I’m glad I left the macOS-ecosystem in 2012 for good in favor of Gentoo. Apple as a company is just milking and babysitting their customers, even if they don’t want to.
I know many professionals that are locked within macOS due to software/habit, and I pity them.
I made the switch by replacing each program with an open source one, one after the other. The restrictions mentioned in the article will make this even harder to achieve unless open source developers shell out the 100$ per year, which is highly unlikely. It’s all about keeping up the walled garden.
The ability to use certain closed source software (Adobe, many electron apps built by startups).
Alfred (rofi/dmenu/etc are not even close without significant effort to configure them)
The “help” button at the top of the screen which allows you to search context menus. (This existed in an older version of Unity but now afaik no longer exists in any modern DE.)
Separation of control/command (you can use command+C in terminal instead of control+shift+c or just copying everything that gets highlighted, no need to mentally context switch every time you go between the Terminal and other apps).
nicer looking websites (look at how much better websites look in a default Ubuntu/Fedora/whatever install vs MacOS, I think it’s fonts but even after copying all my MacOS fonts to Fedora it’s still not the same).
tight hardware integration (longer battery life, fingerprint reader to unlock)
Integration with iOS (easily send files between my phone and laptop via AirDrop; start reading a lobste.rs article on my phone and finish on my laptop)
Finder preview (press spacebar to preview a file quickly)
Many of the above can be done on Linux, but either require a bunch of manual configuration or are clunky to use even after configured.
Except maybe that first point, I really wouldn’t call that “a significant productivity boost”. Especially considering I’d have to walk into a vendor lock-in and buy overpriced baubles with weird keyboards etc.
If I believed hard enough that taking some pill would make me more productive, it might very well do so even if it didn’t contain any active substance. I’ve heard this “productivity talk” from Apple users multiple times and never got any reason to believe it’s actually something more than just a placebo effect taking place.
It’d be very interesting to see a controlled study on this. We’d define productivity as solving programming tasks, replying to e-mails, writing articles etc and see what the differences really are.
Like… OK. Everyone needs a different environment and I can imagine some people actually being more productive within Apple’s ecosystem, but it’s more about personal preferences than anything else. I’d expect all groups (Mac-, Windows-, Linux-with-GNOME-, Linux-with-KDE-, … users) to have roughly the same productivity, with some people being slightly more productive in certain environments, but probably not dramatically (assuming they’re motivated to actually try hard enough – so the study would probably have to be organized as a challenge with some neat prizes).
Basically what I’m trying to say is that it comes to reaching some optimal setup and even though my setup isn’t optimal at all, by migrating to macOS I’d gain very little and lose a lot. That’s because I’ve spent quite some time reaching the setup that works at least this well for me. I suppose that might be the case with most power users and some productivity boost is most likely to be expected with people who tried using Windows or Ubuntu in default configuration, didn’t like it and then got a MacBook. But I’m still kind of skeptical about its magnitude.
Maybe also integration with iOS, but the rest is just what one’s used to. OSX and Windows feel clunky and limiting to me because I’m used to Unix, especially wrt cross platform development.
You would be less productive at the beginning of the transition, yes. But you would eventually develop new workflows and then regain productivity.
I used to be 100% on macOS until a few years ago. My last 2 jobs I’ve been 100% on Linux and haven’t had any problems. I can install all of the corporate software on my Linux machine. I also haven’t seen any cuts in my paycheck… still making a ton of money (I think). ^_^’
I work on web services and most of our software runs on Linux. I got tired of learning 2 OSes. I personally didn’t find any value in running macOS to run Linux (in containers or via SSH). So I cut out the middleman. I also hated that macOS is Linux-like, but not actually. For example, you might end up learning the wrong nc or sed on macOS. Super annoying when debugging.
I do get the appeal of macOS and still recommend it to my family, but as a developer, I value the simplicity of learning 1 set of tools over vanity features. Whenever I have to switch to macOS, my productivity takes a huge hit, but that’s because I’ve learned Linux workflows.
Totally understandable, and I’m not arguing that. There are many people making a really good living working with Macs, and admittedly, Macs are probably the greatest machines for creative works and are superior in terms of color space handling and font rendering, to just name two things.
Nevertheless, the price you pay for this advantage will grow further and further. If you only do it for work, that’s fine of course, godspeed to you! But if you look at it long-term, it looks rather bleak.
If the best thing to happen to my computing career was learning Unix and the second best thing was finding Cygwin for Windows (a lifesaver), the worst decision was getting a MacBook at the end of 2019. Most frustrating keyboard and mouse (Magic Mouse) I have ever used in almost 50 years of using keyboards and X years of using mice. Just awful keyboard design, layout, touch & feel, disaster of a touchbar, no universality or standardization with anything but Macs.
