I found this to be a very odd and strange rant. The author's three issues with Apple are:
1. Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
2. mac OS26. I totally agree that this is a total fiasco from a design perspective, and liquid glass is unqualified shit. Still, I see Apple at least somewhat moving in the right direction by getting rid of Alan Dye.
3. Apple had a bug in their age verification protocol. Again, valid point, but Apple needs to follow UK law. I've seen a lot more missives arguing against requiring things like driver's licenses and other government ID, and so it seems like Apple is at least trying to go the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
To emphasize, I'm not apologizing for Apple here. In particular, much has been written about how Apple has lost their way regarding the "it just works" philosophy. But it seems like the author's main beef is against Apple's level of control, and this is just a fundamental difference in Apple's stance that has existed for about 2 decades.
Author here. Thanks for engaging is such gentle way, this is rare these days. Let me address some of your comments and maybe you'll understand my position a bit better even if you don't agree.
> 1.Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
Apple been tightening that control over time. For a long time on MacOS X you could simply run apps. Then came notarisation, but you could still disable it. Now, even with a certificate, it still shows a dialog. I wish that apps that went through notarisation would simply run like the ones from the app store without a dialog showing.
> 3. (...) the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
But not everyone has a credit card. Those are not something you're born with or required to have or even required to have them issued from the same country you're living in. That is not the least restrictive, that is a very large assumption. What I would have liked to have seen is them providing you with options: "do you want to use credit card verification? National ID? Passport? Credit check? Etc" and then it is up to each user to decide on their risk profile and what they are okay with.
As of now, my only way to verify it is by literally ordering a credit card from my UK bank when I'm pretty happy with my debit cards already.
The Online Safety Act does not require device manufacturers to enforce age "verification" at the OS level. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is displaying anticipatory obedience here, which is the opposite of good citizenship.
Two things stand out from this fiasco:
1. Apple, and those who praise them for what they just did, don't appear to have learnt from history. Anticipatory obedience used to be known as "vorauseilender Gehorsam" during a particularly dark period in the history of a country a few hundred miles southeast of the UK. It was one of the factors enabling the darkness.
2. The UK is a small enough market for Apple to treat it as a test bed. Which it probably is in this case, and which means that removal of anonymity aka "OS-level age verification" is coming to a lot more devices in a lot more countries soon. See also the uncanny coincidence of lots of OECD countries pushing for online age verification at the same time.
Any system of age verification will fail to satisfy the writer, because it is fundamentally the UK’s fault by requiring such draconian measures. Credit cards don't work ever time, but the other options of using AI or sending your data to a third company who will resell it are also not great.
The only other complaint seems to be liquid glass? It really feels strange because Apple feels on the upswing with their new office and their cheap, repairable mac.
The space allocated for "Apple has lost their way" has been maxed out for decades, so it bears stressing that this time is different. This Liquid Glass debacle has disillusioned everyone from hardcore Apple fans to normal people who otherwise don't follow tech.
Once the dust settles, this will be a case study for decades to come. Apple threw their hard-won reputational gains off a cliff for _nothing_.
What keeps me in the Appleverse is the hardware, and the software that Just Works with the hardware (I find that "Just Works" has been rapidly eroding in general, but naturally it still handles the hardware well). The alternatives are Linux on much worse hardware, or the non-starter that is Windows on anything whatsoever.
I'm told ThinkPads are getting to parity and have primo Linux support, but barring accident, my M3 MBP will probably last me a decade. Another reason I prefer Apple hardware.
The third point in this article is what really gets me. The credit card culture in Canada and the US is just insane to me, coming from a European point of view. You can get by without credit cards in Europe, and most of my family only has one for traveling abroad. So sure, they can use their credit card if they really have to, but it’s not a good default, as many others won’t even have credit cards. (And within EU, traveling without one is still fine for the most part).
