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Comment by ivanstojic | Hacker News Reader

So we are moving back into a locked boot loader state of the world.

While I understand there are advantages to what Apple is doing, I worry that we will soon see lockdowns to what apps you can run on your computer. As an Apple fanboy for at least 20 years, that makes me sad.

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I hold the relatively new opinion that being a fanboy, of any company, is no longer a tenable position. There are no good guys, there are no bad guys, they're just corporations.

All we can do is evaluate every new program, every new hardware, and every company policy on its own merits and demerits.

I hold the relatively new opinion that being a fanboy, of any company, is no longer a tenable position. There are no good guys, there are no bad guys, they're just corporations.

This has been on my mind a lot recently. Of course, I knew this. But the grip of corporations on our daily live has increased a lot now that software is eating the world. So the effects are more profound.

It has also enforced my belief that it is only worth investing significant mental energy and free time in non-profit, free software communities. While they are not perfect, their interests are typically much more aligned with our own. And in the worst case, the source code, hardware designs, etc. are always available to pass the baton.

I’ve been flipping through some of the old computer magazines from the 1990s available on the Internet Archive.

- CD-ROM Today: https://archive.org/details/CDROMToday/mode/2up

- MacFormat: https://archive.org/details/Macformat44S/mode/2up

- MacAddict: https://archive.org/details/MacAddict-009-199705/mode/2up

My conclusion is that being a fanboy was never really a tenable position, it’s just that back in the 1990s, you had to spend something like $2,500 just to own a nice computer.

Or more - if you wanted new things like CD-ROM drives, good quality sound, etc. you were often well north of $3k - and when you adjust for inflation that’s like a $4500+ system today.

Bill Machrone, the long-term editor of PC Magazine, coined something that came to be known as Machrone's Law: "The computer you want always costs $5,000." Over time, that $5K system got more and more tricked out to the point where you had to really start working to get to that price point maybe 10-15 years ago.

Being a fanboy may just be a default position - a representation of justifying purchases - but the realization is new for me. It took watching companies I previously championed (Blizzard, Apple, CDPR, Google) make insane yet intentional miss-steps.

Apple has been pretty consistent with where their priorities are. Simple, controlled and high margin. They hope you as a user aligns with those but they have enough money and iPhone sales not to care - you will buy one if you need everything integrated and have to make money developing iOS and Mac store apps.

If I had money I would buy Apple stock - they got it down good strategy wise.

The snidest part of this is to rip off BSD for years and give nowt back to those that want to run BSD outside their walled garden.

Money does not justify evil.

If any BSD developers still work at Apple it would be interesting to know how they feel about it.

Other than years of patches, clang/LLVM, and WebKit? Apple is far from perfect but the odds are good that you’re using a browser which uses or was compiled with open source they’ve supported.

WebKit was based off of KHTML, which is LGPL, and thus Apple is forced to make its modified source available or violate the terms of the LGPL.

This is not wrong but misses the point: they poured a huge amount of engineering time turning a browser engine which had previously been well behind the major players into a major competitor. I used Konqueror on Linux back in the day and if you'd said that in two decades most web users would be using a KHTML-derivative it would have sounded absurd.

I also used Konqueror back in the day, and remember KHTML as being smaller and faster than Gecko. I don't really find it absurd when they've picked up arbitrary bits of *BSD cruft and let them age for a decade.

CUPS would have made the point better.

The bootloader is not locked. Here Apple is only talking about official support.

Secure Boot can and will continue to be disable-able through csrutil.

Never become a fan of companies, politicians, celebrities, religious leaders and pretty much anyone in a position to influence masses. They very much want you to, because the more you become a fan, the pinker your glasses become. Little by little you stop defending their decisions and start defending your decision of following them.

> I worry that we will soon see lockdowns to what apps you can run on your computer.

Soon? Phones are already like this, MacOs you have to flip a setting to get things off store. Windows has been flirting with the idea.

MacOs you have to flip a setting to get things off store.

This is false, until recently you could just run any signed application without changing settings. Currently any application that is signed and notarized.

(IIRC this only applies when the quarantined bit is set.)

So apple stills controls the entire system if you don't disable that checkbox. This is completely anti-user.

I'm willing to accept more flexibility in my phone because of how I perceive it.

My computer has always been a bicycle for the mind. My phone is an assistive device that I use to look at cat photos while waiting in a line.

I could not care a rat's ass if I have to replace my cat addiction with taking a paper book along with me. I do very much care for a platform where authors of myriad free/open source software can continue to create.

Even if you believed Apple was unquestionably good, they're subject to obey the orders of the various governments they do business under in a much stronger way than the practical free speech of a planet's worth of assorted developers and hackers is.

> I worry that we will soon see lockdowns to what apps you can run on your computer.

This is clearly the trajectory macOS is taking, given their move to block unapproved software behind a security setting and the enforcement of notarization. If you don't pay the Apple tax of $99/year, your software is a second-class citizen on macOS.

Sorry but what are the advantages? For Apple maybe, not for the user.

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