A change for the better. The distinction made it unnecessarily complex for users. The ChatGPT desktop app inherited the same separation. Having to change between ChatGPT for day to day questions, to Codex for everything else always seemed too cumbersome.
> The Core Technology Fee, a per-install fee for developers that achieve extraordinary scale, will be replaced by the Core Technology Commission, a simple 5 percent commission on digital transactions in apps distributed outside the App Store. The new terms also eliminate the initial acquisition fee and store services fee.
[...]
> In order to keep EU users as safe as possible, Apple will continue to require every alternatively distributed app to go through Notarization — a baseline review focused on basic functionality and protection from serious threats.
All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone? Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
One thing that ticks me off about this conversation is they are always framed as anti-consumer, instead of anti-developer. It's Tim Sweeney, Mark Zuckerberg, and the ad networks who have the biggest gripe with these policies, not consumers. Consumers are the ones who bear the brunt of the cost when it comes to developers who desperately need to exercise their right to capture every and any piece of data the OS provides.
>If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
Anti-developer is anti-consumer because it creates a barrier to entry as a supplier in a market where consumers create the demand, but I suppose the main thesis behind calling it anti-consumer is that competition among suppliers is generally considered good for consumers for keeping prices and product/service quality in check.
>who desperately need to exercise their right to capture every and any piece of data the OS provides.
thankfully the EU has extensive privacy regulations prohibiting developers from doing just that, so we can enjoy open platforms instead of being at the mercy of a private corporations protection racket as if it's the 19th century
>open platforms instead of being at the mercy of a private corporations protection racket as if it's the 19th century
But your gripe is not about open platforms. Your gripe is that Apple iOS is not an open platform. Those are two different things, there are open platforms out there.
My complaint is that iOS as a closed platform is a feature, and Apple has been a good steward for that platform that has made it a stable computing platform for the general public. Corporations (cosplaying as "poor indie developers"), are simply frustrated that Apple isn't allowing them to abuse their users for extra dollars.
These same "developers" who pretend to care so deeply about open platforms don't even distribute their software on Linux. The concern trolling about open platforms is a farce. Picking on epic games again - you can't play Fortnite on Linux. It's "open platforms for me, but not for thee"
Forget the advertising angle, lets look at payments. Apple forces you to use their payment processor and they charge a larger fee. What does the consumer get? They get a single control panel for all their subscriptions that they can cancel at any time. "Developers" hate this - not because they want to charge you less, but so that they can make you jump through 50 hoops in order to cancel.
If I have to choose between two evil corporations, Apple and the greater tech industry that shit on the web, I'm picking Apple. If I care about open platforms, I'll move to an open platform, not lobby the government for Apple to open theirs.
>, but so that they can make you jump through 50 hoops in order to cancel.
again, doesn't apply in the EU. Consumer Rights Directive passed a few years ago stipulates that any subscription must be as easy to cancel as it is to sign up, and created a 'two click rule'.
Practical example of this is Amazon, here in the EU it takes exactly two clicks, in a lot of other jurisdictions you have to jump through half a dozen pages.
You might have to choose between two evil corporations, my point was I don't. Here we can open Apple up so they don't get to extract platform rent and I'm still not at the mercy of Tim Sweeney. Being governed by robber barons instead of your own government is an ideological choice, if you enjoy living like that fine but we don't.
A closed platform can only ever be a feature if you're so disempowered that private companies are running circles around you, otherwise it's just anti-consumer and anti-developer behavior.
We can? Last time I checked everyone and their mother is collecting all kinds of data for nefarious purposes. EU has a snowball's chance in hell keeping up, and when they eventually get around to issuing a fine it's so small and irrelevant compared to money made that it's business as usual.
Are those regulations adequately enforced? Lots of smaller developers out of jurisdication, and lots of bigger ones treat it as a cost of doing business: the data is worth more than the fines.
Thank you. There is a huge difference between "developers being able to do anything they want to the user's system" and "users being able to do anything they want with their own system." I'm strongly against the former and strongly for the latter.
App developers have shown time and time again that they will abuse every single resource on the user's system they can get their claws into. If they can get it, they will use APIs meant for accessibility and disabled users to remote-control your system. If they can get it, they will use location/GPS when their app has nothing to do with location. If they can get it, they will spam you with notifications and alerts. The USER needs to have control over these and the ability to stop abusive developers from running roughshod over their computers.
> We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
Evil developers forcing poor users to download their applications.
Guess we all to suffer with braindead supercomputers in our pockets, because granny gran installed hax to get free gems for a gacha (that she downloaded from Apple approved App Store).
>Guess we all to suffer with braindead supercomputers in our pockets
Complete non-sequitur. You don't have to suffer, you can just buy a different platform. Android has had alternate stores for decades.
This is concern trolling. If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about - you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.
> You don't have to suffer, you can just buy a different platform. Android has had alternate stores for decades.
Because the only difference between Apple and Android crap is only software, of course? I won't fit into the message limit if I start listing issues that I have with Android garbage.
> If you cared about having an open platform, you could just not buy apple. But that's not what you care about
Where did I say anything about open platform? Are you hallucinating LLM or something? I just want to install whatever I write for myself without going through the hoops of weekly resigning and big brother approving what I do on a device that I OWN.
> you want to be able to push your shitty software onto other people's supercomputers without Apple getting in the way.
> We saw how developers used that "freedom" - now all almost all software runs in a remote server and is delivered through a sandbox (and even then developers try as hard as possible to poison that as well).
What are you talking about exactly?
On linux I can run any software I want, and how is that bad?
Your approach is fine, if that is something important to use then use linux. What I dislike is taking a platform where the sandbox is a feature, and crying you aren't allowed to shit in the sandbox.
