Nowhere in OP's comment did they imply that Apple provides the App Store out of the goodness of their hearts. Obviously they do it to make money, like every other corporation. They have clearly sat down and said "We think building this 'walled garden' will make us more money." No debate there. Why does it make them money? It makes them money because a lot of end users are like OP, prefer the 'walled garden,' and are willing to spend their money there. You can argue that they are wrong to like it, but that kind of argument tends to go nowhere on the Internet.

And they're going to get burned. Each and every one of them. And when they do, they'll make excuses. Other companies that burn them, they won't make excuses for. Apple, they will.

I feel like you hate Apple more than Apple hates me. Your boogieman analogy is over the top or laughable. Also:

  bash --version
  GNU bash, version 5.1.16(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin21.1.0)

You may be running non-standard bash.

In macOS Monterey 12.2.1:

  ┍ … Thu Feb 17 09:09:44[~] 
  ┕ which bash
  /bin/bash

  ┍ … Thu Feb 17 09:10:25[~] 
  ┕ bash --version
  GNU bash, version 3.2.57(1)-release (x86_64-apple-darwin21)
  Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

I absolutely do. I want some parity with Linux so I also install gnu coreutils via brew and alias with bashrc.

  which bash
  /usr/local/bin/bash

  which ls
  /usr/local/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin/ls

Or, hear me out here, maybe just run Linux. Your life can be very simple and easy without having your system subjected to Apple's caprice.

Imagine it, a system that you, and only you, control.

I run both, on top of FreeBSD and Windows. Being an OS zealot isn't what pays my bills.

Comments like these are needlessly cynical. Corporations care about money else they would not have a reason to exist and apple is no exception.

What apple sell is something that is accessible to the majority and usable by most. Their sales are testament to this as is the fact that several ios apps are generally higher quality than their android equivalents. This is a natural consequence of the average ios user spending more on apps. There are no two ways around that.

As a counter to you headphone jack argument, i could equally make the case that many phone users care about their phones working, not much else. Apple's products are quite durable and many here will attest to using laptops from 2015-2016 and phones equally as old.

The short story is that apple provide products and services that people value. Period.

Excuses. Please understand that these are excuses. You are accepting lower quality products and accepting nothing in return, even accepting higher prices. Apple doesn't make the iOS apps that people use and love. They just provide an increasingly crappier platform to put them on.

That's what people make for Apple every single time they get burned. Apple lowers the quality of their manufacturing, people don't care. They remove features, people don't care.

The reality is, people are irrational and will stay in the pot long after the frog has jumped out. With other products, with other companies, people will absolutely not accept this kind of behavior. The nation empowered Teddy Roosevelt to bring down Standard Oil. Today's robber barons have slicker marketing campaigns and PR departments and social media managers.

My main computer is a MacBook from 2013. The battery is a bit flaky now, so I keep it plugged in, but that's some pretty heroic performance.

You're making my point for me. 2013 MacBooks were great. New ones, not so much. IIRC, 2013 was around the high water mark for MacBook quality.

Yeah, the M1 chip is blowing your argument out of the water. The performance and battery life are nothing short of impressive. Find me another OEM that isn't just cobbling parts together and selling it to you in a plastic shell versus actually designing an SoC/CPU.

It's a new processor. Great. What about the rest of the machine?

The rest of the machine is kind of amazing. Better audio than a 2013, WAY better microphones, great battery life, better screen than all the early Retinas, non-mechanical trackpad that lasts longer, keyboard is great again. And that's an entry-level machine, whereas an Air in 2013 wouldn't be as powerful as this. Don't be fooled, the products are great despite your personal feelings on the company.

It's an SoC so it's definitely not just a processor. If you can't appreciate the engineering there isn't much I can say. What parts of the machine bother you the most when compared to other laptops?

Yep. I still can’t find several games that I purchased before simply because they are no longer in the App Store. There was a really solid iOS version of Final Fantasy VI/III, almost the entire catalog of games from Origin8 seems to be missing too. Would love to get them again but can’t for some reason.

> There was a really solid iOS version of Final Fantasy VI/III

Square stopped selling those in anticipation of upcoming remastered versions, but if you already bought them you can still download and install them, you can find them in "Purchased" in the App Store

Thanks for the tip

This is more than likely because the apps were abandoned by the developer and not updated for the new hardware when iOS moved to 64-bit.

This seems light on facts and heavy on fear. I also disagree that removing the head phone jack is user hostile.

> Apple would rather die than ship GPL later than v2.

So would I, so I'm not about to blame them for that.

Apple actively doesn't want to know anything about me. I pay Apple a lot of money because of this.

Our incentives match. Apple gets the money they love. I get devices that actively work against third party tracking.

Alright, I have to respond to this.

> Instead of offering developers a real userland, you get forced onto zsh because Apple would rather die than ship GPL later than v2.

    export BASH_SILENCE_DEPRECATION_WARNING=1
    brew install bash # if homebrew is installed
    chsh `which bash` # if homebrew is configured correctly

Done. I've been running without zsh just fine. oh-my-bash even exists! https://github.com/ohmybash/oh-my-bash

> Don't get it twisted, Apple hates you, and loves only money. It's only a matter of time until each and every Apple user is taught that.

No. Quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur.

Homebrew is not Apple so you're just reinforcing OP's point: you need to go to a 3rd party to get a CLI that's worth a damn.

Nor is Homebrew supported by Apple which is totally outrageous, given that without it, you might as well buy an iPad for how useful MacOS is.

And yum, dnf, dpkg, apt, pacman, emerge, zypper are not Linux. Like brew they repackage software. Let's also not pretend that in the world of Linux I haven't had to add a 3rd party repo to get something working or look to community repos or even enable testing/unstable branches assuming I can get what I want working to work.

There are trade offs everywhere. Considering it takes an entire second to add brew to a machine, it's not a big deal or what I would hang my argument on. I've spent much more time messing with packages in Linux versus troubleshooting brew. I disagree it reinforces anything. I'm using a lot of rust tools on my CLI today and they're all available via brew, on Linux not always because the developer isn't targeting all of the different Linux package managers.

You're classing essentially nonprofit Linux community efforts as "3rd party" then you're comparing it to one of the flagship products of one of the largest tech companies in the world. Are you even listening to yourself? This is absurd.

I actually wrote a pacman wrapper in Bash that makes it feel a lot more like Homebrew: https://github.com/pmarreck/pac