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Comment by pcr910303 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, HN is so much strict to Apple. I'm already seeing 4 ~ 5 top level comments on how Apple "locks down" computers and they are "taking our freedom"...

Apple have stated multiple times that they don't have any intention to lock down macOS more or less - I can't really think why anyone would think Apple would lock down macOS. There's... really no reason right?

My gut feeling is that there are a lot of people that don't like Apple, mostly due to their proprietary nature, and they just... argue against Apple. Before the M1 appeared, the argument was that Apple's Macs are expensive for nothing, they have terrible hardware, Touch Bar is bad, software quality has declined, etc... and now it's all about the user's freedom.

Seriously people. This article is about using dev tools on the M1 Mac. Let's not start arguing about how Apple is bad for freedom, etc.

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It's quite the opposite actually. HN has a ridiculous Apple bias (the flood of blogspam mentioning M1 should be evidence of this), and any comments critical of it are shouted down. They can literally do nothing wrong in most eyes.

NO company can, or should be above criticism. You will see comments critical of _all_ large companies in HN threads, but only comments defensive in these threads. Imagine a comment like yours on a thread about Amazon or Facebook.

I have gut feeling of my own - that many people identify with their Apple products (identity politics) and are personally offended by any criticism that the organisation receives.

Edit: To put it in a little perspective... I invite you to view the contemporary Amazon thread. What would happen if you posted that everyone should focus on AMZN creating jobs and hiring people rather than criticizing them?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237552

Maybe HN just has a diversity of opinion on apple products? There is plenty of reason to critique apple and plenty of reason to praise their products. I come to HN for the insight, and it is hard to get more insight about a tech company than from a bunch of tech nerds who disagree about it!

I actually wonder about that.

M1 has been out for a short time, and Apple Stores are not accepting walk-in customers. People aren't seeing their friends much due to the pandemic, so it's unlikely that those who bought the new machines are broadly showing them off.

Lots of forum praise about M1 seems like it's coming from people who have no hands-on experience with the new devices. I have no reason to believe that Apple pays people to stir up hype on the web, but I definitely sense that the vast majority of people hyping M1 haven't purchased an M1 device. My sense is that they just read some blogs, ogle some benchmarks, and regurgitate what they see.

That's not exactly a diversity of opinion. I can tell you I've been voted down a couple of times just for suggesting that there's too much hype and not enough information.

I've seen some blogs of techy people with hands on experience saying that they like the machine. I haven't really seen anyone who has it say they dislike it. But they do seem willing to jump through extra hoops to make the machine work for them.

So I think there is some reliable evidence in it's favour. But I don't think you should be downvoted for disagreeing with that. Since it definitely up for debate! Someone seems to have downvoted your comment here, and I think that is the wrong action to take on what is clearly a thoughtfull response on your part.

There is some genuine excitement about a new CPU architecture, that’s quite natural. If anything the opposite would be surprising on HN. Some of these people are Apple users, some of them are hoping another vendor will follow and offer powerful ARM laptops and desktops, some of them are just happy that a breakthrough has been made and that it will stimulate the competition. There is quite a lot of diversity in these opinions, actually.

You even find the usual contrarians who moan that it’s Apple, so anyone saying anything positive have to be shills and the CPU has to be terrible (plenty of those in this thread).

Since when do he have to buy something to have an opinion? Are you saying that the people who complain about the M1 (or Macs in general) without having bought one should just shut up?

> Since when do he have to buy something to have an opinion?

It's pretty difficult to have an informed opinion about a product that you've never seen/used/tested/tried.

Due to the requirements for a shopping appointment at an Apple Store (hard to come by, if you check online), and due to social distancing, it's fairly unlikely that a person who hasn't bought/received an M1 machine can have an informed opinion about it -- especially so soon after the release.

That's why I take the hype regurgitation with a grain of salt. Has nothing to do with buying the right to have an opinion.

Another possibility: it is hard to make someone understand something if their income depends on them not understanding it.

"The universal experience is that Hacker News is incredibly biased against whatever you happen to favor."

Apple dictating what tools we can and cannot use (e.g. Firefox not being allowed to use their own rendering engine on iOS, but forced to use Safari internally).

This should be enough to make you look elsewhere.

But then there is the locked bootloader, the Apple tax, etc. etc.

By supporting Apple, things will only get worse.