I find Apple's refusal to patch iOS18 (other than for very old devices that do not support 26) to be more objectionable. I have a 13 mini and everything I've read says not to upgrade to 26. Yet Apple won't issue patches for known security issues that are actively being exploited in the wild? That's crazy.
Any age verification should come with an OAUTH style government run API. The idea being you verify your ID with the government, and the service that required age verification gets back a true or false for does this user meet this age requirement. That way the amount of data shared is kept to a minimum.
The UK, and Brazil who passed a similar law, 'cheated' by just forcing private companies to figure it out.
I bought a cheap, used iPhone SE3 because I needed to Facetime relatives.
I learned quickly that "Find My" was far superior in remote tracking of airtag-equivalents, and switched some of my convertible tags to their network.
I flew out of O'Hare last month, and there were advertisements all over the airport announcing that Illinois id/drivers license import into Apple Wallet, so I did it, and that works.
Supposedly, passports can be imported. I haven't been able to make that work, even after a few hours on the phone with Apple.
I also added a new CTA Ventra card, and I lost my ATM card while out of the country and instantly added a new one to Apple Wallet.
Apple devices allow biometrics to be disabled for unlocking the phone. That is an important requirement for me to use these features.
I would never, ever trust Google with any of these things. Ever.
That being said, if I want to run a torrent client on my phone, I should be able to do so. Apple will never allow that.
If I want a Bourne/POSIX shell, I should be able run one. Apple will never allow that [AFAIK].
There are important reasons that Apple products will never, ever be my primary communication devices.
Credit card usage is a small fraction of debit card usage. This is very different to the USA where there are more credit card transactions than debit card ones.
They have just done the same to me. I spent nearly two hours on the phone with Apple support before I find they will not accept a UK passport as valid ID. They will only accept the national ID card that I also don’t have. I don’t have or want a credit card. I’m 65 so me being now unable to verify my age is embarrassing and insulting. And the way Apple messed me about earlier has put me off them now. I won’t buy another product or service from them ever again.
I've been using Mac for 15+ years now. I thought I would hate Glass so I avoided installing it across my ipad, phone, etc. But it was forced on my on my work laptop. Overall I don't notice the difference. There's nothing that outrages me, but I do find the changes useless.
Mate. None of the companies is worth such stress. I feel rage in you. It is just a tool. You choose what works best. That's it. No need to overthink it.
I wish they'd just show some backbone and refuse to implement age verification.
If this means they would need to geofence + start disabling devices to the extent required by law, good. The laws will immediately be repealed.
The whole platform is a smoldering fire at this point, so nothing in the article is particularly surprising. I've hit 10x as many bugs as the user mentioned. Liquid glass (as bad as it is!) barely makes the top 10 daily issues I have with iOS 26. In any other release, it'd be #1.
Maybe "Flood the zone" should be the word of the year for 2026?
In a world of mature systems and tangled dependencies, we’ve moved from an era of aspiration to an era of mtiigation. Choosing, whether it s a political candidate or an operating system or ecosystem is no longer a vote of confidence in something wonderful, but feels like a defensive maneuver to find the least worst option among a sea of downsides.
> Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score.
UK passed age verification law and people still find a way to blame the US.
Apple has gone from a company with a long term vision of the future and their part in it to a quarterly financial report gradient climber. This is what happens to every company when it loses it's founder(s). They have enough money and market influence to be a problem for all of us for the next 30 years or so.
>Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score.
This is the way ID verification is going in the USA and the reasons for it seem clear. A human person is only useful to a corporation if they have money to give the corporation. If you don't have provable money, either through a third party corporate payment service willing to pay for you sometime later (a credit card) or by giving a corporation your login details to your bank account (ie, Plaid), then you're not a human.
It clear what a bot is now: anything that doesn't have provable money.
I see the arguments are mostly attempts to needle the individual points. But it's clear the writer has reached a personal tipping point; the last straw as it were. Some of us gave up Apple over lesser offenses years ago.