I use multiple machines at home/work and I want everything to be configured the same everywhere to ease transitions between machines. Linux and Windows, I can configure to be sufficiently similar, but it’s virtually impossible with a MacBook and MacOS.
I figured that with 37 years to figure it out and with so many Linux devs using a Mac, Apple would have had to get their act together. Boy, was I wrong. Can’t wait to be done with it and get back to sanity.
Mac hardware 10 years ago was the best on the market, and I loved using it. I am still using an old Apple USB Keyboard because I haven’t found anything matching its quality and feel. Apple changed under Tim Cook, and it will change even further.
What they probably don’t realize is that developers might not make the biggest portion of their revenue, but they keep the ecosystem alive. I like to call this fallacy the “fallacy of the gaussian belly”, because they probably only aim their efforts on the consumers (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc.) and neglect the professional segment because it doesn’t make them as much money.
I hope I’m not sounding like an armchair-CEO here, but in my opinion they shouldn’t even penny-squeeze the Mac customers that much. What the developers do in turn for the ecosystem is much more valuable than just mere stockholder-profits and market value.
In the end, I see the problem in public trading and having a bean-counter at the top. The goals shift and the company goes down in the long-term. And now you might say “Why can you say that when Apple has just passed 2 billion market value?”. Just look at the market data of Apple before 1997. Before its demise under Sculley, Apple was at its most profitable, and just like Cook Sculley is a bean-counter. This degradation-process won’t be sudden and there were more factors at play in 1997, but it will happen in the long-term (10 years).
I joined the Apple ecosystem as the owner of a PowerMac G3 B&W that was given to my dad by a friend in 2007. I became a massive fanboy pretty quickly. 13 years later, and I’m embarrassed at how far my ‘sports team’ have fallen. The next 20 years are gonna be a rough ride and I don’t plan to stay for long.
It’s a good call to leave the sinking ship. I’m sure the ARM-Macs will be successful, but they will just be more locked down and not suitable for anyone interested and invested in open source software.
Sometimes MacOS feels like the point-and-click adventure games of the 1990s. The way to see all the resolutions supported by an external display is to Option-click on a radio button in System Preferences.
I feel like MacOS has a weird history of GUI actions being “special” in these weird ways. Reminds me a bit of how for a while Windows wasn’t great at offering good non-GUI alternatives for actions, with the added obfuscation that Apple doesn’t really need to do much for enterprise vendors relative to Microsoft
Apple UI is all about progressive disclosure. UI starts simple, and maybe you use it that way forever, but if you want more complexity, you dig to reveal it. The idea is that this pattern makes complex domains (like whole apps) approachable. The most common one or two options are in a window toolbar, less common options are in the app’s Preferences window, rare ones are in menu bar items that show a variant when you hold a modifier key. But there are secret ones too, in the user defaults service, AppleScript, and other places not revealed by graphical UI at all. In that vein, there’s this piece of buried treasure to get around Gatekeeper. I can only think it’s like this because Apple does not want anyone to use it unless they know what they’re doing, the way Quake hid the entrance to Nightmare difficulty in a secret. On the other hand, if you do know about it, it’s relatively convenient to sidestep Gatekeeper as needed. It’s convenient because this time there is a gesture, a shortcut, to do one of the secret things. Usually this level of option would mean going to the command line, but the right-click is a compromise to make it suck less for power users.
I don’t know if I’d make the same decision, to place this at the “secret” level of disclosure. A new Mac user is not necessarily a security novice; wouldn’t this repel new power users? But I do see the user safety benefits.
On the other hand, the best way to avoid malware is to pay attention to the software you run. Some users are awfully bad at this.
Having an escape hatch for experts is nice, but bad things will happen if vulnerable users can find it and use it without realizing the danger because malware could instruct them how to bypass the app store.
A lot of times I think that Apple is doing a lot to ease the life to it’s users. Like here, by providing this level of protection that you don’t get with e.g. Windows.
Other times I think they’re doing this to create their walked garden and lock people in.
Most times I think it’s actually both. They both want to lock everybody on and make the most money. They’re pretty successful there. And they’re doing it by also providing this security enhancement and many other QOL improvements for the lay use.
That it’s inconvenient for a few grumpy old men matter in either of their goals.
I think is right. In fact, I think that they’ve talked themselves into a position where the best way to keep your customers safe is also the best way to make a lot of money for Apple. That’s arguable, of course, but motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
People have repeatedly compared Apple’s publicly-reported revenue numbers to even wildly optimistic estimates of the number of people paying $100/year for a developer account, and it would just be a microscopic amount of money compared to the totality of what Apple takes in from everything else.
