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This article makes an acrobatic leap from 1. iOS devices are locked down. 2. Current iOS devices have security features in HFS+ that aren't present in macOS H

This article makes an acrobatic leap from 1. iOS devices are locked down. 2. Current iOS devices have security features in HFS+ that aren't present in macOS HFS+ (such as?). 3. APFS has more security (encryption?) features that bring macOS in line with iOS. 4. macOS is going to become locked down. This may be true, but I don't see it from the evidence provided. I may be wrong, but I don't think that the file system on iOS is the reason that it is locked down and the file system on macOS is why it is open? Disk encryption has very little to do with cryptographically signing and protecting the OS. Apple has been taking the good bits from iOS and moving them to macOS. Deprecating software update in favour of the App Store and changing how the OS is downloaded seems to be one of these cases. Apple has repeatedly said that they aren't going to merge iOS and macOS. They're two different systems with different contexts. Walling macOS off makes little more sense than opening up iOS completely.

lloeki 10y ago
> Disclaimer: This blog post is only a personal, ficticious thought experiment.
- matt4077 10y ago
  Back in Einstein's days, thought experiments had meaning. This guy uses it as an easy cop-out of a transparent attempt to get attention with a sort of Hacker-News-SM-fanfic exploiting the current narrative on Apple. But it works, so all the best to him.
  - sacrilicious 10y ago
    I'm sure the author appreciates your comparisons to Einstein! It's apt. Oh, and look at the publish date before you decide the 'zeitgeist-headline-grabbing' factor.
soneil 10y ago
Personally, I can see them going a slightly different path. Two things caught my attention in apfs - 'space sharing', where two volumes can take the same extents on disk, rather than having non-overlapping bounds (in practice, if not implementation, this so far acts as if its one volume, where members are tagged with which filesystem they belong to) - and linked clones for copies. It doesn't seem inconceivable to me that the 'recovery volume' holds a copy of the OS, and the installed OS is just linked clones to the recovery volume. On the surface this is a lot like how we treat unixy hardlinks, but a) linked clones can diverge from each other on a block-by-block basis, rather than "you're a link or you're not". and b) because two filesystems can take the same physical location on disk, a linked clone _could_ (and this doesn't appear to be possible in the current developer previews) act as a hardlink across volumes. I realise this seems like a lot of effort with little gain, but the 'how' seems to be all in place - and with SSDs setting us back a step to 256GB volumes at the entry tiers, the space-savings wouldn't be unwelcome. .. or this could all be hand-wavy nonsense. But there does seem to be some interesting features in apfs, and I really an curious to see where they go with them - apple rarely do nuts'n'bolts changes this big unless they have a use-case waiting for them (like spotlight & the fs_usage API).
72deluxe 10y ago
Watching the APFS overview at this year's event, I was left wondering if it is still behind NTFS in terms of features. eg. NTFS' index means you can look for a file in milliseconds using a utility like Everything from Void Tools. I know Apple mentioned the planned ability to quickly look up directory sizes without having to iterate through all child nodes, but still there is nothing accessible or equivalent to this NTFS index (please correct me if I am wrong - I would love to put this sort of thing to use on macOS without having to rely on Spotlight being enabled). Spotlight is a bit different as it maintains a large database on top of the filesystem, not in the filesystem. NTFS' feature list is massive. And it hasn't meant the complete lockdown of Windows machines, despite the inability to know when updates will be installed.
sirn 10y ago
> 2. Current iOS devices have security features in HFS+ that aren't present in macOS HFS+ (such as?). I believe it was mentioned in the WWDC APFS session that Apple maintain several folks of HFS+ for different platforms. For example, iOS version of HFS+ shipped with per-file encryption, which is not present elsewhere. Edit: from the transcript: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016-701/?time=264 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016-701/?time=2... > So on iOS today we already shipped a version of HFS+ that uses per file encryption. So every file is encrypted differently on storage form every other file on the file system. [...] We have an iOS specific variant of HFS+ as well as one that supports the per file encryption that we just discussed.
drvdevd 10y ago
I personally feel my choosing macOS over any other OS is almost entirely cosmetic at this point. I might as well just use iOS. Because most of my actual work needs to happen elsewhere anyway. How locked down the platform is is something I'd prefer not to think about when just using the system. If users notice that en masse, it's a problem for Apple. OTOH, Developers are forever a niche. If they were to attempt to turn macOS into a compelling, competitive UNIX-like OS that could serve in production, then maybe it would matter (note that I'm not saying it couldn't now -- it just seems to occupy such a tiny segment of this market). But they don't seem to have much intention of going there, seriously. They've gone after the average consumer market agressively for pretty much their entire existence. They stayed that course and it appears to have paid off for them. So if they do wall off macOS in an iOS manner, who will care?
- Gaelan 10y ago
  What is this "actual work" and where does it happen?
  - drvdevd 10y ago
    Good question. My use case is pretty boring comparatively. Mostly it's typical shell session stuff - SSH, vim, etc. I would classify that as my 'actual work'. And macOS is fine for that of course, except mostly I end up working/testing code on Linux because that's where it will ship. I'm sure I would feel differently if I was using my Mac for Xcode development or video editing or something totally different and specialized - but I'm not. So for me its kind of just a really beautiful shell interface and web browser.
ricardobeat 10y ago
You glossed over the "unifying our encryption story" quote from WWDC. It's a reasonable conclusion to make based on that quote alone.
- dantiberian 10y ago
  How does disk encryption relate to locking down the OS from tampering by the user? I may be way off base, but I don't think that iOS's encryption has anything to do with it being isolated. Put another way, even the first iPhone shielded the user from the OS, and that didn't have encryption.
iainmerrick 10y ago
Apple has been taking the good bits from iOS and moving them to macOS. Deprecating software update in favour of the App Store and changing how the OS is downloaded seems to be one of these cases. I personally see that as a bad change for macOS -- the app store is really not very good, and it's very slow and clunky at downloading and installing system updates. The old built-in Software Update was much more reliable. By "slow and clunky" I mean it'll tell you it has an update, but opening the app first shows you a page of ads for the latest apps that you don't need right now. Then when you click on the "updates" tab, you get the old spinning beach ball for an inordinate amount of time before it finally tells you what updates are available. Often it'll just be a massive iTunes update that requires you to quit Safari(!?!) before installing. iOS doesn't use the app store for system updates (did it ever?) -- it's in Settings, which I think makes sense. It would be a good course correction if macOS were to do the same. (edit: typos)
- rsync 10y ago
  "I personally see that as a bad change for macOS -- the app store is really not very good" On multiple systems, using multiple versions of OSX[1], I have actually never gotten the app store to even launch properly. Luckily, system updates for SL came via the apple menu so it wasn't an issue. In Mavericks, however, it took multiple (sometimes 8 or 10) tries just to fire up the app store without an infinite beach ball in order to do simple OS updates. [1] Snow Leopard and Mavericks
  - LeoPanthera 10y ago
    The command-line software update tool is still available and seems to work OK. "sudo softwareupdate --help"