This is honestly why I've been getting deeper into Linux and self-hosting since early COVID. As much as I've loved my M1 Pro MBP, Apple's OS decisions - and my career expectation to always be on the latest version of OSes/software to help vet organizational migrations - have basically killed my enthusiasm for their kit. The hardware is phenomenal; the software does not spark joy.
And if I'm being frank, my time with Linux (Debian 13 on an N100 NUC w/ Docker) has really opened my eyes to just how excessive modern compute is, specifically to power increasingly bogged-down operating systems and woefully inefficient software. The N100 sips energy while happily transcoding 4K video streams on Jellyfin, running my IRC server for friends to hop off Discord, reverse proxying my entire home network, letting me stream game nights via Owncast, host some image board shitposts for various friend groups, host my RSS Aggregator, and still yawns with 75% excess capacity left over.
I'll still have a Mac because that's what my family uses (if they want free tech support from me, that is), and I'll still have my Windows gaming PC, but I'm already drafting up cyberdeck plans for my first primary Linux box, with just a CLI to get me by. Realizing I don't actually need ten cores and 32GB of RAM and a hefty GPU to do daily work is pretty damn revelatory - and shows how grotesque mass-market software and OSes have become in the name of marketing cycles and advertising dollars.
30 days later they canceled the ABM company account and deleted all the associated users along with the Apple ID which I used to log into a testing device, which now became a fairly expensive paperweight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47516266
I was pleasantly surprised by the age verification. "Based on the age of your Apple account you are verified as being at least 18 years old". Done. Tempus fugit.
Article says his account is 25 years old, but I guess the laws don't care about such metadata.
But OT: it makes me realize my Yahoo Mail account is turning 30 this year, because in 1997 Yahoo wanted to compete with Hotmail and I thought "Having a @yahoo.com email, that's a very good nerd badge!". Nowadays the ridicule is deserved, and they've silently lost all my mail from 1990s...
The gatekeeping, the age identification issues are both "real problems", that compound, from the same root.
Anonymity allows one to behave in ways they would not "in public", with your neighbors, or co workers (for the most part). Be that building malware, or kids doing things they should not, and the people and business that take advantage of that.
I don't think the UK law is a good one, but when major companies continuously fail at their social responsibility I understand why people want the government to step in. I don't think the friction apple creates is a great user experience but it is better than the old approach that ended up with systems riddled with malware and spyware because normal users don't think like the folks who built technology.
Could the law have been written better: sure. "More control" over their Childs devices would have been the way. Is there a solution to the friction with apple... maybe but I'm not sure it would be that much of an improvement (its purpose IS to slow you down).
I didn't know what a MNT Pocket Reform and wow! Rockchip, 20 cm wide keyboard, ix ethernet connector, 4 hour advertised runtime, 2 inches thick and costs more than a macbook. You really have to suffer to stick it to the man!
Wow, that age verification is wild. We need to fight this here in the U.S. If my cell phone starts requiring gov't id and credit/debit cards for verification... god help me...
To the Apple users that are completely fed up with Apple: Stop talking us to death. Just switch already. Send us a follow up post in 6-12 months letting us know how it goes for you.
The forced age verification shocks me. It shouldn't, given how much it's been in the news, but my poor naive Millennial sensibilities still feel it's part of some dystopian nightmare that I saw in some Michael Bay sci-fi once, not my present reality.
Your phone, which you own, updated during the night, and now demands you tell it who you are through a credit card, which you may not have, or you're locked out of features. On your phone. This is outrageous.
We can jump ship -- for now -- but it's only a matter of time before these laws cover every kind of Internet access, if they remain unchecked.
Just to add a little bit of context, when I hit the same problem today the flow offered me the option to scan my driving license or 'national id card' (whatever that is - we don't have those in the UK)
So despite the claims in the article, it's not credit card centric.
However, they did not accept my passport as a scannable ID, and so luckily I had a credit card somewhere that I have used recently for a single large purchase otherwise I'd be stuffed, as I don't drive
> Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it.
