Other companies claim to care about the consumer, they deserve scrutiny too.

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.

Haha! Great minds think alike. (Although they do also say that fools seldom differ...)

This is like an in app Envelope icon thing.

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).

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.

Feature: Apple does not phone home. Enable this feature?

Would you like to enable the feature where you opt out of disabling telemetry?

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.

not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive

In their refusal, while (accidental) acceptance is always definitive...

EDIT: In another thread this is called the ratchet of consent. Apt.

Dutch is fairly unique in how it uses diseases as expletives, whereas most other languages use body parts or excrement. TBC even has the honour of having two expletives named after it (tering and pleuris).

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.

Have you ever seen an app where upon responding to a dialog, an option is irrevocably removed from settings? The conversation is about “no” meaning “don’t bother me again with this question unprompted” (which used to be the norm), not “rewrite your own binary to remove the choice”.

"Remind me later" means "bug me again with a dialog in the future", which is not what I want.

But it is what Apple and others do, and what the conversation is about. Sounds like you want what everyone else does (a “no”) but are just arguing over the specific wording of the message.

Then build better interfaces. Don't ask stupid or nefarious questions.

Microsoft and Google are the same.

Many people have a hard time understanding consent.

It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"

No? When I'm asked about Apple Pay on an iPhone, it says "Maybe later". In the Settings it has reminder, and if I go in and say "No" it never pops up ever again (maybe on a iOS major version upgrade?).

Generally with Apple it's one "Maybe later" with a reminder flag set someplace, and then that's it.

They have a "rapist mentality" like all the other large tech companies.

I see non-consensual more often, tbf.

IIRC you can dismiss the three-month trial in Settings and it never comes back.

And IME the app that launches in the car is the last app you had open. Open Apple Maps and then it shouldn't launch Music every time.

Liquid Glass was one person, who thankfully has already left. iOS 7 was the same deal, terrible at launch.

I do agree that the services are pretty bad. Like, advertising Apple's new pet movie through the fucking Wallet app? Should be straight to jail.

Technically correct then, he's kowtowing to trillionaires.

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?

"good dog, here's a cookie"

Ha, funnily enough that's not far off. (Vulpine)

You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork.

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.

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point

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.

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!

I've seen people in #freebsd attack GPL like it was thought up by satan.

That's the problem with BSD, the community holds a large amount of radical ideologies that led them to BSD. Like a deep hatred for systemd or the GPL.

Not the core developers though, just the community surrounding them.

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.

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.

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)

The post is `I said no and Apple said yes` so not sure how much being a BSD protects you there. Apple still controls it.

Thanks. I intentionally avoid games without KLAC now because the cheating is so bad. The most recent example is Arc Raiders. Such a fun game at launch, very quickly overrun by cheaters. They eventually added KLAC but because they also offer a Linux build, they could not stop the cheating. The game is mostly dead now, [down to just 6% of its peak.](https://steamcharts.com/app/1808500#All)

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?

Because I'm not friends with all 64 players in the lobby.

I don't want kernel level anti-cheat, though. All the games with it have cheaters anyway.

But why do you like them? What do you get out of them? What's the benefit?

I've watched people play slot machines. They sit there and pump money into the machine for no real benefit to themselves. Why are video games any different to that?

I would like to respond because you're speaking authoritatively but this is mostly your opinion.

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 affected a game I really care about: Arc Raiders. That's not a "high-competitive" game. It's PvPvE, shooting at funny robots and scavenging rubber duckies. Cheating killed the game. [It's down to 6% of its peak.](https://steamcharts.com/app/1808500#All) Just because this hasn't affected the games you love doesn't mean it's not affecting many games. See Titanfall, H1Z1, and The Cycle: Frontier, among many more.

It does not affect "multiplayer" in general, to the contrary, most multiplayer games are not affected (coop games, MMOs, RTS).

