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> Most people buying computers don't want flexibility, they want reliability

I think this is a correct statement, for the reason that what was once a enthusiast activity (using computers) becomes a necessity, and tolerance of problems reduces drastically when your life/salary depends on it working flawlessly.

Imagine saying these things about a dishwasher? Who’d care if the circuitry driving the buttons controlling the pumps etc is proprietary and e waste when it’s dead.

The dishwasher doesn't connect to the internet, doesn't have all my passwords and emails, doesn't access my bank accounts and can't spy on me. This is why I don't care how it works.

More importantly, you cannot use a dishwasher to create new things the designers didn't foresee. It's not a general purpose tool but an appliance.

That's why the war on general purpose computing is so upsetting: it seeks to turn general purpose tools into appliances.

I think the point is that for the vast number of people, PCs are already appliances.

It isn’t this change that made them into appliances, it was their natural change in usage - as noted by a previous poster.

For a lot of people -- yes.

But this will affect the future programmers and tinkerers, too. It's as if they are no longer wanted. "But, " you could argue, "hobbyists and enthusiasts can buy specialized hardware". Well, many if not most of the generation of enthusiasts that made the computing world of today possible started with general purpose hardware, not special hardware. They took the common hardware of their day and built stuff with it, doing things that were often not entirely foreseen by the makers of said hardware. And they didn't ask for permission.

If the world of tomorrow consists of most people using gadgets like iphones and ipads, and in order to tinker you need special-purpose hardware, I think we're shooting future kids in their collective feet.

You’re probably right. That said what is an example of something you can’t do note that you could do with more open HW, at a personal level. I get that distributing apps at scale isn’t doable without going through some store . But at a personal level what are the types of things that tinkerers can’t do with a Mac or Arm based PC?

They are not appliances. When I buy an appliance I expect to know by the marketing brochures in advance exactly what it will do, and I expect it to do exactly that until it wears out. When I buy a phone or game system I expect to install new functions on it: things not even thought about by the manufacture.

consumer demand for malware-free (but not vendor spyware-free) platforms is driving this in a big way

The thing is, you can eat your cake and have it too. Various distributions (e.g. Ubuntu and Fedora) already use secure boot to verify the bootloader - kernel - module chain. There is no reason that this couldn't be extended to e.g. only running signed Flatpaks too. And yet, at the same time, you can boot these distributions without secure boot, load unsigned kernel modules, etc.

It is true that a combination of code signing and sandboxing provides a lot of additional protections. But a less consumer-hostile flavor could be where by default the system is restrictive, but the user always has the power to disable certain or all security mechanisms.

The problem is that it is not only about security and protecting against malware for these vendors. It's also about funneling applications and subscriptions through their app stores, so that they can take their 30% cuts. They don't just want to profit from the initial sale, but also the continued use of a system. The security argument is just used to trap users in their app store ecosystems.

What makes this more unfortunate is that a large contingent of the Linux community is opposed to better security measures by default. This is why many Linux distributions are still stuck in a 90ies threat model where gaining UID 0 access is what one should protect against, while applications can freely roam in users' home directories. Consequently, there are only few Linux distributions that are competitive to iOS or macOS when it comes to desktop security.

Even Android is better in regards to default security configuration.

> Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage

There is a massive practical upside of this. It makes thefts worthless, or almost worthless as the only value is spare parts.

It worked like a charm for phones. Thefts of smarphones were rising very rapidly but then diminished as they become worthless to steal.

However it would be nice to be able to disable this for allowing usage in offline environment.

> Thefts of smarphones were rising very rapidly but then diminished

Did it really? In absence of official statistics, I think it just got normalized. When everyone has a monthly contract with insurance, it's not a tragedy if the phone gets stolen: you make a call, they send you a new phone, life goes on.

In the UK at least, phones do get stolen all over the place, it's just not reported anymore because it's simply a fact of life.

Yeah they did. Substantially https://www.google.fi/amp/s/cbslocal.com/2018/01/31/despite-...

” Cell phone robberies and thefts from persons went down 50 percent in the first two years after the kill switch became mandatory on phones. In the past two years they fell again by another 8 percent, to a total of 1,754 last year.” 2018

Not only that. Perhaps most importantly it curbed the growth rate.

> Modifying the signed apps or OS to remove their phone home and spying will be impossible, like iOS is today.

Except if you are the OS maker bending over to a dictatorship like we already have today.

At least with open source eyeballs are allowed to investigate and change without breaking some nonsense ToS.

I hope initiatives like puri.sm thrive.

Maybe the iPhone model? But definitely not the Xbox one. In the newest console, every part of the console is designed not to trust each other. IIRC, even the CPU instructions are encrypted. This is in order to assure game developers that their games will not be pirated -- but I suspect it might be paying quite a large performance price. I don't think Microsoft or Apple need that much distrust of their own packages in regular computing.

The anti-piracy drive is the main one, IMO. The money from services far outweighs the money from the sale of the hardware, in the long run for most types of users on most devices.

It's my understanding that disabling system integrity protection (SIP) on M1 macs immediately disables its new ability to run iOS apps from the iOS App Store, for precisely this reason.

As for the hardware protections, already we have iPhones doing this with their cameras and screens and fingerprint readers and the like, ostensibly for security but who knows if it's just to kill the third party repair market.

