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You ever notice how Apple never really lets the user say "no" to their nudges?
It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"
I’ve noticed that most companies do that, not just Apple.
Apple claims to be the privacy king. They deserve scrutiny.
Most companies did that before Apple, yes. I hate that trend.
Microsoft pioneer it with "ask again in 30 minutes". Or maybe someone else, can't tell for sure who was the original bastard.
And Sync Immediately's only affirmative option is "For Today", so I get to set a daily reminder to remind the setting that I do in fact want it to be ON.
I have this one notification asking me if I want to enable the Personal focus when I’m at home. I don’t want my iPhone to care if I’m at home or not, so the past two years whenever it pops up I click Later.
It will probably never stop asking.
It will. Once you accidentally mis-click once and then suddeny there is no way to back out of it.
I think this should be called the ratchet theory of consent because it only tightens.
I beat you to it by a couple of years :)
https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the-ratchet/
Haha! Great minds think alike. (Although they do also say that fools seldom differ...)
Google Play Store has a notification to enable notifications. You didn't read that wrong. It shows a badge and everything. I said no for years except that last time. Now I can't find how to turn it off again.
Can’t you just disable notifications for the Google Play Store app? Maybe it’s because I’m on GrapheneOS, but I can just enable/disable notifications like any other app.
Not sure about the focus pop up but most/all of Apple’s other nags (like set up Siri, try Apple Music and the like) go away permanently if you go to the settings app and click “later” from there (as opposed to the button in the pop up which has the exact same label).
This hostile behavior has unfortunately grown over the years. Notice how often you cannot really unsubscribe from newsletters, because clicking the small link in the email will only unsubscribe you from 1 of 25 "topics" or whatever and they will gladly re-define the "topics" every 6 months and re-enable them all.
If you are using a big tech mail service like Gmail then just mark them all as spam. If you run your own, block the whole domain.
i see this virtually everywhere, and worked at several places where PMs proactively changed text banners to not equate to "no"
severe industry brainrot
Feature: Apple does not phone home. Enable this feature?
Would you like to enable the feature where you opt out of disabling telemetry?
I don't have a solution, but on this topic I let Fable write a browser extension I called "Nee, krijg de tering". It's "No, fuck off" in English, but the Dutch feels more visceral for me. It's really rough, but it tries to find these "Maybe later", "No, thank you" etc. buttons and replace the No button.. I guess it's kind of self-explanatory. Does not really do anything, but it is cathartic (and also messes with a lot of UIs to the point where unfortunately the blocklist of domains this should not be used on is growing a lot :'( ).
I feel this pattern is really abusive. Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and "Maybe later/no, thank you". As though you have any obligation to be forced to answer this question again at some late time, or to be very polite while you refuse to be slapped in the face. The correct answer is obviously "No, fuck off".
Sensible. Add in a 'Nee, flikker op met je kutcookies' button for cookie consent banners, and you're golden.
This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.
Consent-O-Matic handles those kutcookies for me, but an interesting feature would be to use these fancy new "decision models" to determine the correct explitive to use in the No,-button text based on (the context of the element on) the current page.
In their refusal, while (accidental) acceptance is always definitive...
EDIT: In another thread this is called the ratchet of consent. Apt.
(lit. "No, get the tuberculosis".)
I get the annoyance at "ask me again later", but "maybe later" or "not now" is helpful - there's no way to trigger dialogs by yourself, so this is a promise that even if you say "no" in the dialog, you can still go into settings to change your mind. Gives me less anxiety about the choice.
How about a choice: both "no, maybe later" and "no, never"
And "no, never" would irreversibly remove the option from settings?
It would never prompt again.
That's is the same as what "Not now" and "Maybe later" would (should) do.
Only "ask me again later" is the one that prompts you again. That's why I do mind that one, and appreciate the other ones.
A much better way would be “Yes” and “No” with a small message of “you can change this later in the Settings”.
Or have three buttons: “Yes”, “No”, “Remind me Later”. Apple does stuff like that in other parts of the OS, like when asking for app permissions, so they clearly know how to do it.
"Remind me later" means "bug me again with a dialog in the future", which is not what I want. I don't need to be reminded, but if I change my mind in the future, I want to be able to proactively go and change it.
Yes, more text can be another way to provide the message, but if you've ever done any user testing, you'll know that people at best scan through your UI. I know I wouldn't read that, or at least would prefer not to have to read that.
I guess I don't see why "No" combined with "You can change this later in settings" is so much less offensive than "Not now".
Yes! The most consentless (don't underline this in red firefox!) technology that I can think of certainly.
edit: also install and use Linux
I see non-consensual more often, tbf.
This is barking at the wrong tree. If you value things like your privacy or the ability to strictly control what runs on your computer then perhaps it would be a good idea to not run a proprietary operating system that's primarily designed not to provide you with the best user experience possible but to slowly extract more and more value out of you?
You must be talking about someone other than Apple. Apple has been falling into value extraction lately (which I hope Ternus will change), but their operating systems very much have never been designed for that from the outset. Rather the opposite. Apple is the only company that comprehensively documents platform security and privacy. I can't think of anyone else who doesn't just say "trust me bro". Maybe GrapheneOS. Nobody actually proves they are who they say they are better than Apple does.
