5 ms·
My longstanding prediction that Gatekeeper will ever so slowly tighten so that people don't realise like a frog boiled in water is continuing to be true.
by seanparsons 11mo ago
My longstanding prediction that Gatekeeper will ever so slowly tighten so that people don't realise like a frog boiled in water is continuing to be true.
- JohnTHaller 11mo agoThe writing was on the wall from the first implementation. But we all kept getting downvoted when pointing out the road ahead.
- 4ndrewl 11mo agoShut up and buy the sock.
- bbkane 11mo agoFortunately, Linux laptops are getting better and better. I'm hopeful that by the time my M1 macBook Air gets slow enough to annoy me (maybe a year or two from now?), I'll be able to smoothly transition to Linux. I've already done it on the desktop!
- spaceribs 11mo agoMy family have bought macs and been apple fanboys since the "Pizzabox" 6100 PowerPC. My dad handed me down a DuoDock when I was in middle school. We bought a G4 Cube, I had an iBook and Powerbook throughout college and throughout the 2010s. In 2017 I built my first desktop PC from the ground up and got it running Windows/Linux. I just removed Windows after the 11 upgrade required TPM, and I bought a brand new Framework laptop which I love. This is to say that Apple used to represent a sort of freedom to escape what used to be Microsoft's walled garden. Now it's just another dead-end closed ecosystem that I'm happy to leave behind.
- Aurornis 11mo ago> This is to say that Apple used to represent a sort of freedom to escape what used to be Microsoft's walled garden. Now it's just another dead-end closed ecosystem So you haven’t had a Mac since 2017, but you believe all of us using Macs are stuck in some walled garden? These comments are so weird. Gatekeeper can be turned off easily if that’s what you want. Most of us leave it on because it’s not actually a problem in practice. The homebrew change doesn’t even impact non-cask formulas.
- kstrauser 11mo agoI have to agree. Number of times it’s prevented me from running software I wanted to run: zero. Number of times it’s stopped me and said the equivalent of “are you really sure?”: a handful, maybe once a year on average. And it’s not like I don’t use a gazillion third party apps and commands.
- Aurornis 11mo agoSame. I can see how it would look like a major problem if your only perspective was through clickbait headlines and angry comments from people who don’t use Macs anyway, though. It reminds me of the distant cousin who lives out the countryside and prides themselves on not living in the city because the news tells them it’s a dangerous hellhole where everyone is getting mugged or shot on every street corner. When you immerse yourself in clickbait journalism the other side, whatever that may be, starts to look much worse than reality.
- 91bananas 11mo agorunning VMs on apple chips has been rather difficult for me. other than that, yeah.
- PeaceTed 11mo agoIt is said you only realise you are in jail once you feel the chains. And this is something Apple has tried to walk the line on, be locked down but in a fashion that causes the least push back on users. Personally I never felt Mac OS was that locked down, but it has been over a decade since I last used it. The only time I felt it was trying to delete 'Chess' only it to be listed as a vital system application. I know this isn't true but I would love it if Chess turned out to be a load bearing application for the entire OS. Like folks at Apple don't know why but if you remove it, everything stops.At least MS managed to remove the load bearing Space cadet pinball. Replaced it with a One drive popup that handles all memory management in the kernel ;) Back to the original point, by comparison on iOS I definetly did feel the chains. One could fear Mac OS will turn into that but they haven't conditioned people yet.
- JCattheATM 11mo ago> by the time my M1 macBook Air gets slow enough to annoy me (maybe a year or two from now?) It should be good for at least 5 years from now, if not more.
- abnercoimbre 11mo agoFinger crossed for mine as well!
- kybernetyk 11mo agoBefore macOS 26 I would have agreed with you. But after Tahoe my M1 MacBook Pro feels a lot slower. Funny, there's even some regression in layer backed NSView rendering where the app I'm working on is faster (in some aspects) in a macOS 15 VM than on bare metal under macOS 26.
- hoistbypetard 11mo agoAre you running any electron apps that have not yet been updated to use the most recent upstream electron? https://furbo.org/2025/10/06/tahoe-electron-detector/ https://furbo.org/2025/10/06/tahoe-electron-detector/ I've got a couple things that I use which aren't yet up-to-date, and are blocking my upgrade.
- Mashimo 11mo agoProbably not if you bought the 8GB version :D
- walthamstow 11mo agoMy 8GB M1 Air is still running as well today as the day I bought it.
- Mashimo 11mo agoAnd it will run at the same speed. But I would guess a lot of apps will requier more ram at some point. OP said it should last for " at least 5 years from now, if not more." which I doubt. Maybe for light webbrowsing.
- zackb 11mo agoJust did this. I am so much happier. As a lifelong Apple user, and side-quest Linux user the choice is a no-brainer nowadays. Desktop Linux is honestly great now. I love(d) Apple but Tahoe was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. i use arch btw
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> Gatekeeper will ever so slowly tighten so that people don't realise like a frog boiled in water is continuing to be true Gatekeeper can be disabled. Given Cupertino’s pivot to services and the Mac’s limited install base relative to iPhones (and high penetration among developers) I’m doubtful they’d remove that option in the foreseeable future.