lloeki 10y ago

> Disclaimer: This blog post is only a personal, ficticious thought experiment.

matt4077 10y ago
Back in Einstein's days, thought experiments had meaning. This guy uses it as an easy cop-out of a transparent attempt to get attention with a sort of Hacker-News-SM-fanfic exploiting the current narrative on Apple. But it works, so all the best to him.
- sacrilicious 10y ago
  I'm sure the author appreciates your comparisons to Einstein! It's apt. Oh, and look at the publish date before you decide the 'zeitgeist-headline-grabbing' factor.

soneil 10y ago

Personally, I can see them going a slightly different path. Two things caught my attention in apfs - 'space sharing', where two volumes can take the same extents on disk, rather than having non-overlapping bounds (in practice, if not implementation, this so far acts as if its one volume, where members are tagged with which filesystem they belong to) - and linked clones for copies. It doesn't seem inconceivable to me that the 'recovery volume' holds a copy of the OS, and the installed OS is just linked clones to the recovery volume. On the surface this is a lot like how we treat unixy hardlinks, but a) linked clones can diverge from each other on a block-by-block basis, rather than "you're a link or you're not". and b) because two filesystems can take the same physical location on disk, a linked clone _could_ (and this doesn't appear to be possible in the current developer previews) act as a hardlink across volumes. I realise this seems like a lot of effort with little gain, but the 'how' seems to be all in place - and with SSDs setting us back a step to 256GB volumes at the entry tiers, the space-savings wouldn't be unwelcome. .. or this could all be hand-wavy nonsense. But there does seem to be some interesting features in apfs, and I really an curious to see where they go with them - apple rarely do nuts'n'bolts changes this big unless they have a use-case waiting for them (like spotlight & the fs_usage API).

