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Comment by Toutouxc | Hacker News Reader

I don't get the outrage. Yes, the firmware thing is something you don't have to do with other computers.

But seriously, we expect people to have a second computer around when doing anything involved with their hardware. New computer? Need to create a bootable flash drive with an OS. WiFi not working on Linux? Need to download stuff and move it to your machine. Monitor/ethernet/mouse/GPU/anything not working? Plug it into a different machine. Network settings borked? Ping it from the second machine. We're used to this.

And Apple, surprisingly, expects your other machine to be a Mac. Because why wouldn't it be a Mac. They expect you to use a Mac or an iOS device to verify your identity, to contact their support comfortably, AND to restore firmware on your other devices. They expect you to use their ecosystem of devices and software. You may not like it, and that's why you probably don't have a Mac, but it's consistent and it makes sense in the context of their philosophy.

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Except I can make a bootable Linux disk on Windows, and a bootable Windows disk on Linux. I can download Linux wifi firmware on Windows and move it across on a flash drive. I can troubleshoot my mouse on any damn computer I want because it doesn't need third party drivers. We are not used to the requirement that the second computer be running a particular OS made by a particular company.

Although it's important to have that level of freedom, it hasn't always been the case in the PC world. Furthermore, there are OSes out there working on PC which don't have that level of interop. Finally, some people don't have 2 different OSes installed, and if their setup breaks, they'll surely need another box to fix it.

OTOH, needing a second machine for that sort of maintenance (installing a second drive iiuc) seems indeed quite a big requirement.

Love it how apple fans will contort themselves telling us how every new inconvenience is normal.

I always wondered what it is that makes some products enjoy customers with very high brand loyalty and others not so much.

Microsoft sits at the opposite side of the spectrum with most of it's clients being highly critical of it, and passionately angry at nonsense, except in the case of XBox, other gaming consoles also seem to enjoy very high brand loyalty; I also see it with GNOME.

Marketing/psychology tricks.

Apple has convinced people that wearing their products give them "uniqueness". Tesla has something similar, but with "change the world".

You will hear other excuses that are more tangible, but those are the brain listing features that have little to do with why someone bought it.

Apples poor record on privacy, security, performance, and ease of use should all be stark reminders that marketing sells products.

I was first thinking about the I'm a p.c..-advertisement campaign, but GNOME has never done such a thing, as far as I know, and enjoys similar levels of loyalty, and they are often compared as well in terms of visual design choices.

Hating on GNOME has been cool for a long time.

So has hating on Apple, Microsoft, and XBox, but two out of those three enjoy extensive brand loyalty, and one does not.

It's not typically the brand loyalists that do the hating.

Honestly, I think it's a dedication to competence and good engineering. Say what you like about Apple, but they try damn hard to make everything "just works" (often at the expense of interoperability and maintainability). People complain about all sorts of flaws, but the outrage comes from an underlying expectation that Apple products should be flawless. Apple users yell bloody murder when their phone loses signal when held a certain way; Windows users lose their work to a spontaneous reboot, and sigh and move on with their day.

When you can convince people that all they have to do is buy in to your system and everything will be fine, that gets you religious levels of dedication. And of course the people who buy in are deeply invested in their not-easily-reversed decision, so they market you for free!

> Windows users lose their work to a spontaneous reboot, and sigh and move on with their day.

I keep hearing about this, but except for BSODs (which are super rare these days), but I haven't ever had this happen to me. My guess is that the people complaining about this stuff are the ones abusing their systems, and not telling you that part (the kind that would postpone updates for <<years>> and then wonder why Sasser or whatever were a thing).

>BSODs

yup, save for overclocking (or undervolting, which is essentially the same) I have not seen BSODs for a decade plus. I have seen laptops overheat due to clogged/uncleaned air vents, but that's a hardware issue.

flip note: what's wrong w/ the parent's post to deserve the downvotes.

>flip note: what's wrong w/ the parent's post to deserve the downvotes.

Probably people are rattled at being told that the well-documented phenomenon of spontaneous Windows reboots are somehow their own fault for "abusing their systems".

Happened to me last week ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. Lost an overnight run's worth of CFD calculations.

There's a toggle switch in update settings to explicitly disallow rebooting without intervention. It was ignored. Checked the system log and everything.

