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Comment by js2

13 hours ago

> but they should offer a way for those of us who aren't clueless to turn whatever it is off.

I'm not sure if it's what you're asking for, but you can disable SIP:

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/disabling...

It's been a while since I dumped OSX and went back to Linux, but IIRC, this setting gets reset every time the system updates.

At some point Apple realized the "power user" market was too small, and they were better off treating all of their users like idiots. And that's when I left.

  • The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

    Desktop power users were on the Acorn, Amiga, Atari and PC.

    As NeXT "acquired" Apple, Linux users thought OS X was the UNIX experience they were looking for, and since they were never part of Apple culture, keep getting their expectations wrong.

    • Apple also kind of accidentally won the power user/developer market. When macbooks became synonymous with SV devs, Windows sucked for everything that wasn't Win32 development, and Linux on the desktop wasn't quite there yet (workable, but no where near the state its in today). Your only other choice was mac. It was UNIX, could dual boot windows if you needed it, so it checked the boxes is nice looking hardware (this was around 2008-2012 era, PC hardware at the time was complete crap).

      They never set out to build the ultimate power user machine, their target was still general consumers. They just happened to have the right product at the right time when everything else just failed to compete.

      Had desktop linux been in a better state, or had MS built WSL earlier, things might look a lot different today.

      3 replies →

    • I don't think Apple was ever really strong with the "idiots" market until the iPhone halo effect came into being, as much as they may have tried in their marketing.

      That market always bought the cheapest machine (or "best value", by specs/$) they could find (or, if they were really an "idiot", the machine that Best Buy had the highest commission on), which would be a PC.

      In the beige days, Apple's bread was buttered in the publishing market, once they moved to OS X, they got the "professional nerds who wanted UNIX but not doing sysadmin at home".

    • >The power user market was never that big for Apple since Mac Classic came to be, that was the target market, the "idiots".

      I'd call the power user market that - the kind of idiocy that's more interested in the process than the results.

      The actual target market was "people that have a life outside computers".