Does them quitting Apple mean they're going to stop supporting MacOS users?
> It will take me a while before I can fully migrate away... I’m gonna throw all of them away... I purchased a MNT Pocket Reform. It will take them a while to assemble and send it to me... I am considering getting a Fairphone Gen 6...
Honestly it sounds like Apple is far from lost here, but I'm excited to see updates on how the transition is, if it ever does happen.
You’ll be back. Have you tried Windows 11 lately? Want an exercise in self-restraint not plowing yours fist through your monitor? Use Windows. Microsoft as Steve Jobs said has no taste. They hire the cheapest international engineers who take zero accountability and perfection in their work. Everything is just, that will do. Good enough.
The laptops seem... crazy enough. And what you get for your buck is even less than with normal PC manufacturers, let alone Apple. You get CPU that is slow for a phone. For 1300 USD.
On the other hand I have a weird urge to buy one and use as a daily.
I read about the new age check nonsense just before 26.4 downloaded, fortunately. I turned off automatic updates and so I guess I have a little time to get out of the apple ecosystem. I'm thinking GrapheneOS on Pixel 10. This is absolutely not required by UK law, apple just seems to enjoy the taste of government boot.
Great timing too to ditch MacOS. Just instilled Fedora Asahi Remix 43 on may MacBook Pro M2, and both KDE and Gnome work great. So happy to be liberated form the increasingly sloppy Apple OS.
We just got fucked by this today. My 22 year old daughter doesn't have a driving license or a credit card but does have a passport and it didn't work. She's now got a kids phone. I haven't tried the 20 year old yet who is in the same situation...
They have 5 days to unfuck this or I'm literally rolling out Pixels + Graphene to the family.
I'm in the same boat, but only because of the age verification thing.
I was never an Apple maximalist to begin with, I just have an iPhone and use a Mac at work because I have to (and will continue to), but I just turned off auto-updates on my iPhone and will never buy a new Apple device.
For the UK people among us: What happens if you just don't verify your age? Do you not get access to adult things? What if you use a VPN? Will civil disobedience lead to any punishment or just inconvenience? What it's like to live with these invasive laws?
nitpick: just changed my monitor to a UWQHD one. The text on this blog occupies 1/6 of the screen, 5/6 of white. If i only use half the screen for the broswer, it would be 1/3 and 2/2. Still too much white space for me.
Anyway: Not sure why fairphone. While i like the concept it's still an android phone, eos is not much better than lineage.
If i had to change today i would go again for a Pixel 8A (or a series 10) and graphene. But if the OP can wait and see, next year we should get replaceable batteries everywhere because EU, and maybe wait and see whatever motorola is cooking for graphene.
Or check out the pinephone and go full linux.. i guess, when i'll have some spare cash to throw away..
I sympathize with the author's feelings in general, but also hope he directs some of the frustration towards his government for forcing the whole age verification scam (let alone everything else that is being broken in that particular jurisdiction)
Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it.
Indeed. I'm honestly impressed that he lasted this long. My first "I'm very displeased moment" was when Java became a second-class citizen on macos. I was a Java dev at that time and had written some non-trivial apps. They weren't native perfect, but they were close enough that my highly-Apple-fan relatives didn't realize they weren't "native" until I told them. The write-once-run-anywhere dream of desktop UI software (without getting into Qt) was there in a very real way for me. I ran it on my windows machine at work, and my mac laptop and linux desktop at home. The hoops at that point were nothing compared to what they are now, and it began souring me.
For me the final straw was when I got the latest macbook pro with the latest mac monitor (all from Apple mind you) and yet there was a horrific bug that about half the time when you plugged in to the monitor, the laptop screen shut off and would never come back on until you did a hard reboot (holding the power button). That was never supposed to be possible since it was Apple hardware/software controlled top to bottom, the original promise of the vertical integration and one of the reasons we accepted the heavy lack of cross-platform compatiblity.