All the things you state is only for their phones, not their computers. The bootloader isn't locked at all. And in terms of the "Apple tax". It's largely a myth. If you look at individual components used, they tend to be all top-end binned parts of everything. There is some Apple upmark, but it's not nearly as much as others say. You can't get a PC laptop with the same mix of low weight, high performance, and long longevity.

> I can't really think why anyone would think Apple would lock down macOS.

Because they keep introducing new security features that get progressively more annoying to disable. Have you looked at how difficult it is to modify system files these days?

Security is the antithesis of convenience. Would you rather they send every unit out with Frontier Law levels of user protections? Every graphics artist, musician, businessperson, student, and Joe Bloggs who buys a Mac needs to study the implications of owning a computer for themselves and mitigate all the threats on their own. Suddenly Apple computers are infected with malware like Windows was in the 2000s and we just burn all the research Apple did on the right compromise for their entire user base because a few power users want to turn on a machine and debug system processes before they even log in.

I perceive a level of anti-Apple bias in HN threads, I don't think it's imagined, but more prevalent is the power user bias of people who have advanced knowledge of computer systems and want a superuser machine off the shelf.

To me, the fact that you call them "security features" and not some pejorative euphemism is a bit of a capitulation.

Some of the things Apple makes are certainly "security features" and not security features, but to your main point: Apple designed their security model to be "trust us or trust nobody" and the security model most users want is "I trust me". It is eminently possible to do that without going back to the wild west of not having any security, actually, the issue is that Apple forces you to go there if you aren't happy with anything they add on macOS.

Most power users maybe. Most consumer users don’t think about the fact they have to trust at all. And you can’t say you don’t want the security features and then say that it’s bad you have to turn them off if you don’t want them. The goalposts are Apple’s customers, my guesstimate is that 80% of those paying customers would rather be secured by the vendor they already trusted to produce the hardware, firmware, software, and infrastructure they use on a daily basis. Do you know of any market research about the level of security most users want?

No, most users would rather trust Apple. These are the people who drop their computer off at the Genius Bar for software problems. They never even think about rolling up their sleeves to fix a problem, never mind firing up the terminal.

You have to be realistic: you already trust them if you buy their hardware.

Why specifically, are you trying to modify system files?

I run beta software on my devices. Apple, in its infinite wisdom, believes that programs compiled on beta operating systems do not belong on the App Store. Thus, I modify SystemVersion.plist so Xcode will think it's running the latest release version rather than the beta.

This is just one of the things that you can do; I've occasionally patched system libraries, replaced resources, and so on depending on what I've wanted to do.

Do you think it's really that odd that they wouldn't want someone publishing releases from beta OS/Libraries?

Given how everything else you talked about could be turned off. Do you think that would be a better default? to allow system libraries and such to be altered? and that the protection would need to be explicitly turned on instead?

> Do you think it's really that odd that they wouldn't want someone publishing releases from beta OS/Libraries?

Yes, very. It's not like the toolchain really cares which version of XNU it's running on.

> Given how everything else you talked about could be turned off. Do you think that would be a better default? to allow system libraries and such to be altered? and that the protection would need to be explicitly turned on instead?

I liked what they did in Catalina, where you could remount the rootfs as writable. What they have in Big Sur is too much; you have to restart every time you want to modify anything and it is not possible to change anything after booting.

`sudo spctl --master-disable` to disable Gatekeeper, and `csrutil disable` in Recovery Mode to disable rootless/System Integrity Protection. Just like that, it's a Mac from a decade ago in openness.

Neither of those help with the thing I mentioned.

Almost all the security features are getting progressively less sensible to disable though. You gotta be for real Jedi to be using a computer with easily modifiable system files these days.

I don't see how that's any different from Microsoft, Amazon, or any other major tech company that makes the front page of HN.

In fact the only difference I can think of is that there's always some degree of reactionary discourse when Apple is mentioned by people who feel the need to defend the company personally. You never see this type of comment on a thread full of people complaining about Windows or AWS, but you almost always see it when there are a few comments critical of Apple.

If you really want to see “reactionary discourse” check out any article critical of Tesla.

Historically the attacks against Tesla have only been matched by the ferocity of political attack ads. So a lot of fans of Tesla get very defensive about them.

I think the reactionaries in any of these conversations are the ones advocating that Apple not improve security, i.e. that they don't make progress in protecting their users.

There are many reactive voices speaking out in support of Apple, but they are responding to those who complain (for the most part) from the outside, or on their way out of Apple's door.