So if you want to assert a nefarious motive for code signing, you’ll need a different nefarious motive.
I kind of like the requirement that I need to right-click to run a program that has not been notirized. To me, it’s not a problem, but it will save my mom from running random crap mindlessly.
I can see the logic in the system, and browsers tend to do quite well with it when accessing a site with a broken certificate. But this is way more than just a right click.
no, the program could be distributed unsigned and then signed with an ad-hoc signature on the destination computer. However as the article says:
Significant restrictions apply to the use of ad-hoc signed code; consult documentation before using this.
And maybe not everything in those systems would work within those significant restrictions (I would be very surprised if you could sign a debugger ad-hoc and still use the ptrace call, for example).
To be fair Windows 10 does nearly the same thing. If you try to run an exe that isn’t code-signed, you get the “Windows Protected Your PC” alert. and it hides the “run anyway” button unless you click a “more info” link. Code signing is crazy expensive it’s like $500 for only 2 years. And even after buying the code signing cert, you still have to get a minimum number of installs before your exe is really trusted.
This is fine. Anyone who is too much of a novice to disable the security settings surrounding an app downloaded from the internet, probably should not be running executables downloaded from the internet.
I’ve never had any problem with the more restrictive application signing restrictions. I just disable them for the apps I know are good.
This doesn’t even get into things like unsigned mdimporter bundles (custom Spotlight plugins to allow searching through contents of specific file types) and other non-.app bundles.
After running Migration Assisstant, I was getting an annoying dialog everytime an ePub would finish downloading. Since it was macOS running the bundle and not me, and you can’t “open” a non-.app bundle, I could never figure out how to get rid of the disruptive dialogs and just let the plugin do its job. This despite the fact that normal apps I download show an “Open” button on the dialog without having to right click (and no “Move to Bin” button like the bundle alert dialog kept showing).
Finally, I figured it out: there’s an extended attribute called com.apple.quarantine that you can recursively delete from the bundle.
I’m glad I left the macOS-ecosystem in 2012 for good in favor of Gentoo. Apple as a company is just milking and babysitting their customers, even if they don’t want to.
I know many professionals that are locked within macOS due to software/habit, and I pity them.
I made the switch by replacing each program with an open source one, one after the other. The restrictions mentioned in the article will make this even harder to achieve unless open source developers shell out the 100$ per year, which is highly unlikely. It’s all about keeping up the walled garden.
Apple can screw themselves.
I would be significantly less productive and make a ton less money if I went /back/ to Linux/BSD on the desktop.
What is the productivity boost that macOS gives you compared to Linux/BSD?
A quick list off the top of my head:
Many of the above can be done on Linux, but either require a bunch of manual configuration or are clunky to use even after configured.
Except maybe that first point, I really wouldn’t call that “a significant productivity boost”. Especially considering I’d have to walk into a vendor lock-in and buy overpriced baubles with weird keyboards etc.
You’re right; it’s not one big thing, it’s a bunch of little things that make it more productive for me.
If I believed hard enough that taking some pill would make me more productive, it might very well do so even if it didn’t contain any active substance. I’ve heard this “productivity talk” from Apple users multiple times and never got any reason to believe it’s actually something more than just a placebo effect taking place.
It’d be very interesting to see a controlled study on this. We’d define productivity as solving programming tasks, replying to e-mails, writing articles etc and see what the differences really are.
Like… OK. Everyone needs a different environment and I can imagine some people actually being more productive within Apple’s ecosystem, but it’s more about personal preferences than anything else. I’d expect all groups (Mac-, Windows-, Linux-with-GNOME-, Linux-with-KDE-, … users) to have roughly the same productivity, with some people being slightly more productive in certain environments, but probably not dramatically (assuming they’re motivated to actually try hard enough – so the study would probably have to be organized as a challenge with some neat prizes).
Basically what I’m trying to say is that it comes to reaching some optimal setup and even though my setup isn’t optimal at all, by migrating to macOS I’d gain very little and lose a lot. That’s because I’ve spent quite some time reaching the setup that works at least this well for me. I suppose that might be the case with most power users and some productivity boost is most likely to be expected with people who tried using Windows or Ubuntu in default configuration, didn’t like it and then got a MacBook. But I’m still kind of skeptical about its magnitude.
Maybe also integration with iOS, but the rest is just what one’s used to. OSX and Windows feel clunky and limiting to me because I’m used to Unix, especially wrt cross platform development.