> If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
I just bought a new m5 macbook air. The day that I can't treat my MacOS laptop as basically a glorified NeXT workstation and install/run code of my own choice (albeit after going through a few scary warnings in the default user protecting system preferences, like allow to run unsigned code, etc), is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again.
I see news about apple thinking about "merging" MacOS and iOS and making a touch screen macbook and it really makes me think they are going to try to do this in the near future.
> "is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again."
I bought a Linux laptop 1 or 2 years ago (after many years of using Macbooks), and was very surprised how well Linux works nowadays.
As a matter of fact, in many areas Linux is even better than macOS. There's so many annoying bugs in macOS that interrupt your workflow on a daily basis.
So, my Linux laptop is a lot more stable too.
Would definitely recommend giving Linux a try
(Unless maybe if you have very little "tech" knowledge. I would not recommend it to everyone and their grandmother just yet, since they probably aren't aware of the consequences and howto migrate things.)
It's not that I haven't given it a try, my primary desktop machine is debian stable and xfce4 with the libraries installed to also run a bunch of gnome and kde-native applications, but that right now I prefer macos for laptop use... Primarily due to suspend/resume working properly, the touchpad, and certain user interface things in MacOS that make working with a single smaller screen easier for extensive multitasking (expose hot corners of screen to quickly see all windows, switch windows, etc).
I haven't had any suspend/resume issues for years on laptops with Linux. I've used multiple ThinkPads and Dell XPS machines. Currently rocking an ancient MacBook air from 2014 running Ubuntu which also doesn't have any issues.
I use Asahi Linux as my M2 work laptop on a daily basis. Other than the lack of USB external display support, which I don't use, and sleep eating up about 1% of battery per hour it works incredibly well. I have an 13th gen Intel laptop that I got last year and Asahi just runs circles around it on Linux with just about everything.
For desktop and server, sure. MacBook is superior for everything that matters in a laptop. The touchpad alone is a dream. compare that to constant pain for the thousands of hours I will use the device over it's lifetime.
Apple makes nice hardware, but it's definitely not superior for everything, and the gap between other manufacturers isn't really there anymore on the upper end.
So sure - the Macbook is better than a cheap ~$500 laptop. But between my work issued Macbook and my nice Dell XPS? Not much difference. In either price or hardware...
Honestly, even between the macbook and my framework - not enough of a difference to really be that upset about (my biggest complaint is mostly just battery life).
---
Personally, I would argue that OS is a much bigger pain point to deal with, and you should probably factor that higher in the decision than the hardware. Just expect to spend roughly the same on the machine (Apple is still ~20% more)
And none of these are meaningfully different on high end laptops from other providers.
Apple had a window with M1 devices where I'd probably agree they were just better. Apple also has a history of making devices that are very expensive, and have a corresponding higher quality (ex - in the 2000s when most laptop manufacturers were racing to the bottom, and things like the Eee pc were considered hot - lots of garbage quality windows machines).
But many manufacturers today have entries in the "High quality, high price" category, and they're very similar.
The size is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the battery life is almost identical to an M5 laptop, the touchpad is almost identical to an M5 laptop (personally, I actually like the touchpad on the xps slightly more because the cutout on the front of macbooks is sharp, and I find it annoying and painful for long use, but I also have very large hands and I'm left handed).
And also - the price is functionally the same as the new M5 laptops.
All of those land in the +/- 10% range of each other. With just slight differences (ex - I can get a touchscreen on the XPS if I want, but it makes the battery life 15hrs instead of 18hrs on the macbook. The XPS is also fractionally lighter (3lbs vs 3.4lbs). The macbook is ~10% faster on single core benchmarks then the intel series 3, but identical to slightly worse on multicore. etc...)
Basically - unless you're actually using different machines here... stop it, you're talking out your ass (cough - fanboy - cough).
Even the framework... yes - it's clearly not as "good" as the $3600 macbook I have. I don't expect it to be given I paid ~$1500 for it. But it also excels in other areas that make it worth considering - I have 3 young kids, and I've had the screen pulled flat several times, the touchpad got a cup of milk dumped in it, and my oldest shoved a screwdriver into a usb-c port. Turns out new screen hinges were ~$19, the touchpad was ~$21, and the replacement port was $9. All done at home myself with simple tools.
Compared to several trips to a store and weeks without a laptop... that's a type of ergonomics that I prefer right now.
Eh, it depends on how you use it. I have a heavily used Linux laptop that's almost a decade old and I still love it.
I've had various work and personal MacBooks over the years and don't really miss them. It sounds like their quality has gotten somewhat better in recent cycles but the era of keyboards so fragile they break if you sneeze on them, and gimmicks like turning part of the keyboard into a touch screen were terrible. I would absolutely take a Linux machine from that era that costs half as much over any of those devices.
One caveat is that there are Apple-specific features like some of the trackpad gestures that I've never been a heavy user of. Partly because they aren't that interesting to me, and partly because I don't like having my workflows and muscle memory tied to a specific platform I don't control. Someone heavily into those features might have a harder time switching away.
How is that touchpad better than any other? My wife has Macbook Air, I don't see any difference between touchpad on my linux Dell 5680 compared to the Macbook.
It sounds similar to people that praise "haptic feedback" on phones, and describe feedback on some devices as extraordinary. (vibration device, seriously?)
Macbook has nice hardware, if I can ignore the strange keyboard layout, although I would prefer bigger keyboard and smaller touchpad.
Macbook software is something that is so bad compared to linux that I won't even comment.
Glad to see I am not the only one. Many years ago I had a laptop with a pointing stick, aka "the clit", and that was surprisingly easy to use. But touchpads? No matter how fancy and expensive you make them, they will always be a bad interface.
