Comment by bflesch
5 hours ago
Funny how Apple has reached the crapware maturity level that Microsoft users are quite familiar with: After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.
> After first boot, go through a long list of things to deactivate so that one can experience at least some feeling of agency and privacy when using your own hardware.
The difference is that you can actually not set these things up: with Windows you often have to choice. Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them, whereas to avoid a Microsoft cloud account there are magic CLI incantations that have to be invoked. And once you say "no", Apple generally leaves you alone.
I don't mind a bit of 'upsell' or informing (new) users of available offerings, as long as I get a choice.
The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo. Since 200gb is quite low, the next tier up is 2tb for $9.99, but then you're essentially locked in. I can't view the iCloud price tiers as anything other than predatory.
But 50GB is $0.99 and I'm only really paying for it since I have a bunch of their private email addresses in use. iPhone backup with just the essentials I trust them with is less than 2GB.
I don't know how I would even begin to fill the 50GB plan since I don't trust any cloud storage provider with pictures and videos.
> The issue with iCloud is that before you even know it, you're paying $9.99/mo.
Sounds like the issue is you.
3 replies →
> Macs allow you to not have an iCloud account and run just fine without them
Until you need to install an app through the App store. Even a free app will refuse to install without an iCloud account. Frustrating when you want something with a verified source, for me it was Wireguard, and don't want to build it locally.
> Until you need to install an app through the App store.
Do you have an example of needing to go through the app store? There's apple's apps, I guess.
That's on Wireguard.
If they can apt get on Ubuntu, they can likely brew install on macOS.
I'd expect turning off Siri as a whole, which is very easy, would be enough. The list is for people who still want to use Siri after it became a OS-level LLM, I mean, Apple Intelligence.
Presumably it's the LLM integrations into apps people want, not an anthropomorphized assistant
It's the "agency" bit that really annoys me. The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke. It should not do a laundry list of things that the device manufacturer wants it to do, nor a laundry list of things the OS vendor wants it to do. I shouldn't have to turn things off. They shouldn't be on to begin with, unless I deliberately turned them on.
Of course this doesn't extend to obvious things like "running the kernel" and "initializing the filesystem." But in general I want to be the person responsible for running things, not some product manager 3,000 miles away in Silicon Valley.
I think the fundamental problem is one person's "Only do the things I choose to invoke" is another person's "Why do I have to do all this stupid setup". Especially given that most people aren't computer people, and they want to use their computers to get other tasks done, not to be system administrators themselves.
Should your computer automatically build search indexes for your files? For most people, fast search is more useful than the disk space this takes up, but it would be doing something you didn't explicitly invoke.
Should your computer turn on global spell check (and even basic auto correct) for text fields? Again, you didn't invoke it explicitly, but most people probably think it's a good idea.
So you might say "well anything that just runs locally is ok" but even that's thorny. Obviously much of the AI stuff apple has been implementing is running locally and some of it has been around for a while (image classification in Photos for example). But not everyone wants the AI, even with local models.
And then there's things like "should your computer default to using NTP time?", again most people would probably say yes, especially given how important accurate time is for modern computer security. But it requires your computer doing network requests to make it work.
"Should your computer automatically check for updates?", again for most people the answer is probably "yes it should". But again it requires your computer to do network requests to make it all work.
"Should your computer automatically scan for malware?", probably yes it should, but keeping those malware lists up to date is going to require network requests and access.
There's always a tension between "being helpful and useful out of the box" and "doing stuff the OS vendor wants".
Anyone who wants an OS that does nothing out of the box is always free to grab any x86 box and install ArchLinux on it, but most people don't do that for the same reason that Spacemacs / Doom Emacs is more popular than a raw emacs install, and things like Sublime, or Notepad++ are more popular than those. Defaults matter a lot.
> The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke.
The internet and its consequences have been a disaster for the personal computer user.
It's like saying that wind blows because trees sway.
There's clearly an agenda to double down on stripping away all remaining privacy. The internet as we knew it and remembered as free is just the medium to make that happen, if not purely a byproduct of this.
Yeah, whatever happened to the personal computer, a kind of capital equipment available to the masses, something you own and can direct towards your goals and wellbeing?
Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.
Comparing apple intelligence to a service that records your screen without consent feels extremely disingenuous.