I guess I'm just holding it wrong...

>disallow rebooting without intervention.

That one is a fair point. I bet it did have 'intervention', showed a message it would reboot in whatever minutes and proceeded later.

Personally I use windows offline updater, and ignore the built-in 'windows updater'. 'shutdown /a' aborts an initiated shutdown

Nope. Vanilla Windows 10 is set to download and update itself automatically, which it seems to do at the most inconvenient moments. It's absolutely infuriating.

>Honestly, I think it's a dedication to competence and good engineering.

Apple is fully form over function. Macs laptops are anything but good engineering (hardware wise)

Yup, there are aspects of Apple's offerings that are form over function (No, I do not need laptop parts in my desktop so you can make it thin just because). However, I'm a Mac user not because of the pro's/con's of just the hardware or just the software, but the overall experience - from using, maintaining, buying, servicing. It's frictionless. It feels better.

I prefer it. I have Windows and Linux boxes (gaming and tinkering respectively) but when I just want to do stuff I reflexively grab for my Macs.

If they don't have the same value to you - great. That's why it's awesome to have choice. But pretending there is no difference in value for everyone because there isn't any for you is silly (and more than a tad narcissistic).

This reads as the kind of brand loyalty of which I speak, frankness be.

> but the outrage comes from an underlying expectation that Apple products should be flawless.

This is particularly silly. Apple has a reputation for product tying and expecting one to buy other products, also made by Apple. We've all seen the MacBook Wheel parody that, though parodious and exaggerated, shows the reputation it has for form-over-function and consumers that are too loyal to see they are paying more for less.

If Microsoft were to require something such as this, no one would come to it's defence on the same level I've seen with Apple, except, as said, with XBox, but that seems to be a common thing with gaming consoles, but Nintendo seemingly enjoying even higher loyalty.

It's more like complaining that the software your mechanic uses to tune your McLaren F1 only runs on specific hardware. [1] In this case the required platform is a lot easier to come by - there might be one shop in the world whose fleet includes Mac Pros but no MBPs; I can't imagine there are two - but the point remains that exotic hardware tends to come with exotic support and tooling requirements more or less as a matter of course.

Why not complain instead about the totally needless complexity of the Mac Pro case and its spacecraft-grade CNC manufacture? Slow, wasteful, expensive - and for what? Nothing in the world I can see, save to satisfy Jony Ive's apparent thing for metal with lots of tiny regular holes in it. I'm not here to kinkshame, but I'm glad dude has finally found a different venue for it.

[1] https://jalopnik.com/this-ancient-laptop-is-the-only-key-to-...

I don't think it helps to conflate a common consumer hardware with purpose built professional racing cars.

At most, the kind of car we'd be looking at would be an Audi or BMW and they have pretty standard ports and desktop software for tuning the in car firmware. The reason it's standard and widely available is because while their cars are premium end, they're still widely bought and widely driven so those respective car manufacturers need to make maintenance accessible. Apple, on the other hand, are part of an increasing new trend where manufacturers intentionally remove the ability for 3rd parties to maintain their own hardware. So Apple (and others who pull the similar stunts) should absolutely be called up on this unethical practice.

> I can make a bootable Linux disk on Windows, and a bootable Windows disk on Linux

Have you ever noticed how Apple considers Macs a separate platform from PCs? Not as in "Windows or Linux or macOS on a computer", but as in "macOS on a Mac, or anything you want on a PC".

They don't want you to make a bootable macOS disk on Linux, because Macs and PCs are not supposed to be friends. Like PlayStation and Xbox, their hardware is similar and from the outside they both look like general purpose computers, but they're different platforms and they're not friends.

You can run macOS on generic PC hardware (Hackintoshes) and you can run Windows or Linux on Mac hardware, but that's mostly a byproduct of the platforms being similar.

You can disagree with Mac not being a PC and not being an open general computing platform, you can choose not to buy them, use them or develop for them, but I don't think it's a difficult concept to understand that Apple doesn't sell, support or care about PCs.

Your original post said you didn't understand the outrage. You then explain how Apple goes out of their way to unnecessarily inconvenience the user by forcing them to have multiple Macs. I can't understand why you don't understand the outrage...

