A more charitable take is that both are true. Apple blinked, and one of several large contributing factors (probably a very big one) is the upcoming iPhone launch.

When the tech news cycle is dominated by bad press about a move like this, and every tech nerd community is discussing this topic almost daily, it would be insane for Apple not to take some notice.

I know many are pessimistic about this, but Apple has learned from bad mistakes before. They rarely directly admit they're wrong, but conceding to pressure from the community is not unprecedented: see the return to the "Magic Keyboard" in their laptops.

Edit: removed the word “never” and replaced it with “rarely directly”.

Could we please not say silly, easily-disproven things like Apple "never admit[s] they're wrong", when 10 seconds of Googling instantly gives the lie to that assertion?

It might not happen every day, but it happens frequently enough that it's easy to find a lot of examples.

I expected the knee-jerk lazy downvotes from the usual suspects, so:

Apple admits mistake, says it’s back in EPEAT https://channeldailynews.com/news/apple-admits-mistake-says-...

Apple Admits the Mac Pro was a mess https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/4/15175994/apple-mac-pro-fai...

Apple Admits iPhone 7 Manufacturing Fault https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/feb/11/apple-iphone7-...

I could go on for pages, but I trust the point is made.

Ok, Apple rarely admit they are wrong, and when they do, they tend to spin it heavily. I don’t think this meaningfully changes the primary message of my comment though.

Or the changes to the new version of Safari in response to user feedback.

But that was GP's point: They listen to feedback and improve things, but typically quietly, rather than admitting a mistake. Exceptions do prove the rule.

What was the mistake for this example though that they would admit to? Iterating aggressive UX changes in a beta?

Every single one of them was to the point Apple could no longer hold the bad press or damaging to sales figure they admit they were wrong. Or more like they didn't, they just accept defeat.

Mac Pro was a mess when one of their largest customer told them they will switch their whole studio away from Apple right in front of Eddy's Cue face before some thing was being done.

I wondered if Apple would ever say that you want more than one mouse button. They started having an option to use each side of the mouse as a separate button (even if it looked like a single one and defaulted that way), but I've never heard that two buttons are better than one from Apple. With Steve gone, who even cares now?

When Apple was designing Mac as personal computer for everyone, a single button mouse is truly godzillion times better than two button. There used to be an Apple guideline on how to move a mouse and not to lift the mouse up into the air, but mapping the horizontal plane of the mouse to the vertical plane on the screen. Even that was difficult for some people.

People just dont realise how normal people have problem with mouse. Of course as we progress I think Two Button mouse could make sense as default. The role of PC also changed. The PC for everyone is now an Smartphone.

One button is better than two, for people who don’t know how to use two. I imagine the number of such users is higher than most of us here assume.

> One button is better than two, for people who don’t know how to use two.

It's like the three seashells. They don't know how to use them.

In the early days of Macintosh they tried hard to make this true. The excessive and inconsistent use of click vs double-click in apps even then was confusing.

These days it's hard to find an app that can get by without Cmd+click which is harder than click on the right button, which would be even easier if the right button was physically distinguishable. Long-press is super annoying as well as force click--I never want the action that comes up when I accidentally force-click. With the prevalence of touch phones, the two-finger-tap might be the easiest of them to remember (if not as precise).

The primary input device to Apple hardware is the trackpad, so it’s kind of irrelevant. But two button mice have been well-supported since classic Mac OS circa 1997-1998.

> A more charitable take

No, no, GP clearly has direct insight into the values, ulterior motives, and decision process of Tim Cook and other top brass at Apple.

This is the most likely outcome. Moreover, they won't even announce it.

Apple learned a valuable lesson here. Roll the panopticon out in secret, and don't announce it. They've done a very good job locking down their modern devices, enough that security researchers would have an exceptionally difficult time proving that they're doing it anyway.

GrapheneOS is still a viable option until Google ends upstream security updates in 2023. That's a solid two years for Purism, PinePhone, and anyone else working on linux phones to bring their performance and feature set up to modern standards.

The correct course of action is to buy a Pixel 5, run GrapheneOS for the next couple years, while donating to the main privacy-focused linux phone projects, and make the switch again in 2023.

> Moreover, they won't even announce it.

That's a terrible idea. Apple knows that researchers are going through every bit of assembly code on the phone.

If all of a sudden they say "Hey we found some code that scans all your photos and sends information up to the cloud" how bad would that look? It's better to explain upfront rather than get found, because they will get found.

Is this still possible? My lay understanding is that the SEP decrypts kernelspace on-demand, loads the opcodes on a very temporary (and randomly allocated) basis, and makes dumping any meaningful amount of the contents out of RAM very difficult.

Not a jailbreaker at all, so happy to be completely wrong on this.

The default for images is signed, not encrypted. A new section of self-modifying or encrypted kernel code would probably trigger some red flags.

> The correct course of action is to buy a Pixel 5, run GrapheneOS for the next couple years, while donating to the main privacy-focused linux phone projects, and make the switch again in 2023.

Alternatively, get a Linux phone right now and donate time by contributing bugfixes.

Exactly, it's (sadly) a temporary victory at best.

Ten bucks says they take a page out of our politicians' handbooks and sneak it in as a small, vague footnote in a much larger, unrelated announcement once the initial bad press blows over.

Honestly, that's what I assumed they did in MacOS 11.5.2 where they refused to give details of the change. It's likely the last update for many intel devices.

Your description sounds like a blink to me.

The bad press led to them blinking.