It’s all anecdotal.
The hardware/software cohesion is nigh impossible to beat.
You would be less productive at the beginning of the transition, yes. But you would eventually develop new workflows and then regain productivity.
I used to be 100% on macOS until a few years ago. My last 2 jobs I’ve been 100% on Linux and haven’t had any problems. I can install all of the corporate software on my Linux machine. I also haven’t seen any cuts in my paycheck… still making a ton of money (I think). ^_^’
I work on web services and most of our software runs on Linux. I got tired of learning 2 OSes. I personally didn’t find any value in running macOS to run Linux (in containers or via SSH). So I cut out the middleman. I also hated that macOS is Linux-like, but not actually. For example, you might end up learning the wrong
ncorsedon macOS. Super annoying when debugging.I do get the appeal of macOS and still recommend it to my family, but as a developer, I value the simplicity of learning 1 set of tools over vanity features. Whenever I have to switch to macOS, my productivity takes a huge hit, but that’s because I’ve learned Linux workflows.
Totally understandable, and I’m not arguing that. There are many people making a really good living working with Macs, and admittedly, Macs are probably the greatest machines for creative works and are superior in terms of color space handling and font rendering, to just name two things.
Nevertheless, the price you pay for this advantage will grow further and further. If you only do it for work, that’s fine of course, godspeed to you! But if you look at it long-term, it looks rather bleak.
If the best thing to happen to my computing career was learning Unix and the second best thing was finding Cygwin for Windows (a lifesaver), the worst decision was getting a MacBook at the end of 2019. Most frustrating keyboard and mouse (Magic Mouse) I have ever used in almost 50 years of using keyboards and X years of using mice. Just awful keyboard design, layout, touch & feel, disaster of a touchbar, no universality or standardization with anything but Macs.
I use multiple machines at home/work and I want everything to be configured the same everywhere to ease transitions between machines. Linux and Windows, I can configure to be sufficiently similar, but it’s virtually impossible with a MacBook and MacOS.
I figured that with 37 years to figure it out and with so many Linux devs using a Mac, Apple would have had to get their act together. Boy, was I wrong. Can’t wait to be done with it and get back to sanity.
Mac hardware 10 years ago was the best on the market, and I loved using it. I am still using an old Apple USB Keyboard because I haven’t found anything matching its quality and feel. Apple changed under Tim Cook, and it will change even further.
What they probably don’t realize is that developers might not make the biggest portion of their revenue, but they keep the ecosystem alive. I like to call this fallacy the “fallacy of the gaussian belly”, because they probably only aim their efforts on the consumers (iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, etc.) and neglect the professional segment because it doesn’t make them as much money.
I hope I’m not sounding like an armchair-CEO here, but in my opinion they shouldn’t even penny-squeeze the Mac customers that much. What the developers do in turn for the ecosystem is much more valuable than just mere stockholder-profits and market value.
In the end, I see the problem in public trading and having a bean-counter at the top. The goals shift and the company goes down in the long-term. And now you might say “Why can you say that when Apple has just passed 2 billion market value?”. Just look at the market data of Apple before 1997. Before its demise under Sculley, Apple was at its most profitable, and just like Cook Sculley is a bean-counter. This degradation-process won’t be sudden and there were more factors at play in 1997, but it will happen in the long-term (10 years).
I joined the Apple ecosystem as the owner of a PowerMac G3 B&W that was given to my dad by a friend in 2007. I became a massive fanboy pretty quickly. 13 years later, and I’m embarrassed at how far my ‘sports team’ have fallen. The next 20 years are gonna be a rough ride and I don’t plan to stay for long.
It’s a good call to leave the sinking ship. I’m sure the ARM-Macs will be successful, but they will just be more locked down and not suitable for anyone interested and invested in open source software.
TIL. I would never expect right-click Open to do anything different to double-clicking the icon.
Sometimes MacOS feels like the point-and-click adventure games of the 1990s. The way to see all the resolutions supported by an external display is to Option-click on a radio button in System Preferences.
Oof, I just tried pressing Option in the Displays prefpane and a “Detect Displays” button magically appears and disappears. What else.
Hold Option when clicking on “Scaled” in the resolution chooser. I think it only works on external displays.
I feel like MacOS has a weird history of GUI actions being “special” in these weird ways. Reminds me a bit of how for a while Windows wasn’t great at offering good non-GUI alternatives for actions, with the added obfuscation that Apple doesn’t really need to do much for enterprise vendors relative to Microsoft
This reminded me of a short story: Before the law sits a Gatekeeper
This is really nicely assembled. Well worth the click.
