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> In this scenario the macOS firewall does not seem to function correctly and is disregarding firewall rules ... Some examples of apps that do this are Apple’s

> In this scenario the macOS firewall does not seem to function correctly and is disregarding firewall rules ... Some examples of apps that do this are Apple’s own apps and services since macOS 14.6, up until a recent 15.1 beta. This is not new - every time I update macOS, some of the system settings are changed to default including some in the firewall. And I have to painstakingly go through all of it and change it. Also, the few times I've reinstalled or updated macOS, I've always noticed that it takes longer for the installation if your system has access to the internet - so now I've made it a practice to switch of the router while installing or updating macOS or ios. (With all the AI bullshit being integrated everywhere in Windows, macOS and Android etc., I expect this kind of "offloading" of personal data, and downloading of data, to / from AI servers to keep increasing, especially during updates, to "prepare" for the new AI features in the newer OS updates. No internet means the installer is forced to skip it for later, saving you some valuable time, and hopefully you get to change the default setting before it starts up again. Whatever the claims of AI processing done on the Mac or iDevices itself, some "offloading" to their servers, will still happen, especially if the default settings - which you can change only after the OS is installed - also enables analytics and data collection.) (More here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418809 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26418809 and on this thread - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26303946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26303946 ).

hypeatei 2y ago
> I've made it a practice to switch of the router while installing or updating macOS or ios. Why are you still using those OSes? That seems like a lot of work for something you paid for.
- freehorse 2y ago
  For me, because of the hardware.
  - binary132 2y ago
    it’s just not that much better or worth it
    - kbolino 2y ago
      It may not be worth it: the ridiculous upfront prices to get enough RAM and SSD space, and the lack of upgradeability of those two components, significantly undermine the value proposition of the Mac platform. But the laptops at least are definitely better quality. The touchpad, charger, screen, keyboard, case, speakers, etc. are all well above the Windows competition in terms of both build quality and durability. The commoditization of every component in a PC laptop has really sapped the life of that platform. No, actually, I don't want another shitty Synaptics touchpad with ancient features and buggy drivers. I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer. And no 1080p is not good enough (but hey at least we finally got away from 1366x768!). Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around.
      - thewebguyd 2y ago
        > Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around. This has kept me on Mac laptops as well. There's always some compromise made elsewhere, even on high end laptops. Usually it's the trackpad, or poor thermals making it unusable as a laptop or just super loud (comparing to the Apple Silicon line here, my intel MBPs were furnaces). Plus, if you want anything other than a 1080p screen you are pushing close to MBP prices anyway.
      - mrguyorama 2y ago
        >I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer. You say this as if Apple didn't spend 5 years selling keyboards that were nearly guaranteed to die after a years worth of usage in a slightly dusty environment. People love Apple hardware because they have a terrible memory for all the flawed hardware Apple always releases and pretends isn't flawed. There are significant design flaws that affect a significant portion of their customers that they just never acknowledge. For example, I only recently learned that my previous work macbook failed in the way it did because a specific short ribbon cable was made shorter for no discernible reason and so some revisions of the 2015 macbook pro just have indescribable screen corruption as a failure mode. Apple doesn't tell you that though, just send it in, let us charge you $1500, and replace half of the computer.
- throw73484858 2y ago
  Because Linux is soo hard to use. You have to use supported hardware (like with any other OS), and once a year paste a few commands into terminal.
  - bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
    I love Linux. I've just been burned too many times to trust it on my primary laptop. This is a machine with a high availability requirement -- if I have a job interview, the camera had better work right now.
    - mananaysiempre 2y ago
      Never updating within several days of anything important works well in my experience. Although the specific hardware matters as well—an Intel Macbook’s Facetime HD abomination with its out-of-tree drivers was a source of constant frustration; by contrast, the Framework’s camera (the old one, not the one released recently) has been solid enough that I don’t actually know what it is.
    - themaninthedark 2y ago
      I agree about the issues that Linux sometimes has.... However, how is this different from current Windows? I have had a machine decide that it needed to update while I was in the middle of a teams call. "Luckily" I was able to switch over to phone while it did what it wanted to do and then switch back but still....
  - idunnoman1222 2y ago
    Your Wi-Fi drivers have been removed from the kernel. Please download them on USB stick. You were warned
    - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
      I've actually had to get Wi-Fi drivers on a USB stick a lot more times for Windows than for Linux.