- ewoodrich 11mo agoIt really bothers me that Apple removed any convenient shortcut to bypass Gatekeeper like the old Control-click [1] hotkey. Apple's relentless ratcheting of the difficulty/annoyance of Gatekeeper has just about pushed me over the edge to completely disable it, despite the risk. The ridiculous song and dance of "File is dangerous, delete it?"->No->Settings->Security->Open Anyway->"File is dangerous, delete it?"->No is getting ridiculously old after literally doing it a hundred times at this point. And soon enough Apple will inevitably come up with some additional hurdle like, idk, closing Settings three times in a row while reading a fingerprint during an odd numbered minute. So in the name of "increased security" they've needlessly turned it into a binary thing where it's completely unprotected or accept my own computer that I paid for will deliberately waste my time constantly. It makes Windows 11 seem elegant in comparison where all I need to do is run Win11Debloat once on install and it gets out of my way. [1] https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=saqachfa https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=saqachfa
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago> in the name of "increased security" they've needlessly turned it into a binary thing where it's completely unprotected Why isn't a binary condition valid? Isn't that the ethos inherent to a literal walled garden? If you're inside, trust us. If you're outside, you don't, but don't expect us to bail you out.
- ewoodrich 11mo agoI didn’t say it was invalid, just that it was needless. When I bought the laptop Gatekeeper was a tolerable nuisance and I was fine with the tradeoff given the security benefits. The removal of the hotkey (which also required changing a setting before it worked at all) didn’t actually make it harder for a regular user to access, just 5x as aggravating every time it's necessary. If they made developers go through some long and tedious process to re-enable it I would grumble but understand, but the only solution to get back to the 2024 status quo being entirely disabling a critical security feature certainly doesn't benefit me in any way.
- armchairhacker 11mo agoPeople did realize when the actual Gatekeeper change happened a year ago [1]. But your prediction still holds because frogs do realize when they're boiled in water [2]. [1] 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..., https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/06/macos-sequoia-gatekeeper-security-change/ https://www.macrumors.com/2024/08/06/macos-sequoia-gatekeepe..., https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/08/07/mac-os-15-sequoia-gatekeeper https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/08/07/mac-os-15-sequo.... Top HN comment on Sequoia's announcement mentions it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559761 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#Experiments_and_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#Experiments_and_a...
- seanparsons 11mo agoThe point is that by the time Gatekeeper closes tight enough that everything must run through Apple and it can't be disabled, most people wont notice and will be stuck with it.
- danudey 11mo agoYour assertion seems to imply that there will be a point of no return where users are no longer able to stop buying apple hardware to run the software they want, and that therefore people should do so now. If that's not what you're saying then your point is effectively moot, because if indeed Apple's platform control gets too egregious for some individuals then those people will switch at that point so there's no point in panic-switching now just in case. In other words, users will switch when what Apple is offering does not meet what those users require. Some users will literally never care because all the software they use is signed and gatekept and so on; some users have jumped ship already because they want to be able to change whatever they want whenever they want. If things continue to "slippery slope" then more people will hit their own tipping point but asserting that it's going to happen all at once and apply to everyone is nonsense.
- 11mo ago
- marcodiego 11mo agoApple does not support running other OS's on their hardware. This is bad in many senses but it is specially bad since it weakens competition and reduces incentives for Apple to improve their own OS, meaning it is bad even for their users in the long run. If you choose to buy hardware from apple, you must consider that you're encouraging a behaviour that is bad for everyone, including yourself.
- cweagans 11mo agoI'm not sure what you're talking about. Their bootloader explicitly supports other OSes. They make it easy to run Windows (even through a built-in app that helps you set it up). There are plenty of reasons to criticize Apple, but they literally don't do anything to prevent you from running another OS.
- marcodiego 11mo ago> they literally don't do anything to prevent you from running another OS. Like not documenting their hardware? Like making Asahi Linux becoming a multi-year reverse engineering project that may possibly never achieve perfect compatibility? > They make it easy to run Windows On apple silicon without virtualisation? Sorry, didn't know that.
- dangus 11mo agoThe point is that Apple could have easily locked down the bootloader and made it not possible at all to install something else. In designing the M1 hardware they explicitly went out of their way to make sure other operating systems could be installed and they’ve said as much. They took their smartphone SoCs and bootloader that never allowed alternate operating systems and added that feature in actively. Technically Asahi Linux isn’t facing a much different situation than standard Linux distributions as they relate to x86 hardware. There are thousands of PC components that don’t provide any sort of Linux driver where contributors reverse engineer those drivers. Sure, in the PC world a lot more vendors do voluntarily provide Linux drivers, and Apple will never to that for its hardware, and that specific point is a valid criticism. As far as assisting in running Windows, my understanding is that the company that makes Parallels and Apple have some kind of relationship. Microsoft officially endorses Parallels. You can complain about it being virtualization but it’s perfectly fine for desktop apps or even some more intensive apps. And it’s not really a very valid complaint considering that Microsoft doesn’t distribute a general purpose ARM distribution of Windows.
- jdxcode 11mo agoI hate that analogy—frogs jump out.
- GaryBluto 11mo agoI thought the problem with the analogy was that they died instantly?
- Aurornis 11mo agoGatekeeper isn’t changing. Homebrew’s policies are changing. It also only applies to casks. If you don’t use homebrew casks, nothing is changing for you. You can also disable Gatekeeper entirely. It’s very easy. I don’t see what you think you’re predicting, unless you’re trying to imply that that Gatekeeper is a conspiratorial plot to turn your Mac into an iPhone. I predict we’re going to be seeing those conspiracy theories for decades while it never comes true. Apple doesn’t want to destroy the market for their $5000 laptops so they can sell us a $1000 iPad as our only computing device or send customers to competitors. This is like a replay of the sky is falling drama when secure boot was announced