Haptic feedback touchpad is vastly superior to the button style. Less force required makes it easier to move your finger while the "button" is pressed. Most higher end laptops use it as the standard touchpad these days. MacOS is also well optimized for touchpads to the point that the traditional mouse experience is somewhat degraded. The smoothness and interactivity of the animations in response to touchpad gestures give a powerful placebo effect for how good the hardware is.
Multiple other competitive laptops have haptic trackpads with the list growing every year.
Lenovo and Framework have great ones, so does Microsoft and other brands I can’t think of right now.
I also find it that “macOS is well-optimized for touchpads” actually means “macOS is hostile to traditional mice and keyboards so that Apple can sell you external mice that cost 3x the price of alternatives even though you’re using your laptop at a stationary desk with external monitor 80% of the time”.
Plug in a traditional mouse to macOS and you’ll see how horrible the OS is with it for no reason. I needed third party mouse software just to play Minecraft without a horrendous scroll wheel experience for the item bar. There’s no built-in OS setting to have separate scroll directions for trackpad versus external mouse even though such a setup is highly logical. You need third party software for that. Meanwhile, on Linux that configuration option is built-in to Gnome and KDE.
Most trackpad gestures in macOS don’t need to be trackpad gestures at all and seem to be aimed at selling expensive peripherals and making Apple’s trackpad advantage larger than it would be if their system used a different OS. There’s no advantage to three finger swiping versus a traditional keyboard shortcut (to be fair, macOS also offers the keyboard shortcuts).
With the exception of flying on an airplane, grabbing a $30 mouse out of your backpack and plopping it on the table is perfectly acceptable and portable solution and often better than any trackpad imaginable for deep productive work.
Anyway, that last bit is a tangent and a rant of mine, but either way, the list of reasons to prefer a Mac is shrinking every day, if you ask me.
For example, MacBook Pros aren’t at the top of the battery life charts anymore, that honor goes to the Framework 13 Pro with the Panther Lake chips.
Unfortunately, not to my knowledge. I wouldn’t be surprised if they get a retail partner soon, though. Surely they must realize that Micro Center would be an ideal partner for their demographic.
I own the original chassis 13, AMD 7640U. My previous laptop was a MacBook Pro M2 14”.
There are some clear downgrades: battery life, screen, speakers. Processing power, yeah, though it’s not like I ever maxed out the one I had.
I love having ample storage though. 2TB/32GB in a MacBook Pro was wildly out of my price range. Back in the good old days of early 2025 buying those components yourself was something like a $200-300 cost while the Mac was closer to a thousand bucks. The keyboard is superior to a MacBook Pro in my eyes. I also started to really, really despise the notch and the way the menu bar software fights it.
My Framework 13 Pro arrives tomorrow. It appears like it should address every complaint I have on my original 13”. It’s just too bad about the RAM situation otherwise LPCAMM2 would be a benefit rather than something of a detractor like it is today. I’m one of the lucky people who snagged an old stock 32GB module for $250 during the announcement keynote. You’re almost better off with soldered memory in the current situation, but hopefully that’s temporary.
It’s a dream with Linux compatibility, as you’d expect. I enjoy the fact that I can play real games on Steam compared to the macOS situation where gaming was always a pain. There are also a lot of things I like about CachyOS and KDE a lot better than macOS. In a lot of ways it’s freeing, but some commercial software is obviously missing.
Apple is the worst about this. "It works on my computer" but it won't on your computer, because Apple will quarantine my code when it gets copied to your computer, so it can't run on your computer because it's "damaged". Unless I pay Apple $100/yr. Microsoft is worse these days, but that's no excuse.
The "merging" is the "convergence" meme. Tech journos like it because they can say "the coming unification" and it has a kind of mythic taste and they're casual thinkers. If (when?) Apple goes down that path, their entire value prop will be dead and gone. The Linux Desktop will come as everything else simply decays.
yes, though the level of headache is relatively minimal. I meant I'd stop using it if things became completely impossible to run unsigned code (or the hassle went from a couple of extra seconds of work to some convoluted process) . Additionally something like this takes less than a minute to do once.
> yes, though the level of headache is relatively minimal
Minimal if you're technical, completely incomprehensible if you're not. I mean I know when the OS says "this application is damaged and should be deleted" that it's lying and there is a terminal command for it, I can never remember it off the top of my head.
At least the right click open thing was something a normie could remember, but a non-technical person doesn't understand navigating a file structure and running a terminal command on a file with flags.
SOC2 and other compliance frameworks will take charge of making those flags compulsory, with the threat of being uninsured and willfully personally responsible in case of breach.
At least computers of all other normal workers would be locked down; Those of developers could have development tools but certainly shouldn't be able to connect to production servers or have customer invoicing data in them. Maybe buy two computers for developers with legal tasks? Win-win for Apple.
The water is fine! All you have to do is a little song and dance now and then, and you hardly even feel the heat. If it was boiling I'd be out of here in a jiffy.
First, Gatekeeper was introduced, but you could globally set in system preferences if unsigned software is enabled. Then this setting option was removed. What will come next? I do not know but I started to migrate off the ecosystem. Just in case.
(At least on macOS one can still disable routined. Unlnike on iOS.)
There was a time I was worried about them doing this (during the touchbar Macbook era) but I think the Mac is once again viewed by Apple as extremely important. I think it's more likely we see a split of the iPad line in the next few years - Pros run macOS, whereas the base iPad, iPad Mini, and iPad Air continue to run iOS which is being modified for larger screens of foldables anyway. iPadOS goes away
> is the day I stop buying apple hardware and just use linux laptops again.
Kinda tempted to do that already just because of Liquid Glass.
I mean, if I'm going to be stuck with a *nix OS whose UI is badly thought out and inconsistent between apps, might as well take the cheaper option, right?
yeah, but if only suspend/resume worked near flawlessly... I've had MacOS crash on suspend or resume before, but I'd say it happens less than 1/10th of 1% of the time I sleep or resume my laptop.