Apple is also one of the only companies to focus on user experience above all else (nearly, anyway). Again, I can't think of a single other example (maybe Framework comes close), but while Apple has incredible technology, they have always been fairly measured with it to attain just the user experience they want. IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance, and iPhone a reputation for having low memory, because Apple gave them the specs they needed to run well and have a terrific UX, not necessarily the specs to push the frontier of what you can run at home.
Apple has been learning that frontier is important, though, and they've been leaning more into it lately. Part of why Apple Silicon has been such an incredible shock to the industry.
The author is complaining that his OS doesn't let him say "no". This would never happen with an OS which actually respects you. Of course, it's not Apple's fault, it never is -- it's those "AI bros"! It's incredibly ironic that the author writes "I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires", yet he kowtowing to a company with a market cap of 5 trillion USD.
You wrote as if the entire operating system was designed from the start to extract value from you. That's what I'm disputing. I'm not trying to say that removing a disablement option that literally already existed had the user's best interest in mind. Just that it's not a sign of some core fundamental disrespect that the company has. We've already seen that Apple's been getting swept up by generative AI bullshit, like with the iPhone 16 marketing, and it is entirely fair to hold them accountable for all the shit they're doing, but it's also entirely possible that this is just a ripple and they're going to get themselves under control again.
Of course it's designed to extract value. MacOS is primarily a consumer content platform with some developer features, rather than vice versa.
The Apple experience is enshitifying at all levels and becoming consistently intrusive. I'm perpetually nagged about a 3 month trial of Apple Music I will never use and have zero interest in. Music player launches when I get in the car, even though I don't want it to. Apple Maps persistently asks me if I want a quick route home, when I don't. Apple TV repeatedly runs trailers for Apple Shows I have no interest in.
Apple '26 gave the world the much-loathed and objectively pointless Liquid Glass. iOS27 has some idiotically obvious bugs and usability issues. Parts of the hardware remain world-leading, but the software is getting less and less humane while pretending to be the opposite.
Technically correct then, he's kowtowing to trillionaires.
"good dog, here's a cookie"
You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork. In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem". They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be. Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.
We all have a line, it's just in a different place. Mine is strongly at the "forcibly stealing huge amounts of disk space for features you don't want" point. As a happy Mac and Android user, I don't recognise the 'make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem"' description; maybe you can give an example?
Ha, funnily enough that's not far off. (Vulpine)
I hated Apple for a really long time. I don't know exactly why, but if anything, it was all the Apple haters that got me. And of course, the general idea of devices not being locked down to the company, and some other stuff. Having a rooted Android phone made me prone to confirmation bias too.
But my school had Mac, and after using them, I knew that Mac was for me. I still hated iOS at the time, but I knew I needed Mac. So I got one, and I was absolutely right.
The Mac broke down constantly though, didn't seem designed for the abuse I put it through. People begged me to go back to Windows because of the constant repairs, and I did, but I eventually got fed up with Windows again and tried Linux. I eventually got fed up with Linux too, went back to Windows, continued to be relentlessly fed up with Windows, and then eventually got a Mac again, with my own money this time.
At some point, it just clicked for me that the company is what I need, rather than Mac alone. I realized that iOS had the exact same philosophy that I liked so much about Mac. I got an iPhone and got to benefit from the ecosystem with my Mac. And at that point, my mind was fully made up. All in on Apple.
Note that at basically none of these points did marketing become a factor in my decisions. So no it's not the marketing. Though that is a great way to discredit opinions, I think Apple is genuinely the best for me.
To me, this feels kind of like the argument that Steam is an abusive monopoly. I choose and prefer them because the alternatives kinda suck in comparison. Apple is like that for me. I'm not locked into their ecosystem the same way that I'd be locked into an online game that I've poured thousands of hours into. Or locked into a social network where all my friends have been for over a decade. I can easily move somewhere else, and I even did recently, before moving back because I couldn't bear it.
I noticed just how much my habits changed to adapt to Windows, as opposed to Mac. I naturally used the system differently because it just wasn't capable of things I could rely on Mac to do for me. Spotlight is a big part of Mac for me, and none of the third-party software out there quite replicates that experience on Windows. In addition, the file management is far more primitive, and I found myself using directory structure in place of search. You could call this a skill issue, but to me, it's just a mismatch. Given how much I've used both sides my whole life -- I mean for much of my early life it was only Windows, but Mac has always been far more intuitive and expressive for me -- if they were comparable, I'd use them comparably, but I don't, so I think they're not.
I'm leaving Linux out of this because they don't have an ecosystem, they just rely on you bringing your own, I guess. You want file sharing, you install something like KDE Connect. You want organization, just find a file manager that has that, or make one. I've tried a few distributions, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora Silverblue. I preferred Arch on my MacBook, eventually preferred Fedora Silverblue on my later PC, but nothing's quite right, even when I put the effort into curating (like the time I tried KISS Linux).
