It really doesn't depend on the threat at all. It's about the model of the society you wish to have and what values you promote.
It's about who you wish to be responsible : the 'big company' caring about your safety and taking your freedom on the way or you caring yourself about own safety and preserving freedom on the way. I do not really think there is a choice here because the first option will always be abused at some point.
Freedom does matter and it comes with responsibility. THIS is the main issue here. THIS is what separates society with responsible citizens from the society with 'irresponsible people' who wish to trade their freedom for 'safety' resulting in loosing both (and democracy itself after some time).
If you don’t like their model, choose someone else. Why should average users who would otherwise be served perfectly well by Apple’s solution be required to be “responsible” for some subset of personal security you think denotes a “responsible” citizen from an “irresponsible” one?
Many follow their example and without push back there will be no someone else because average users my not understand consequences unless they are educated by people who do understand them. Like with many other areas requiring certain level of expertise to understand consequences of certain desicions.
> we’ve tried relying on “user responsibility” before, >Why should average users who would otherwise be served perfectly well by Apple’s solution be required to be “responsible”
Do you believe in choice? If you do then average users should have a choice whether to rely on Apple or switch such functionality off. Without having such choice people become less and less responsible. You can say they choose by buying such machines but I do not think this could be qualified as a choice just like accepting EULA. It's not really a choice.
I think if Apple was to add a developer mode to the iPhone, 99% of people would actually shut up.
I just don't think that the counterargument is completely spurious. Craig Federighi taking the stand in court and saying that Mac security is at a place they "don’t find acceptable" doesn't exactly make me feel all warm and fuzzy about Apple's future plans. And so if someone says they don't want to buy an M1 Mac, even if it's open today, because they see the iPhone as indicative of the direction Apple is going, I think that's fair, even if I disagree about Apple's intentions.
By contrast, if Apple added a way to unlock the bootloader on iPhones tomorrow, this argument would immediately evaporate. :)
Apple could certainly choose to lock down future Mac iterations (though I don't think they will), but I think fears that they might retroactively lock down existing Macs are just unfounded and ignore the realities of the situation.
Of course people are free to buy or not buy machines for whatever reason; that's why I want everyone to be informed about the details. My beef is with those who disagree with this stance, and think people shouldn't buy these machines period because Apple is evil and those who buy their devices sheep, and anyone who thinks otherwise is mistaken, and there is no room for having different priorities when choosing hardware because Freedom™ is the only priority that matters. For whatever definition of Freedom™ they feel like using that day.
> I think the irony would be less dramatic if the free software wasn't running on hardware constructed with slave labor.
Why do you feel the need to direct criticism of Apple's business practices at me? I do not work for Apple.
> but people's worries about the conflict of interests here is fully justified.
Then don't buy the machines and move on with your life?
> Apple and open source are not friends
Neither are they enemies. The world isn't binary. I do not exclude from my life everything that is related to everyone who isn't explicitly my friend, do you?
> their ultimate goal is to stomp you out and expand control
Ah yes, stomp us out by... building machines we can use to run our own OS? They could've just not done that and we wouldn't exist.
> just don't be surprised when your blood, sweat and tears ultimately end up being used to grease the gears of their production line.
So which is, are they going to stomp us out or are they going to embrace the extra business we bring? You can't have it both ways, you know.
> We're talking about a trillion-dollar company that doesn't release their own device drivers or schematics; it's ridiculous that we even need to finish the job for them in the first place.
I find it fun finishing the job for them. This is exactly the kind of project I enjoy doing. If you don't, then choose a different free software to contribute to.
> It's hard to see this work as "noble" in the same way other free software projects are, at least to me.
So our project is inherently morally inferior to others because you simultaneously think Apple should've done the work for us and Apple are our enemies. ????????
Seriously, this makes no sense. You know Linux itself started out as a hobby OS with no corporate backing and tons of other drivers are reverse engineered, right? Do you also think Nouveau isn't noble? What about LineageOS? What about XBMC/Kodi when it started? Freedreno, Panfrost, and friends? All of those projects are or were about bringing free software to devices designed and manufactured by giant corporations without any support.
Heck, I got sued by a multinational for bringing Linux back to the PS3, and I still don't regret it. That work got upstreamed, by the way.
That's a really good point I hadn't thought of!
"When Apple's servers go down you lose the ability to do low-level recovery on these machines anyway, since DFU flashing requires phoning home to get a ticket for your machine as well as low-level configuration data"
If your fundamental firmware-stuff is screwed up on any platform, you are going to have a bad time. Being able to plug into an off-the-shelf machine and fix it, or to plug into another PC running special software, is much better than I'm accustomed to.
