> there are a lot of folks reasonably asking if they can trust Apple to be in the loop of deciding what apps should or should not run on their Macs. My argument is - who better than Apple?
... The user?
... The user?
On the one hand, no. Probably, statistically, apple will know better.
On the other hand, despite the above, if you want to call apple devices "owned" (vs "leased") then yes, the user must be the ultimate decision maker. They might want to delegate these things to apple (or someone else for that matter) most of the time. But they must have the possibility to simply run what they want.
I think we're seeing the "HN crowd" be so frustrated about this because it is a pretty transparently anti freedom thing to do, and HN folks do love themselves some freedom.
Also, I think while we're exchanging meaningless and besides-the-point platitudes: "fewer people" ;)
I can see the argument, but at the same time, if they really did, I’m not sure I would agree.
I also am not sure that’s completely theoretical. Apple (almost?) has the money to do so (yearly revenues about $260 billion, cash reserves about $190 billion), and I think ‘the world’ is getting used to not owning stuff more and more. Many users already pay per month for their phones, anyways.
Would I sign up for that? Certainly not. But if that sounds unattractive, then they should just accept that when you sell something and the buyer owns it, you don't control over anymore.
I keep pushing this distinction in DRM contexts, too. It's kinda my personal soapbox. :)
No such person would have any illusion about what Mac hardware they could use.
Everyone else, reasonably expects Apple to take care of the OS for them. Indeed that is arguably the selling point and key differentiator of the Mac.
Nobody is misled.
See elsewhere where I respond to the distinction you are making about ownership: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25093873
The user is the ultimate decision maker - the user gets to decide whether they want MacOS or not.
The only people talking about constraining this freedom are the ones asking for the government to regulate software distribution.
What you are asking for is for Apple to make a design change to their software to support your use case.
That is a very reasonable thing to want, and to reject Apple for not providing, but it has nothing to do with some ideology of what it means to ‘own’ something.
My car has software problems I don’t like - the digital speedometer only reads kph, whereas I live in a place where mph is standard. There is no facility for changing the software.
Obviously I still own the car.
Do you still own the car if it'll just turn off the engines when attempt to drive into a sketchy neighbourhood?
Let's assume the car manufacturer knows the city/town's crime rates well and they have your best intentions in mind. They want you to be safe.
Do you still own the car?
Note: I agree that scenario isn’t desirable. However there is no slippery slope.
And yeah, when people lost access to their zune music, or their steam stuff, they did get upset.
Mind you, I would not outlaw the transaction. But calling it a "sale" is false advertising in my book.
How is that not ‘buying’?
Except run software when the server gets a little smokey.
This is what Tim Cook said about govt agencies wanting a backdoor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZmeZyDGkQ0 - right around 4:25.
When I buy an Apple product, this is part of what I think Apple does to protect their customers' privacy - No matter what, not even if the govt says so.
Now suddenly, we're back to talking about whether we can trust Apple after they expressly told us not to trust ANYONE including Apple and why that was such a good thing.
We're discussing the implications of it. You're welcome to not if you think it's irrelevant.
The problem is that they (have the ability to) continue to make those decisions afterwards. You could have "known" an iPhone could run Fortnite at the moment you bought it and then after you received it in the mail discovered that they had decided you were no longer allowed to do that.
You could then say "well I bought it knowing they had the ability to change anything at any time" but I'm not sure I agree that you can give informed consent to a blank check.
Epic knew it, and the chose to breach the terms of service on purpose to cause this effect. Epic intentionally triggered a contract term that they knew would result in their software being removed from their customer’s devices.
They were given an opportunity by both Apple and the court to restore their software to compliance and still get to continue the lawsuit.
This is 100% Epic’s responsibility.
They could have sued Apple without deliberately breaching the contract, but they chose to make their customers into pawns in their legal strategy.
You effectively need to know what every company in the world is doing to have any real idea what your device is going to be able to do tomorrow. Under those conditions I don't think you can say you were informed when you purchased it.
But I disagree that people weren’t informed. It is common knowledge and widely advertised that Apple issues software updates, and it is widely known that Apple enforces its store rules.
The information about what changes could be made and by whom was readily available to purchasers.
As someone who works in IT: not for most users. Certainly not for any of my relatives, as successful/smart as they may be in other fields.
Certainly have manual overrides for Alpha Geeks (to use O'Reilly's term), but even if a person is on the right-hand side of the Bell curve generally, that doesn't necessarily mean they can make informed software decisions specifically.
I'm fine with automatic seatbelts as long as there's a Terminal.app command I can run to disable them on an as-needed basis.
I want to run the apps I want to run, thank you very much. No one else should have any say in that. It's my computer.
Unfortunately, that world is no longer the one we live in.
One of the things I’ve learned about software security is the need to minimise the attack surface of your systems — don’t keep a database running on your web server unless you actually need it, don’t keep ports open unless they’re important, don’t install packages or dependencies you can do without — because everything has the potential for a zero-day exploit. Likewise for my own productive output: the only code guaranteed to be bug free is the absence of code.
For any computer not attached to the public internet, I agree that you should be free to run whatever you want. For anything networked? That’s anarchy, and although I would like the freedom of anarchy I experienced in 2003, unfortunately I don’t like the consequences of everyone else having the freedoms of anarchy in 2020.
I don’t have any fun, easy, side-effect free, solutions.
If they don’t, they can buy a Mac.
Don’t force them to choose an unsafe tool when they don’t want to.
We learn from mistakes, not from success.
But, more importantly - people use photoshop because they want to edit images.
Most people do not buy computers because they want to learn how to defeat cyberattacks.
You know what some users learn after dealing with insecure systems? They learn to buy a Mac.
This is why there is no 'File Access' API in the browser, because it'd be like giving guns to teenagers, even with 'safety training' it would get out of hand.
So the issue then becomes one of 'power' as much as 'knowledge' of security, and of course all the peripherial abuse surrounding the 'security rules' that have nothing to do with security.
Involving 3rd parties, giving proper security notifications but still letting users have the final say etc. etc. there are definitely middle paths and reasonable choices we coudl make.
But there's just too much money on the table for the powers that be to look the other way, they will continue to infringe until they are stopped.