We are talking about that Apple which sued a recycling vendor in Canada because they recycled devices instead of trashing them.
We are talking about that Apple which bribed judges in the US to deny its endusers the right to repair.
We are talking about that Apple which removed even the audio port of a device to prevent its competition to breakout of the locked hardware with their "upgrades" like better cameras, or even payment systems that wont be supported by Apple.
We are talking about that Apple which even changed their goddamn shell from the BSD fork because they didnt want to "open source" (Apple thinks this is zip file dumping) their own bash, which was the only reason bash was outdated for decades.
Yes, we are talking about that Apple.
Once anything is a competition, it will be extinguished by Apple. They only care about profits, and nothing else.
Care to expand on that?
> We are talking about that Apple which sued a recycling vendor in Canada because they recycled devices instead of trashing them.
That's incorrect. They sued the company because they were supposed to take the devices apart and recycle/recover the parts. Not resell them as manufacturer refurbished.
> We are talking about that Apple which bribed judges in the US to deny its endusers the right to repair.
Again, please expand on that.
> We are talking about that Apple which removed even the audio port of a device to prevent its competition to breakout of the locked hardware with their "upgrades" like better cameras, or even payment systems that wont be supported by Apple.
Arguably, for the 2 things you have mentioned, the Lightening port would be much better suited. They took out the headphone jack because wires are a pain in the ass and the state of the art for wireless headsets is good enough for the majority.
> We are talking about that Apple which even changed their goddamn shell from the BSD fork because they didnt want to "open source" (Apple thinks this is zip file dumping) their own bash, which was the only reason bash was outdated for decades.
So brief history of the defaults shells in macOS. First 3 releases it was tcsh (BSD - inherited from NeXTStep), then for a while, it was the GPLv2 version of bash (last version to be released under GPLv2 was 3.2), more recently they moved to zsh (MIT). The critical part to get here is licensing. The GPLv3, like it or not, is a controversial license. Apple have an issue with GPLv3, so they avoid software that uses it. Frankly, when bash transitioned to GPLv3 is when Apple should've made the change, but that is a different discussion.
While they ended up on the market as refurbished, (not necessarily manufacturer refurbished) the devices were sold to refurbishers, who would have treated them as any other device they received for refurbishing.
The lock feature is implemented via iCloud and the "Find My Mac" page, which is able to remotely shut the soft fuses via BIOS/EFI, and in return physically bricks the hardware. Anybody that has control over your iCloud account (e.g. a malicious third party) can potentially do this. See [1], this happened to a lot of companies (customers) that had problems with malicious third-parties getting access to their network.
> That's incorrect. They sued the company because they were supposed to take the devices apart and recycle/recover the parts. Not resell them as manufacturer refurbished.
How come that they could only prove that by having more than 18% of devices that were sent to be trashed with active GPS antennas, and active remote iCloud software tracking? [2] Also, recycle is defined as re-cycling, not re-abandoning. The definition of recycling among the population seems to be a different perception than yours.
Do you honestly think Apple would've dropped the lawsuit if the devices would've been repaired and given away for free? Also kind of related: The lawsuit that happened in Norway, where Rossmann was called as a witness [4]
> They took out the headphone jack because wires are a pain in the ass and the state of the art for wireless headsets is good enough for the majority.
Literally a couple months after PayPal and other payment providers were banned by removing the headphone jack in the 8th gen iPhone, Apple Pay was introduced. You're making it sound like 2 or 3 tiny low-voltage wires are harder to implement than a Bluetooth antenna wiring... c'mon, really?
> (history of default shells in macOS)
You're making it sound as if bash was only inside macOS for a short time. bash, for the sake of argument, has been in use since macOS 10.2 which was released in 2002 [3], whereas 10.0 was a public beta and 10.1 was released the same year in 2001. The argument of a tcsh being in use for 9 months, and bash being in use for over 19 years is quite the opposite way around than you seem to perceive it.
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[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987
[2] https://www.theverge.com/apple/2020/10/4/21499422/apple-sues...
[3] https://opensource.apple.com/release/mac-os-x-102.html
[4] https://repair.eu/de/news/apple-crushes-one-man-repair-shop/
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Again, my arguments were to counteract the argument that "Apple is acting in good faith for the people", because I do not think that anything innovative can happen on a crippled platform.
Apple actively shuts down innovation, every time it could be seen as an alternative to their own product, which they will release only once market adaption has been done by pioneers. This was happening a lot of times with hardware, and a lot of times with software.
I personally would choose repairability over anything, always, because I've learned my lessons the hard way with financial burdens.
So a security feature? Hardly Apple acting maliciously, is it. Regarding iCloud being compromised, this is inarguably down to lack security policy on the part of business or the end user. iCloud now enforces 2fa by default as a result, largely because (and I'm speaking from experience here) most businesses can't be trusted to do this themselves.
> How come that they could only prove that by having more than 18% of devices that were sent to be trashed with active GPS antennas, and active remote iCloud software tracking? [2] Also, recycle is defined as re-cycling, not re-abandoning. The definition of recycling among the population seems to be a different perception than yours.
