>Ventura dropped support for AFP and make it difficult to enable any sort of filesharing at all. In order to get the built-in samba server to work properly, you have to add a manual security exception for it using the command line.

What?

I enabled SMB sharing along with joining my Windows-based LAN at home on my M2 Macbook Air and it was by far second only to Windows in ease of setup. No command line voodoo required, just set some configs under System Settings and Bob became my uncle.

In fact it was so easy to setup the Macbook is sharing everything onto the network...

I wish Samba was this easy to setup in Linux.

Some things are heavily optimized to promote their ecosystem, I agree. But it's Apple software so it's expected they want you to use their ecosystem.

But they always provide an escape hatch. Yes random binaries are harder to run, but that's for the security of 90% of all mac users. The last 10% still have ways to run it anyway, it might be a few clicks more yes.

Overall I think it's still a very developer friendly operating system when you compare it with the competition, Windows. Which is spamming you with ads, also many Windows Defender warnings, random binary removals or refusing to execute them even when you allow it.

Holy taking the goalposts and running with them Batman.

> Apple is even doing it with file transfers. *On an iPhone* there's no way to select a default file save location; it always starts in your iCloud folder, and third party file sync tools are third class citizens.

We’re not talking about iOS here, we’re talking about macOS.

The bit about Samba is nonsense. It just works and always has. If you’re going into the command line to turn on file sharing you’re quite literally doing it wrong.

Yes it’s harder to run any random binary or delete an important system file, but that’s probably a good thing. Computers these days are people’s entire lives and therefore have to be reliable and resistant to user carelessness and external maliciousness.

You can still run totallynotavirus.app or delete Finder if you want, but it rightly makes you work for it.

> It's objective, provable fact that Apple has been steadily locking down its software ecosystem through restrictions and UI dark patterns in concert with ever-tightening hardware lockdowns.

Only if you intentionally conflate iOS with Mac OS.

Apple didn't create a new Mac bootloader that allows you to boot an unsigned third party OS without weakening the security when you boot the Mac partition because they are "locking down" Macs.