alt Hacker NewsApple Just Lost Me
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Any system of age verification will fail to satisfy the writer, because it is fundamentally the UK’s fault by requiring such draconian measures. Credit cards don't work ever time, but the other options of using AI or sending your data to a third company who will resell it are also not great.
The only other complaint seems to be liquid glass? It really feels strange because Apple feels on the upswing with their new office and their cheap, repairable mac.
The space allocated for "Apple has lost their way" has been maxed out for decades, so it bears stressing that this time is different. This Liquid Glass debacle has disillusioned everyone from hardcore Apple fans to normal people who otherwise don't follow tech.
Once the dust settles, this will be a case study for decades to come. Apple threw their hard-won reputational gains off a cliff for _nothing_.
What keeps me in the Appleverse is the hardware, and the software that Just Works with the hardware (I find that "Just Works" has been rapidly eroding in general, but naturally it still handles the hardware well). The alternatives are Linux on much worse hardware, or the non-starter that is Windows on anything whatsoever.
I'm told ThinkPads are getting to parity and have primo Linux support, but barring accident, my M3 MBP will probably last me a decade. Another reason I prefer Apple hardware.
The third point in this article is what really gets me. The credit card culture in Canada and the US is just insane to me, coming from a European point of view. You can get by without credit cards in Europe, and most of my family only has one for traveling abroad. So sure, they can use their credit card if they really have to, but it’s not a good default, as many others won’t even have credit cards. (And within EU, traveling without one is still fine for the most part).
I find Apple's refusal to patch iOS18 (other than for very old devices that do not support 26) to be more objectionable. I have a 13 mini and everything I've read says not to upgrade to 26. Yet Apple won't issue patches for known security issues that are actively being exploited in the wild? That's crazy.
I've been using Mac for 15+ years now. I thought I would hate Glass so I avoided installing it across my ipad, phone, etc. But it was forced on my on my work laptop. Overall I don't notice the difference. There's nothing that outrages me, but I do find the changes useless.
I bought a cheap, used iPhone SE3 because I needed to Facetime relatives.
I learned quickly that "Find My" was far superior in remote tracking of airtag-equivalents, and switched some of my convertible tags to their network.
I flew out of O'Hare last month, and there were advertisements all over the airport announcing that Illinois id/drivers license import into Apple Wallet, so I did it, and that works.
Supposedly, passports can be imported. I haven't been able to make that work, even after a few hours on the phone with Apple.
I also added a new CTA Ventra card, and I lost my ATM card while out of the country and instantly added a new one to Apple Wallet.
Apple devices allow biometrics to be disabled for unlocking the phone. That is an important requirement for me to use these features.
I would never, ever trust Google with any of these things. Ever.
That being said, if I want to run a torrent client on my phone, I should be able to do so. Apple will never allow that.
If I want a Bourne/POSIX shell, I should be able run one. Apple will never allow that [AFAIK].
There are important reasons that Apple products will never, ever be my primary communication devices.
They have just done the same to me. I spent nearly two hours on the phone with Apple support before I find they will not accept a UK passport as valid ID. They will only accept the national ID card that I also don’t have. I don’t have or want a credit card. I’m 65 so me being now unable to verify my age is embarrassing and insulting. And the way Apple messed me about earlier has put me off them now. I won’t buy another product or service from them ever again.
Any age verification should come with an OAUTH style government run API. The idea being you verify your ID with the government, and the service that required age verification gets back a true or false for does this user meet this age requirement. That way the amount of data shared is kept to a minimum.
The UK, and Brazil who passed a similar law, 'cheated' by just forcing private companies to figure it out.
In a world of mature systems and tangled dependencies, we’ve moved from an era of aspiration to an era of mtiigation. Choosing, whether it s a political candidate or an operating system or ecosystem is no longer a vote of confidence in something wonderful, but feels like a defensive maneuver to find the least worst option among a sea of downsides.
I wish they'd just show some backbone and refuse to implement age verification.
If this means they would need to geofence + start disabling devices to the extent required by law, good. The laws will immediately be repealed.