Had Apple sold the lots to the company, you'd be right, but that's not what happened. Apple paid the company to destroy, recover and recycle. The company acted in bad faith and against the terms of the contract they had with Apple. With regards to you claim that Apple tracked active devices - when a business has any kind of electronic equipment destroyed, they are required, by law, to record certain information about the devices like serial numbers, etc. Unsurprisingly, some of the devices turned up at Apple stores for repair. The article that you linked to has the following from Apple: “Products sent for recycling are no longer adequate to sell to consumers and if they are rebuilt with counterfeit parts they could cause serious safety issues, including electrical or battery defects...”. Devices that can and meet the requisant standards to be refurbished and resold are.
> Literally a couple months after PayPal and other payment providers were banned by removing the headphone jack in the 8th gen iPhone, Apple Pay was introduced. You're making it sound like 2 or 3 tiny low-voltage wires are harder to implement than a Bluetooth antenna wiring... c'mon, really?
This is noting more than a conspiracy theory! Do you really believe that they removed the headphone jack to fuck with Paypal? This is utterly ridiculous. I'm not, by the way, suggesting that wires are are a pain in the ass from an engineering perspective, rather a user perspective.
> You're making it sound as if bash was only inside macOS for a short time. bash, for the sake of argument, has been in use since macOS 10.2 which was released in 2002 [3], whereas 10.0 was a public beta and 10.1 was released the same year in 2001. The argument of a tcsh being in use for 9 months, and bash being in use for over 19 years is quite the opposite way around than you seem to perceive it.
Your link shows that bash was included with 10.2 (it was included with 10.0/10.1 and NeXTStep too), not the default. tsch was still the default until OS X 10.3 (bash-2.05a-release) - not 9 months, 2.5 years. bash 4.0 was formally released in 2009, with a change to GPLv3. Apple had updated bash to 3.2 and stuck with that as it was licensed in a way that was acceptable to them for distribution. I know this to be the case because I actually used these OS's on a daily basis. As I said originally, Apple should have switched to a different shell at this point. The wornderfull thing about UNIX shells is that the user can change the default and use what they want, including updating the pre installed one, so suggesting this as Apple being user hostile is well wide of the mark.
> Again, my arguments were to counteract the argument that "Apple is acting in good faith for the people", because I do not think that anything innovative can happen on a crippled platform.
That's your opinion, and a perfectly fine and valid one to have, but...
> Apple actively shuts down innovation, every time it could be seen as an alternative to their own product, which they will release only once market adaption has been done by pioneers. This was happening a lot of times with hardware, and a lot of times with software.
...is simply not accurate in the way you are framing it.
> I personally would choose repairability over anything, always, because I've learned my lessons the hard way with financial burdens.
That's fine. Others wouldn't. I'd suggest convenience is top of the list for the majority of people that use Apple products. It's the same argument that goes against the customisation camp.
...
Say more...?
If they see a similar use for Linux support, they'll do the same. If they think it will hurt them in some way, they won't.
But I think it's fair to at least consider the "undermine" possibility considering that on iPhones they've consistently blocked attempts to jailbreak or open that platform in the way an alternate OS does on their Macs. We've already seen incremental moves to make MacOS app distribution more centrally controlled. So I honestly don't know where Apple believes their long-term interested to be on the topic of facilitating, or at least not actively blocking Linux.
I agree and said... pretty much the same thing. I just don’t think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell Apple will see Linux as a threat.
> But I think it's fair to at least consider the "undermine" possibility considering that on iPhones they've consistently blocked attempts to jailbreak or open that platform in the way an alternate OS does on their Macs. We've already seen incremental moves to make MacOS app distribution more centrally controlled. So I honestly don't know where Apple believes their long-term interested to be on the topic of facilitating, or at least not actively blocking Linux.
Nope. Not likely, unless the mechanism for getting Linux on the M-series is software exploits of the macOS platform. They don’t do anything to undermine booting entirely other OSes on their hardware, even iDevices. But they do patch up their own stack.
It's just business: Apple won't intentionally remove features that makes their hardware more attractive. It's where they make most of their money.
Second while Gatekeeper has been around for 8+ years, the default of contacting an Apple server on every program launch was new (or so I thought) with Big Sur. It's a step towards that direction. People could not launch apps when this server was down.
It only became noticeable because there was an oversight in the "fail-fast" algorithm. If Apple was available, it was assumed it would be fast, and it wasn't when there was an iCloud outage.
Federighi quote: “We have the core technologies for them to do that, to run their ARM version of Windows, which in turn of course supports x86 user mode applications. But that’s a decision Microsoft has to make, to bring to license that technology for users to run on these Macs. But the Macs are certainly very capable of it.”
To be completely clear, this quote may have only been referring to virtualized operation, but given a change in the WinARM solution licensing model, Apple might support booting as they did on x86 Macs.
Let's rephrase that: The company that made a generic X86 computer and intentionally created a non-standard way to boot operating systems on their run-of-the-mill X86 hardware, so that other X86-compatible operating-systems running on the same hardware would have issues and make OSX look better by comparison.
Yeah, that company. I don't expect them to do jack shit for compatibility.
How generous of them. And will they provide microsoft with the specs needed to do so?
We're talking about Apple, right? The company that made an entire software platform called Bootcamp, specifically to enable a competitor's OS to run on their hardware? A company who custom-developed drivers specifically to be compatible with a competitor's OS on their own hardware? You're talking about that Apple? The one who said they would be open to allowing Windows to run on M1 if Microsoft developed a compatible version of Windows?
I just want to make sure we're talking about the same company, because you seem to think we're talking about a company who runs in the face of competition, where the Apple I know confronts it head-on and goes out of their way to be compatible with the competitors.