4 ms·

It's a completely sensible reason to avoid products that are undependable by design. Many Apple "engineering" decisions favor the walled garden over robustness

It's a completely sensible reason to avoid products that are undependable by design. Many Apple "engineering" decisions favor the walled garden over robustness; for example, I am unable to update many important applications on my old work Macintosh because they were installed from the app store using an "Apple account", or whatever it's called, that cannot be used anymore because the colleague who knew the password has left the company; having a privileged account on the computer isn't good enough.

mort96 3y ago
It is definitely reasonable to avoid Apple products! For both these sorts of reasons and others. I'm not trying to argue otherwise. However, the claim "it's reasonable to not use Apple products" is very different from "using/liking Apple products is a sign of Stockholm syndrome".
- HelloNurse 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - stringsandchars 3y ago
    > Apple products attract weak, vulnerable people It may contravene some sort of HN guidelines to point this out, but the fact that this comment has not been downvoted by a large number of people is quite an indictment of the mindset here. In my opinion, of course.
    - Tagbert 3y ago
      That comment is buried pretty deeply in the thread and it can take time for people to notice and react. It is grayed out now.
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    You seem to be reading a lot into the fact that your company's IT is poorly run.
memsom 3y ago
That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case? This is universally a bad design. It's not just Apple. I know, for example, Microsoft closed a loophole with Microsoft accounts being allowed to be opened using a company email address when your organisation has a hosted domain. This is stupid. Every year I now need to purchase my MSDN subscription using a personal email address based account because my corporate account is not allowed to buy anything from the Microsoft Store. To add insult to injury - unless I am very, very careful and make sure the personal account is completely logged out, I then can't apply the activation code correctly to my corporate account that is associated with the subscription renewal. Before this renewal, which was successful, I have had two years in a row where I have ended up needing to file a support ticket and wait for the "magic" activation flag to be re-set because my browser was half logged in. This year I just logged in to my personal account with Edge and use Chrome for my corporate one to register the activation for the renewal. It shouldn't be this hard!!! Also - yes, this should probably all be done by IT for me in the background, but we are a small company and that is just the way it is. The subscription was set up years ago and I inherited it from another developer when they left about 3 years ago.
- HelloNurse 3y ago
  > That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case? It wasn't even obvious that the personal account existed in the first place; if the app store "just works" and the former designated Macintosh user doesn't care about software updates too much, forgetting that the account was necessary and it should have been either handed over to posterity or purged by uninstalling the involved apps is a reasonable outcome.
  - memsom 3y ago
    The way Apple handles this sucks. It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible. It would be nice if there was an easy way to merge obsolete/outdated accounts in to a valid one.
rsynnott 3y ago
That seems like a "your company" problem, not an Apple problem.
- ubertaco 3y ago
  Would you say that they're sort of... holding it wrong?
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    I mean, yes, fairly literally; this is not how any company should be installing software. Anywhere; they'd have the same problem if they were using the Microsoft one, or had just had a former employee register commercial software directly with their personal email on the company's behalf.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Or an AWS etc. account. Maybe that account with a personal name and company domain as an address is a company thing and maybe it's a personal thing. In the case of the former, that's bad company IT practices. In the case of the latter, it's bad personal IT practices. In any case, I'm not sure I want a vendor to just hand over access because there's a company domain in the email. Maybe there are circumstances where it makes sense to do so, but it's not clear that as a general rule, setting up an account with a company email should magically hand over all the data and other information associated with that account to the IT department. Maybe you should assume it does though.
- Hizonner 3y ago
  Apple's system design is brittle and forces both the individual and the company to be meticulous about stuff that shouldn't matter. How is that not an Apple problem?

mort96 3y ago

It is definitely reasonable to avoid Apple products! For both these sorts of reasons and others. I'm not trying to argue otherwise. However, the claim "it's reasonable to not use Apple products" is very different from "using/liking Apple products is a sign of Stockholm syndrome".

HelloNurse 3y ago
[flagged]
- stringsandchars 3y ago
  > Apple products attract weak, vulnerable people It may contravene some sort of HN guidelines to point this out, but the fact that this comment has not been downvoted by a large number of people is quite an indictment of the mindset here. In my opinion, of course.
  - Tagbert 3y ago
    That comment is buried pretty deeply in the thread and it can take time for people to notice and react. It is grayed out now.
- rsynnott 3y ago
  You seem to be reading a lot into the fact that your company's IT is poorly run.

memsom 3y ago

That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case? This is universally a bad design. It's not just Apple. I know, for example, Microsoft closed a loophole with Microsoft accounts being allowed to be opened using a company email address when your organisation has a hosted domain. This is stupid. Every year I now need to purchase my MSDN subscription using a personal email address based account because my corporate account is not allowed to buy anything from the Microsoft Store. To add insult to injury - unless I am very, very careful and make sure the personal account is completely logged out, I then can't apply the activation code correctly to my corporate account that is associated with the subscription renewal. Before this renewal, which was successful, I have had two years in a row where I have ended up needing to file a support ticket and wait for the "magic" activation flag to be re-set because my browser was half logged in. This year I just logged in to my personal account with Edge and use Chrome for my corporate one to register the activation for the renewal. It shouldn't be this hard!!! Also - yes, this should probably all be done by IT for me in the background, but we are a small company and that is just the way it is. The subscription was set up years ago and I inherited it from another developer when they left about 3 years ago.

HelloNurse 3y ago
> That sounds a lot like your company allowed either a personal account or an account tied to an individual to be used to purchase the software. Surely a better policy would be to use an account not tied to an individual in that case? It wasn't even obvious that the personal account existed in the first place; if the app store "just works" and the former designated Macintosh user doesn't care about software updates too much, forgetting that the account was necessary and it should have been either handed over to posterity or purged by uninstalling the involved apps is a reasonable outcome.
- memsom 3y ago
  The way Apple handles this sucks. It is not clear how you can transfer purchases, or if that is even possible. It would be nice if there was an easy way to merge obsolete/outdated accounts in to a valid one.

rsynnott 3y ago

That seems like a "your company" problem, not an Apple problem.

ubertaco 3y ago
Would you say that they're sort of... holding it wrong?
- rsynnott 3y ago
  I mean, yes, fairly literally; this is not how any company should be installing software. Anywhere; they'd have the same problem if they were using the Microsoft one, or had just had a former employee register commercial software directly with their personal email on the company's behalf.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Or an AWS etc. account. Maybe that account with a personal name and company domain as an address is a company thing and maybe it's a personal thing. In the case of the former, that's bad company IT practices. In the case of the latter, it's bad personal IT practices. In any case, I'm not sure I want a vendor to just hand over access because there's a company domain in the email. Maybe there are circumstances where it makes sense to do so, but it's not clear that as a general rule, setting up an account with a company email should magically hand over all the data and other information associated with that account to the IT department. Maybe you should assume it does though.
Hizonner 3y ago
Apple's system design is brittle and forces both the individual and the company to be meticulous about stuff that shouldn't matter. How is that not an Apple problem?