I was going to ask you to back that up, but I realise I made a broad claim and can also not back it up, so we're just giving each other our opinions, I suppose.

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, ...)

Indeed. The goal is to reduce cheating to a manageable level. It is impossible to eliminate.

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.

Linux does not properly support KLAC because its architecture and development philosophy work against it. For example, Valve explicitly recommends user-space anti-cheat for Proton and says kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.

The Linux kernel also deliberately does not provide a stable binary kernel-driver interface. Kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has said that Linux has neither a stable in-kernel API nor a stable binary kernel interface, because maintainers want the freedom to change kernel internals rather than permanently support proprietary out-of-tree drivers.

Riot is on the record as explaining that Linux does not give Vanguard sufficient ability to attest boot state and kernel modules. They also claim that distribution differences make enforcement harder, and that cheats can potentially operate outside an emulated environment where the anti-cheat cannot see them. Riot is on the record saying that anti-cheat is “extremely hard on Linux by design”.

So you're technically correct, but I think you misunderstand a lot of the architecture which underpins this issue, and the ideological boundaries which many developers prefer to enforce around security, FOSS, and ownership.

I agree, it's a curve. I don't think we'll ever completely eliminate cheating, but we can make it so difficult and expensive that most people don't do it. That's good enough for me.

Online cheating as existed for as long as online games have existed. Long before companies cared about online gaming as a serious generator of revenue. There is a certain percentage of the population which enjoys hurting others and making them have a bad time. The anonymity of online games allows them to be antisocial with very few social repercussions.

I think equating having the option of KLAC with Windows is totally disingenuous. There are countless other differentiators. You would be free to just not use KLAC if you so desired.

There is no doubt an economics problem here, where it might not make sense to invest a lot of effort into a system from which less than 1% of revenue is derived.

However, KVM does not solve the problem. In fact, Riot explicitly explains why virtualisation can make the problem worse: if Vanguard runs inside a guest, a cheat can run on the host and manipulate the VM in ways the anti-cheat cannot see. Riot says Linux currently does not give it sufficient ability to attest the boot state or kernel modules, with distro differences making the problem harder.

Linux also deliberately does not provide a stable in-kernel ABI for proprietary out-of-tree drivers. The kernel documentation explicitly says there is neither a stable binary kernel interface nor a stable internal kernel interface. The preferred model is for drivers to be upstreamed and maintained with the kernel, which is almost the opposite of how closed-source kernel anti-cheat is normally deployed.

And this isn't just Riot. EA actually supported EAC through Proton for Apex and then removed Linux access because its anti-cheat team said Linux was being used for impactful cheats, that Linux cheats were harder to detect, and that they couldn't reliably distinguish a legitimate Steam Deck from a malicious Linux client pretending to be one.

Valve itself tells developers that Proton's recommended solution is user-space anti-cheat and that kernel-space anti-cheat is “not currently supported and is not recommended”.

So I guess it's technically possible for a game dev to effectively create their own Linux distro, but I hope we agree that's never going to happen. They're game devs, not Linux devs. Anti-cheat needs a trust chain that the hostile user cannot control and not just an API through which it can inspect the system. Linux deliberately gives the machine owner far more control over the kernel and environment, which is exactly what makes strong client-side attestation difficult.

FYI bhyve isn't a Linux hypervisor. It's part of FreeBSD.

If it's on Linux then it wasn't kernel-level anti-cheat, and therefore mostly useless. It's not surprising that it did nothing to slow down cheating. Even KLAC can be circumvented. It increases friction and cost for cheaters but it doesn't solve the issue completely.

Ideally you would be free to not play KLAC games, and I would be free to play KLAC games. I just hope for the option one day, as I would very much like to make the move to Linux.

It will be an impasse until (or unless) the Linux user base grow big enough that the gaming companies start to prioritize better solutions.

For me, it is no problem at all since the games I play have no issues. That includes the multiplayer games I play.