To be honest, I'm not quite sure why people say Apple's ecosystem is this terrible walled garden that's super hard to leave. Maybe they're hostile to a user experience that they prefer over the alternatives. Maybe they think that their preference is a sign that the walled garden is manipulative. I guess I just don't get it yet. Maybe they want to leave but it's inconvenient, they think Apple could make it easier, and that makes them conclude it's designed to trap them. In my experience, the alternatives simply are less convenient, it's nothing about Apple that makes it more difficult to leave.
I don't think there's any evidence that Apple cares whether or not there are "apologists". Maybe if nobody in the world liked them they would decide to change their minds. But I don't think it's as simple as people just rationalizing their bad decisions and excusing them, therefore enabling them. I think they're just as likely to make bad decisions that are universally bad, and it takes about as long for them to go back on them as bad decisions with "loyal apologists". Like that fiasco with the butterfly keyboard repair programs.
I do agree on one point, that Apple is unlikely to realize their mistake when it keeps generating profit, regardless of how many users complain. That's why I'm hoping for top-down action. I hope the new CEO sees that their more recent enshittifications like "Apple Creator Studio" are a mistake, a betrayal. I have no evidence that'll ever happen, though. Maybe that's the loyalty you're talking about. Or just the last shred of hope I have for what seems like the last company on earth I can rely on.
Desktops maybe, but on mobile, Apple has always outclassed most Windows laptops that ordinary people might buy - alone because the full-aluminium case allows for far more heat input until saturation kicks in.
Sure - my MacBook Pro from 2015 could run BeamNG.drive playably when my previous Windows laptops absolutely could not. I think it wasn't necessarily that competitive with the best gaming laptops at the time, but it was far better for me as a user in general, even if in retrospect, it was more of a middle class machine, but it absolutely got the job done and I don't think it deserved the bad reputation at all. (Then again, it's entirely likely people dissing Mac for having low specs were not talking about their top of the line pro machines.)
I see the dangers of AI and agree that many companies don’t value our privacy and do what’s best for them and not us, but…
…this is an emotional dogmatic post. „All of this garbage“ clearly shows that the author is stuck in the past. The banners on the website confirm this. It’s the figurative fanatic complaining about those black steam devils and their tracks that nobody needs and that destroy nature. Yeah, steam trains were noisy and created smoke, but the age of horses was over. No emotional outburst would have stopped that, and won’t stop AI now.
The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point he is trying to make.
He's not talking about AI in general. He's talking about a device he owns.
Agree. Anyone should be allowed to disable generative AI features on their device, especially a general computing device such as Mac. It's not some hysterical outburst about the industry to be upset when you can't do that, especially when the option used to exist but was removed.
If you honestly can't see the blatant and absolute anti-AI rhetoric in his post (I provided a citation) and the banners, then there really is no reason to continue this discussion.
It's there for sure. However, it's not particularly relevant to the following two points:
1. The author should be able to do whatever he wants with his own device. That he owns.
2. The author should be able to decline consent for data-gathering activities and general AI stuff that he doesn't want.
If something can't be stopped, does that mean it's good? Reading accounts of the industrial revolution, huge swathes of nature in the north of England were destroyed. This article is an argument that it should be different, and is mostly focused on consent, not whether AI should exist or not (although the author's position on that is pretty clear too).
As a side note, I would argue you're being just as "emotional" (which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing despite your aspersions) by calling it "fanatic".
The "unstoppable" narrative may or may not be correct but it's certainly maximizing the backlash.
No it doesn't, one can hate LLMs with a passion and still not want features they don't use take 20GB of the storage they paid a premium for.
I feel the same way. I'm not completely against the technology, but please let me say "no" and remove the models and kill the processes.
Is it normal that I am enraged by this new process…is there a MacBook version of Graphene or something we can use if things keep boiling this way?
Asahi Linux. It'll take some years to reach the latest devices, but the effort is helping the whole of the Linux ecosystem on Apple silicon.
It feels like consent is being undermined in so many places. The anti-Meta Glasses ad with a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and the strap line "Glasses for people who don't do consent" hits the nail on the head for me. It's a profoundly inhuman stance in the name of profits.
The answer is simple: Regulation to grant users the right to refuse during installation/setup of a system. This must also include updates. This feel like a repeat of the EU browser choice rule!
If you want to own your computer, linux is where it's at. Windows is rusty iron chains and MacOS's are gold-plated silver pretending to be gold, but they're still chains.
For now.
My gut is we'll have to start learning BSD soon.
GPL is a more free license if one cares about having control over their computing. The BSD community cares a lot less about that in my (limited) experience and more about purely technical aspects. Which is fine, I just wouldn't expect them to hold if Linux is no longer an option somehow.
A Linux computer is so many things and also nothing at the same time that's is basically impossible that one or N AI company can impose you something like Apple, Microsoft or Google can.
With that said, also or instead using *BSD won't do any harm.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are your friends too!
Let me know if any of them work well on a laptop that's never than 5 years old.
Running FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 ARP that was bought brand new less than a year ago. Everything except the wifi works flawlessly (daily driver for working).
And the wifi is easily fixable either buying a non expensive dongle or waiting for the next release.