Sure I just have an impression after some googling that this DFU happens much more frequently then one would expect. Certainly I didn't expect it to happen in the first day after purchase but it did. So perhaps this pleasing 'much better' ability to fix it by just connecting it with another device that you probably do not possess(in my case) comes with another pleasure of having to do it more frequently. If that is the case then I really prefer the state to which you are accustomed to.
We have 3 Apple Silicon based Macs in the house, and there's 4-5 others that I support. So far 0 incidents in about 3 device years. I don't think it's tremendously common like you imply.
In the same time period, I built two Ryzen machines, and had to swap in older processors to run BIOS updates on each, and the laptops in my wife's classroom all decided to take themselves out of service for an hour one day to do BIOS updates that were delivered by Windows update and then only triggered on the second reboot after update when we all thought we were safe.
Yes, if you don't have internet access you have a problem, but I'm personally happy enough with the benefits of this security model that I'm willing to accept the tradeoff.
For now ... Thank you for the link but may I suggest you to think about the future and where it leads.
So iPhone is closed for 15 years already and thus "the future is doom and gloom" is happening for 15 years already. The more important question is what will be next.
>You really need to find an argument other than an unqualified "the future is doom and gloom" when after all this time that future hasn't come and the platform remains open.
Argument can be qualified or unqualified depending on the topic. It is unclear which topic assumed here.
"I disagree with one product's direction, therefore all other products from the same company are doomed to that direction" is not a valid argument, especially not after 15 years of it not happening. Companies are capable of producing products targeting different markets and use cases.
"Domino's added a pizza I don't like to their menu, what will be next? Their entire line up will be a horrible inedible mess in a few years!"
See how stupid that sounds?
All you have to do is not buy an iPhone (like I didn't either) and stop spreading FUD about Macs.
>... not a valid argument, especially not after 15 years of it not happening.
It's not about trusting or not particular company. The idea is to protect and insist on certain level of respect toward owners of the computers that no company would dare/able to diminish without consequnces.
>"Domino's added a pizza I don't like to their menu, what will be next? Their entire line up will be a horrible inedible mess in a few years!"
>See how stupid that sounds?
"what will be next" question was addressing the issue of trusting to any company and about level of dependency from any company for any owner of any computer. The context of the question was not about trusting particular company. When the context is switched then anything may appear "stupid" but then it is interpretation to blame not the question.
>All you have to do is not buy an iPhone (like I didn't either) and stop spreading FUD about Macs.
The issue I am discussing can not be resolved by marked and buying preferences and therefore 'just buy something else' would not work and cannot help.
Like I said above, it's not about trusting Macs or company. It's about pushing back against the tendency to make personal computers more dependent and less personal.
It's about respecting independence for the owner not about security, not about trust to a particular company. It's about making trust to the company irrelevant enough. It's about preserving level of respect to the owner which reduces dependency and importance of the trust to a particular company.
I already explained to you how you have to trust the company if you're using their silicon. There is no way around that for modern devices. You're trying to fight a fight against the laws of physics.
Again, if you need absolute trust, then I suggest you order a Precursor, and then you'll have to be content doing all your computing on a 100MHz CPU.
> The idea is to protect and insist on certain level of respect toward owners of the computers that no company would dare/able to diminish without consequnces.
So you're saying companies shouldn't be allowed to have secure systems that benefit the average user; they should all be forced to do what you say is "respect" users, which means requiring that they develop their own secure boot infrastructure, in your world, since that's the only way they can be in control (or just give up security altogether).
Do you realize how hypocritical it is for someone advocating for freedom to try to take away everyone's freedom of choice by making it illegal or immoral to trade off your own personal vision of freedom for something they might care more about? Seriously, you brought up authoritarian governments, but you're the one using their propaganda tactics here. You're not just saying users should be able to buy devices they control; you're saying they shouldn't have the choice but to be in "control", even if it hurts them in other ways. The Way of the Freedom Party is the One True Way.
Have you considered that maybe, just maybe, there are actual practical consumer-protecting arguments to be made here without resorting to ridiculous extremist positions? Here's one: companies should be required to allow users to run their own software on devices that have reached end of support and are no longer receiving security updates. See? That is the kind of useful policy position that'll get people interested and might even have a chance at becoming law. Not "iPhones are evil and should be illegal".