8 ms·

The Mac Is a Power Tool

87 points by erickhill 2y ago

jmclnx 2y ago
I do not know what to make of this. > I want applications to be cryptographically signed by known developers and notarized by Apple by default Not me, this describes a Walled Garden to a tee. Power Tools mean flexibility, not locked down. The only real "power tools" out there are *BSD and Linux. With those systems I can do whatever I want without begging for permission from a commercial vendor or anyone else for that matter.
- k8sToGo 2y ago
  Did you read the whole thing? He said he prefers that, but wants the option to bypass it.
  - jmclnx 2y ago
    No, when I saw that quote I bailed. But what is the point of have all those checks when you will bypass them anyway. It is like spending thousands for a house alarm but never turning the alarm on. It just adds needless complexity that will never get used.
    - roughly 2y ago
      Because you don’t always bypass them. You bypass them knowingly and intentionally - you leave the burglar alarm off when your friend is coming by - but most of the time, you want the alarm and you want the choice.
  - talldayo 2y ago
    Poor Gruber. I can't imagine owing my entire livelihood to the success of a closed platform and then deciding one day you disagree with it's development philosophy. I hope he makes his peace with it because lord knows neither rain nor shine will stop Apple from locking-down and removing features from MacOS.
    - robenkleene 2y ago
      Isn't it the development philosophy itself that's evolving (i.e., not Gruber's opinion)? E.g., the linked post is about a change that isn't even been released yet? https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/08/07/mac-os-15-sequoia-gatekeeper https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/08/07/mac-os-15-sequo...
      - talldayo 2y ago
        I dunno, Gruber really ought to know better by now. I left MacOS myself years ago because I considered the depreciation of OpenGL to be the writing on the wall. Apple was beefing with companies like Nvidia for nothing other than the sake of petty conflict, and sabotaging public resources for profit and making everyone else suffer for it. As a user I was getting absolutely nothing out of their aggressive public profile and it made me ashamed to support a company that cared so little for their userbase. So I bought different computers. Gruber has been in this longer than I have, and clearly he can see the same stuff you and I can. If he was okay with Apple going guns-akimbo 10 years ago I don't see why he'd grow a conscience all of the sudden. Seems to me that the frogs notice the water boiling, now.
        Kon5ole 2y ago
        >Seems to me that the frogs notice the water boiling, now. I think this is spot on. When even Gruber complains openly you know it's bad. See also DHH lately. Warren Buffet recently sold half his AAPL holdings. When he got them he mentioned the brand strength as the main reason. Maybe he too noticed the heat of the water?
znpy 2y ago
> The Mac is a platform where you need to be able to shoot yourself in the foot. This person yearns for Linux but hasn’t admitted such thing to themselves yet.
- WillAdams 2y ago
  I miss the "Unix Expert Checkbox" from NeXTstep.
- mholm 2y ago
  I've given linux a lot of tries over the years. I can be equally productive in both. But Linux always has a high friction to get it to behave how you want it. With Mac, sensible defaults are generally chosen, and there are some easy to change options. Of all the distros I've tried, defaults seem largely arbitrary, broken, or barely implemented. At least with windows/mac everyone is using the same DE.
  - lambdaba 2y ago
    I would say Linux has *zero* friction to get it to behave exactly how you want it, as a power user, which can be a rabbit hole, but a worthwhile one IMO.
  - dijit 2y ago
    > But Linux always has a high friction to get it to behave how you want it. Anecdotally, I find the exact opposite to be true. Certainly it's because I've been using Linux (along with Windows and MacOS) for a decade or more. Linux is the only consistently power-user friendly experience.
  - phoronixrly 2y ago
    Tell me it's simpler to retrofit a packaging system that distributes binaries compiled by randos on the Internet (Homebrew) to your mac just so you have access to the software you need for your work -- be it a dev environment for a given programming language, or ops tools like ansible, docker, etc... Software that all people using Linux have out of the box signed and in many cases QAd by their distro. What kind of sensible default is to have to install a packaging system on your OS?
supportengineer 2y ago
There’s one power tool remaining, Linux
- minkles 2y ago
  If it had a working, competent desktop environment, yes. But it's not there. Everything else, 100%. But the whole desktop environment thing is a mess with extremely poor quality control. It's much more fun to change the universe 50 times than it is to actually fix all the bugs and problems with it. And that's why for the last 25 years I ended up flipping back and forward between Windows and Mac and Linux lasting a maximum of a day or two.
  - yonatan8070 2y ago
    I use KDE Plasma both at home and at work (software dev), it's stable and works well. I have a colleague who does the same with Ubuntu's GNOME. What about the Linux desktops do you find incompetent?
    - minkles 2y ago
      Things that suck: fractional scaling doesn't work anywhere properly, most of the desktop apps have terrible user experiences, absolutely show stopping bugs, suspend/resume on the whole platform is Russian roulette, inconsistencies everywhere, vast differences on rendering between toolkits, sound over BT is terrible and everything is half finished. It feels like an artist's attic rather than a competent platform. If you spend most of your time in a terminal or IDE you don't see the pain. I want it to work. I want to use it. But it's just bad quality. In context, by the time I've worked around the issues, I earn enough to just buy a Mac and use that. And everything works fine there!
      - talldayo 2y ago
        It's funny, I'm the same way for Macs. Why would I buy a computer that launches Apple Music by default when I plug in my headphones? Why does my taskbar ship with services I'll never use pinned to the bottom? Why does Safari send me little reminder notifications that it's still installed? It all feels so gaudy and anti-productive that I end up spending more time setting up Macs then I do setting up Linux. When I have to go use a Mac it's like getting assigned to a Siberian labor camp. Nowadays desktop Linux is pretty good, to the point that Valve uses it as the backbone for their gaming handheld. Fractional scaling is upstreamed in Qt and GTK, Pipewire is the default for Bluetooth now alongside 320kbps codecs (including AAC), and GNOME and KDE are both now stable enough on Wayland to daily-drive. I think your complaints would have been valid 10 years ago, but the hodge-podge x11 desktops are in the rearview mirror for most users.