A little before that I used to put my macbook on the nightstand and listen to podcasts at night to fall asleep. I would dim the screen to off and have the volume at low levels. Apple rolled out a software update that suddenly caused the screen to kick on at FULL BRIGHTNESS after about 5 to 10 minutes (when the screensaver would have normally kicked in), while I'm sleeping in a completely dark room. It was so bright that it would wake me up. That bug was there for years, and myabe still is (I replaced it with a Linux laptop).
My user experience on macs was never close to bug-free, and was frankly worse than almost everything else out there. It took me a while to figure that out though.
462 comments
1. Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
2. mac OS26. I totally agree that this is a total fiasco from a design perspective, and liquid glass is unqualified shit. Still, I see Apple at least somewhat moving in the right direction by getting rid of Alan Dye.
3. Apple had a bug in their age verification protocol. Again, valid point, but Apple needs to follow UK law. I've seen a lot more missives arguing against requiring things like driver's licenses and other government ID, and so it seems like Apple is at least trying to go the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
To emphasize, I'm not apologizing for Apple here. In particular, much has been written about how Apple has lost their way regarding the "it just works" philosophy. But it seems like the author's main beef is against Apple's level of control, and this is just a fundamental difference in Apple's stance that has existed for about 2 decades.
> 1.Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
Apple been tightening that control over time. For a long time on MacOS X you could simply run apps. Then came notarisation, but you could still disable it. Now, even with a certificate, it still shows a dialog. I wish that apps that went through notarisation would simply run like the ones from the app store without a dialog showing.
> 3. (...) the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
But not everyone has a credit card. Those are not something you're born with or required to have or even required to have them issued from the same country you're living in. That is not the least restrictive, that is a very large assumption. What I would have liked to have seen is them providing you with options: "do you want to use credit card verification? National ID? Passport? Credit check? Etc" and then it is up to each user to decide on their risk profile and what they are okay with.
As of now, my only way to verify it is by literally ordering a credit card from my UK bank when I'm pretty happy with my debit cards already.
> but Apple needs to follow UK law
The Online Safety Act does not require device manufacturers to enforce age "verification" at the OS level. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is displaying anticipatory obedience here, which is the opposite of good citizenship.
Two things stand out from this fiasco:
1. Apple, and those who praise them for what they just did, don't appear to have learnt from history. Anticipatory obedience used to be known as "vorauseilender Gehorsam" during a particularly dark period in the history of a country a few hundred miles southeast of the UK. It was one of the factors enabling the darkness.
2. The UK is a small enough market for Apple to treat it as a test bed. Which it probably is in this case, and which means that removal of anonymity aka "OS-level age verification" is coming to a lot more devices in a lot more countries soon. See also the uncanny coincidence of lots of OECD countries pushing for online age verification at the same time.
> If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you
Author started at System 8. They didn't start locking things down until the iPhone.
> To summarise for yous there are three main issues for me and the last one happened today and is what pushed me through the threshold.
The compounding led to this, not that individual issues existed (and have been a problem) for a while.
The only other complaint seems to be liquid glass? It really feels strange because Apple feels on the upswing with their new office and their cheap, repairable mac.
Once the dust settles, this will be a case study for decades to come. Apple threw their hard-won reputational gains off a cliff for _nothing_.
I'm told ThinkPads are getting to parity and have primo Linux support, but barring accident, my M3 MBP will probably last me a decade. Another reason I prefer Apple hardware.
The UK, and Brazil who passed a similar law, 'cheated' by just forcing private companies to figure it out.
I learned quickly that "Find My" was far superior in remote tracking of airtag-equivalents, and switched some of my convertible tags to their network.
I flew out of O'Hare last month, and there were advertisements all over the airport announcing that Illinois id/drivers license import into Apple Wallet, so I did it, and that works.
Supposedly, passports can be imported. I haven't been able to make that work, even after a few hours on the phone with Apple.
