1st gen) released in 2016 got the iOS14 update.
Yes it could be used that way. But they have never even indicated that they've been thinking of using the secure enclave for that purpose.
The T2 also has a particularly wonky approach to disk encryption. It uses a key management approach where neither you nor Apple control the actual key material. This means that a dead T2 takes your data with it and there is no recovery. In pre-T2 MacBooks, Apple had a lifeboat connector which could be used for data recovery from the soldered-on SSD. They got rid of this with the T2, because there's no point - only that specific T2 in that specific motherboard is ever able to decrypt the data.
Please. As for matching parts to the motherboard, they have a point when it comes to I/O devices. It’s probably way more cloak and dagger than most people will ever have to worry about but it’s not unheard of. Again, if you don’t want to think about such things and want a device that trades ease of repair for improved base security why isn’t that something that shouldn’t be a choice?
I’m generally pretty pro right to repair, but as with anything there are pro’s and con’s to all choices and I’m not fond of several of the right to repair arguments for government regulation being made. Apple is far from the only maker of computers out there. It is the only maker of macOS, but that still doesn’t justify people trying to dictate their business model - especially when many aspects of their business models are major reasons why I prefer their platforms.
Until then, clouds operate on a best-effort basis, some of which rely on hacks or break common use-cases (I can't put a Git repo in iCloud for example, and it doesn't perform well with lots of small files, and accessing the iCloud folder from the terminal apparently has problems). Why is iCloud still not a supported target for Time Machine, Apple's official backup solution for macOS?
Furthermore, most people do not make this calculation in their head of "Okay, anything I put behind the T2 is Apple's property now so I'd better have unencrypted backups". They just buy the computer that works and says that it keeps thieves and snoops out of their data. Everything we're talking about with backups comes as a post-purchase surprise, usually AFTER the data is already lost.
This is referencing the Touch Bar repair which means that the user has encrypted their drive with Touch ID. The only reason any repair would be harder is because the Touch ID sensor is paired to the secure enclave. The same goes for the SSD. Without the key, as you stated, you shouldn't be able to access the data so I don't see how that's any different than "having a data recovery mechanism". A data recovery mechanism shouldn't exist if you don't have the proper keys.
Then they got in a legal fracas with Epic and immediately retaliated against Epic by banning all their software from all Apple hardware!
Apple has shown they are very eager to use their position of power to strong-arm the competition, and these kinds of chips only add to their power.
Apple promised to the users (not Epic) they would only use notarization to block harmful software. Epic's software is not harmful to the user, and the lawsuit didn't change anything about that.
I think you don't understand how this works. The agreement itself is the subject of the lawsuit and thus MUST be violated in order to show harm. Epic did it on purpose in order to sue Apple and whether you agree with that or not, it is the only mechanism the law allows to make the agreement itself the subject of the suit. And Epic does have a right to sue Apple for whatever reason they choose.
Not to the consumer.
The T2 chip can prevent people from putting their OS of choice on their hardware once Apple deprecates support for their machine.
This is substantially inaccurate. Current versions of macOS run on nearly all Apple systems from 2012 (8 years old), with the exception of some 2012 Mac Pros. The limiting factor in most cases is GPUs -- macOS 10.14 and later require some GPU capabilities which weren't reliably available in 2012.
Catalina, released in October 2019, dropped support for MacBooks released before 2015, MacBook Air models from before mid-2012, MacBook Pro models from before mid-2012, Mac Minis from before late 2012, and Mac Pros from before late 2013[1]. Do the math and that is 5 to 7 years between initial release of the hardware and deprecation by macOS.
[1] https://www.macworld.co.uk/feature/mac-software/what-version...
Those machines were all sold in 2011 or earlier. Saying "before 2015" is misleading, because the MacBook name was used during two disjoint periods to refer to two completely different machines.
Between 2006 and mid-2011, the MacBook brand name was used for a line of low-cost Core 2 laptops, most of which had plastic cases. (Some sales to schools continued through 2012.) These are the laptops which were not supported by macOS 10.14 and later.
Between mid-2011 and 2015, there were no computers sold under the MacBook brand. Apple only sold laptops under the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro brands during this period.
In 2015, Apple reused the MacBook brand name for a line of 12" ultraportable laptops. These are supported under current releases of macOS.
No, models release before 2015 were deprecated. Same thing with the models of other lines that only had 7 years before being deprecated by macOS.
My money is on the second option but AFAIK there's no study like this.