Comment by mason55
4 years ago
You can still do all those things on a computer.
And now it’s so easy to put up a web app that I’d argue barriers are much, much lower than when you had to figure out how to get your physical software distributed.
The goals of “keep grandpa from getting his life savings stolen by malicious software” and “allow a power user to do whatever they want” can literally never be solved by the same device. If there’s any way to disable protections then the scammers will get grandpa to do it. And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.
This is false.
Windows used to be a sieve. The infection rates and general abuse Windows received went down by orders of magnitude once they added UAC and the default malware scanner/antivirus.
And they didn't need to lock down everything, completely.
The rest is an easy money grab from the OS vendors who obviously don't want to remain "dumb pipes".
Before Windows Vista there was no real file permissions.
Linux file permisdions are still kinda rubbish. Move a file from system A to system B and it's oner is no longer Rob, its now Bob because they have the same Id!
Wait till you figure out there can even be 2 people named Rob.
And the market for grandpas is much larger than the market for tinkerers.
This kind of thing has become a meme. It's basically irrelevant. If the market of tinkerers was big enough 20 years ago, it's more than big enough now, and the GPU shortage kind of proves that. It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try. There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.
The market for tinkerers is huge. Which is why there is a huge selection of computing products out there that cater almost exclusively to this market. The question is, why should Apple be forced to cater to them as well?
It would be understandable if Apple owned most of the computer/smartphone market, but they don't. iPhones make up less than 20% of smartphones out in the wild. Nobody who wants to avoid Apple is put in a situation where they are at a disadvantage, unlike a telephone user in the 1970's trying to avoid Bell.
> If the market of tinkerers was big enough 20 years ago, it's more than big enough now
It isn't, because the momentum is with big vendors, and big vendors look at economies of scale. Doesn't matter if "tinkerer's market" is 10x as big as it was 20 years ago, when "grandpa's market" is now 100x bigger than that, an every marginal unit of effort is better spent on that than on catering to power users.
> and the GPU shortage kind of proves that.
It doesn't prove the tinkerer's market grew, it's a result of being able to use GPUs to turn electricity directly into money. It's not tinkerers who buy them, it's the business-savvy people. Tinkerers' role is to handle setup.
> It's also an all-or-nothing fallacy -- nobody can protect all financial victims, and restricting the tech device market is probably one of the least effective ways to try.
It's not a fallacy, and it is effective. That's why everyone is doing it. That's why, for example, smartphones are locked down tight and the ecosystem shuns attempts at unlocking them. The pressure is everywhere. Even if the phone vendor lets you root it, your banking app will try to detect it and refuse to run.
> There are much better chokepoints for combatting both malware and fraud than the sanitized amusement park experience.
Can you name some? Because as much as I hate the "sanitized amusement park experience" trend, I honestly can't think of an alternative approach that would work. Past a certain point, security and usability are mutually exclusive - the features needed to protect you from someone impersonating you, or to protect you from getting tricked into self-pwning, are directly restricting what you can do on your own device.
> You can still do all those things on a computer.
Have you tried to distribute software on macOS out of the App Store recently?
Did you try to distribute software out of the App Store 25 years ago?