I can flash any iOS device using iTunes for Windows. I don't see this situation as fundamentally different.

"Apple considers Macs a separate platform from PCs?"

Apple might consider paying taxes optional, or the moon to be made of cheese. But why should any of us care or be bound by that?

"and PCs are not supposed to be friends."

Wtf does this even mean, how is it helpfull or provable?

Another important distinction is that most of the operating systems you mentioned are not bound to any particular hardware.

I don't think I ever managed to create a working bootable Windows disk on linux. The hardest part was to fetch the image (from Linux).

My constant struggle is some motherboards (mine!) refuse to boot the Windows installer from the UDF-formatted image Microsoft provides as a download; IIRC I have to copy all the files to a FAT32 partition on the disk instead. (I assume their installer-creation tool, which naturally requires an already-working Windows install, plays some games with creating a disk that's both FAT and UDF, and building all the right tables for files to show up in both? Never dug into it though, this is just conjecture.)

> But seriously, we expect people to have a second computer around when doing anything involved with their hardware.

Not in this particular case. If you are installing an OS on a new drive, all you need is the installation media. You can get that from someone else or prepare it ahead of time. You certainly don't need a second machine on hand at the time of the upgrade or repair. On Macs of a certain vintage, you did not even need that. The firmware has the ability to download the operating system itself over a network connection.

Even in the other cases, a second computer is not necessary. It may be convenient to test a component that you believe has failed before purchasing a replacement, but you certainly have the option to purchase a replacement without testing it. It is also relatively rare these days to require a computer from the same vendor to do testing. As for pinging a computer on the network, that implies that you have a second computer to network with. It does not have to be from the same vendor.

Even though it is likely an unintentional consequence of Apple's design decisions, this does make a relatively simple upgrade or repair less accessible. About the only thing I can say in Apple's favour is that Mac Pro owners probably have easy access to another Mac. (After all, it is quite an expense to accept without having prior experience with Apple hardware.)

Eh, to be honest, even simple Windows and Linux installations can go so wrong that I'll never do that without having second computer with internet access.

Methinks that's excessive. All one really needs is something such as SystemRescueCD on a u.s.b. drive on hand, which I always have with me.

If one's machine be sufficiently destroyed that it can no longer boot from that, I don't think another computer can fix it.

Second machine is usually for googling unexpected problems. I'd never attempt using something like SystemRescueCD without that possibility.

Usually a phone would be enough for that. Hell, with something like DriveDroid[0] you don't even need a separate computer to flash the rescue image.

[0]: https://www.drivedroid.io/

One can do that on SystemRescueCD; I don't understand your angle.

It comes with internet and a web browser.

So would you boot the CD, google the question you want to google, write answer down to paper notebook or make photo, and then restart to resume installation?

No, I fix my machine from SystemRescueCD if anything go awry.

I wasn't thinking of “resuming installation” so much as “accidentally made my machine inoperable”, which becomes apparent when rebooting after the installation.

If the machine were not made inoperable, I would simply use the web browser that comes with the live medium of the installer.

It's good to have an internet connected computer on hand, and I haven't been in a situation in decades where that wasn't the case (even if it was just a mobile device for looking up documentation). Yet there is a bit of a difference between it being a good idea and it being required. There is an even bigger difference between it being required and requiring equipment from a particular vendor.

Requiring specialized tooling should not be required for replacing a modular component. I understand that this case involves the security chip, but surely Apple would be able to implement a solution that is integrated into the system's firmware. Macs are already capable of connecting to a wireless access point to download and install the operating system via the Internet[1], so this seems like a reasonable approach.

[1] At least they had that capability when I purchased a 2012 MacBook. I'm not sure if things have changed since then.

All I need for that are bootable usb drives. Someone would have to lock down the boot order in bios and forget the password for that to go wrong.

I have a USB stick that I can use to reload Windows at any time. I downloaded Windows and put it on the USB key using their utility and if I were to replace a drive, my OS eats itself, etc. I just grab that stick. It really should be that easy with macOS too.

Most people don't have multiple computers and most people that own a Mac are unlikely to have two of them.

"Most people don't have multiple computers and most people that own a Mac are unlikely to have two of them." - I would actually be interested on the stats for this for Mac Pro owners.