Also running bhyve as daily driver with Ubuntu for development purposes. Everything works without issues, perfectly.
That's valuable and good to know, but I meant a machine that's actually new (not one you just bought recently). That laptop is about 2.5 years old specs wise at this point. I use mine for anything from programming to video editing to AAA gaming on Linux. I don't think a machine like that could be my primary one, but looks like a decent secondary.
Psst. Macos is bsd in a trenchcoat. Don't let the others see this comment or they will get angry.
Perhaps, but the BSD developers do not fully invite themselves into your home and network through use of their operating system. I do appreciate however that macOS is BSD somewhere under the hood and switched to zsh as default shell (even if it was supposedly only for licensing reasons, but I believe it's the correct decision practically or legally)
I would love to move my gaming PC to Linux but until the kernel devs permit kernel-level anti-cheats, or an equivalent, I refuse to give up games that I love. It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.
Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse. Valve claimed to be working on a solution, and if there is any company which can negotiate an accord, it's them.
It's worth having a look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/. I found that the most of the games I play which use anti cheat work on Linux. It's also not hard to dual-boot windows as a backup, though I haven't had a use for my windows partition yet.
But why? They're just video games. Why are they important, especially when a lot of them are designed to be addictive.
A lot of people love smoking but that's not important either and it's better to give it up.
What if those games are the only games they and their friends play together? I wouldnt want to stop that.
Having to give over time and money to a video game company to maintain friendships sounds more like a symptom than a cure.
When your grandkids ask you what you did with your finite time, is "I pwned noobs" the answer you want to give?
I want to clarify to anyone reading this that this only effects high-competitive games, like LoL, Valorant, PUBG, R6S; and not all of them (e.g. Counter Strike).
It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).
Ofc, cheating is also present with KLAC, its just the next level of the cat and mouse game (Driver exploits, DMA access via PCIe, Network Packet analysis, ...)
Nonsense. 1. Almost no anticheat is implemented on Linux in the first place. Most "working" anti-cheat solutions for Linux are just a #if Linux doNothing(); #else ... 2. KLAC requires SecureBoot/ChainOfTrust + closed source code running with highest privileges. This does not make sense for any PC, but I dont see why it would be harder to do on Linux than on Windows, Linux just has a smaller install base in general and a lower acceptance rate for KLAC, therefore its not worth it to implement.
There are hardware cheats that are not detectable by KLAC, so it doesn't solve the problem, just improves the situation.
The only way to avoid cheaters is to play with people you trust.
It's very fortunate that Linux devs do not tolerate this DRM crap. What you are asking for is to turn Linux into another Windows, at which point there is not point.
If you're not willing to stop using harmful software that's your problem.
Maybe Little Snitch can be helpful in this sort of case ? Consent or not, it must be possible to kill the phone home line.
Potentially! Would be interesting to hear if anyone manages to block internal Apple shenanigans with Little Snitch successfully and feasibly (without constant toggling of rules or alike).
Uncertain, doubtful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791435
So... Apple should develop a separate version of their system, that doesn't include AI anywhere? Because Siri AI is not the only part of the system that uses the onboard models. The moral panic is just ridiculous at this point
I don't think anyone's asking for a separate version, just an option to turn the AI features off. Even totally aside from the moral points, some of us simply don't have the disk space.
it is off, Apple Intelligence and Siri AI IS NOT the name of the models. The worst they're guilty of here is confusing denominations, something hardly new to Apple
So if I upgrade to the next version of the OS, I absolutely won't get that 20GB+ file downloaded against my wishes, absolute guarantee?
Do you believe that adding a "no" button _and then honoring it when the user clicked on it_ requires developing a separate version of their system?
Regardless: they already did, because Apple intelligence is not available in the EU.
You're mixing up Siri AI and Apple Intelligence with the models... Siri AI and Apple Intelligence are PRODUCTS, the tech behind it, the models, are called Apple Foundation Models and they're used in many places in the system. It's not a matter of consent, it's people not understanding the tech they're using and doing spurious analogies.
I am doing nothing of the sort; you're shadow-boxing, and nothing you wrote has any bearing on the point under discussion here: a privacy-sensitive feature that the user explicitly disabled was silently re-enabled and the toggle removed.
No worries, it’s only a matter of time until this becomes normal. Will probably follow the same trajectory as people disabling JavaScript. You still hear about that constantly of course, because the 7 people that do it can’t go a day without letting you know, but it won’t be a panic anymore.
Thanks, that does help
I never really understood the craze for the overpriced Apple products. After many years of using PCs with Linux and Windows, I got forced to use a MacBook Pro as the company laptop and I found it hard to use. The OS is so limiting, Finder so crappy, oh my. There are some advantages, like the hardware is good, but on the other hand there are countless tiny issues where "Apple knows better" such as tying mouse scroll direction to the trackpad direction which is awkward for me. And now this what you're describing. So no, thanks, I'll stick to ThinkPad.
You don't buy Apple because it's good. You buy it because it's what the cool people use.
Imagine applying for a SF startup job and letting them know you use a Windows computer.