There is no actual "news" about that, because it is, and always has been, bullshit.
People talk about it every time Apple releases a new major OS update with UI changes that make macOS and iOS look similar, or a new laptop form factor, because it gets clicks. It's basically the new "Apple is Doomed!" (Which, in case you weren't paying attention to the tech press pre-2010, was the perennial narrative around them—and yes, it did take years after the runaway success of the iPhone for the stories to stop.)
> All in all, still extremely anti-consumer. If I can download and run arbitrary code on my Mac--even if I have to jump through scary warnings--why should I not be able to do so on my phone?
Don’t worry. They’re working really hard to fix the bug. It’s not intended that you can install without paying a fee.
There is a big difference between fighting to keep their walled garden in IOS alive and nuking the entire developer ecosystem that they have built on macos.
Strictly speaking, you can. Enable developer mode, connect your phone to your Mac (you need a Mac), and you can build and install whatever code you want.
Asterisks being that your phone will uninstall it after a while I think, and you need to create a free account for Xcode.
The up to 3 apps per device stay but cannot be opened after 7 days until refreshed.
And "whatever code you want" here excludes JIT compilation, or as I understand it memory that is both writable and executable, as your app would require a special 'entitlement' from Apple.
Seriously? I have a custom Android app that I use. It's mostly vibe coded now, which I'm a bit embarrassed about, but demonstrates that the bar for custom software is very low at the moment and getting lower.
I considered getting an iPhone to replace my S-series Samsung, the only reason I stayed with Samsung is for the S-Pen. Had I gone with iPhone I would not be able to write and run my own software? That's absolutely ridiculous.
Apple's internal justification for this is that the iPhone and iPad are consumer devices designed for maximum comfort and safety, whereas the Mac is a device designed for developers and professionals. From their perspective there's legitimate demand for both, and they serve both market needs.
BTW you can't download and run arbitrary code on your Mac unless you break out a terminal and do developer-y things, because notarization has been a requirement on macOS for years. There is no clicking through scary warnings. macOS will simply tell you that an unnotarized app is broken and refuse to open it via any GUI path that exists. You'll have to strip the quarantine xattrs at the UNIX level to bypass it.
> Apple's internal justification for this is that the iPhone and iPad are consumer devices designed for maximum comfort and safety, whereas the Mac is a device designed for developers and professionals.
Then why did they recently launch a MacBook that costs less than an iPhone and a marketing campaign targeted at existing iPhone users?
> If you love iPhone, you'll love Mac. Mac is designed to be just as easy to learn as iPhone.
Actually, it is just apple started with app store/closed with the iphone, and got away with it.
for the mac - I don't think they could close the platform.
What I think they could do is make the ipad more appealing, add a keyboard, then kill the mac like they killed the mac pro. (fire your low-value customers)
> Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
Good question - maybe ask Epic (a video game company known for Fortnite) why they sued Apple and Google while ignoring Sony, Nintendo and (the Xbox portion of) Microsoft.
As arstechnica noted:
> "That might help explain why console makers feel the need to guard their 30-percent cut on software and microtransaction sales. But it doesn’t really explain why a company like Epic would be OK with paying that fee to Sony but not to Apple."
The messages on Mac are becoming more ridiculous and cumbersome each upgrade though. Kind of sick of jumping through System Settings hoops every time I upgrade an app
Every time I’m forced to do it[0] I feel good because I’m glad these hoops are unavoidable on all the computers of the people I provide family tech support for.
[0] Which is rare. I’m installing random shit all the time using homebrew and it’s basically never an issue.
Except that it's easier to invalidate an entire signing certificate than to hope your malware definition satisfies all mechanically generated permutations of the malware.
How does that help you when the malware authors can get more signing certificates the same way they got the first one?
Notice that this is easier for malware authors to do than ordinary people because their business is compromising others' machines, so then they can use the signing keys of any victims who have a developer account, or sign up for new ones using stolen cards from any of the victims.
Meanwhile you would then have Apple revoking the victims' signing certificates and screwing their honest users who can now no longer install the non-malicious software they previously released.
The entire premise is a scam to extract an annual fee from a million small developers.
You know what's even easier than getting a signing certificate for malware? Not bothering with signing at all.
And revoking a cert for one "dev" does not mean revoking everything, as for them stealing signing keys from other devs (not typical users, but security literate) how often does that happen, especially in the case of apple with sandboxing etc?
I'm honestly baffled as to how EU regulators can see Apple's behavior as compliance. They're doing everything they did before, perhaps changing only to temporarily turn down the intensity a bit.
If what we were discussing was hacky ways of installing apps on your own device rather than distribution to end users, you can do without the Developer membership cost.
It would just be limited to 3 apps per device that require to be refreshed every 7 days to continue to be able to open them.
Web apps are a non starter for iOS since the only allowed browser on iOS happens to not support crucial standards and may drop your app's persistent data.
Because a Raspberry Pi would be very inconvenient to use as a smartphone, obviously. Doesn't explain why it makes sense to treat one ARM computer as a mildly locked jail (Macs) and another as a hard locked jail (iPhones and other handhelds); I feel like the only explanation here is that the smartphone duopoly has worked hard to condition customers into accepting this.
> I feel like the only explanation here is that the smartphone duopoly has worked hard to condition customers into accepting this.
This is older than the current smartphone duopoly; IIRC, with a few exceptions like the N900 and the Palm Treo, cell phones were always very locked down. It probably came initially from the phone companies being control freaks, and wanting to restrict which devices (even mechanical ones with no electrical or radio interface) could be attached to their phone system.
Yes, phone companies did not want this parties devices attached to their analog network, which basically was a low voltage power grid.