Turns out lay people can get through this, if given the right coaching and the wrong information: TurboTax apparently didn’t bother to sign their binary, so the official docs tell people to go down this route D: https://ttlc.intuit.com/community/troubleshooting/help/turbotax-for-mac-won-t-open-when-installed/01/26611
You’d expect that a big company (software company even) would find someone to go through the trouble of properly signing the binary, …
Apple UI is all about progressive disclosure. UI starts simple, and maybe you use it that way forever, but if you want more complexity, you dig to reveal it. The idea is that this pattern makes complex domains (like whole apps) approachable. The most common one or two options are in a window toolbar, less common options are in the app’s Preferences window, rare ones are in menu bar items that show a variant when you hold a modifier key. But there are secret ones too, in the user defaults service, AppleScript, and other places not revealed by graphical UI at all. In that vein, there’s this piece of buried treasure to get around Gatekeeper. I can only think it’s like this because Apple does not want anyone to use it unless they know what they’re doing, the way Quake hid the entrance to Nightmare difficulty in a secret. On the other hand, if you do know about it, it’s relatively convenient to sidestep Gatekeeper as needed. It’s convenient because this time there is a gesture, a shortcut, to do one of the secret things. Usually this level of option would mean going to the command line, but the right-click is a compromise to make it suck less for power users.
I don’t know if I’d make the same decision, to place this at the “secret” level of disclosure. A new Mac user is not necessarily a security novice; wouldn’t this repel new power users? But I do see the user safety benefits.
On the other hand, the best way to avoid malware is to pay attention to the software you run. Some users are awfully bad at this.
Having an escape hatch for experts is nice, but bad things will happen if vulnerable users can find it and use it without realizing the danger because malware could instruct them how to bypass the app store.
A lot of times I think that Apple is doing a lot to ease the life to it’s users. Like here, by providing this level of protection that you don’t get with e.g. Windows.
Other times I think they’re doing this to create their walked garden and lock people in.
Most times I think it’s actually both. They both want to lock everybody on and make the most money. They’re pretty successful there. And they’re doing it by also providing this security enhancement and many other QOL improvements for the lay use.
That it’s inconvenient for a few grumpy old men matter in either of their goals.
ETA: that doesn’t make me less grumpy.
I think is right. In fact, I think that they’ve talked themselves into a position where the best way to keep your customers safe is also the best way to make a lot of money for Apple. That’s arguable, of course, but motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
People have repeatedly compared Apple’s publicly-reported revenue numbers to even wildly optimistic estimates of the number of people paying $100/year for a developer account, and it would just be a microscopic amount of money compared to the totality of what Apple takes in from everything else.
So if you want to assert a nefarious motive for code signing, you’ll need a different nefarious motive.
I was speaking more of their overall strategy w/r/t services. Code signing seems like a pretty good idea.
I kind of like the requirement that I need to right-click to run a program that has not been notirized. To me, it’s not a problem, but it will save my mom from running random crap mindlessly.
I can see the logic in the system, and browsers tend to do quite well with it when accessing a site with a broken certificate. But this is way more than just a right click.
Does this mean all the programs distributed with brew and pkg must be signed?
no, the program could be distributed unsigned and then signed with an ad-hoc signature on the destination computer. However as the article says:
And maybe not everything in those systems would work within those significant restrictions (I would be very surprised if you could sign a debugger ad-hoc and still use the ptrace call, for example).
To be fair Windows 10 does nearly the same thing. If you try to run an exe that isn’t code-signed, you get the “Windows Protected Your PC” alert. and it hides the “run anyway” button unless you click a “more info” link. Code signing is crazy expensive it’s like $500 for only 2 years. And even after buying the code signing cert, you still have to get a minimum number of installs before your exe is really trusted.
This is fine. Anyone who is too much of a novice to disable the security settings surrounding an app downloaded from the internet, probably should not be running executables downloaded from the internet.
I’ve never had any problem with the more restrictive application signing restrictions. I just disable them for the apps I know are good.
This doesn’t even get into things like unsigned
mdimporterbundles (custom Spotlight plugins to allow searching through contents of specific file types) and other non-.appbundles.After running Migration Assisstant, I was getting an annoying dialog everytime an ePub would finish downloading. Since it was macOS running the bundle and not me, and you can’t “open” a non-
.appbundle, I could never figure out how to get rid of the disruptive dialogs and just let the plugin do its job. This despite the fact that normal apps I download show an “Open” button on the dialog without having to right click (and no “Move to Bin” button like the bundle alert dialog kept showing).Finally, I figured it out: there’s an extended attribute called
com.apple.quarantinethat you can recursively delete from the bundle.