At best they will politely tell you to fuck off. But they might blog/X about the idiot Windows user who imagined they could be cool enough to work for them, all coated in a plausible "a craftsman takes care of using good tools, sharp knifes, ..."
You do, because their hardware is very good. Denying this is just silly.
There is no contradiction. I agree Apple hardware is good. But it's not why you buy it (well, maybe you personally do, but you are not representative of the median Apple client)
Do you have any sources for this? I agree that people tend to follow their peers, or seek things that communicate a higher social status, but like, Apple's hardware just is also very good, and that could easily be why someone stays with them, even if they were prompted by status.
If it was that simple mainstream Linux success would be one good marketing campaign away.
Their hardware is really good, their software is fine — at least as good as all the others to the average user I think, the integration between their products is good, and their marketing is obviously top tier.
I don’t think they’d be as successful if their products were not premium hardware.
I’d love an arm based laptop with a great screen and trackpad running Linux for work.
I apparently define cool people differently :joy:
No, thanks :joy:
Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you.
if you are happy on Linux, why do you even "try to use a mac or win"?
When those unfortunate ones need my help. Or when teaching kids in school.
my work offers win or mac only.
Fanboys, including management, push macs down our throats and there's little you can do when apple fanboys are also decision makers, since they don't listen to reason.
macOS has been on a downward trend since Apple started pushing "Services", basically iCloud. Now it's as bad as Windows when I last used Windows.
It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.
It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.
I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.
I won't disagree that MacOS has been getting worse, but Windows is even worse than you remember it. It's clearly a race to the bottom, but Windows 11 is full of ads, and you can't even search the Start menu for your installed programs anymore. MacOS hasn't gotten that bad yet, as frustrating as the new "Apps" menu is.
I switched my desktop to Ubuntu about a year ago, and while it's not 100% free of trouble, I still can't imagine running Windows 11 again. My MBP still runs MacOS and I haven't been pushed far enough to want to try installing a Linux distro on it.
Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.
Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…
It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.
Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
We're 30+ years into trackpads on laptops and they're still terrible on Windows machines. Make it make sense.
I can't say I've ever been impressed by an Apple track pad. Or their insistence on removing actual buttons for them.
The peak was my high school Gateway laptop.
I pulled out my old windows laptop to debug why my Linux machine is giving me issues, and the mouse was unusable, making clicking anything impossible. It was adding momentum, and any precise movement or click just couldn't be done because it wouldn't move with small touches, and added 'weight' to anything bigger.
Anyway, I was sure something was up, checked settings, and found a new feature akin to 'more accurate mouse'. I disabled it and my trackpad started working again. Everytime I have to use that PC I get angry about something unbearable windows thought was a good idea. Tbh my Linux has been driving me up the walls recently. I think I just don't like computers at all.
I am confused here. While I generally like Mac hardware the trackpads are quite mediocre. Lenovo and Dell have better ones. What are they better at?
I have to agree, unfortunately. Macbooks have their issues, and give me violent tendencies like any piece of hardware every now and then, but when it comes to UX and reliability, they are far, far ahead of anything I tried, and I tried a lot of hardware.
Reliability, yes. UX, no.
If you look at MacOS with a critical eye, it's nearly impossible to say the OS has good UX. It's outdated and everything requires more clicks. Finder stuck 20 years ago. Hard to find settings. Poor screen real estate. Hard to read text with transparent everything.
Let's kill this myth that "Macs are more intuitive to use".
Mac build quality is nice indeed. And Nvidia sometimes doesn't play along, but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.
My both parents use linux and are happy with it. If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.
If thats all you do you might as well just use macos. Something comes up you can just send your parents to the apple store. Probably one of the last places on earth you can get a real life human in a real life building from a real life major company to sit down with you and walk you through your issue. They will do this for free, you only pay for an actual repair job, which you can also of course do there for a relatively fair price all things considered for oem quality work. Not sure where I would take any other laptop for repair. Do people even repair laptops as a business?
For software issues they have a real person - me, and for hardware ones they can be sent to ANY repair service. Just close to them there are like three vendors who do hardware work. But the thing is, for last 5 years or so I do not remember they actually had some issue with their box. Things just work and updates do not overhaul your system out of nowhere.
The major os updates on mac are entirely optional. They still do security releases for the other os's for a long time. This current mac I am on sonoma same as when I got it. That 2012 I kept on mojave. Its just the most polished unix os. The hardware is always set up to work perfectly with it. No driver support issues. Just works. Always works.
Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.
Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.
This has changed recently
For example this dell is superb, has tandem oled with 200% scaling and runs linux (dhh runs this on onarchy)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps14da...
I will never buy/use DELL again. Even if the company completely reinvents itself, stops selling computers and just rebrands toasters, these combination of letters make me distrust anything they are physically printed on.
I'm not exaggerating, I had so many horrible experiences.
I've probably heard "this time is different" on the topic of PC laptops catching up to Macs a hundred times over the last decade, but it never is...
It's hard to rebuild trust after selling a computer (without a CD drive) without networking drivers and no indication of which wireless chipset it has, but including a CD with said drivers.
Aluminium is not build quality. It makes lying stuff inside cheap. And feels horrible on skin contact.