I don't know if we can say that those old phones were locked down: either they could not run any software at all or they run only what they got in their factory settings.
Symbian phones, palmtops from the 90s and the like could run apps and I did write a few of them. Usually Java and an emulator on my computer and an upload to the phone. They were almost general purpose computing devices but it was hard to get a 30% tax on them. All of these policies from Apple derive from the will of making money from services, not only from the hardware. It's understandable because it's a lot of money.
If apps will ever start losing money to Apple (e.g. they are forced to distribute them for free), apps will be dead, the Store will shut down, nothing could be installed anymore (privacy, safety, think of the children) and everything will be done with a web browser.
You technically don’t need to pay if you just want to run your app on your phone. If you want to distribute your app with Testflight or the App Store you need to pay.
As long as you're willing to re-sign and reinstall it every 7 days, that is. The free certificates Apple hands out have expiry set to a week, and AFAIK you can't configure your own iPhone to trust your own certificate.
> The curated experience on iOS is a feature, not a bug.
Which experience do you mean? The crApp Store full of obvious scams? The abuse of the built-in push notifications and apps to advertise Apple "services" on every device? I mean, how many damn times do I have to say no to Apple Arcade or iCloud+?
These aren't problems I face often. I especially don't get random push notifications about Apple (or any other) services, so I'm not sure what's going on for you.
Microsoft proposed locked-down PCs decades ago and got criticism from sources as mainstream as the New York Times. Everyone more technical than that, with the possible exception of corporate IT types flatly rejected it.
I'm sad there was so much less backlash to restricting user control on phones.
Microsoft sell locked down PCs today. Secure Boot cannot be disabled, nor new keys enrolled, on Windows PCs that ship with an ARM processor (yes they exist). It's as if Apple decided to lock down Macbooks when they switched to M-series. The only thing keeping PCs "free" is that ARM processors suck at the high end if you're not Apple, so it's seen as acceptable market segmentation. It's purely arbitrary though, just like it's purely arbitrary that you can put Linux on a Macbook but not an iPad despite having the same SoC.
They do, and 20 years ago a move like that would have also drawn widespread condemnation.
It's not as big a problem as it is with phones though because the vast majority of PCs on the market are not locked down in this way, and only a handful of PC applications (a few competitive games) use remote attestation to check for an unmodified Microsoft OS.
Well here's EU regulators working with Apple directly to allow it. I honestly think that's worse, the EU government took the time to allow this directly. It's not just a case of the existing laws not being clear in this instance, it's the EU working with Apple to come up with this 'solution'.
5% tax on all digital transactions (still applies to Kindle ebooks too I'm guessing?) and all applications have to go through an Apple review process. That's ridiculous for a government to explicitly agree to.
Governments will agree to that because at the end of the day it gives them a party they can go to. In this instance if they want Apple or Google to remove an app they can. It gives them the ability to use that option whenever they don't like something it's not by accident. Its a win-win for them and Apple/Google. You are never going to get the wild wild west we have on the pc platform ever again.
On mobile we have a duopoly, Apple/Google. While Apple has their platform on lockdown since day one, Google is slowly making its way there. Where does that leave the average users?
The dominance of Microsoft actually depended on openness.
The IBM PC commoditized hardware and software, which facilitated PC clones. When IBM licensed DOS from MS, it allowed MS to license a version to non-IBM computers too. Thus, IBM ended up commoditizing itself and became replaceable, with the MS OS as the new standard.
Apple can lock down iPhones because it's the sole provider of the software and the hardware.
They successfully did it, basically, if you read about Xbox's architecture. It's a really interesting look into how we basically wouldn't own our Windows PCs if they used that tech in their mainstream software and hardware.
> Why would one computing platform be different from the other?
Because malware breaking the sandbox of one of them can mostly only spy on the owner, while malware breaking the sandbox of the other can spy on whoever the owner walks past, GPS trace their movements…
Question for those with more industry knowledge than me: If you assume a broken sandbox, is it possible for an app to record phone calls, then use that recording to create a deepfaked voice that can then be transmitted as a new call? My naïve assumption is "yes obviously", but for all I know the hardware has some way to activate a switched circuit from the phone service to the speaker and microphone that can't have other sound data pass through it.
LOL. That security bogeyman argument is a convenient post-hoc justification. The real reason is much simpler: Because "computers" started out with "Owner can run code of their choice on it" as one of the main definitional qualities agreed upon by the market.
Devices which only ran code that the vendor had specially packaged for the device always had other names, like Games Console, Word Processor, MP3 Player, Graphing Calculator, or just plain "Toy." Nobody confused those with computers and nobody accepted them as computers.
Phones entered this world already in that second category, long before Apple even considered making one. Apple kept an iron grip at first and after careful consideration, decided to only allow third-parties to even enter on terms extremely favorable and profitable to Apple, and always under their direct control.
Closing off the Mac would be very messy and also cause tremendous headaches due to it being the development platform for iOS. They don't want to bother. But the reason iOS is closed is because it's always been closed, and they'll never open it unless forced, because money.
I respect your overall point but I think the picture is more nuanced than that. "Computer" as a term is simply unpopular, in favor of something referencing the intended application, as determined by things like the form factor:
Graphing Calculators are computers in every sense, it's hard to find one you can't at least program in a high level language like Basic or Python, and many accept assembly programs - even Texas Instruments models did, before their signing keys were brute forced.
Games consoles too almost invariably run third party code, although they tend not to be end user programmable - no different than an iPhone in that regard, really.
"Feature phones" - pre-smartphone phones with cameras and internet etc - usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer blessing, even though you couldn't touch the OS. You could SSH into servers from those!