sharkjacobs 2y ago
A lot of the time, when I agree with Gruber it’s grudgingly. With this it’s wholeheartedly.
- refulgentis 2y ago
  If it makes you feel any better, I'm still cranky about it, because it's a really low-effort echo of Jobs' pickup truck analogy for Macs, coupled to no novel insight, groping its way to saying nothing substantive about scales that were tipped years ago. Absolutely nothing changed recently in Apple's macOS security posture / UI, the annoyances have been there for years. All this accomplishes is signalling its okay to talk about them as they are. Idk why I'm reflexively cranky towards him, I used to worship the guy. Somewhere around 2016/2017 it started reading like nails on chalkboard. I think it was the attempts to prove the Google restaurant reservation service thing was fake, including the demo, escalating it into encouraging people to call the restaurant to ask, then when the restaurant said it was true, please stop calling, suggesting the restaurant was in on it. Also, when I grew up on tech in the Apple fandom community pre-iPhone/early iPhone, there was a ton of principled worries about the App Store that was treated respectfully, at least, until the leaders willing to say that moved onto other tech. At some point those same concerns became reflexively dismissed as trolling / wanting to hurt users / EU pandering
ribs 2y ago
It’s a mass-market computer used by millions of people who don’t want to shoot themselves in the foot. People can be tricked into things, perhaps like turning off a “Bypass Mode”-like switch. I think this is a hard problem.
troupo 2y ago
--- start quote --- The Mac is an expensive tool. On average, Mac costs more than iPad or iPhone. I dislike the idea that computing freedom belongs only to those who can afford it. That seems classist to me. Gruber says, “Computers are such an essential part of the modern world — and almost everyone’s daily lives — that computers-that-work-like-computers aren’t for everyone.” I agree they’re essential, which is exactly why computers-that-work-like-computers ARE for everyone. Otherwise, it’s haves and have-nots. --- end quote --- https://mastodon.social/@lapcatsoftware/112939278677244969 https://mastodon.social/@lapcatsoftware/112939278677244969
mediumsmart 2y ago
If I was a programmer or admin - GnuLinux. Just for gaming - windows. The Mac is what I call a Davinci Machine. Unrivaled.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
highwaylights 2y ago
I’ve been thinking more and more about this lately. I’m not sure I want macOS to be a power tool. I’m not sure I want Windows to be either - they have access to too much. I want a VM for laissez-faire workspaces, and in those cases it makes sense for my workflows to use Linux (granted it might not for others). This works out pretty well for me. I have my run-whatever-I-need environment isolated from my host, which means that environment doesn’t have access to emails and browser logins that I don’t really need on the VM. Sure, the host should protect my data if the permissions are configured correctly etc., but I’m not about to give anything root access if I can help it there, whereas in a dedicated environment there’s less to worry about.
roughly 2y ago
Early in my career I was working ops, and we got into a debate about a tool we were building - how much we should let people bypass some safeties we were putting in. A veteran colleague said "the fundamental requirements of my job are to do unsafe things," which stuck with me. For a lot of what we do, you cannot make a fully safe tool that's actually effective and usable. You need to trust your users when they tell you they know what they're doing.
nerdjon 2y ago
I will admit that the gatekeeper change is annoying. It’s already hidden under a menu with control click so I hope that change doesn’t hit retail. But correct me if I am wrong, the weekly alerts is only for screen recording right? Realistically how many apps do you have with that permission? Given that it a highly sensitive permission since it can basically expose nearly anything else that isn’t in a password box… it seems fine? Maybe make it 2 weeks or “smart” and taking into account how often the app is really using that permission. But similar on my iPhone if I were to grant an app permission to read my contacts(I don’t, but still), I would want to know if it’s constantly doing that in the background. Even if Mac has a notice at the top saying your screen is being monitored, I still think having this periodically confirm access again is a good thing. As mentioned Apple does have to walk that line between power users and most users. Even as a power user why is a one week alert really going to interfere with my ability to use it as I wish? To me the reality is there isn’t a solution here that appeases everyone. An app that wants unrestricted access will try to trick the user to follow a few steps to disable a safeguard. We see this all over iOS with so many apps trying to justify their tracking.
- upon_drumhead 2y ago
  The control click is the impious that is causing these articles. In Sequoia they removed that shortcut so it's only available via deep menus now. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/macos-15-sequoia-makes-you-jump-through-more-hoops-to-disable-gatekeeper-app-checks/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/macos-15-sequoia-mak...
  - nerdjon 2y ago
    That I agree with, it is a stupid change. However, it is worth mentioning that in 3 of the "span of links" seem to be referencing the screen recording change I mentioned. (1 for sure, the third one ... kinda vague?). But also: > But I also want to be able to grant trusted applications non-sandboxed access to my entire file system, access to cameras and microphones, and the ability to capture my screen. So that may have causing it, but clearly both of these issues the author is upset about and implying it causes issues for power users.
- 2y ago
erickhill 2y ago
[flagged]
TacticalCoder 2y ago
> Such a laissez-faire approach to software privileges obviously wouldn’t fly today. Funnily enough it kinda would work, again, today as most people now only ever need one app: a browser. I still need to install apps, but most people don't. So as far as the browser itself is the sandbox, the OS is fine: it runs nothing but the browser. It's the reason I could switch my mother-in-law's laptop to a Chromebook: she's fine as long as she's got a browser.