The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.
The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.
Aside from that?
Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).
YMMV. I never had any issues holding a mac laptop. I know people think they are sharp but I genuinely struggle to replicate this when it comes up. As I am typing this comment the laptop is resting on my chest with the entire weight of either hand resting on the sharp side edge of this mac. When I type I move my right arm so that the soft fleshy part under the wrist is now resting with full weight on the sharp edge of the mac. No pain or any discomfort doing this. Currently pressing down as hard as I can on that edge just so see. Again, no clue what people are doing to be in discomfort here. Lead hands? Skin condition? Not sure.
I haven't abused this m series mac as much. But my old original aluminum unibody from 2012, that thing lasted about 12 years until water damage took it out. It fell to the floor on every corner multiple times. None are perfectly round anymore due to the force of the impacts. Never shattered the screen or affected anything with the computer.
I have a friend who ran over his with his f150. That did end up putting some cracks into the screen, but it still worked and he still used it in that state for a couple years at least.
At work we can choose between Apple laptops or Thinkpads, I choose thinkpads, using Windows and WSL.
Previously either VMware Workstation or Virtual Box.
Also I am not speaking from a position of no experience, as some projects require being assigned Mac Books, that I gladly return after delivery.
WSL is such a pain compared to just using a unix os from the get, which is of course what macos is. People forget that it is in fact a unix distro.
a UNIX distro which interfaces well with Linux. A fact which makes life way easier in the interoperability department.
No, people don't.
It's just that mishmash of OSFMK (with BSD APIs of 1991 or so) with random additions of newer APIs does not necessarily make it a great Unix to work with in 2026
People really get hard up about it shipping with some older versions of some tools. But if you are really that much of a unix nerd then you'd also know that is solved in 5 mins with a brew one liner.
Unix certification requires things like case sensitive file systems, which MacOS can do, but doesn't so they had to supply a special configuration for certification.
So no. The MacOS you use is not Unix.
Except UNIX and GNU/Linux aren't the same thing, which is why so many folks keep complaining about their UNIX experience in macOS.
They buy macOS and then complain macOS isn't Linux, duh!
One thing Windows did right is keyboard based navigation. Most of the general public does not know or appreciate how close to productivity nirvana the alt key brings you.
Same is possible in KDE. Combined with hot corners, you can become "blazingly fast".
Once a colleague seeing me work looked at my screen, lifted his head and pointed to my colleague saying "Have you seen how this guy work, he's a maniac!".
Mastering the tool you have always brings speed and smoothness into your process, one step at a time.
I don't feel like I've had much issue with keyboard driven workflows on any OS.
Any app can has its extensive set of keyboard shortcuts, but when it comes to DE itself, it's not always the case.
Microsoft has Meta+ and Alt+ combinations dime a dozen, and it's consistent across versions. KDE has extensive programmability which allows you to design you own. Both allows you to pack so many features into a small number of keys and work across applications or in general without thinking.
A terminal? It appears. A window? You call it without thinking. Ran out of space, a new desktop is just an instinct...
Not to mention that once you're in this ecosystem, it's usually pretty reliable.
It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.
Indeed. TBH if I was running a Google- or even OpenAI-scale company (3000+ devices) I'd probably invest into creating a useful Linux distribution and hardware configuration myself (at that scale, it could maybe start to make sense).
10 years ago Google had Goobuntu internally.
Red Hat had most employees running a custom corporate RHEL build or Fedora on Thinkpads prior to 2018 or so, and even then most employees moved to Mac as soon as they were allowed to do so.
I was a true Linux believer, and I still switched to a Mac because I needed things to just work. Poor battery life, awful HiDPI support, strange driver issues all contributed. Yes, I could fix them. I opened bugs and could talk to the engineers responsible to get things fixed ASAP. Even so, it was a second full time job keeping up with it.
Xiaomi certainly does: they have billboards touting it: along the bottom they show phones, dishwashers, cars, laptops, and everything in between.
Also don't forget calibrated screens, great speakers, long-life (you can use one for a 7-8 years without even trying), and durable keyboards which doesn't become smeared wear-fests which defaces itself within a single heavy development session.
I always run Linux (Debian primarily) on my desktops and servers with a zealot-ish dedication, but what Mac and macOS brings to the table as a portable machine is irreplaceable with anything else.
Even a top end ThinkPad with a well groomed Linux distribution can't come close, sorry.
It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which could be a death knell for the laptop, and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec. They've come far in recent years, and I certainly wouldn't be sad if it was my main machine yet I don't expect them to be an outlier forever.
In some dimension Apple (and any serious manufacturer) is always going to be ahead - and they certainly are in non-gaming portable CPU/GPU combos right now. Alas, they aren't ahead in many other dimensions; my Fedora X1 Carbon is my strong preference over my M4 macbook pro and a large part of that is the basic usability of the system and window manager (sway), which is something Apple will never match until we meaningfully switch interaction paradigms.
Yes, their butterfly switch keyboards were really bad. I skipped that generation. I own machines from 2006, 2014 and 2020.