The whole platform is a smoldering fire at this point, so nothing in the article is particularly surprising. I've hit 10x as many bugs as the user mentioned. Liquid glass (as bad as it is!) barely makes the top 10 daily issues I have with iOS 26. In any other release, it'd be #1.
Maybe "Flood the zone" should be the word of the year for 2026?
It's particularly culturally deaf to try to verify with literally "credit cards".
In the UK most people use debit cards instead for most things.
https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/data-and-research/data/card-spe...
Credit card usage is a small fraction of debit card usage. This is very different to the USA where there are more credit card transactions than debit card ones.
Mate. None of the companies is worth such stress. I feel rage in you. It is just a tool. You choose what works best. That's it. No need to overthink it.
I sympathize with the author's feelings in general, but also hope he directs some of the frustration towards his government for forcing the whole age verification scam (let alone everything else that is being broken in that particular jurisdiction)
> Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score.
UK passed age verification law and people still find a way to blame the US.
I was pleasantly surprised by the age verification. "Based on the age of your Apple account you are verified as being at least 18 years old". Done. Tempus fugit.
Also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47504112
30 days later they canceled the ABM company account and deleted all the associated users along with the Apple ID which I used to log into a testing device, which now became a fairly expensive paperweight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47516266
This new age verification is such bullshit, I don't even live in the UK any more yet have to be subject to that bullshit because Apple (and a bunch of other companies) can't comprehend the concept that people might want to change which country they live in.
Can't use my expired provisional license to confirm my age.
Can't use my Croatian ID to confirm my age.
Can't use a credit card, because I never have had nor do I ever want to have a credit card.
So I'm fucked.
This is honestly why I've been getting deeper into Linux and self-hosting since early COVID. As much as I've loved my M1 Pro MBP, Apple's OS decisions - and my career expectation to always be on the latest version of OSes/software to help vet organizational migrations - have basically killed my enthusiasm for their kit. The hardware is phenomenal; the software does not spark joy.
And if I'm being frank, my time with Linux (Debian 13 on an N100 NUC w/ Docker) has really opened my eyes to just how excessive modern compute is, specifically to power increasingly bogged-down operating systems and woefully inefficient software. The N100 sips energy while happily transcoding 4K video streams on Jellyfin, running my IRC server for friends to hop off Discord, reverse proxying my entire home network, letting me stream game nights via Owncast, host some image board shitposts for various friend groups, host my RSS Aggregator, and still yawns with 75% excess capacity left over.
I'll still have a Mac because that's what my family uses (if they want free tech support from me, that is), and I'll still have my Windows gaming PC, but I'm already drafting up cyberdeck plans for my first primary Linux box, with just a CLI to get me by. Realizing I don't actually need ten cores and 32GB of RAM and a hefty GPU to do daily work is pretty damn revelatory - and shows how grotesque mass-market software and OSes have become in the name of marketing cycles and advertising dollars.
To the Apple users that are completely fed up with Apple: Stop talking us to death. Just switch already. Send us a follow up post in 6-12 months letting us know how it goes for you.
Article says his account is 25 years old, but I guess the laws don't care about such metadata.
But OT: it makes me realize my Yahoo Mail account is turning 30 this year, because in 1997 Yahoo wanted to compete with Hotmail and I thought "Having a @yahoo.com email, that's a very good nerd badge!". Nowadays the ridicule is deserved, and they've silently lost all my mail from 1990s...
totally valid to call out apple for issues, but for most folks already accustomed to apple's walled garden, the grass is not greener on the other side
For instance, I've had a ton of issues with Airpods Max so I moved over to the Sony WH-1000XM6, and they do a much worse job sharing connections between multiple devices to the point where I have to reset them constantly to get sound to reliably play from both my phone & computer.
Same for moving to macOS to linux - the issues on add up to the point where the papercuts from macOS are still worth it.
I didn't know what a MNT Pocket Reform and wow! Rockchip, 20 cm wide keyboard, ix ethernet connector, 4 hour advertised runtime, 2 inches thick and costs more than a macbook. You really have to suffer to stick it to the man!