I don't know if I would say this as much anymore except for Linux distributions steering away from Red Hat/IBM or Canonical attempts at replacing traditional methods, or the BSDs that aren't necessarily in agreement with more recent developments either.

I certainly would not feel I owned my system if I accepted the full suite of attempts by these companies to replace and subvert existing standards. I do feel I have control with non-systemd init and service management, and source based packaging.

Uncertain, doubtful: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49791435

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?

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.

Thanks, that does help

I thought AI was going to write all our code for us and make developers 10x more productive? If code is that cheap, what's the problem with writing a second version of the system with no AI?

They should provide a kill switch to kill the AI slop. People. Don't. Want. It. Listen to customers.

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.

You buy it because it's what the cool people use.

I apparently define cool people differently :joy:

Imagine applying for a SF startup job

No, thanks :joy:

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.

I can't speak for OP but there can be many reasons. For example, I'm using a Macbook Air for development purposes, it's essentially dumb compilation/notarization machine. I don't use it for anything else because I find the user interface infuriating and can't get around it (which is weird because I used to be a Mac developer but IMHO the UI has gotten much less practical).

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.

There's no seam, and it depends on being a button by guessing that you're not scrolling.

It's annoyingly non-deterministic.

I've never had a laptop mouse button ever break down on me.

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.

While I generally like Mac hardware the trackpads are quite mediocre. Lenovo and Dell have better ones

I find the Mac better for scrolling, clicking, gestures and zooming. It’s rejection of eg palm input and the size of the touch pad are great.

because 99% of the time these people are comparing a macbook trackpad to a $300 Acer trackpad on their parents machine they have to fix twice a year.

Hardware has "UX and reliability" too.

For example, this teapot has bad UX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things#...

Are you talking about macOS 26+? in that case yea. macOS 15 is a lot better, although obviously not perfect.

Translating terms that are basically proper names is not trivial, and Apple loves to give these catchy quasi-proper names for their features. Often it can be better to leave them untranslated.

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.

but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.

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.

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.

This has changed recently

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.

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.

a UNIX distro which interfaces well with Linux. A fact which makes life way easier in the interoperability department.

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!

It's alright, but a step down from tiling window managers that you can use on Linux.

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.

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.

Xiaomi certainly does: they have billboards touting it: along the bottom they show phones, dishwashers, cars, laptops, and everything in between.

It wasn't that long ago they had terrible keyboard lifespans which...

Yes, their butterfly switch keyboards were really bad. I skipped that generation. I own machines from 2006, 2014 and 2020.

and overheating CPUs which limited performance way behind spec...

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.

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.

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.

I agree. Trackpads also come with gesture support for things like switching between windows which I found difficult to live without. Unfortunately it's not very ergonomic to use a laptop with it's trackpad when you're using multiple screens.

Next time you try Linux on the laptop, go with Void.

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

By those standards neither Mac nor Windows just work. No modern OS expect maybe ChromeOS just works.

In my experience Linux can yeah.

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.

macOS has a 'service (priority) order':

* https://sixcolors.com/post/2025/05/service-please-manage-mul...

It's no different that having multiple default gateways in Linux (with different metric/priorities):

* https://superuser.com/questions/1600190/change-order-of-rout...

And when your default route changes so will the TCP connection end-points. This is mostly an issue when you have a stateful session, like SSH, and less so with 'bursty' traffic like web surfing or e-mail.

By default wired connections are higher priority. I've been on Wifi with a MacBook and patched in with the Network Settings panel open and see the change, which is reflected in the output of "netstat -rn". Underneath the hood most of the macOS kernel is (Free)BSD/Unix.

Until we get SCTP multihoming popularized this will generally be an issue on any operating system. Though it would perhaps be nice to perhaps have a socket (TCP) API flag to tell the kernel "keep me on the initial interface as long as it exists" so sessions don't flip over.

issues with audio during Zoom, Teams, and Google Meetings sessions

Could it be due to a poor support of Linux by these proprietary apps? Possibly even intentional.