I also added a new CTA Ventra card, and I lost my ATM card while out of the country and instantly added a new one to Apple Wallet.
Apple devices allow biometrics to be disabled for unlocking the phone. That is an important requirement for me to use these features.
I would never, ever trust Google with any of these things. Ever.
That being said, if I want to run a torrent client on my phone, I should be able to do so. Apple will never allow that.
If I want a Bourne/POSIX shell, I should be able run one. Apple will never allow that [AFAIK].
There are important reasons that Apple products will never, ever be my primary communication devices.
In the UK most people use debit cards instead for most things.
https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/data-and-research/data/card-spe...
Credit card usage is a small fraction of debit card usage. This is very different to the USA where there are more credit card transactions than debit card ones.
If this means they would need to geofence + start disabling devices to the extent required by law, good. The laws will immediately be repealed.
The whole platform is a smoldering fire at this point, so nothing in the article is particularly surprising. I've hit 10x as many bugs as the user mentioned. Liquid glass (as bad as it is!) barely makes the top 10 daily issues I have with iOS 26. In any other release, it'd be #1.
Maybe "Flood the zone" should be the word of the year for 2026?
> Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score.
UK passed age verification law and people still find a way to blame the US.
>Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score.
This is the way ID verification is going in the USA and the reasons for it seem clear. A human person is only useful to a corporation if they have money to give the corporation. If you don't have provable money, either through a third party corporate payment service willing to pay for you sometime later (a credit card) or by giving a corporation your login details to your bank account (ie, Plaid), then you're not a human.
It clear what a bot is now: anything that doesn't have provable money.
And if I'm being frank, my time with Linux (Debian 13 on an N100 NUC w/ Docker) has really opened my eyes to just how excessive modern compute is, specifically to power increasingly bogged-down operating systems and woefully inefficient software. The N100 sips energy while happily transcoding 4K video streams on Jellyfin, running my IRC server for friends to hop off Discord, reverse proxying my entire home network, letting me stream game nights via Owncast, host some image board shitposts for various friend groups, host my RSS Aggregator, and still yawns with 75% excess capacity left over.
I'll still have a Mac because that's what my family uses (if they want free tech support from me, that is), and I'll still have my Windows gaming PC, but I'm already drafting up cyberdeck plans for my first primary Linux box, with just a CLI to get me by. Realizing I don't actually need ten cores and 32GB of RAM and a hefty GPU to do daily work is pretty damn revelatory - and shows how grotesque mass-market software and OSes have become in the name of marketing cycles and advertising dollars.
30 days later they canceled the ABM company account and deleted all the associated users along with the Apple ID which I used to log into a testing device, which now became a fairly expensive paperweight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47516266
But OT: it makes me realize my Yahoo Mail account is turning 30 this year, because in 1997 Yahoo wanted to compete with Hotmail and I thought "Having a @yahoo.com email, that's a very good nerd badge!". Nowadays the ridicule is deserved, and they've silently lost all my mail from 1990s...
Anonymity allows one to behave in ways they would not "in public", with your neighbors, or co workers (for the most part). Be that building malware, or kids doing things they should not, and the people and business that take advantage of that.
I don't think the UK law is a good one, but when major companies continuously fail at their social responsibility I understand why people want the government to step in. I don't think the friction apple creates is a great user experience but it is better than the old approach that ended up with systems riddled with malware and spyware because normal users don't think like the folks who built technology.
Could the law have been written better: sure. "More control" over their Childs devices would have been the way. Is there a solution to the friction with apple... maybe but I'm not sure it would be that much of an improvement (its purpose IS to slow you down).
This problem is everywhere in your products and it’s clear the passion for high quality work is gone from the company.
Apple will not survive at luxury prices and Google level service.
The sad story is, that I would rather go caveman mode than use MS Windows.
In other words: Apple’s complacency will be left unpunished since there has never been a worse situation for an alternative.
I see none. None at all.