I think a big problem is that the distinction between "general purpose computer" and "end user programmable general purpose computer" is functionally meaningless when you can't write programs, which is most people. Instead they understand it in a functional context - what is this device for? How does it compare to how such devices usually work? The general purpose CPU inside is an implementation detail, and just because you think of an iPhone as a computer doesn't mean everyone does. They think of it as a "phone".
> usually had the ability to run Java Midlets without manufacturer
I had to respond first to this - I happened to grow up with Verizon phones. They had the manufacturers ship variants that replaced Java with BREW - some locked-down bastardized atrocity with DRM, which could only be acquired through purchasing in an on-device App Store (Called "Get It Now"). I knew about how everyone else had Java on their dumbphones though. But overall in that era the meme is accurate that if you even accidentally pushed the "Internet" button on your phone, the ensuing insane per-KB data charges would be noticeable. No one I know used any such apps or features.
Anyway, I didn't mean to suggest "end user programmable" was a requirement to be a computer. I meant that the computer owner expects that the computer manufacturer isn't gatekeeping.
Now, a GameCube or PlayStation buyer may have seen the gatekeeping as a positive -- knowing that Nintendo wouldn't bless a cartridge/disc that was pornographic, bomb-making instructions, or what have you, they felt it was a safer device to put in a kid's bedroom than a Windows XP computer.
I posit: To normal people, "A computer" is a subset of devices which, conceptually speaking, wants to be usable for a maximum of purposes. In other words, if you gave someone a variety of tasks (Edit the file on this flash drive, do your taxes, sort 100 photos into 3 folders based on occasion and print the best 3 of each, find an email you sent 3 months ago and quote excerpts from it) and then presented them with a bunch of devices from all the categories I mentioned, basically everyone knows a Mac or Windows PC will do that well, and anything else will lack important tools like the filesystem, drivers for hardware, reasonable multitasking, capable browsers, etc and make those tasks painful at best. And if specialized software is needed, that software will likely not run on those other devices.
Every other modern device, including my Apple Watch to a Chromebook to a PS5, is more than capable of all those tasks computationally, but the manufacturers specifically crippled many abilities and blocked all non-blessed software, and Nintendo or Samsung doesn't want you running TurboTax on the Switch or your Smart Fridge.
Most people consider the iPhone as a "phone", not as a "computer". It's even in the name. So it fits your definition for devices which only run code that the vendor had specially packaged.
People obviously consider it a computer; they install and use third party software on it. The question is whether the vendor should be allowed to monopolize the market for the third party software even when both the user and the third party developer don't want them to.
> Because malware breaking the sandbox of one of them can mostly only spy on the owner, while malware breaking the sandbox of the other can spy on whoever the owner walks past, GPS trace their movements…
Apple doesn’t sell the Vision Pro in Spain yet, so acquiring one would require taking a trip to France.
For Vision Pro owners: is it worth it? Do you use it often? The post does mention a very compelling use case, but it is quite narrow (how often are you remodelling your house?)
It is the greatest piece of technology I have ever owned, and I have a very hard time recommending it anyone.
It's clear that it is the future. But there's still some steps between where Apple is at with it today, and where it needs to be in order to be a mainstream product. I would look and see if you can find one used either in the local market, or via a short trip if possible.
The main problem being that I'm not about to pay the cost of a pretty nice macbook for a vr/ar headset. I'll be interested to see what price the steam frames comes in at.
Favorite tech product I have ever purchased. I use it as my main MacBook display for often 8+ hours per day. As long as you are willing to bump up the font size a bit, the programming experience is fantastic. I use it as a 21:9 display, but it can go up to 32:9. My wife and I watch movies together in the theater environment, and the in-room sharing experience is great. My face and neck were prepared from numerous past headsets, but my wife really hasn't had any comfort issues. Since this is her first headset, I think that just varies by person.
The device is so different for different people. I tried really hard to use my VP as a MacBook display but sitting up in a chair with it on for more than 15 minutes is simply too uncomfortable: too heavy.
I only use it to watch movies, ALWAYS while lying down with my head on a pillow and my feet propped up on cushions. That way I'm able to position the device so as to distribute the weight evenly on my forehead/cheekbones. The revised strap enables the weight to be precisely distributed and altered as needed if it gets uncomfortable.
There are a couple of ways to do it, but I'm not sure which is best.
you can install an app on OSX that allows you to do a passthrough, but the last time I used it horizon was called workrooms.
On windows you can use the official oculus app to use your local gfx card to render graphics. THat gives you really smooth graphics at much better fidelity.
my colleague used vrdesktop to get more screen estate.
For me the screens on the O3 aren't high enough resolution, I can see the gaps between pixels, which means less dense text.
so the screen resolution might be higher, the effective resolution is not so much.
The quest feels sharper for a lot of things. Apart from the rgb camera.
Either way, for me, they are both too lower resolution for useful text work. I can see the pixels and the size of the font I want starts to fall below the effective reolution.
I realise that this is not the case for a lot of people though
So you have two, one for you and one for your wife? What is it like watching a movie next to someone, with both of you wearing headsets?
I would have been much more likely to get one when I was unmarried, but now with a family it greatly reduces my use cases since I don't watch content alone (except when doing the dishes, when I am largely focused on the real world task in front of me).
Yes, my wife took the M2 version when I upgraded to the M5. We find it pretty great, and it really is not much different from having a huge personal theater. The headsets appear to display the content in perfect sync. When sharing content with someone in the same room, it does not render a persona or avatar as it does when using FaceTime (where users appear as floating heads and hands).
As far as I know, she only uses it for movies and YouTube. I have demoed mine a few times, but I honestly do not like doing it much because it feels pretty gross to share something that sits on my face all day.
I bought one and returned it within the 2 week window, well before the last day. I didn't even use it the last weekend I had it, I couldn't be bothered. When I brought it into the Apple Store to return it, the employee who processed the return seemed happy I was returning it rather than getting stuck with it, she didn't pull her punches when talking about it, which I found a bit shocking from an Apple employee. She marked down the reason for return as "not enough content", so I'm assuming that's why most people return it, but that wasn't really my issue.