You can absolutely do that with macOS, you just have to download the OS and create the macOS-installer USB stick on a Mac.

The firmware thing is a separate, unfortunate, issue.

Honestly I would assume nearly all people with a Mac Pro also have a laptop of some sort, and they have a Mac Pro it's likely the laptop is also a Mac.

For reinstalling macOS it is that easy. You can create your own USB install media either using Apple's tool or a third party one.

Or the more common and easier method is to do an "eraseinstall" which does the same thing but without the need to make the USB media. It does some APFS volume stuff automatically to copy the installer, wipe all other volumes, install, then remove the installer volume.

The need for a second Mac is something most Mac users never encounter as it means something has gone seriously wrong or they are a power user doing something "not normal".

I'm not defending Apple's decision here, I see pros and cons for it. Just saying that for almost all users reinstalling macOS doesn't require a second Mac. I have been a Mac user (and developer so not a "normal" user fwtw) for almost two decades now and never once needed a second Mac for any restore tasks.

What does reloading an operating system have to do with swapping hardware that gets cryptographically mated to the machine it's being installed in?

> But seriously, we expect people to have a second computer around when doing anything involved with their hardware.

Sometimes we even expect a second computer with a different operating system or even different architecture. I had a retail Seagate harddrive in my Mac that was going bad during the warranty period. Seagate expected me to run their diagnostic software to get an authorization code to return the drive--and at the time that authorization software only ran on DOS or Windows.

I had a Windows PC that I could move the disk to and run the diagnostics on, so just went ahead and did that. I don't know what they would have done if I had not had a PC available.

The box explicitly listed the Mac as being supported and said nothing about a PC being required for warranty replacement so I assume they could have been forced to honor the warranty without running the diagnostic, but don't know how much of a hassle that would be.

In no case you need a second computer, except for convenience. I can have bootable usb w/ linux and even use my phone with an usb cable to transfer files, or even attach usb wifi with drivers I have already.

I can create bootable usb both on Windows and Linux. All of the statements are pretty much false.

ever hear of right to repair movement? I can buy a right to repair computer form system76 and always know that I can replace a SSD as SSD reach end-of-life faster than HDs despite Apple's claims that they should be non replaceable.

I know. Especially when we are talking about Mac Pro (!) users. Even in the HIGHLY unlikely probability that they don't have a second Mac of their own already, they more than likely know someone with a Mac they could borrow for the 10 minutes (tops) it would take to perform this procedure.

It could make sense to have an iphone and a mac. But who needs two Macs? Why are you sp eager to defend them?

> But who needs two Macs?

There are many reasons. I'm a developer, I like having computers around, so I have multiple computers, including two Macs. Some people just have multiple computers and I'd guess that people who own a Mac Pro will probably have a second, more portable machine.

> Why are you sp eager to defend them?

Because I believe the i3-Linux-Thinkpad crowd needs to be constantly reminded that there are other people using computers with different opinions who may be actually happy and productive on their Apple hardware and who prefer dealing with minor hiccups like these over running Windows or Linux on generic PC hardware.

>Because I believe the i3-Linux-Thinkpad crowd needs to be constantly reminded that there are other people using computers with different opinions who may be actually happy and productive on their Apple hardware and who prefer dealing with minor hiccups like these over running Windows or Linux on generic PC hardware.

Yup. When I just want to get work done and not feel like I'm having to spend more time tending to an active science fair project than getting stuff done I turn to my Macs. I have plenty of friends who prefer Windows and even a few masochists who prefer Linux on their desktops. I never feel the need to criticize them for their choices.

I'm not so curious about why someone would defend their choices, but why others who have no idea what someone else's wants or needs are feels that it's OK to pontificate as if their thoughts were relevant or even needed.

Mac Pro is an expensive desktop computer; people are saying it makes sense someone would also have a laptop for portability in that situation. A MacBook Air is 5-15% the price of a Mac Pro depending on the configuration, not exactly doubling the computing budget.

Pros are supposedly typically bought by businesses, too, which would have a fleet of devices.

Just explaining—hopefully it helped.

This will really blow your mind - I have three. And they all three have uses.

I also have two windows and three linux boxes. I guess I'm a windows and linux defender too? :p

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