72deluxe 10y ago

Watching the APFS overview at this year's event, I was left wondering if it is still behind NTFS in terms of features. eg. NTFS' index means you can look for a file in milliseconds using a utility like Everything from Void Tools. I know Apple mentioned the planned ability to quickly look up directory sizes without having to iterate through all child nodes, but still there is nothing accessible or equivalent to this NTFS index (please correct me if I am wrong - I would love to put this sort of thing to use on macOS without having to rely on Spotlight being enabled). Spotlight is a bit different as it maintains a large database on top of the filesystem, not in the filesystem. NTFS' feature list is massive. And it hasn't meant the complete lockdown of Windows machines, despite the inability to know when updates will be installed.

sirn 10y ago

> 2. Current iOS devices have security features in HFS+ that aren't present in macOS HFS+ (such as?). I believe it was mentioned in the WWDC APFS session that Apple maintain several folks of HFS+ for different platforms. For example, iOS version of HFS+ shipped with per-file encryption, which is not present elsewhere. Edit: from the transcript: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016-701/?time=264 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016-701/?time=2... > So on iOS today we already shipped a version of HFS+ that uses per file encryption. So every file is encrypted differently on storage form every other file on the file system. [...] We have an iOS specific variant of HFS+ as well as one that supports the per file encryption that we just discussed.

drvdevd 10y ago

I personally feel my choosing macOS over any other OS is almost entirely cosmetic at this point. I might as well just use iOS. Because most of my actual work needs to happen elsewhere anyway. How locked down the platform is is something I'd prefer not to think about when just using the system. If users notice that en masse, it's a problem for Apple. OTOH, Developers are forever a niche. If they were to attempt to turn macOS into a compelling, competitive UNIX-like OS that could serve in production, then maybe it would matter (note that I'm not saying it couldn't now -- it just seems to occupy such a tiny segment of this market). But they don't seem to have much intention of going there, seriously. They've gone after the average consumer market agressively for pretty much their entire existence. They stayed that course and it appears to have paid off for them. So if they do wall off macOS in an iOS manner, who will care?

Gaelan 10y ago
What is this "actual work" and where does it happen?
- drvdevd 10y ago
  Good question. My use case is pretty boring comparatively. Mostly it's typical shell session stuff - SSH, vim, etc. I would classify that as my 'actual work'. And macOS is fine for that of course, except mostly I end up working/testing code on Linux because that's where it will ship. I'm sure I would feel differently if I was using my Mac for Xcode development or video editing or something totally different and specialized - but I'm not. So for me its kind of just a really beautiful shell interface and web browser.

ricardobeat 10y ago

You glossed over the "unifying our encryption story" quote from WWDC. It's a reasonable conclusion to make based on that quote alone.

dantiberian 10y ago
How does disk encryption relate to locking down the OS from tampering by the user? I may be way off base, but I don't think that iOS's encryption has anything to do with it being isolated. Put another way, even the first iPhone shielded the user from the OS, and that didn't have encryption.

iainmerrick 10y ago

Apple has been taking the good bits from iOS and moving them to macOS. Deprecating software update in favour of the App Store and changing how the OS is downloaded seems to be one of these cases. I personally see that as a bad change for macOS -- the app store is really not very good, and it's very slow and clunky at downloading and installing system updates. The old built-in Software Update was much more reliable. By "slow and clunky" I mean it'll tell you it has an update, but opening the app first shows you a page of ads for the latest apps that you don't need right now. Then when you click on the "updates" tab, you get the old spinning beach ball for an inordinate amount of time before it finally tells you what updates are available. Often it'll just be a massive iTunes update that requires you to quit Safari(!?!) before installing. iOS doesn't use the app store for system updates (did it ever?) -- it's in Settings, which I think makes sense. It would be a good course correction if macOS were to do the same. (edit: typos)

rsync 10y ago
"I personally see that as a bad change for macOS -- the app store is really not very good" On multiple systems, using multiple versions of OSX[1], I have actually never gotten the app store to even launch properly. Luckily, system updates for SL came via the apple menu so it wasn't an issue. In Mavericks, however, it took multiple (sometimes 8 or 10) tries just to fire up the app store without an infinite beach ball in order to do simple OS updates. [1] Snow Leopard and Mavericks
- LeoPanthera 10y ago
  The command-line software update tool is still available and seems to work OK. "sudo softwareupdate --help"