- thisislife2 2y ago
  Others in the family still use iDevices. Can't avoid Windows or macOS due to work. Prefer FreeBSD and use that mostly. It's an old mac and will be dumping it after another year or two. Do not plan to buy an Apple computer ever again as soldered RAM / HDD and iShittification of macOS is the future.
- vundercind 2y ago
  Because all operating systems are terrible but the rest are so incredibly bad that Apple’s are still by far the best, once you add up time saved by features and capabilities and subtract time lost to pain-in-the-ass brokenness. (Two decades on DOS/Windows home series and NT, at least for gaming and sometimes work, twelve years with Linux as my main desktop OS, started on Android for smartphones, before finally giving Apple a fair chance around 2011 or 2012… because I was issued a MacBook at work and was doing dual-platform mobile dev—FWIW I was rooting for BeOS back when it was still a thing, it was great)
  - MichaelZuo 2y ago
    The real question is why is every other company with a consumer OS even more incompetent and/or malicious?
    - idunnoman1222 2y ago
      “ Every other company “
    - fsflover 2y ago
      What's incompetent about Linux? Have you tried to buy preinstalled?
      - MichaelZuo 2y ago
        Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS? There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux. Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years. Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups. Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  Just use Linux bro (Suspend still doesn’t wake consistently on my thinkpad it’s been 20 years)
  - fsflover 2y ago
    Suspend is flawless on my Librem 14.
    - idunnoman1222 2y ago
      Thanks let me just go to distrowatch.org and install a new distro
      - fsflover 2y ago
        This is more related to hardware than the distro.
- appendix-rock 2y ago
  [dead]
- throwaway19972 2y ago
  The marginal cost of that work is insignificant compared to the amount of equivalent work you'd have to put in for linux or bsd. Plus, little snitch is basically state-of-the-art in terms of ease-of-use if you're willing to put the money into it.
Foivos 2y ago
How can you even install the update without access to the Internet? For years, I can not do the automatic updates, because it always fails with an error message along the lines of "Failed to personalise software, check your internet!", even though I have a perfectly working Internet connection. The only way to update is with a live USB and an ethernet connection. Everything else fails.
- thisislife2 2y ago
  You can manually download the updates from here - https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs for the older versions of mac (or check and download it manually through Software Update). Once the installation starts, the installer does some verification and / or data collection for which it requires the internet, and then starts the installation - at this point, just switch off the router.
isodev 2y ago
The beautiful hardware of the Mac is so wasted with recent versions of macOS.
- diggan 2y ago
  It's funny how Apple went from leading in UX/UI and being average/below average on hardware, to the opposite. iOS/macOS truly is a cluster-fuck when it comes to UX that makes sense. Luckily we can run other OSes on Apple computer hardware, but not as lucky with Apple phone hardware...
  - talldayo 2y ago
    My kingdom for an iPad that runs GNOME!
    - isodev 2y ago
      Or KDE Plasma… they’ve been making amazing things with look and feel in the last couple of releases. Either way, that much customisation and user control on an iPad… practically unheard of.
userbinator 2y ago
every time I update macOS, some of the system settings are changed to default including some in the firewall Windows has also been doing that for some time now. Only Linux is relatively "clean" from that perspective, but even now some distros are beginning to sneak in spyware. The enshittification of OSes continues...
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  Please tell me that upgrading fedora versions works every time ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
  - timlatim 2y ago
    What problems have you encountered on Fedora that were caused by a distro upgrade? Asking this because I've been using Fedora for years across different machines and can't recall any breakages that were direct consequences of an upgrade, though I usually apply it a month or two after the release date, so maybe there are early kinks that get resolved by that time.
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    I've been in-place upgrading my Fedora install for about 7 years. Or is it 10? IDR. As far as I remember the upgrade has always succeeded. Sometimes things are broken afterwards because software I liked got removed or something, but I never got locked out or the operating system unusable.
- RMPR 2y ago
  > but even now some distros are beginning to sneak in spyware. Citation needed. I remember Ubuntu sneaking in some stuff a couple of years ago[0], but most of the mainstream distros have a clean track record. What are you referring to exactly? 0: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/02/ubuntu-data-collection-opt-out https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/02/ubuntu-data-collection-o...
  - mixmastamyk 2y ago
    New installs make lots of unrequested accesses… fwupmgr, unbound-anchor, ocsp, firefox, all generate telemetry. Companies have tried buying floss software specifically to add spyware, such as audacity. It’s not a big fraction of what proprietary OS does, but the threat grows steadily each year.
AndyMcConachie 2y ago
I am completely with you here man. Everytime I upgrade my iPhone it turns on Bluetooth. Phreaking annoying. Apple clearly wants their customer base to use certain features so they simply enable them at upgrade. It's gross.

