Not OP but pretty much in the same boat.

> Was it better before, when everything had carte blanche to do what it liked without your knowledge/consent?

Yes.

The caveat is I'm using a very stable set of programs, that I spent a long time to decide if I was OK with giving access to a lot of my critical information. I'm using Karabiner since it exists, and it's a worse experience and performance as it is now than when it was running unprotected and full carte blanche. Same with Bitwarden, it already has all my life's passwords, giving it access to read my screen is just an additional annoyance.

At some point VSCode could also go rogue, but I'll be more worried with it leaking my SSH keys than recording my face when I'm coding.

The caveat is that you know what you're doing. Most people don't. Computers are made for most people. The era of computers being made for people like us, is long gone.

(We did this to ourselves, by constantly trying to make computers easier to use, and telling everyone else they should have one)

Yes, but … no.

> (We did this to ourselves, by constantly trying to make computers easier to use, and telling everyone else they should have one)

Agreed. However: most people never wanted a computer, they only wanted to do certain computer-y things.

And they don't have to anymore! We now have this new breed of wondrous, computer-y devices which are less capable, but in return are also a lot easier to use. It's here, it's absolutely ubiquitous and it is roughly good enough most of the time.

The worlds of "smart" devices and general computing machines could have, _should_ have coexisted perfectly next to each other. That Apple is slowly but surely merging the two is a massive, unnecessary, foolhardy mistake that is on them and them alone.

Thing is, these people already have better options.

Enterprise "businessy" people already have fully managed enterprise Windows, large education fleets and low computing needs organizations can be served by Chromebooks or iPads.

We're the ones stuck in a state where linux is still too compromised, Windows lacks polish, and now macos has iOS-ified to the point it becomes an hinderance but without getting the real advantages (touch support etc.).

I'm patientely waiting for a shift to happen, in the meantime jumping to Windows looks like the more pragmatic solution, how crazy it may sound.

I agree, in my eyes one of the major problem is that Apple does this at an insane markup. Sure the hardware is mostly nice but when you factor in the premium you pay for it there shouldn't be this kind of major hindrance to usage in the software. It's like if you were to buy a professional power tools but it would still have all the warnings message and "protections" found on consumer level tools with no real way to disable them without rendering the tool almost useless...

Sure you can disable many security stuff in macOS but then many of the apple stuff don't work, so you would need to leave on the table one major reason to buy Apple hardware.

In my opinion Apple painted itself in a corner with their strategy, they may have more money than ever and more customer than ever but they are making their offering so irrelevant to tech enthusiast people so quickly I'm not sure any of their tech will be relevant in ten years.

Of course Apple fanboys (omnipresent here) want to believe the contrary...

> The caveat is that you know what you're doing. Most people don't. Computers are made for most people.

While you're absolutely correct it's my impression that most people will grant any permission without reading just to make this popup interruption go away and move on with their task.

I think it's not bad for the average user, say my dad. Personally, I would like a 'developer' toggle to disable it all or have a different default.

Reboot into Recovery Mode, open the terminal, run:

  spctl --master-disable
  csrutil disable
  nvram boot-args="amfi_get_out_of_my_way=1"

and reboot into normal mode. Almost all of the "annoying" safety protections will be disabled.