alt Hacker NewsApple Just Lost Me
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Gatekeeping is trivially turned off by those who won't footgun themselves by dragging literal garbage from the Internet into their system. It is a good feature for most macOS users. They only care about your verification woes a tiniest bit, if at all. They need a walled garden, Apple gives one to them, it's a product-market fit, while power users are given a reasonable off-ramp.
The other issues are more serious, especially macOS 25, but again, how much of that deeply affects the vast majority of actual paying customers who buy Macbooks? As long as Apple learned their lesson and will do another one of those bugfix OS releases they've done before, no long lasting harm done.
Using credit cards for age verification is certainly dumb, but age verification is coming and most people see the need for it. You can disagree that there is a need for it (entirely different discussion), but you must acknowledge the broad support for it at least.
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!
Apple bothers me less than Microsoft. At least Apple has been consistent. "Our hardware, our software"... while Microsoft plays all these games. At the end of the day, there's never been a solution for people who care about this stuff other than Linux.
Point taken that Apple hardware isn't ideal anymore, but of course the problem is neither is Windows or Chrome OS. I can switch myself over to Linux now easily enough, but what about the rest of the family? Kids need their tablets with their shows downloaded, so good luck doing that without a chrome tablet or an iPad.
For anyone at Apple: your company is on fire. You’re making too much money to notice but Apple is literally on fire.
This problem is everywhere in your products and it’s clear the passion for high quality work is gone from the company.
Apple will not survive at luxury prices and Google level service.
Building on the incredible success of MacOS 26 Tahoe, I can hardly wait for MacOS 27 Tehran.
Sounds like a lot of their problem boils down to them living in a nanny surveillance state.
Apple has gone from a company with a long term vision of the future and their part in it to a quarterly financial report gradient climber. This is what happens to every company when it loses it's founder(s). They have enough money and market influence to be a problem for all of us for the next 30 years or so.
If he's pissed at this, imagine how pissed he'll become when he enters the ridiculous Android ecosystem.
Anyway, he's free to choose whatever, but I have to nitpick here:
1. macOS 26 - a fiasco? Come on. A lot of like the liquid glass. On macOS I hardly notice it, but on iOS is actually beautiful to me. Also a long time macOS user, since 2003 btw. You can always dampen it using accessibility settings.
2. Age verification ? First time I've heard of it. Also on latest iOS. But then I'm also not in the UK.
3. "Interfaces built with AppKit or SwiftUI that rendered perfect, are now overlapping controls and clipping stuff. They have no consistency at all in terms of icons, placement, corners…". I'm all for constructive criticism. But where are you seeing this? I've got 8-9 apps open and none are inconsistent in my view. I'm picky about these things too. Genuinely I'd like to know.
Can the Apple Store help people with verifications? This seems like a reasonable backup technique plus gets people in the store where they can spend money.
I wish Nvidia would drop a Linux laptop so we could all have a 3rd option.
I know, this exists in some form or another, eg Dell, but meh.
And I know Jony Ive / Altman are working on something but Altman, uhg.
You’ll be back. Have you tried Windows 11 lately? Want an exercise in self-restraint not plowing yours fist through your monitor? Use Windows. Microsoft as Steve Jobs said has no taste. They hire the cheapest international engineers who take zero accountability and perfection in their work. Everything is just, that will do. Good enough.
I'm asking genuinely, how is this top of HN? The comments seem to indicate that HN overall doesn't find this article to be valuable at its face.
Seems to happen a lot with "ragequitting" posts. I feel like I could write "Microsoft Just Lost Me" and it could get to the top.
I didn't know MNT existed
The laptops seem... crazy enough. And what you get for your buck is even less than with normal PC manufacturers, let alone Apple. You get CPU that is slow for a phone. For 1300 USD.
On the other hand I have a weird urge to buy one and use as a daily.
The gatekeeping, the age identification issues are both "real problems", that compound, from the same root.
Anonymity allows one to behave in ways they would not "in public", with your neighbors, or co workers (for the most part). Be that building malware, or kids doing things they should not, and the people and business that take advantage of that.
I don't think the UK law is a good one, but when major companies continuously fail at their social responsibility I understand why people want the government to step in. I don't think the friction apple creates is a great user experience but it is better than the old approach that ended up with systems riddled with malware and spyware because normal users don't think like the folks who built technology.
Could the law have been written better: sure. "More control" over their Childs devices would have been the way. Is there a solution to the friction with apple... maybe but I'm not sure it would be that much of an improvement (its purpose IS to slow you down).
I'm in the same boat, but only because of the age verification thing.
I was never an Apple maximalist to begin with, I just have an iPhone and use a Mac at work because I have to (and will continue to), but I just turned off auto-updates on my iPhone and will never buy a new Apple device.
>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.
This is the way ID verification is going in the USA and the reasons for it seem clear. A human person is only useful to a corporation if they have money to give the corporation. If you don't have provable money, either through a third party corporate payment service willing to pay for you sometime later (a credit card) or by giving a corporation your login details to your bank account (ie, Plaid), then you're not a human.
It clear what a bot is now: anything that doesn't have provable money.
I like liquid glass. I liked it since the first betas i tried. Am i the only one
Yeah, it has pretty much all gone to shit.
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Another nail in the coffin, but the author fails to realize that the only viable answer here is to move towards relying on your smartphone as little as possible. You can get a fairphone, or whatever, but will anything in the real world (outside of old fashioned websites) actually talk to the thing?
Can we all just agree that cyber criminals suck? Especially if you are a legit developer who wants to offer useful apps to the world?
Don't get me wrong, I can't stand surveillance, and I think age verification is virtue signaling and will have very little affect on actual cyber crime. We need a better way to stop online abuse.
But certificates, GateKeeper, app certification, app stores etc. are all supposed to mitigate serious harm from bad actors.
We need to get much better at security in general if we want to have nice things.
These "breaking up with Apple" stories pop up from time to time here. Cracks me up because they all follow the same pattern:
"I'm done with Apple. I've been a Mac user since since $EARLY_YEAR. I loved using $OLD_APPLE_HARDWARE to work on $VARIOUS_INTERESTING_PROJECTS. I fondly recall $FORMATIVE_APPLE_MEMORY.
But they've gone too far. $NEW_APPLE_ENSHITTIFICATION is the last straw, I can't do this any more. This will be hard because $REASONS. But I'm going to adopt $PLATFORM because it's the right thing to do."
Most of them mention Steve Jobs but this one didn't actually.
Age verification has been put into law across the world over the last year. Apple doesn’t have a choice.
Worst part about liquid glass changes is that it was probably rushed so they could cover for lack of AI features that they promised a year ago
> they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score.
Strong take from a random nobody.
It will only get worse. The bureaucracy has taken over at these companies. Contrarian viewpoints are severely punished, and you need contrarians to speak up when things suck.
I find it so odd to have such an extreme response to Apple all-of-the-sudden. Like they've been so great all of these years and only just now you're deciding to make such an extreme switch that you're going to choose the worst possible hardware imaginable because you can't even stomach buying a decent GNU/Linux laptop from Dell or Lenovo or Framework or System76? Jeeze. That little puny 8GB ARM laptop you're choosing instead is going to be painfully slow compared to whatever Mac you're coming from. At least check out the System76 laptops - some I do believe come fully open-source with Coreboot if that's all-of-the-sudden so important to you.
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.