Apple turning our devices into jail cells.
These tech titans need to be regulated. We should be able to install whatever we want on Mac, iPhone, and Android. To be able to back up whatever we want, install from web, not be forced to use app stores, not be forced to sync with the cloud, and not be forced to use first party software.
I’m not the biggest fan of the grip Apple has on iOS, but this seems less of a case of platform protectionism, and more one of not wanting to (implicitly) support low-level interfaces/implicit APIs that are becoming hard to support for whatever reason.
Definitely annoying, but almost every OS does that at some point.
> These tech titans need to be regulated.
You say this as though anyone buying a Macbook in the past decade reserves the right to be surprised. New Trump administration isn't going to budge on this - he's actually rather upset at the EU for how they've been treating his good friend Tim Apple. Chances are, he likes this lockdown and wants Americans to accept it.
If you're an American owner of Apple hardware, you've involuntarily signed yourself up for the Apple Isolationist program. There is no government to save you, and no god Apple will answer to.
I use iPhone because I try not to use any Google products. I didn't sign up for no nothing, I have no other choice.
Regulations on our OSes means we end up with Microsoft refusing to limit access to the kernel not to displease the EU, which led to the Crowdstrike outage.
There has been no EU objection to creating new security APIs that would be accessable to Microsoft and third party developers.
As far as MacOS goes, you can't infect the system files with malware when the whole partition they live on cannot be modified by anything but the OS, which does indeed seem like a valid technical reason.
Here's why:
The cloud is someone else's computer, not yours. It's a shared drawer that you get a key to, but so do many others. If our main access to your drawer is through the programs on our computer, it also can be limited and broken for hours, days, or weeks while under repair.
I'm not sure how many laptops you've owned (personal and work), it seems once people get past 5-10, we are basically buying the death of the device at the first moment we open a new laptop.
It's my device. I pay for it. I own it. I use it how I want.
Being protected from myself is fine. Being protected from external internet threats is fine.
Having a switch to bypass it is mandatory. Non negotiable. Instant deal breaker.
More realistically, MacOS is possibly * being shuttered, sequestered to get locked down to make adopting iOS / iPadOS type OS on the macbooks directly instead.
Windows tried to dictate when my computer should update and not do anything else, so I left. It's unforgivable. This was well before any policies to manage it cam eout.
The simple thing is choice. A switch to turn it off. By making it locked down, it also does make it more insecure.
Open Source and auditable code is better than private code that no one has an idea of whether it's compromised or not, and for how long.
The recent iPhone zero days are an example.
Having bootable backups was the only reason I ever moved to a Mac.
This means, a backup of my computer created using something like Carbon Copy Cloner, or SuperDuper backup when plugged into any other Mac, and it would boot as my computer. Also known as Target Disk Mode booting off this backup.
Indispensible when or if my laptop was in for repair with Apple.
Having Target Disc Mode and Target Display Mode on a Mac are two of probably the 4 reasons I switched to a Mac from Windows. Skitch was the other, and CC/SuperDuper was the 4th. I had tolerated my last windows laptop dying :)
Multiple copies of multiple types of backups is the only way.
I have always maintained a CarbonCopy/SuperDuper at all times, plus a Time Machine that I cared far less about. Time Machine is my desperate fall back.
Time Machine backups haven't always been super reliable, nor is the recovery time to restore acceptable. I'm sure it's gotten better, but enough for me to forget what it hasn't done in the past? Doubt it.
Time Machine is kind OK for set it and forget it backup to a NAS or something. I didn't find as much value in Time Machine to a dedicated external drive since it had the risk of being the only backup, and it's not a backup if there's only one copy. Time machine's limited utility of use when there is an emergency on an external drive, compared to SuperDuper/Carbon Copy Cloner which is you are up in minutes not hours or days while you figure out what is going..
Having a Carbon Copy/Super Duper external drive sitting at one of your desks that's regularly plugged in gives you a live replica should anything happen.
Time Machine has it's own history of issues:
AFAIK, in that case, maybe it's just a bug that they're planning to fix...
Or are you arguing that this blog post is wrong in asserting the OS release this week introduced a bug in those tools?
But that doesn't mean it's not reckless of Apple to introduce a load-bearing component that wasn't necessary before and then not properly regression test it across OS updates.
I'm mystified about why I'm getting downvoted for that question. If it's inadvertently stupid of insulting to Apple users, wouldn't an explanation be more useful then trying to censor it?
Edit: I suppose it could explain the downvoting. "Apple doesn't let us boot Linux, you insensitive clod!"