Apple is the new Windows XP for me. It is as crappy as it gets, but compared to any alternative it still leads by a fair margin.
Apple before the glossy crap was the amount of boring beauty, I loved to work with on a daily basis. Decent visuals without any distractions.
Glossy suddenly put me over the edge and I am glad to get a discount for mainly using the devices as business machines.
Otherwise: luxurious rot.
Your phone, which you own, updated during the night, and now demands you tell it who you are through a credit card, which you may not have, or you're locked out of features. On your phone. This is outrageous.
We can jump ship -- for now -- but it's only a matter of time before these laws cover every kind of Internet access, if they remain unchecked.
So despite the claims in the article, it's not credit card centric.
However, they did not accept my passport as a scannable ID, and so luckily I had a credit card somewhere that I have used recently for a single large purchase otherwise I'd be stuffed, as I don't drive
> Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it.
Does them quitting Apple mean they're going to stop supporting MacOS users?
> It will take me a while before I can fully migrate away... I’m gonna throw all of them away... I purchased a MNT Pocket Reform. It will take them a while to assemble and send it to me... I am considering getting a Fairphone Gen 6...
Honestly it sounds like Apple is far from lost here, but I'm excited to see updates on how the transition is, if it ever does happen.
https://shop.mntre.com/
The laptops seem... crazy enough. And what you get for your buck is even less than with normal PC manufacturers, let alone Apple. You get CPU that is slow for a phone. For 1300 USD.
On the other hand I have a weird urge to buy one and use as a daily.
https://asahilinux.org/fedora/
They have 5 days to unfuck this or I'm literally rolling out Pixels + Graphene to the family.
Exit plan for the Mac is a Linux desktop.
Seems to happen a lot with "ragequitting" posts. I feel like I could write "Microsoft Just Lost Me" and it could get to the top.
I was never an Apple maximalist to begin with, I just have an iPhone and use a Mac at work because I have to (and will continue to), but I just turned off auto-updates on my iPhone and will never buy a new Apple device.
Anyway: Not sure why fairphone. While i like the concept it's still an android phone, eos is not much better than lineage. If i had to change today i would go again for a Pixel 8A (or a series 10) and graphene. But if the OP can wait and see, next year we should get replaceable batteries everywhere because EU, and maybe wait and see whatever motorola is cooking for graphene. Or check out the pinephone and go full linux.. i guess, when i'll have some spare cash to throw away..
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Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it.Indeed. I'm honestly impressed that he lasted this long. My first "I'm very displeased moment" was when Java became a second-class citizen on macos. I was a Java dev at that time and had written some non-trivial apps. They weren't native perfect, but they were close enough that my highly-Apple-fan relatives didn't realize they weren't "native" until I told them. The write-once-run-anywhere dream of desktop UI software (without getting into Qt) was there in a very real way for me. I ran it on my windows machine at work, and my mac laptop and linux desktop at home. The hoops at that point were nothing compared to what they are now, and it began souring me.
For me the final straw was when I got the latest macbook pro with the latest mac monitor (all from Apple mind you) and yet there was a horrific bug that about half the time when you plugged in to the monitor, the laptop screen shut off and would never come back on until you did a hard reboot (holding the power button). That was never supposed to be possible since it was Apple hardware/software controlled top to bottom, the original promise of the vertical integration and one of the reasons we accepted the heavy lack of cross-platform compatiblity.
A little before that I used to put my macbook on the nightstand and listen to podcasts at night to fall asleep. I would dim the screen to off and have the volume at low levels. Apple rolled out a software update that suddenly caused the screen to kick on at FULL BRIGHTNESS after about 5 to 10 minutes (when the screensaver would have normally kicked in), while I'm sleeping in a completely dark room. It was so bright that it would wake me up. That bug was there for years, and myabe still is (I replaced it with a Linux laptop).
My user experience on macs was never close to bug-free, and was frankly worse than almost everything else out there. It took me a while to figure that out though.