It's true that I don't have data on how often this type of problem happens, how long they last, and what the workarounds are, but I'm using those words not to be intentionally vague, but to reflect my own impression from my own experience, and I strongly suspect my impression matches most people's.
It's like saying car crashes are rare, insured against, and you personally never experienced one.
This does not mean car crashes can be ignored, or cannot happen to be dangerous.
There is a balance between the possible damage because of not checking signatures remotely, and the possible damage from not being able to run a program when the remote checking service is unavailable. But there is no situation where the average damage is exactly zero :-/
What? In your analogy, the parent commenter would be saying "I'm puzzled that people are willing to buy an operate an automobile given that they can be involved in dangerous accidents."
And in this analogy, I'm not saying "we should ignore car crashes." I'm saying "the reason people still buy and operate automobiles despite the possibility of accidents is pretty simple."
Your metaphor suffers an imbalance in spectrum. We are hardly talking about life and death here. You clearly can’t make the same comparison to car crashes. People’s motivations will certainly not be the same in these two cases.
The problem is that this is not an issue that should be viewed only in the current context. Just because things are rare now, don't last very long doesn't mean that they will continue to be that way, or that it will work at all in the future if Apple decides that only EOL OSs could be using this system at some future point where it's mostly changed.
Not caring about this now is like not caring about government or corporate privacy invasions because "I have nothing to hide". It completely ignores all the variables that have to align to make this benign that happen to at this point, but are in now was assured for the future.
He's not commenting how the problem should be viewed. He's communicating how he thinks most people view it. IOW, you're arguing what should be while he was talking about what is.
> Just because things are rare now, don't last very long doesn't mean that they will continue to be that way, or that it will work at all in the future if Apple decides that only EOL OSs could be using this system at some future point where it's mostly changed.
Okay, sure, you could attempt to estimate future damage from what appears to be a simple (albeit bad) bug in MacOS. Maybe it means all Macs will completely stop working in 2 years. But again, I think consumers will subconsciously estimate the likelihood of this to be extremely low.
> Not caring about this now is like not caring about government or corporate privacy invasions because "I have nothing to hide".
What? I thought we were talking about the immediate user-visible bug here, where some third-party apps could not be opened on some Macs for some period of time today. Sure, there are separate potential privacy concerns any time an OS phones home for any reason. But the problem here is just a blatant bug that manifests when the OS phones home and the servers are having problems. Macs continue to work fine when they're not connected to the internet, so it's pretty clear this is just a bug that's not actually related to the privacy concerns with phoning home.
If you use your laptop as mostly a youtube machine or a social media station then yes, the described problems are not a big deal, in fact they are probably beneficial to your well-being. But if you use your laptop to earn a living, that can be a major problem, day traders for a top of the head example. This also sounds like a nightmare for the corporate world. I suspect that these custom silicon iOS devices will be fully cemented as 'Fisher Price' computers.
> If you use your laptop as mostly a youtube machine or a social media station then yes, the described problems are not a big deal, in fact they are probably beneficial to your well-being
I've set up a few Linux installations for people who only use their computers as Facebook and YouTube machines, and I haven't had a complaint. They also wouldn't be able to break their systems if they tried.
I'm of the opinion that if ChromeOS would fit a user's use case, then so would Ubuntu with Firefox or Chrome, most of the time.
Those same Linux systems would fit my needs as a developer with only a few small changes.
Security, simplicity, power and ownership don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can have a simple and secure computer, and also have power over your system and own your hardware.
Even a youtube machine can become a big deal if the walled garden prevents you from installing an ad blocker or third party client & forces you to watch mandatory adds to see any videos - that might very well happens (and happens) in walled gardens.
There's no question that software bugs are bad. But that doesn't mean we should expect consumers to ditch an entire manufacturer forever because it's physically possible for that manufacturer to have a software bug. Obviously, bugs are inevitable. I'm not making excuses. I'm just explaining why people wouldn't instantly abandon a manufacturer after experiencing a single serious software bug.