Author here, didn't realise this was posted on this site. AMA.
Just to add a little bit of context, when I hit the same problem today the flow offered me the option to scan my driving license or 'national id card' (whatever that is - we don't have those in the UK)
So despite the claims in the article, it's not credit card centric.
However, they did not accept my passport as a scannable ID, and so luckily I had a credit card somewhere that I have used recently for a single large purchase otherwise I'd be stuffed, as I don't drive
Wow, that age verification is wild. We need to fight this here in the U.S. If my cell phone starts requiring gov't id and credit/debit cards for verification... god help me...
The forced age verification shocks me. It shouldn't, given how much it's been in the news, but my poor naive Millennial sensibilities still feel it's part of some dystopian nightmare that I saw in some Michael Bay sci-fi once, not my present reality.
Your phone, which you own, updated during the night, and now demands you tell it who you are through a credit card, which you may not have, or you're locked out of features. On your phone. This is outrageous.
We can jump ship -- for now -- but it's only a matter of time before these laws cover every kind of Internet access, if they remain unchecked.
> It will take me a while before I can fully migrate away... I’m gonna throw all of them away... I purchased a MNT Pocket Reform. It will take them a while to assemble and send it to me... I am considering getting a Fairphone Gen 6...
Honestly it sounds like Apple is far from lost here, but I'm excited to see updates on how the transition is, if it ever does happen.
> Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it.
Does them quitting Apple mean they're going to stop supporting MacOS users?
You know what's funny? Even China doesn't do OS verification and block everybody from every website by default.
Great timing too to ditch MacOS. Just instilled Fedora Asahi Remix 43 on may MacBook Pro M2, and both KDE and Gnome work great. So happy to be liberated form the increasingly sloppy Apple OS.
nitpick: just changed my monitor to a UWQHD one. The text on this blog occupies 1/6 of the screen, 5/6 of white. If i only use half the screen for the broswer, it would be 1/3 and 2/2. Still too much white space for me.
Anyway: Not sure why fairphone. While i like the concept it's still an android phone, eos is not much better than lineage. If i had to change today i would go again for a Pixel 8A (or a series 10) and graphene. But if the OP can wait and see, next year we should get replaceable batteries everywhere because EU, and maybe wait and see whatever motorola is cooking for graphene. Or check out the pinephone and go full linux.. i guess, when i'll have some spare cash to throw away..
We just got fucked by this today. My 22 year old daughter doesn't have a driving license or a credit card but does have a passport and it didn't work. She's now got a kids phone. I haven't tried the 20 year old yet who is in the same situation...
They have 5 days to unfuck this or I'm literally rolling out Pixels + Graphene to the family.
Exit plan for the Mac is a Linux desktop.
> Gatekeeper
"curl -LsSf https://acme.tld/install.sh | sh" and "xattr -c" ?
Far from ideal and safe but it's still a very common pattern.
> Bear in mind, I am 45 years old. I have an Apple account for 25 years, the age of my personal account alone should already verify my age.
Someone make it make sense.
> Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it.
Indeed. I'm honestly impressed that he lasted this long. My first "I'm very displeased moment" was when Java became a second-class citizen on macos. I was a Java dev at that time and had written some non-trivial apps. They weren't native perfect, but they were close enough that my highly-Apple-fan relatives didn't realize they weren't "native" until I told them. The write-once-run-anywhere dream of desktop UI software (without getting into Qt) was there in a very real way for me. I ran it on my windows machine at work, and my mac laptop and linux desktop at home. The hoops at that point were nothing compared to what they are now, and it began souring me.
For me the final straw was when I got the latest macbook pro with the latest mac monitor (all from Apple mind you) and yet there was a horrific bug that about half the time when you plugged in to the monitor, the laptop screen shut off and would never come back on until you did a hard reboot (holding the power button). That was never supposed to be possible since it was Apple hardware/software controlled top to bottom, the original promise of the vertical integration and one of the reasons we accepted the heavy lack of cross-platform compatiblity.