While the new head strap was better than the original, it still wasn't all that comfortable to wear. Some things were super sharp, while other things always looked blurry. The window system still seemed buggy and I'd describe it as finicky. The battery doesn't last long enough to feel comfortable untethered, while it also gets in the way while being plugged into the wall. It also felt like a lot of work to actively look at what needed focus all the time. It still feels like it should be in beta, maybe even the lab. I'll be willing to try again down the road, but it's hard to tell how much attention Apple is really giving it, as we haven't seen all that much progress in the last couple years.
Not worth it. Get a Meta Quest 3 and can vibe code something similar in a few hours. I recommend WebXR that comes with the built-in browser. Easier to distribute, share, collect feedback and iterate than native. And can use A-Frame: open source framework, very accesible and that I help maintain :)
It’s a cool use case, the same thing is achievable with other VR headsets of course. I imagine you can buy a second hand Quest 2 headset for under 100 euros
I keep on hearing it’s a flop, but where I live, Switzerland, they don’t sell it. So I can’t really say.
And I am not even talking about the badly taken product decisions for such a great headset but… how can they get devs onboarded for an app ecosystem for a device that can only be bought in a handful of countries?
Clearly Apple sold it and did their best so that it fails.
It's been 2.5 years and Apple still hasn't sold out of its test run of 500k units. About 350k of those sold in year 1, about 50k sold in year two, and less than 20K so far in year 3. Workers at Apple's flagship retail stores are saying they haven't sold one in recent memories. The tables displaying them are disappearing from stores. Roadmaps for all future goggles have been shelved. It's a flop and Apple knows it.
> It's been 2.5 years and Apple still hasn't sold out of its test run of 500k units.
I don't know why you would post something that is clearly not true? They released an upgraded version, sporting an M5, October 2025. They do not sell the original M2 version anymore.
Have you gone around and surveyed Apple corporate employees to gather this insight? I’m amazed that your manager didn’t get a call from Apple security, if so.
They weren't handing out dev fused AVPs in sufficient number for anyone to do this when I left. And Apple software developers rarely buy their own hardware, why would you, when you get most of the hardware for free (and dev fused)?
It is true that buying one for use as an extra monitor was pretty niche at Apple Park. And it’s also true that everyone is crammed into shared offices where it would feel anti-social to be wearing one all the time.
So I’m vaguely aligned with you on the utility to the average dev, but your argument for why makes little sense.
FWIW almost none of my direct reports used HomePods, from your list of freely available devices, and grabbing an iPad for anything other than testing was maybe 50/50. And I don’t think you’d claim the iPad isn’t popular.
I have the inverse, not wanting a v2 but a v0.5 that's 80% of the result for 20% of the price! Okay, it's Apple so it'll never be a good price, but conceptually right?
From what I hear, I'd probably be happy with the v1, just not at 3000€ and not when you need to buy a mac in addition to use various features. Depending on what is supported from open OSes (AOSP or Linux desktop/mobile OSes), I could see myself paying 0.5-1.5k to try if it's something for me. Maybe I could get one off the second-hand market if Apple (or a competitor) ends up making a v2 vision device, so I'll join you in hoping for that :)
yeah just anything better than current product will do it for me, i agree you can't expect a full visionos blown hardware probably to fit on regular glasses but a man can wish
So the argument is basically: This technology is too dangerous so only _we_ should have access to it. We’re the good guys and only we can ensure a safe use of this technology.
That is in fact Anthropic's entire reason for existence, the belief that AGI is too dangerous to be controlled by OpenAI/Sam Altman. It naturally follows that it would also be too dangerous to be in the hands of literally everyone on earth.
>the belief that AGI is too dangerous to be controlled by OpenAI/Sam Altman.
I agree with that assessment. But the Dario's jump went from "AGI should not be controlled by OpenAI/Sam Altman" to "AGI shoudl be controlled by Anthropic/Dario", which is definitely a better scenario for him, but not the rest of the world.
>It naturally follows that it would also be too dangerous to be in the hands of literally everyone on earth.
In fact, you can argue that in a world where all countries have nuclear weapons is actually a better scenario than a world where nuclear weapons are owned by 1 or 2 American billionaires/trillionaires, no matter if those people believe they are the "good guys".
Isn’t it plausibly better if AI is controlled by Dario than Altman even if neither situation is palatable? It feels like people look at the two and dislike both of them so they consider them the same.
People who know him frequently refer to Altman as a literal psychopath unprompted. People who don’t know Dario just find him arrogant.
> To summarize my and Anthropic’s position, we have not and are not advocating for a ban on open-weights models as a category. We should instead focus on keeping powerful chips out of authoritarian hands, stopping industrial-scale distillation, and requiring safety testing of all sufficiently capable models, open and closed.
Maybe I should’ve expanded a bit on my comment. I didn’t mean “we” as in Anthropic directly—even though they certainly are advocating for restrictions on how to train AI systems by proposing mandatory safety training—I mean the argument that American AI labs are somehow more responsible than their Chinese counterparts.
It’s especially jarring when just last week OpenAI—an American company—accidentally hacked Hugginface when performing safety testing on an upcoming model [1]. If they have the ability to turn off all guardrails when testing out their models—or when selling them to the military—then the safety training is only there for show. If they can pick and choose who should have access to their most powerful model, surely they are trying to act as the world police?
Demanding "required safety testing" is demanding a ban. Otherwise the testing would be inconsequential, right?
I'm sure he didn't mean just a "lobotomized to be worse than Anthropic products" badge for the test-passing models.