Apple unfortunately does this sometimes, but interestingly just before changing CPU architectures (Power to Intel, Intel to ARM). I sometimes think whether it was semi-intentional. I don't blindly support them, however.
I'm way faster in my Debian + KDE system as well, but portables are always secondary machines for me, so Mac doesn't bother me much.
Also, I like running different operating systems and paradigms at the same time, so I can learn from all of them while developing some stuff for myself and others. However, as I said multiple times over the years, macOS is the "alternative" OS for me, not the primary one. Linux has that part for the last 20+ years.
Do regular people care about these things or is this a hn thing?
I find a trackpad (even a Mac one) is absolutely infuriating to use compared to a decent mouse.
Battery life/screens/magsafe I'm plugged into a dock 99% of the time so it's irrelevant, but when forced to occasionally, the ergonomics of looking down at a single small 1x in screen is just terrible if doing it for hours and also makes my back feel horrible.
Agree unfortunately. I hate apple, for the same reasons as everyone else, but I have both a MacBook and iPhone and can’t do much about it. It’s like politics a little, you can only choose the least bad, there is no good.
I have a Linux server, and use cloud Linux machines extensively, but at least the last time I checked, Linux desktop sucks. There are always memory management issues, doing a video call makes my fan sound like a jet taking off, not sleeping, put my laptop in my bag and it gets to hot to touch - that’s just off the top of my head, I’ve tried Linux laptops on multiple occasions and they suck.
This actually just happened to me... How did you fix it? I just finished proving that my issue isn't my peripherals or cords so it must be the GPU
if you use distros which ship the latest _stable_ release of software
and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up
but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues, something I haven't exactly had with either Windows or Mac
like my current gaming setup from a year ago(roughly) was setup once, I had to fiddle some minor tweaks during setup and since then it "just works tm". No issues, not know how needed, nothing. (At least for the Games I play.) But also not Nvidea which has in recent years increasingly more QA issues across _all_ OSes and _all_ hardware including their supper expensive AI cards... But that is more a Nvidea then a Linux Problem, by now, was different in the past.
These are defining qualities of something that does not "just work"
By those standards neither Mac nor Windows just work. No modern OS expect maybe ChromeOS just works.
I've never used a computer that didn't have occasional hiccups. The Mac I have for work has lots of weird bugs. One is that if it has been using WI-FI and I plug-in my dock with an Ethernet cable attached, I lose internet access because MacOS can't gracefully handle the new interface becoming available.
I also find Apple's choice to just continually create 1G swap files until the system locks absolutely baffling.
Windows on laptops also just works, especially for high end ones. It’s the Linux on laptops that’s hit or miss.
False. Get one with Linux pre installed (Dell developer edition, system 76, framework) and it just works as well.
Of course it works and is beautiful hardware and all that.
But don't fool yourself. You're subverted to Apple's rules the same as Microsoft users are to Windows.
I prefer to fight a little bit on an update on a unix system on something that is not working 100% to give up choices. When you use Windows, MacOS, Android you do not have choices. Choices are dictated from above, like it or not.
As for me every time I have to interact with something that is not BSD or Linux I suffer miserably.
We are trading usability & quality for freedom & privacy. We know that, but we're all so busy that we have to make that trade. I've used linux since 2000 for servers, I've used it (and still do sometimes) for workstations, but even 2026 linux workstations & laptops aren't at where macbooks were 15 years ago.
Yes, there is a whole moral discussion to be had, but as much as you win points for doing the better thing, the better things don't really pay bills.
The good news though is that we definitely won the server war. We can spin up VMs and install Linux without licences. We have access to software that works well, security updates, frequent releases, a massive ecosystem of free software, no advertising, very little to no licensing for software, and it works incredibly well. So much so, that we can't even imagine a world in which servers require licence keys or subscriptions or a marketplace account.
Imagine now, if laptops & workstations were as solved as servers are.
That's why we aren't there yet, because they're not.
I'm not sure the hardware is worth the price.
As for the OS, everytime I tried MacOS, I find rapidly major showstoppers. It's like people are just blind to them.
If I'd qualify each platform, I'd say Windows is a toy, Mac is a piece of art, Linux is a tool. I picked my category.
It’s the standard enshittification playbook. Get a large market share with a good product, then you can safely degrade it since your users are too reliant on the ecosystem to conveniently switch.
Microsoft Office. That’s the last reason.
I was using Windows on my personal-but-for-work laptop; it got to the point where I hated it too much so tried Linux. Most stuff was great (even Teams was 90% fine!) but I couldn’t function professionally without installed versions of Office, and I couldn’t find an acceptable workaround.
I then switched back to MacOS and am mostly happy hanging on to Sequoia… but I’m dreading the point at which (for some reason) Apple make it unavoidable to upgrade.
Then… Windows 11 LTSC?
What's more interesting is his "No AI" policy
https://dbushell.com/ai/
Why do you think it’s (more) interesting?
Guess it's time to switch back to Linux... Shame, I'll miss the macbook build quality.
This is a very interesting shift with Apple where customers are starting to perceive it as hostile company.