hypeatei 2y ago

> I've made it a practice to switch of the router while installing or updating macOS or ios. Why are you still using those OSes? That seems like a lot of work for something you paid for.

freehorse 2y ago
For me, because of the hardware.
- binary132 2y ago
  it’s just not that much better or worth it
  - kbolino 2y ago
    It may not be worth it: the ridiculous upfront prices to get enough RAM and SSD space, and the lack of upgradeability of those two components, significantly undermine the value proposition of the Mac platform. But the laptops at least are definitely better quality. The touchpad, charger, screen, keyboard, case, speakers, etc. are all well above the Windows competition in terms of both build quality and durability. The commoditization of every component in a PC laptop has really sapped the life of that platform. No, actually, I don't want another shitty Synaptics touchpad with ancient features and buggy drivers. I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer. And no 1080p is not good enough (but hey at least we finally got away from 1366x768!). Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around.
    - thewebguyd 2y ago
      > Some of the PC makers do seem to have caught on and you can get something comparably specced and competitively priced if you look hard and carefully. But it will still have some deficiencies compared to the MacBook that you can't shop your way around. This has kept me on Mac laptops as well. There's always some compromise made elsewhere, even on high end laptops. Usually it's the trackpad, or poor thermals making it unusable as a laptop or just super loud (comparing to the Apple Silicon line here, my intel MBPs were furnaces). Plus, if you want anything other than a 1080p screen you are pushing close to MBP prices anyway.
    - mrguyorama 2y ago
      >I really would like every key on my keyboard to still work consistently 2 years after I bought the computer. You say this as if Apple didn't spend 5 years selling keyboards that were nearly guaranteed to die after a years worth of usage in a slightly dusty environment. People love Apple hardware because they have a terrible memory for all the flawed hardware Apple always releases and pretends isn't flawed. There are significant design flaws that affect a significant portion of their customers that they just never acknowledge. For example, I only recently learned that my previous work macbook failed in the way it did because a specific short ribbon cable was made shorter for no discernible reason and so some revisions of the 2015 macbook pro just have indescribable screen corruption as a failure mode. Apple doesn't tell you that though, just send it in, let us charge you $1500, and replace half of the computer.
throw73484858 2y ago
Because Linux is soo hard to use. You have to use supported hardware (like with any other OS), and once a year paste a few commands into terminal.
- bqmjjx0kac 2y ago
  I love Linux. I've just been burned too many times to trust it on my primary laptop. This is a machine with a high availability requirement -- if I have a job interview, the camera had better work right now.
  - mananaysiempre 2y ago
    Never updating within several days of anything important works well in my experience. Although the specific hardware matters as well—an Intel Macbook’s Facetime HD abomination with its out-of-tree drivers was a source of constant frustration; by contrast, the Framework’s camera (the old one, not the one released recently) has been solid enough that I don’t actually know what it is.
  - themaninthedark 2y ago
    I agree about the issues that Linux sometimes has.... However, how is this different from current Windows? I have had a machine decide that it needed to update while I was in the middle of a teams call. "Luckily" I was able to switch over to phone while it did what it wanted to do and then switch back but still....
- idunnoman1222 2y ago
  Your Wi-Fi drivers have been removed from the kernel. Please download them on USB stick. You were warned
  - BenjiWiebe 2y ago
    I've actually had to get Wi-Fi drivers on a USB stick a lot more times for Windows than for Linux.
thisislife2 2y ago
Others in the family still use iDevices. Can't avoid Windows or macOS due to work. Prefer FreeBSD and use that mostly. It's an old mac and will be dumping it after another year or two. Do not plan to buy an Apple computer ever again as soldered RAM / HDD and iShittification of macOS is the future.
vundercind 2y ago
Because all operating systems are terrible but the rest are so incredibly bad that Apple’s are still by far the best, once you add up time saved by features and capabilities and subtract time lost to pain-in-the-ass brokenness. (Two decades on DOS/Windows home series and NT, at least for gaming and sometimes work, twelve years with Linux as my main desktop OS, started on Android for smartphones, before finally giving Apple a fair chance around 2011 or 2012… because I was issued a MacBook at work and was doing dual-platform mobile dev—FWIW I was rooting for BeOS back when it was still a thing, it was great)
- MichaelZuo 2y ago
  The real question is why is every other company with a consumer OS even more incompetent and/or malicious?
  - idunnoman1222 2y ago
    “ Every other company “
  - fsflover 2y ago
    What's incompetent about Linux? Have you tried to buy preinstalled?
    - MichaelZuo 2y ago
      Have you ever tried to compare something like Ubuntu or RHEL on a per feature per function basis with Mac OS? There are literally thousands of possible combinations of accessibility features alone, that are vastly more difficult to impossible to access. Or simply don’t exist in any form. Once you add in all the default apps and functions of Mac OS, there’s likely millions of possible combinations that would take a fortune in time and effort and knowledge to replicate maybe a quarter of, on a hypothetical laptop installed with Linux. Not to mention many peripheral manufacturers for many of their product lines simply don’t officially support any version of Linux released in the past few years. Edit: Of course 99% of these combinations are irrelevant to any particular individual, but they are all relevant to at least a few small groups. Linux promoters don’t seem to understand that alienating a few thousand users each time is a big deal if that alienation process happens thousands of times…
idunnoman1222 2y ago
Just use Linux bro (Suspend still doesn’t wake consistently on my thinkpad it’s been 20 years)
- fsflover 2y ago
  Suspend is flawless on my Librem 14.
  - idunnoman1222 2y ago
    Thanks let me just go to distrowatch.org and install a new distro
    - fsflover 2y ago
      This is more related to hardware than the distro.
appendix-rock 2y ago
[dead]
throwaway19972 2y ago
The marginal cost of that work is insignificant compared to the amount of equivalent work you'd have to put in for linux or bsd. Plus, little snitch is basically state-of-the-art in terms of ease-of-use if you're willing to put the money into it.