False. Get one with Linux pre installed (Dell developer edition, system 76, framework) and it just works as well.

That sentiment is rampant on this site.

They have one built in now and have had third party ones for over a decade. I used SizeUp to tile windows in Mac OS in 2013. Now the OS has it built in but I find Rectangle to be superior. And it’s free and much better than any window manager I’ve tried in any Linux Distro.

We are trading usability & quality for freedom & privacy.

Are we? Not sure what usability and quality improvement there are in an OS where you have to fight against its vendor's decision.

Most critics against Linux I read come from people who never took the time to choose perfectly supported hardware in the first place but just buy whatever bleeding edge stuff is available running on windows, then hope it will works. It is like criticizing Apple/macOS because it doesn't work well on an hackintosh really and is completely dishonest. I don't criticize windows because it doesn't work on the latest Macbook M8 ultra studio pro nor do I criticize iOS because it doesn't work on my Samsung Note tab 6 or macOS 27 because it doesn't work on a Microsoft Surface.

I haven't had any update nor hardware support issue in the last 15 years because I have chosen hardware based on Linux support compatibility before purchasing them.

Yeah but the 1% can still accomplish whatever they want. It just may require a bit of code. No big deal if you’re in the 1%. And you get the added benefit of automatic security updates that don’t break critical system components like what happens from time to time in every Linux distro I’ve ever used over the last 20 years.

Nobody is fooling themselves about this, we have stuff to do with the device beyond focusing on it

That simply isn’t true. You can disable whatever you want. You just may not be able to do it through the UI. I’ve customized my Mac to never phone home. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing. It’s even easier if you don’t, and just ask Claude code to do it.

Every OS is filled with showstoppers. And yes everyone is blind to their own OSs issues or quirks. You work around them and develop different workflows.

When I first tried macOS I hated it and had a long list of issues I could give. They are all still valid but it turns out they don’t actually stop you getting work done.

Macs are for people who think they know how to computer but actually don't know anything at all.

This is really the only reason I have a MacOS system around. The M4 Air feels like what I imagined a laptop could be 15 years ago. No fans to block, can grab it and carry it around almost like a tablet, works great as a thin client into a more powerful system over Moonlight, it's light enough that I don't even think about carrying it around in my backpack even when I'm also carrying my work laptop, and it was cheap enough that if anything happens to it I won't be too concerned.

Compared to the last XPS I had, it's substantially better for my use case, since I'll generally be remoting into systems anyway.

Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware

Can Mac laptops run QubesOS?

I repeat: Putting yourself in a situation where you have less risk of having issues like not using hardware from a company whose drivers are not maintained in the mainline kernel source tree goes a long way.

but that sort of thing only happens on Linux (and windows probably)

Yeah right.

https://support.apple.com/es-es/guide/mac-help/-mchl4e4b758d...

Ironically the website from the company that is supposed to make software "that just works" do not let me put their page in english and force it back to spanish ignoring my choice. Hum.

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

I pulled the same update, and it was annoying but it came nowhere near bricking itself. The integrated graphics worked, it just disabled the Nvidia open-source driver for the GPU. Simply (re)installing it fixed it. Notably, just asking ChatGPT for the solution worked (after pasting the output of a few commands).

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.

Not sure if [...] works nicely.

This is the billion dollar question for corps though. Windows and MacOS are first class citizens of the corporate IT universe and all the weirdness of corporate IT works. MDM, identity/auth, Office, LOB apps, video, document signing, data labeling, everything.

Linux has taken huge, heroic strides, and has caught up to about 2005. Corporate IT simply will not sanction Linux desktops unless they are provably as well versed in the entire ecosystem as Win/Mac, barring a "political" decision made at the top to make it happen.

To change this would require a profoundly deep, expensive, and continuing investment in all aspects of the 'Modern Work' experience, plus genuine commitment from Microsoft to make it happen (which would likely require lawsuits and enforcement).

