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Comment by userbinator | Hacker News Reader

Apple clearly does not want you to have a general-purpose computer:

https://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html

Everything is done with "security" as an excuse because it's hard to argue against[1], but I think people are slowly starting to see through that. Apple wants to control every aspect of your life, and if you let it, it will. I wonder whether those who work at Apple and are responsible for doing such things really understand the implications, and whether they agree with it...

[1] Except with that classic Franklin quote.

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Many people, although certainly not everyone, are perfectly ok with this. I, for one, don’t have the expectation that my iOS devices are general purpose computers. I have the expectation that the device works with zero configuration for a set of fixed purposes in a design language that I’m accustomed to. That’s it.

Exactly! When I’m on my phone I want to use the internet, take pictures, use banking apps, access email and Dropbox, and watch video. That’s mostly it.

I don’t expect or want to be productive, as security is more important.

> use banking apps

Coming from a country where at some point the only way to have internet banking was to install an impossible-to-uninstall rootkit in my own machine that fucked up accessibility, messed up Steam and made it impossible for me from using competitors (because other banks needed incompatible rootkits), iOS being the way it is makes a lot of sense.

I once had to spend a whole weekend untangling the mess made by one of these rootkits in my father's computer. I remember it screwed with his ability to use third-party USB digital signing dongles, which he needed for his company to operate. The bank's rootkit basically prevented him from conducting business, and since he needed both bank and emitting digital receipts, the only solution was creating another partition.

I'm not even expecting security at this point, I just want to use the damn thing without some asshole bank developer ruining it forever (or until I reformat the machine).

South Korea/Windows XP?

South America.

SK's situation got a lot better with the new wave of personal banking (Toss, Kakao Bank), basically playing catchup to China.

The general-purpose computer you’re referring to requires an administrator that makes security decisions and provides safer environments for users who don’t have the expertise to do the administration part, or don’t want to spend time on it.

One could describe what Apple sells “system administration as a service” (possibly even “network administration as a service”. They control what software can run on any phone in the iOS ‘network’). I don’t think that’s “wants to control every aspect of your life”. Their privacy stance seems to be at odds with that.

I think this is closer to Hanlon's razor than it is to "Apple wants to control every aspect of your life".

Big selling point for Apple products is privacy, security, and consistency of experience. All of these things are made easier by this policy (including applying to iSH). The cost is less flexibility / freedom.

Not quite Hanlon, but just replace "stupidity" in the original formulation with "unwillingness to spend the massive engineering effort required to provide both security and flexibility".

Though in all honesty I think that even with stupendous engineering effort, it will always more safe to just disallow certain actions entirely. After all, although birth control is a great way to not have a baby, not having sex at all is even better.

Weird. I keep buying general-purpose computers from them on the regular. They're called "Macs".

> Apple clearly does not want you to have a general-purpose computer

Can you explain the existence of the MacBook, iMac, Mac Mini, and Mac Pro?

Legacy stuff that they are currently eroding. They invalidated (or threatened to) developer signatures on Desktop/Laptop that were supposed to be 100% about security over an iOS business dispute.

They have been working on locking those down too, even before they announced the switch to ARM, which will continue this trend.

People have been this since Apple first launched the iOS app store. It plays well on message boards. So far, it has done a terrible job of describing reality.

They are boiling the frog slowly. The T2, app notorization and kext depreciation are steps towards locking the device down. Combined with the iPhone-ification of their hardware I see the Mac becoming more like the iPad than the iPad becoming a general purpose computer.

I'd call it a "not great" job at describing reality–Macs today are certainly more locked-down than they were five or ten years ago, but I think it would be unfair to compare them to iOS right now.

I'm gonna need actual examples.

There is nothing on my Mac that prevents me from downloading and running absolutely anything I want, or from writing my own software and running it.

By default, there are security guardrails in place that you have to turn off (one click!), but I 100% support measures like this. It means it's harder for nontechnical people get duped into running nefarious code, but creates no meaningful roadblock to people like HN readers who quite reasonably want to do whatever the hell they like with their computers.

Give it a few more years. They're working on it. They've already done Gatekeeper, SIP, removal of kexts, making the root partition read-only every boot even if you turn off SIP, etc.

What was that little storm a few months back where they turned on code signature checking on shell scripts? One could just imagine the final step is you have to have a developer license to run your own code.

Source? Can't find a HN submission regarding this, and the most I found via Google is this question on the Apple developer forums https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/127709.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23273247

This has driven me insane in 10.15.7. If my ISP has intermittent connectivity, macOS starts beach balling. To prevent this I have to shut off internet.

The catch?

Shutting down the network requires suffering through multiple beach balls. Every single mouse click or key press invokes a beach ball. Everything goes away the moment internet is connected.

That's the story.

It's funny because the Mac was introduced with a 1984 theme about PC as a uniform experience controlled by central authority and here we are.

Epic Games had some fun mocking that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqTNO8LTggI

They restrict user with every new macOS release.

Nope.

What do you think MacBooks will look like in 5 years? From tomorrow they will already be able to run iOS apps.

What's a computer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pI-iJcC9JUc&t=55

I find it interesting they removed this from their channel.

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