Foivos 2y ago

How can you even install the update without access to the Internet? For years, I can not do the automatic updates, because it always fails with an error message along the lines of "Failed to personalise software, check your internet!", even though I have a perfectly working Internet connection. The only way to update is with a live USB and an ethernet connection. Everything else fails.

thisislife2 2y ago
You can manually download the updates from here - https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs https://support.apple.com/en-us/docs for the older versions of mac (or check and download it manually through Software Update). Once the installation starts, the installer does some verification and / or data collection for which it requires the internet, and then starts the installation - at this point, just switch off the router.

isodev 2y ago

The beautiful hardware of the Mac is so wasted with recent versions of macOS.

diggan 2y ago
It's funny how Apple went from leading in UX/UI and being average/below average on hardware, to the opposite. iOS/macOS truly is a cluster-fuck when it comes to UX that makes sense. Luckily we can run other OSes on Apple computer hardware, but not as lucky with Apple phone hardware...
- talldayo 2y ago
  My kingdom for an iPad that runs GNOME!
  - isodev 2y ago
    Or KDE Plasma… they’ve been making amazing things with look and feel in the last couple of releases. Either way, that much customisation and user control on an iPad… practically unheard of.

userbinator 2y ago

every time I update macOS, some of the system settings are changed to default including some in the firewall Windows has also been doing that for some time now. Only Linux is relatively "clean" from that perspective, but even now some distros are beginning to sneak in spyware. The enshittification of OSes continues...

idunnoman1222 2y ago
Please tell me that upgrading fedora versions works every time ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
- timlatim 2y ago
  What problems have you encountered on Fedora that were caused by a distro upgrade? Asking this because I've been using Fedora for years across different machines and can't recall any breakages that were direct consequences of an upgrade, though I usually apply it a month or two after the release date, so maybe there are early kinks that get resolved by that time.
- BenjiWiebe 2y ago
  I've been in-place upgrading my Fedora install for about 7 years. Or is it 10? IDR. As far as I remember the upgrade has always succeeded. Sometimes things are broken afterwards because software I liked got removed or something, but I never got locked out or the operating system unusable.
RMPR 2y ago
> but even now some distros are beginning to sneak in spyware. Citation needed. I remember Ubuntu sneaking in some stuff a couple of years ago[0], but most of the mainstream distros have a clean track record. What are you referring to exactly? 0: https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/02/ubuntu-data-collection-opt-out https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2018/02/ubuntu-data-collection-o...
- mixmastamyk 2y ago
  New installs make lots of unrequested accesses… fwupmgr, unbound-anchor, ocsp, firefox, all generate telemetry. Companies have tried buying floss software specifically to add spyware, such as audacity. It’s not a big fraction of what proprietary OS does, but the threat grows steadily each year.

AndyMcConachie 2y ago

I am completely with you here man. Everytime I upgrade my iPhone it turns on Bluetooth. Phreaking annoying. Apple clearly wants their customer base to use certain features so they simply enable them at upgrade. It's gross.