87 points by erickhill 2y ago

I do not know what to make of this. > I want applications to be cryptographically signed by known developers and notarized by Apple by default Not me, this describes a Walled Garden to a tee. Power Tools mean flexibility, not locked down. The only real "power tools" out there are *BSD and Linux. With those systems I can do whatever I want without begging for permission from a commercial vendor or anyone else for that matter.

k8sToGo 2y ago
Did you read the whole thing? He said he prefers that, but wants the option to bypass it.
- jmclnx 2y ago
  No, when I saw that quote I bailed. But what is the point of have all those checks when you will bypass them anyway. It is like spending thousands for a house alarm but never turning the alarm on. It just adds needless complexity that will never get used.
  - roughly 2y ago
    Because you don’t always bypass them. You bypass them knowingly and intentionally - you leave the burglar alarm off when your friend is coming by - but most of the time, you want the alarm and you want the choice.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Poor Gruber. I can't imagine owing my entire livelihood to the success of a closed platform and then deciding one day you disagree with it's development philosophy. I hope he makes his peace with it because lord knows neither rain nor shine will stop Apple from locking-down and removing features from MacOS.
  - robenkleene 2y ago
    Isn't it the development philosophy itself that's evolving (i.e., not Gruber's opinion)? E.g., the linked post is about a change that isn't even been released yet? https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/08/07/mac-os-15-sequoia-gatekeeper https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/08/07/mac-os-15-sequo...
    - talldayo 2y ago
      I dunno, Gruber really ought to know better by now. I left MacOS myself years ago because I considered the depreciation of OpenGL to be the writing on the wall. Apple was beefing with companies like Nvidia for nothing other than the sake of petty conflict, and sabotaging public resources for profit and making everyone else suffer for it. As a user I was getting absolutely nothing out of their aggressive public profile and it made me ashamed to support a company that cared so little for their userbase. So I bought different computers. Gruber has been in this longer than I have, and clearly he can see the same stuff you and I can. If he was okay with Apple going guns-akimbo 10 years ago I don't see why he'd grow a conscience all of the sudden. Seems to me that the frogs notice the water boiling, now.
      - Kon5ole 2y ago
        >Seems to me that the frogs notice the water boiling, now. I think this is spot on. When even Gruber complains openly you know it's bad. See also DHH lately. Warren Buffet recently sold half his AAPL holdings. When he got them he mentioned the brand strength as the main reason. Maybe he too noticed the heat of the water?

znpy 2y ago

> The Mac is a platform where you need to be able to shoot yourself in the foot. This person yearns for Linux but hasn’t admitted such thing to themselves yet.

