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Comment by baz00 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah the Apple bootloader and restore stuff scares the shit out of me. The network access requirement, firmware on SSD and hardware lock are always lurking waiting for the most inconvenient time to go wonky when I hose something.

Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

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> Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

It goes further than that, on many motherboards even a failed firmware update can be fixed through a random USB stick from the drawer, you just need the right BIOS file to put in it.

And some motherboards even have a backup BIOS if one of them becomes deranged. Now that's luxury.

As a lifelong Mac user, it just now hit me how inconvenient locked down the restore process is.

In the FireWire days, you could firmware boot a Mac into target disk mode and plug it into another mac where it would show up as a disk.

How far we’ve fallen.

Yep, macOS is nice but Apple stuff is mostly locked down luxury garbage nowadays, yet they have more fanboys than ever which infuriates me. Previously everything was open, and it was genuinely nice to work on the various parts of a Mac, now I would rather have to fix 10 PCs than deal with a single modern mac...

> Conversely windows, just got a USB stick in the drawer I can boot off.

Linux as well. Will probably work better than windows on older hardware

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