I don't think I'm telling any tales out of school when I say that Apple would prefer nobody ever buy a formerly-broken, repaired, secondhand iPhone or iPad.

"The money from services far outweighs the money from the sale of the hardware, in the long run for most types of users on most devices."

I believe that this is true for the USA market but not true for many markets worldwide. From the perspective of the developing world (containing most of the users and most of the devices, but not most of the revenue), the market is very different, much less relevance of iOS/Apple Store, much higher preference for free apps instead of service subscriptions, etc.

This is a very Apple-centric view. A reminder:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/576473/united-states-qua...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...

It's not just Apple that's shipping AMD and Intel chips with a special security coprocessor (ME/PSP) embedded in the CPU that only boots signed, unmodifiable code: everyone in that marketshare table is doing so.

What OS does the main CPU run? Usually the one from Microsoft, the vendor with specific state-of-the-art expertise in locking down the platforms on which they operate stores (xbox).

Apple is simply ahead of the curve here; Microsoft (and the entirety of the PC market they run on) will get there soon enough.

I hope you're right and I'm totally wrong, but everything I see with regards to platform stores, DRM, and "cryptographic integrity of software" as it's termed leads me to believe that in a relatively short period of time (10 years, +/-5) basically nothing cheap and performant off the shelf will run open OSes or common software without significant difficulty.

> Already every mac available for purchase, even the Intel ones, requires online activation to wipe and reinstall the storage:

I was under the impression that activation can be circumvented by setting the secure boot mode to something less than "maximum security", at least on Intel Macs. Is that a different mechanism then?

You are confusing signed boot security with the activation of the T2 chip.

The T2/M1 still needs activation data before it will do anything (like let you use the touchbar or touchid or secure enclave or even talk to the SSD) after a disk wipe.

This [online activation] is done after the recovery kernel has already booted from the USB install media. Signed boot and T2/M1 activation are different things entirely.

>Most people buying computers don't want flexibility

Ancient greeks knew this idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procrustes

This is the kind of comment dictators love. Crushed spirits. It's a cold, emotionless, frank extrapolation to a future without hope. You've already given up. Maybe you can drag a few more down with you.

My comment didn't suggest if this future is good or bad, or if I am pleased or dismayed by the state of affairs. I stuck to the facts and my own predictions about future facts and left my emotional opinions out of it.

Perhaps these sort of closed systems are crushing to you, as you have correctly assumed that they are to me. They aren't to most people: the iPhone is wildly popular. Many people will be very happy to get new M1 macs, xboxes, and iPhones this christmas.

Most people prefer the conveniences of central management, having never personally experienced the terrifying and violent failure modes of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship.

I believe most people like what they're told to like. I think a small number of taste makers can change the future drastically and you never know how your words will influence people. If you ever want it to be different, you and I and everyone who cares have to simply say that it is different.

If you want it to be different, you have to ignore them and get people jazzed about a more open future. Eventually one of us will either become famous enough for us to do something about it, or inspire someone else.

> Most people prefer the conveniences of central management

To be fair, it's a pretty broad stretch to compare buying an xbox to "terrifying and violent failure modes of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship".

The console experience is easy to understand for non-technical folk, is vertically integrated (you buy a headset with the correct label and you can voice chat with your friends, you know you have the prerequisite account to play X game on your platform), is fully usable with a controller and designed from the ground up for a tv.

The gaming PC experience is... far worse. If you buy a $1000 gaming PC, you're going to need to install steam/epic/gog/xbox/origin/ea to play the top 5 games of the year, deal with awful audio issues, masses of account systems with varying levels of "party" support, hardware/driver incompatibilities, background software issues (antivirus, etc), varied levels of online play/party support, mixed support for controller/kbm, the list goes on. Networking issues? Hope you don't accidentally have a double NAT, or you might run into [0]. That's before touching on the actual open way of running proton on linux (You have an Nvidia card? tough. Have an AMD card? that's great, just compile your own mesa).

It's tempting to distill this down to "convenience", but it's much more than that. For many people (including myself, a professional programmer) that convenience is the difference between gaming being a way I want to spend my time or not. I'm not choosing between an open and closed device, I'm choosing between a closed device or no device.

[0] https://support.xbox.com/en-US/help/hardware-network/connect... (disclaimer: I work for Epic, we have skin in this, but this is my own personal experience, and I don't work on the store)

I'm comparing the future of all commonly available computing devices (phones, PCs, consoles, et c) following the xbox model to terrifying and violent failure modes of ubiquitous surveillance and censorship.

When all systems available follow only these cryptographically enforced rules, your tools will make it impossible for you to do basic human life tasks without being censored and surveilled.

I encourage you to study what happens to societies that go through that.

I would prefer folks like yourself choose no device.

I love comments like these.

Android phones largely out number iOS devices and phone home far more than iOS devices.

This illusion of caring about "security" or "privacy rights" that hackernews expresses never ever passes the sniff test.

They never claimed that Android vendors aren't facing similar issues.

And I think your point just goes to show how easily Apple could turn around the public perception of this issue if they just allowed sideloading.

They never claimed that Android vendors aren't facing similar issues.

No, but like many here they couldn't stop bleeting about Apple.

And what is the problem with that? It's a salient example.

Making sure that Apple is represented in an equal and positive light should be a small concern compared to these consumer device privacy issues that affect all vendors.