It's true that I don't have data on how often this type of problem happens, how long they last, and what the workarounds are, but I'm using those words not to be intentionally vague, but to reflect my own impression from my own experience, and I strongly suspect my impression matches most people's.
It's like saying car crashes are rare, insured against, and you personally never experienced one.
This does not mean car crashes can be ignored, or cannot happen to be dangerous.
There is a balance between the possible damage because of not checking signatures remotely, and the possible damage from not being able to run a program when the remote checking service is unavailable. But there is no situation where the average damage is exactly zero :-/
What? In your analogy, the parent commenter would be saying "I'm puzzled that people are willing to buy an operate an automobile given that they can be involved in dangerous accidents."
And in this analogy, I'm not saying "we should ignore car crashes." I'm saying "the reason people still buy and operate automobiles despite the possibility of accidents is pretty simple."
Your metaphor suffers an imbalance in spectrum. We are hardly talking about life and death here. You clearly can’t make the same comparison to car crashes. People’s motivations will certainly not be the same in these two cases.
The problem is that this is not an issue that should be viewed only in the current context. Just because things are rare now, don't last very long doesn't mean that they will continue to be that way, or that it will work at all in the future if Apple decides that only EOL OSs could be using this system at some future point where it's mostly changed.
Not caring about this now is like not caring about government or corporate privacy invasions because "I have nothing to hide". It completely ignores all the variables that have to align to make this benign that happen to at this point, but are in now was assured for the future.
He's not commenting how the problem should be viewed. He's communicating how he thinks most people view it. IOW, you're arguing what should be while he was talking about what is.
> Just because things are rare now, don't last very long doesn't mean that they will continue to be that way, or that it will work at all in the future if Apple decides that only EOL OSs could be using this system at some future point where it's mostly changed.
Okay, sure, you could attempt to estimate future damage from what appears to be a simple (albeit bad) bug in MacOS. Maybe it means all Macs will completely stop working in 2 years. But again, I think consumers will subconsciously estimate the likelihood of this to be extremely low.
> Not caring about this now is like not caring about government or corporate privacy invasions because "I have nothing to hide".
What? I thought we were talking about the immediate user-visible bug here, where some third-party apps could not be opened on some Macs for some period of time today. Sure, there are separate potential privacy concerns any time an OS phones home for any reason. But the problem here is just a blatant bug that manifests when the OS phones home and the servers are having problems. Macs continue to work fine when they're not connected to the internet, so it's pretty clear this is just a bug that's not actually related to the privacy concerns with phoning home.
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If you use your laptop as mostly a youtube machine or a social media station then yes, the described problems are not a big deal, in fact they are probably beneficial to your well-being. But if you use your laptop to earn a living, that can be a major problem, day traders for a top of the head example. This also sounds like a nightmare for the corporate world. I suspect that these custom silicon iOS devices will be fully cemented as 'Fisher Price' computers.
> If you use your laptop as mostly a youtube machine or a social media station then yes, the described problems are not a big deal, in fact they are probably beneficial to your well-being
I've set up a few Linux installations for people who only use their computers as Facebook and YouTube machines, and I haven't had a complaint. They also wouldn't be able to break their systems if they tried.
I'm of the opinion that if ChromeOS would fit a user's use case, then so would Ubuntu with Firefox or Chrome, most of the time.
Those same Linux systems would fit my needs as a developer with only a few small changes.
Security, simplicity, power and ownership don't have to be mutually exclusive. You can have a simple and secure computer, and also have power over your system and own your hardware.
1 reply →
Even a youtube machine can become a big deal if the walled garden prevents you from installing an ad blocker or third party client & forces you to watch mandatory adds to see any videos - that might very well happens (and happens) in walled gardens.
There's no question that software bugs are bad. But that doesn't mean we should expect consumers to ditch an entire manufacturer forever because it's physically possible for that manufacturer to have a software bug. Obviously, bugs are inevitable. I'm not making excuses. I'm just explaining why people wouldn't instantly abandon a manufacturer after experiencing a single serious software bug.