If a ban is the implied consequence of failing his "safety" tests, that means that Anthropic was and currently is advocating for a ban on some open-weight models.
If models that fail the safety testing are banned, then asking for that testing is asking for a ban. That you believe any sane regulation would involve such a ban doesn't stop it from being a ban.
You are taking a hardline libertarian position. We safety test cars, roads, bridges, pharmaceutical. What happens when the unvetted AI model starts teaching people how to make biological weapons, or convincing kids to kill themselves?
The parent is, to my reading, arguing that Anthropic is indeed advocating for a ban. I do not see them making any judgement on whether that ban is justified or not. I don’t think that claim is hardline libertarian.
Yeah, which is ironic considering their track record too. The most recent one is every shared Claude chat has been indexed by Google and is searchable on the search results. Then there was the RCE in their CLI that they had for a year and was silently patched without any sort of disclosure.
There's more to it than just safety: in Dario's psychopathic mind, obtaining advanced AI will lead to massive military advantage, hence "we" must do it first to prevent "them" attacking "us". See where it's going? Suppose it happened, then what? By Dario's logic there are two possible continuations: 1. start a war by attacking first and 2. do nothing and waste the entire effort because "they" will obtain the same capability a bit later.
Not to mention it's simply farcical America of all places would be considered responsible. You could not name another country on earth who could wreak more damage (although thank god this is waning by the day with Trump destroying the empire in charge)
In the Canary Islands, where it’s not just hot, but also humid, you’ll be pressed to find a restaurant with AC. Some businesses do, but frankly it’s quite rare, and often times I’ve entered a business and felt a slap of heat in the face. Quite different from Madrid
I’d say open models are catching up to proprietary ones quite quickly, and those open models can be hosted on European infrastructure [1]. Some have direct model as a service apis, and others offer dedicated hosting for whichever model you choose to use. Qwen 3.5-397b-a17b and now Minimax M2.7 are two very strong contenders.
I just looked at Scaleway’s pricing for two popular open source models (gpt-oss-120b and qwen3.5-397b) and it’s meaningfully more expensive than alternatives (e.g., many you’d find on OpenRouter).
What makes you say that about Android? I’m a iOS user, but was under the impression that Android was already quite polished, especially the stock experience (as it is with pixel phones)
It comes down mostly to app quality. The apps that are present are not as polished in ways that I found intolerable:
- myNetDiary: seemingly equivalent features, but was super stuttery on Android - like 20fps just scrolling and interacting. It also didn't feel native at all
- Transit: the app was extremely glitch when trying to scroll. Seizure inducing.
- Wire guard supports on demand tunnel on iOS and macOS. No such option on Android. Inconceivable.
- If you want a polished experience, you have to install the Pixel/Google equivalents of apps, and it is hard to use them in ways that aren't associated with your Google account. The built-in messages app is horrible so you need to install Google Messages. If you're logged into Play you're logged into Google Messages; no choice in the matter. If you want a good camera you need to install Pixel camera, and they leverage that to lock you into Google Photos. iOS is no better, but the trade off with Android is less polish for more choice, not less polish for the same strong arm lock in tactics.
- the OS hijack navigation in ways that are horrible for day to day browsing. In particular, there are no forward gestures because android insists on making swipe left from the right edge go back. I was told android is customizable but there is no option here. Consequence: no draggable scrollbar, no forward navigation in browsers.
- the built-in calendar (Google calendar) doesn't support drag and drop for adjusting event times. It made the calendar app excruciating to use - everything takes many more taps than iOS. Also, no support for CalDAV and CardDAV out of the box means Android is a bad choice if you self host. I tried DAVx5 but found it unreliable.
- Google Calendar won't show local calendar entries on open until you navigate to a different app then go back.
- The back gesture works differently more or less at random. Sometimes an app screen is part of the navigation stack, sometimes it isn't. Because android apps assume you will have a back button, they don't provide any back option, but it is always ambiguous what back will do - close the keyboard, close the app, close the menu, navigate back within the app. On iOS the options are different but more clearly presented and overall far more consistent than android.
- copy and paste is less consistent than iOS. Sometimes it for some reason makes me do a detour through a full screen text editor. Not really sure why.
- app design is inconsistent - a mix of pre-material, material 1, and material 3/you.
- doesn't have basic features I've come to rely on. Like on iOS I can make an app require biometrics to open. No such option with stock android launcher. Similarly, basic android doesn't seem to have the photo slides how option for backgrounds, which I love on my iPhone.
- Android has poor support for RCS. RCS just worked on my iPhone, but it failed to set up after a day of trying on the Pixel.
- Health Connect does a bad job deduplicating data. On iOS my watch, phone, earphones, etc all contribute data. IOS can handle this without eg double counting steps. Health Connect cannot. There are also fewer options for visualizing the data, since Health Connect is very new, whereas HealthKit is well over a decade old.
There are parts of android that are polished. I think the basic launcher experience is overall better if you turn off the Google Now stuff. I like that the animations are faster. Material You, although underrealized, looks great where it is implemented, far better than liquid glass.
Am I the only one who hasn’t felt the need to upgrade in _way_ more than just one year? I still have an old XPS 15 9560 (pushing 10 years!!!) running Ubuntu which is perfectly usable. I upgraded the ram (32Gb) and the battery, and I still consider it to be totally usable for most day to day tasks. Development, docker containers, browsing the web with an unhealthy number of tabs open. What more do I need?
Same. My daily driver is a high spec Dell laptop from 2018. I do CAD work on it and it's approximately fine. I upgraded the memory last year and I've had to repaste the heatsink and replace the battery, but I still can't justify getting a new machine given that it does everything I actually need flawlessly.
You might wanna give Bitwig a try, it’s one of the best commercial DAWs available on Linux. You can record live loops, similar to Ableton (it was originally built by ex-Ableton developers)
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