I specifically mean reacting to the criticism Apple is getting. You see the same level of criticism of any major tech company in the comments section of the front page but very rarely are those criticisms followed up by a bunch of users defending the tech company in the comment section. You're arguing a weird semantic that doesn't really have anything to do with what I'm saying.

Yeah that’s reactive, rather than reactionary. It’s a significant definition, particularly as reactionary tends to be used pejoratively to describe the proverbial “stick in the mud”.

And my point was that the very fact that Apple is the one with defendants, among the technologists who tend to make up HN commenters, should make one wonder if they aren’t doing some of those things right, not that the supporting commenters are mouth-breathing dullards who just “don’t get it”. Apple are getting bad press right now over pushing for a bill in the US designed to eliminate slavery from supply chains, and I will join the voices calling on them to take responsibility for that. But in reference to how they control their hardware-software ecosystem for their customers, the reactionary point of view is that they shouldn’t be progressing towards a user-safe environment.

A cursory scan of the front page article concerning Amazon turns up a few standing in Amazon’s defence. I guess Apple isn’t the only tech giant with blindly loyal fans

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25240953

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237993

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237932

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25237628

None of these comments are reacting to people complaining about Amazon in the comments or claiming that HN is unfairly biased against Amazon, which is what the comment I replied to was about.

Very good. You got me. Here you go:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9583362

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25238542

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6420048

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23655400

Some of these are the replies to the claims of bias, some are the original claims themselves. The search bar is at the bottom of the home page. I may have been rather childish throughout this thread, it's a defence mechanism, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong, and it doesn't mean there isn't pro-Apple bias on HN. That doesn't mean there isn't pro-<FAANG> bias around here either.

People are entitled to these opinions, and to express them, as are you and I to participate in whatever you call this exchange. It's why I still love the internet even though it feels like it's raising my blood pressure from time to time. And why I go through spits and spats of spurning all social media and then participating in controversial discussions like this and other philosophical debates.

Would you happen to know any data science? I took a course on R but I never got to use it, but this is actually starting to sound like an interesting project. There's a lot of data entry level work to do I guess. My data chops aren't great but I can handle repetitive tasks.

> Apple have stated multiple times that they don't have any intention to lock down macOS more or less

What Apple says and Apple does can or are two different things. And it applies to any company in the world. Blindly believing them is naive at best.

> I can't really think why anyone would think Apple would lock down macOS

I can think of one: iOS. Locking down the software and hardware can allow Apple to funnel people to their own stores and services. It is not rocket science to figure out that a company is trying to increase their revenue. Right now you have only MacOS as the operating system, Linux may never come and Windows support is anyones guess right now.

The easy path on M1 would have been to lock everything down. Use the same iBoot phones use, the same kernel configuration, and call it a day.

It takes a lot of engineering work to make more permissive security modes work. To re-architect booting. To make external drive booting work. To make developing kernel extensions on production systems work. To allow signing your own boot blob. Work that 99% of users don't even understand let alone care about.

If that isn't enough evidence then nothing ever will be.

Yep this is true of all big tech companies in general. It’s a bit like when punk rock became mainstream, but now it’s tech companies - or rather was ~10 years ago. People hate change.

These new CPUs will represent a huge generational leap and dropping of old baggage. A laptop which has nearly 20h battery life, is small/portable, and is still fast? Wow.

Anything Apple delivers on for the CPUs will find its way into Linux and Windows machine.

This is good for everyone. Eventually you’ll see the next generation Lenovo’s X series or Dell’s XPS series with the same generational improvements.

Yeah it's unusual.

Generally it's people who aren't even invested in the ecosystem anyway.

They've said this stuff for years, I can't do anything less on Big Sur than I've been able to do on any mac.

One example of Apple locking down macOS is how they're pushing out custom kernel extensions. For example firewalls used to be kernel extensions. Now they use explicit APIs and no longer run in kernel space. One could say that it allows for more stable operating system. But on the other hand macOS now by-passes firewalls for its own services and this feature was abused to by-pass firewall with ordinary programs.

The margins on the App Store for iOS is enough of a reason to lock down the OS as far as they can. The difference is they can't practically lock it down to the point that app developers aren't impeded.

But all that said, given the quality of developer tools from Apple I don't have much faith that they won't impede everything but swift development in Xcode.

>Apple have stated multiple times that they don't have any intention to lock down macOS more or less

Didn't they also say that notarization was about security?

It is

Then maybe they shouldn't try to prevent Epic Games from doing it.

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