WillAdams 2y ago
I miss the "Unix Expert Checkbox" from NeXTstep.
mholm 2y ago
I've given linux a lot of tries over the years. I can be equally productive in both. But Linux always has a high friction to get it to behave how you want it. With Mac, sensible defaults are generally chosen, and there are some easy to change options. Of all the distros I've tried, defaults seem largely arbitrary, broken, or barely implemented. At least with windows/mac everyone is using the same DE.
- lambdaba 2y ago
  I would say Linux has *zero* friction to get it to behave exactly how you want it, as a power user, which can be a rabbit hole, but a worthwhile one IMO.
- dijit 2y ago
  > But Linux always has a high friction to get it to behave how you want it. Anecdotally, I find the exact opposite to be true. Certainly it's because I've been using Linux (along with Windows and MacOS) for a decade or more. Linux is the only consistently power-user friendly experience.
- phoronixrly 2y ago
  Tell me it's simpler to retrofit a packaging system that distributes binaries compiled by randos on the Internet (Homebrew) to your mac just so you have access to the software you need for your work -- be it a dev environment for a given programming language, or ops tools like ansible, docker, etc... Software that all people using Linux have out of the box signed and in many cases QAd by their distro. What kind of sensible default is to have to install a packaging system on your OS?

supportengineer 2y ago

There’s one power tool remaining, Linux

minkles 2y ago
If it had a working, competent desktop environment, yes. But it's not there. Everything else, 100%. But the whole desktop environment thing is a mess with extremely poor quality control. It's much more fun to change the universe 50 times than it is to actually fix all the bugs and problems with it. And that's why for the last 25 years I ended up flipping back and forward between Windows and Mac and Linux lasting a maximum of a day or two.
- yonatan8070 2y ago
  I use KDE Plasma both at home and at work (software dev), it's stable and works well. I have a colleague who does the same with Ubuntu's GNOME. What about the Linux desktops do you find incompetent?
  - minkles 2y ago
    Things that suck: fractional scaling doesn't work anywhere properly, most of the desktop apps have terrible user experiences, absolutely show stopping bugs, suspend/resume on the whole platform is Russian roulette, inconsistencies everywhere, vast differences on rendering between toolkits, sound over BT is terrible and everything is half finished. It feels like an artist's attic rather than a competent platform. If you spend most of your time in a terminal or IDE you don't see the pain. I want it to work. I want to use it. But it's just bad quality. In context, by the time I've worked around the issues, I earn enough to just buy a Mac and use that. And everything works fine there!
    - talldayo 2y ago
      It's funny, I'm the same way for Macs. Why would I buy a computer that launches Apple Music by default when I plug in my headphones? Why does my taskbar ship with services I'll never use pinned to the bottom? Why does Safari send me little reminder notifications that it's still installed? It all feels so gaudy and anti-productive that I end up spending more time setting up Macs then I do setting up Linux. When I have to go use a Mac it's like getting assigned to a Siberian labor camp. Nowadays desktop Linux is pretty good, to the point that Valve uses it as the backbone for their gaming handheld. Fractional scaling is upstreamed in Qt and GTK, Pipewire is the default for Bluetooth now alongside 320kbps codecs (including AAC), and GNOME and KDE are both now stable enough on Wayland to daily-drive. I think your complaints would have been valid 10 years ago, but the hodge-podge x11 desktops are in the rearview mirror for most users.

sharkjacobs 2y ago

A lot of the time, when I agree with Gruber it’s grudgingly. With this it’s wholeheartedly.

refulgentis 2y ago
If it makes you feel any better, I'm still cranky about it, because it's a really low-effort echo of Jobs' pickup truck analogy for Macs, coupled to no novel insight, groping its way to saying nothing substantive about scales that were tipped years ago. Absolutely nothing changed recently in Apple's macOS security posture / UI, the annoyances have been there for years. All this accomplishes is signalling its okay to talk about them as they are. Idk why I'm reflexively cranky towards him, I used to worship the guy. Somewhere around 2016/2017 it started reading like nails on chalkboard. I think it was the attempts to prove the Google restaurant reservation service thing was fake, including the demo, escalating it into encouraging people to call the restaurant to ask, then when the restaurant said it was true, please stop calling, suggesting the restaurant was in on it. Also, when I grew up on tech in the Apple fandom community pre-iPhone/early iPhone, there was a ton of principled worries about the App Store that was treated respectfully, at least, until the leaders willing to say that moved onto other tech. At some point those same concerns became reflexively dismissed as trolling / wanting to hurt users / EU pandering

ribs 2y ago

It’s a mass-market computer used by millions of people who don’t want to shoot themselves in the foot. People can be tricked into things, perhaps like turning off a “Bypass Mode”-like switch. I think this is a hard problem.