That mindset shift surely started quite some years ago? At least in my book they’re actively hindering standards/compatibility with other ecosystems, greenwashing their products, squeezing out third-party developers, and design/UX is also going downhill at least since Liquid Glass (or rather since Jobs left).
It's been heading this way since they rolled out the butterfly keyboard and soldered RAM in 2015 unfortunately.
In several years, the GDPR enforcers (national information commissioners) may eventually wake up to this and start talking about fines. But I suspect everyone is too cowed by the AI inevitability narrative.
“Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787535
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1vlnf13/workarou...
I'm done with Apple. Got rid of my iPhone and back on android (GrapheneOS) and very impresses after playing with Omarchy for a few weeks.
I think we will keep reading more and more of these Apple stories and it feels like shit is getting worse as time goes by
I posted a thread on thr MacRumors forum making a similar point. I tried to couch it in the language of Apple being inconsistent with Apple Intelligence. You can’t turn it off anymore globally but Apple provides the user the ability to block, not turn off, some parts of it. Even then you can’t block everything, like the Apple Intelligence parts of the Photos app. Even if you turn off Siri that stuff sticks around. But iOS 27 does not require Apple Intelligence to function or anything like that because my 4th gen iPad Air can’t run Apple Intelligence but can run iPadOS 27 just fine.
I make it a point to never install the first versions of major macos releases. they are usually buggy and have annoying new features that are either removed, improved or made optional in the following minor releases. Currently on 26.6.2, it's pretty good.
You said yes when you bought their shit
Don't know when he bought his devices, but Apple Intelligence is not yet 2 years old so it might no even have existed when he bought his Mac.
Is this happening only when upgrading the os or does it force enable apple intelligence on clean re-installs too?
These are reasons enough. I switched to Asahi recently on my Macbook Pro M1
My fingerprint reader doesn't work, nor does my speaker. But hey, its way better than having to use MacOS. Atleast, linux lets me use my computer the way I want.
FIY speakers should work on a Macbook Pro M1 running Asahi. They have been working for a long time now (like 1 or 2 years) and they do work fine for me (running Asahi Alarm, not Fedora, but Fedora is supposed to work better since it's officially supported).
Just curious... Would Asahi Linux allow me to run llama.cpp on my m1? I have a spare laptop with lots of memory, wondering whether performance could be improved by using Asahi over running models on macOS?
I had a similar thing with Xcode the other day. I unticked the "download a code assistance model" thing, clicked to continue and it started downloading it anyway (which, to be fair, you can just X out of).
Why does anyone who seems to be working in the software industry even think that immediately updating to the latest major release is ever a good idea?
I always wait one year, upgrading to major release N-1 in August before N comes out in September. I made an exception last year and stayed on Sequoia. It will be August of next year before I consider Golden Gate.
I just stick with whatever major release comes with the computer. If I had actual liberty though I'd have this m3 pro running mojave. I actually got a lot of utility out of bootcamp.
He did justify it in https://dbushell.com/notes/2026-09-16T05:01Z/
Run Linux, Virtualizise windows or Mac OS be happy.
The cost? You have to research a machine that will run Linux, not everyone can do this. I'm quite happy with my hp zbook is it a mac, no bit it's as close as I can go.
The reason corporations disable our right to stop AI tracking is because, at least for now, AI agents can be held to account for crimes once blamed on a person or corporation -- all one need do is disable the off-switches.
Until we sort out our relationship with AI, it will be the universal whipping boy, blamed for all sorts of things that once would indict an individual or corporation.
The best -- or worst, depending on your outlook -- AI trait is its complete absence of an ethical or moral sense. When an AI agent breaks into a computer, it's not with guilty knowledge, because AI doesn't possess that -- it's not part of their design. People need to remember: AI agents live in a moral vacuum, and that's not an accident.
When a corporation is called out for disabling a switch that once stopped AI tracking, the AI bros might say, "Oh, yes, that's an oversight, easily fixed." But it's not an oversight, it's a trial balloon, an A/B test to see how people will react.
But there's more. Decades ago, the Nielsen TV rating service would monitor what people watched on their TV sets (remember TV sets, boxes weighing 500 pounds?), by calling people on their telephones (remember telephones?). By modern standards, the Nielsen people were amateurs -- today's TV sets have built-in AI agents, active 24/7, and no disable switch. They patiently record what you watch.
In the next phase, TV sets will do eye-tracking, find out what parts of a TV scene people are looking at. Not true now but soon (Samsung is working on it). Pupil dilation, facial expressions, everything.
A super-old Bob Hope joke from the Cold War era: "Yes, they have TV in Russia, but you don't watch it, it watches you." Not so funny any more.
Well that's a philosophical point, because morality is bound up with opinions and personality and internal motivation, and quite possibly with creativity and with whatever intelligence really means. So it probably can't be designed into LLMs, and struggles with "alignment" probably aren't faked.
I don't know about Macs, but under iOS/iPadOS you can set a Siri region to somewhere it's unsupported (e.g. Russia) to truly disable it.
It gets back about 15 gigabytes of storage and removes additional stuffs you couldn't disable by setting Screen Time options, such as the Safari Reader's gigantic "summarize" button.