A little before that I used to put my macbook on the nightstand and listen to podcasts at night to fall asleep. I would dim the screen to off and have the volume at low levels. Apple rolled out a software update that suddenly caused the screen to kick on at FULL BRIGHTNESS after about 5 to 10 minutes (when the screensaver would have normally kicked in), while I'm sleeping in a completely dark room. It was so bright that it would wake me up. That bug was there for years, and myabe still is (I replaced it with a Linux laptop).
My user experience on macs was never close to bug-free, and was frankly worse than almost everything else out there. It took me a while to figure that out though.
I am all for voting with your dollar - but it sounds like maybe this user doesn't realize how bad it is out there right now for the grievances he listed.
Yeah, sure, I'll ditch my Apple Silicon MBP and switch to MNT Pocket Reform for all my computing. So I don't have ugly Liquid Glass.
Luckily, the author will face no frustrations with Ubuntu or whatever Linux OS they migrate to. Flawless UX. Zero compromises.
For anyone that is bothered by the glass effect…
-Accessibility options
-Display & Text Size
-Turn on “Reduce Transparency”
I forgot glass was even a thing as I immediately turned it on day one.
after about 10+ years in the Apple ecosystem, I'm completely done, my next machine is linux and my next phone is android.
How does this credit card thing even work? Are they just assuming if you have a credit card you must be an adult??
Haha, a fanboi got what he deserves. That's for feeding the evil with your money, for caving in to unfair demands. In your face!
This isn’t an airport, you don’t need to announce your departure.
I have FP6 with eOS, it's fine and works well. One thing that I can't do is use my phone to pay, e.g. Apple Pay.
You can't install Google Wallet - it does not work, but also defeats degoogle mindset. There were curve company that people seem to have used in the past, but seems like the company was sold to someone and now it's dead. So I have to use physical card like a boomer.
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My story is similar, somehow my air managed to update to 26' (maybe I just clicked that stupid notification window button to make it go away). I will keep my opinions on glass to myself.
Facts are: docker broke again, app launcher is whatever the hell it is, firewall with started messing up with my dns blacklists. I know you can somewhat fix it, but nixos/asahi on m2 with hyprland gives me a workflow that is superior. I just won't go back. AeroSpace just can't match.
Then the credit cards... I have my original store country elsewhere. I've then moved a few times and changed banks. Now, apple does not like my card. It won't accept it. That's it. Nothing you can do about that. And I couldn't really change the country because I have had some subscriptions and I had to wait until they expire. Meanwhile, apple killed my apple subscription I lost Music, I lost cloud storage, I lost some backups.
The thing that incredibly pissed me off is that as soon as my apple subscription got cancelled I could not even see my music library in the app. It would just prompt me with "gotta subscribe buddy" screen, which I can't.
And yes, the hardware is very good. I love my m2. But the whole software part is becoming messier and messier and I don't want to deal with it anymore.
I don't hate iOS 26 as much as I thought I would but macOS 26 has been a disaster. I'm staying with Sequoia for as long as I can. Hopefully Apple will fix this mess in macOS 27 or 28.
I see the arguments are mostly attempts to needle the individual points. But it's clear the writer has reached a personal tipping point; the last straw as it were. Some of us gave up Apple over lesser offenses years ago.
I found this to be a very odd and strange rant. The author's three issues with Apple are:
1. Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
2. mac OS26. I totally agree that this is a total fiasco from a design perspective, and liquid glass is unqualified shit. Still, I see Apple at least somewhat moving in the right direction by getting rid of Alan Dye.
3. Apple had a bug in their age verification protocol. Again, valid point, but Apple needs to follow UK law. I've seen a lot more missives arguing against requiring things like driver's licenses and other government ID, and so it seems like Apple is at least trying to go the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
To emphasize, I'm not apologizing for Apple here. In particular, much has been written about how Apple has lost their way regarding the "it just works" philosophy. But it seems like the author's main beef is against Apple's level of control, and this is just a fundamental difference in Apple's stance that has existed for about 2 decades.