troupo 2y ago

--- start quote --- The Mac is an expensive tool. On average, Mac costs more than iPad or iPhone. I dislike the idea that computing freedom belongs only to those who can afford it. That seems classist to me. Gruber says, “Computers are such an essential part of the modern world — and almost everyone’s daily lives — that computers-that-work-like-computers aren’t for everyone.” I agree they’re essential, which is exactly why computers-that-work-like-computers ARE for everyone. Otherwise, it’s haves and have-nots. --- end quote --- https://mastodon.social/@lapcatsoftware/112939278677244969 https://mastodon.social/@lapcatsoftware/112939278677244969

mediumsmart 2y ago

If I was a programmer or admin - GnuLinux. Just for gaming - windows. The Mac is what I call a Davinci Machine. Unrivaled.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

highwaylights 2y ago

I’ve been thinking more and more about this lately. I’m not sure I want macOS to be a power tool. I’m not sure I want Windows to be either - they have access to too much. I want a VM for laissez-faire workspaces, and in those cases it makes sense for my workflows to use Linux (granted it might not for others). This works out pretty well for me. I have my run-whatever-I-need environment isolated from my host, which means that environment doesn’t have access to emails and browser logins that I don’t really need on the VM. Sure, the host should protect my data if the permissions are configured correctly etc., but I’m not about to give anything root access if I can help it there, whereas in a dedicated environment there’s less to worry about.

roughly 2y ago

Early in my career I was working ops, and we got into a debate about a tool we were building - how much we should let people bypass some safeties we were putting in. A veteran colleague said "the fundamental requirements of my job are to do unsafe things," which stuck with me. For a lot of what we do, you cannot make a fully safe tool that's actually effective and usable. You need to trust your users when they tell you they know what they're doing.

nerdjon 2y ago

I will admit that the gatekeeper change is annoying. It’s already hidden under a menu with control click so I hope that change doesn’t hit retail. But correct me if I am wrong, the weekly alerts is only for screen recording right? Realistically how many apps do you have with that permission? Given that it a highly sensitive permission since it can basically expose nearly anything else that isn’t in a password box… it seems fine? Maybe make it 2 weeks or “smart” and taking into account how often the app is really using that permission. But similar on my iPhone if I were to grant an app permission to read my contacts(I don’t, but still), I would want to know if it’s constantly doing that in the background. Even if Mac has a notice at the top saying your screen is being monitored, I still think having this periodically confirm access again is a good thing. As mentioned Apple does have to walk that line between power users and most users. Even as a power user why is a one week alert really going to interfere with my ability to use it as I wish? To me the reality is there isn’t a solution here that appeases everyone. An app that wants unrestricted access will try to trick the user to follow a few steps to disable a safeguard. We see this all over iOS with so many apps trying to justify their tracking.

upon_drumhead 2y ago
The control click is the impious that is causing these articles. In Sequoia they removed that shortcut so it's only available via deep menus now. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/macos-15-sequoia-makes-you-jump-through-more-hoops-to-disable-gatekeeper-app-checks/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/macos-15-sequoia-mak...
- nerdjon 2y ago
  That I agree with, it is a stupid change. However, it is worth mentioning that in 3 of the "span of links" seem to be referencing the screen recording change I mentioned. (1 for sure, the third one ... kinda vague?). But also: > But I also want to be able to grant trusted applications non-sandboxed access to my entire file system, access to cameras and microphones, and the ability to capture my screen. So that may have causing it, but clearly both of these issues the author is upset about and implying it causes issues for power users.
2y ago

erickhill 2y ago

[flagged]

TacticalCoder 2y ago

> Such a laissez-faire approach to software privileges obviously wouldn’t fly today. Funnily enough it kinda would work, again, today as most people now only ever need one app: a browser. I still need to install apps, but most people don't. So as far as the browser itself is the sandbox, the OS is fine: it runs nothing but the browser. It's the reason I could switch my mother-in-law's laptop to a Chromebook: she's fine as long as she's got a browser.