The situation today is that a few orgs are playing catchup on some features, but that will never be enough to match a platform that has been dedicated to corporate life for 40+ years, and from a company infamous for extending their advantages to extinguish the competition.

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.

MacOS 27 is a lot less shit than 26, thankfully. I upgraded from 15 to 27 directly (on a M-series Mac).

Well the example given in the article, for example, will not be noticed by just about anyone, and most of those that do notice don't care. Myself included - I already use iCloud, some extra analytics aren't going to kill me. Maybe one day we'll switch away, but I'm doing a lot less tech support now that the whole household is on Apple.

This comes from an ardent Apple/macOS/iOS hater. Yes, I know I am using a very strong word. The short version is: when it comes to laptop hardware w.r.t price nothing comes even remotely close. Like, literally none.

Price as well? Yes. When I bought my first MacBook Air in ~2011-12 I was shocked to see what I got for ~57K INR (no, I am not converting it to USD) I would not have gotten from any other OEM even for fricking 120-130K INR (I had the choice here to instead say 1.2-1.3L :D). And that hasn't changed more or less.

But their OSs are pathetic, their software (even other than the OS part) are downright disgusting. But they sort of have a great personal computing hardware monopoly. Because no one else bothers to make it. For whatever reason.

They make it increasingly hard to make Linux on this. Really really hard.

What else sucks? Repair and repair cost. You are literally using a costly (bank-broken-level) repair affair ticking time-bomb in your backpacks - there is no two way about it.

And people who are going to say, like every time, "but how many times has your Apple device broken down", or even "but why won't you buy a new one after 3-4 years", or something even more stupid like "wait.. so your AirPod stopped working after 3 years.. you wanted it to last for 30 years?", please go and put the head back into the warm sand where it safely was. Anyone saying, "but they give you repair kits", please f-- off!

tl;dr: it's not the right way to buy personal computing hardware, but the the closest right way is a decade behind or at best many years.

On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads.

I've been using Linux since the a.out days and MacOS X since the PowerPC days, and I find MacOS less of an ordeal for day-to-day tasks as my terminal/workstation. I sysadmin Linux (and previously also Solaris and IRIX) servers for a living. It's been several years since I had to daily drive a Windows machine (though I've heard PowerShell and WSL2 are pretty good).

I'm not sure what "ordeal" you are referring to. I'm mostly in Terminals SSHing places, so perhaps my work use cases are not 'advanced' enough to bump into them? (I also use macOS for my personal systems.)

Most people are not like you and don’t care about this. They just want something that works.

When I'm at home I can afford to waste an hour to debug audio which inexplicably stopped working (LLMs help with it a lot). When I take a laptop with me somewhere, I probably can't afford that, hence a macbook.

Yes, the slow enshittification and the increasingly obnoxious push for services and recurring revenue on MacOS is worrying, but it's also extremely reliable in a way that Linux simply isn't. I love Fedora KDE for freeing me from Microsoft, but there's a new issue every month - usually minor, but sometimes not. As of last month I had to restart plasma-shell multiple times a day because the desktop window would become non-responsive when CPU was under heavy load.

Helps that macbooks have excellent hardware and battery life, too. I just wish users weren't increasingly treated like cattle to be milked.

I just started getting ads in chats with ChatGPT... Insane.

I'm a lunix engineer, probably 25+ years of lunix now (I started on bsd, thats why I say lunix), I've worked on macbook pros for the last 15 years. I had to reinstall macos for the FIRST TIME ever this year because their current version Tahoe is absolute trash that slowed down my M1 Max so my much I finally gave up and wiped it.

I also won't go near an x86 processor ever again after using the arm procs.

We're paying for the hardware. The 100x better screens, speakers, battery life, the apps on macos blow linux apps away even if all of them, even the most simple apps, cost $20+.

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.

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.

The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer.

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...

Wait so you got rid of Apple because its baked in AI, and went with Omarchy that is also fully vibe coded and has baked in AI? Furthermore it has built-in ads for the products of DHH, such as Basecamp. Omarchy feels a lot like Windows, with it being slopped together and with built-in ads for products.

The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it.

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.

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?

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).

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.

moral vacuum, and that's not an accident

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.

AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.

This is why I continue screaming against AI. I’ve moved past the theft roots, because I know we can just make its output un-protected by copyright or trademark laws - including the models themselves - thus returning back for free what was stolen in the first place.

Consent, however, remains an evergreen nail in the entire industry’s heart. It’s shoved into everything without our consent, into products that used to be perpetual but are now subscription-based. We’re forced to pay for someone else’s feature we don’t want in terms of storage, electricity, and compute costs - both on what we buy, and in higher prices due to the industry hoovering up every scrap of NAND and memory it can find and at scales that would make the GPU cryptomining boom feel embarrassed by. We have to endure this destruction of our limited capital and freedom to use our devices on our own terms, along with the immense invasion of privacy it brings about in surveillance and telemetry, all to boost an industry that spends its time loudly boasting how it will destroy the economy/nations/humanity/the biosphere with its eventual, inevitable output.

And honestly, I’m incredibly sick of it. It’d be one thing if I could turn off telemetry and point Siri to a local OpenAI-compatible API endpoint for inferencing and processing, but those options are barred specifically because the data harvesting is the point. These features were never designed or intended to improve the quality of my life, otherwise they’d be flexible enough for me to engage with them on my terms; no, the surveillance and data was always the point, and a proprietary answer engine that can have ads inserted into it or have its output engineered into speech benefiting the creator without transparency to the user - reality authoring - is a holy grail to a tech industry that still deeply resents open source software and “public good” services like Wikipedia.

AI companies refuse to let us opt out, because opting out means we’ve chosen to engage reality on our own terms, rather than theirs.

Isn't Apple pushing features or decisions for how things work down your throat regardless of if you want them part of the classic Apple value proposition? If you don't like that, why are you even using Apple in the first place? This is about how much you want the hardware maker to decide things for you, and Apple has always been maximalist with regards to that.

Author claims the system setting "Privacy & Security > Apple Intelligence Report > Report Duration" with its 3 options [Off | 15 minutes | 7 days] sends that data to Apple with that frequency. This is wrong - this is a transparency report so that you as a user can see everything that is getting sent to Apple as a part of Apple Intelligence. Nothing additionally is getting sent to apple if you switch this away from "Off".

It's placed right next to a similar report for the user to see which apps generally connect to the internet and to which domains.

Basically, the main point of the article, "I discovered that macOS 15.3 had enabled a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data" is not true.

I wonder if all the work to do Linux and self hosting is actually shorter than having to deal with these unasked for annoyances.

Open: 0 to comfort that always grows. When it works you usually don't touch it for years.

Closed: Comfort to never-quite-what-you-want-but-compromise. Works, but you never know what's going on. Features might just get added whenever to your detriment.

So in one case i have a known state i can reach and hold. The time i put in is known and the point in time is up to me. In the other case i can never be sure about state, time and point in time. That's a clear loser to me.

"Last week I succumbed to Apple’s harassment" - usually what all end-users do eventually when caught in the walled garden ...

I foolishly bought a Macbook Air with only 256GB of drive space. Now whenever I need to "upgrade" OS versions, there's not enough drive space to do so. It sure would be nice to delete all this unnecessary Siri bullshit bloat so that I can use my laptop with the latest updates.

I’m considering linux full time going forward and just keeping a mac mini for ios builds.

LuLu is honestly the best piece of software for macOS. Every upgrade, I always dowanload the latest version of LuLu first, the the OS upgrade, and then turn all connectivity off. Once it's done with the updates I make sure LuLu is active and up-to-date and running before I reactivate WiFi so I can review every outgoing connection (and deny most).