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.

> 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.

What's odd and strange about this? Author clearly specifies this at the start:

> 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.

When I got the prompt it just said "your account age is old enough to prove your age" and didn't ask for any further info.

> Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now

Are you sure you're not apologising for Apple?

I don't think it's just those three issues. Those are just the three final drops in the bucket.

Maybe the author was aware of all this, but with "Apple Just Lost Me" they wanted to say that this is the straw that broke the camel's back.

I hope the author reports back in a year. Getting off the Apple train appeals to me, the reality of doing so looks bleak.

Full disclosure: I've been in the Apple ecosystem since System 6, worked as an engineer there for 25 years. But I am as frustrated by many of the decisions Apple has made as many people I see posting.

Liquid glass? This too shall pass.

Locked down ecosystem? I imagine the blowback if they unlocked it and people's devices were suddenly being compromised by malware.

I guess I prefer the frying pan to the fire that I feel awaits me if I jump. As I mentioned though, seeing blog posts after the jump will be interesting.

I struggle to believe that Liquid Glass was one person's fault.

I had the UK Age verification popup today. It verified immediately based on the age of my Apple account, I didn't have to take any further action. I am much younger than the OP, and probably than their Apple account. I am surprised that this didn't happen for them.

Criticize gatekeeping all you want, but I feel it’s safer to recommend a Mac or iPhone to an older, non-technical person than the equivalent Windows / Android machine.

And I’m still able to install any app I want with minimal fuss.

Someone changed their mind about something they've been putting up with, it's as simple as that.

The boiling frog thing is a myth - most frogs realize the water's too hot at some point, and jump out.

Yeah, agreed. Gatekeeper is nearly 15 years old now, and has progressively gotten more aggressive, but AFAIK there isn't much new in the past year or two. macOS 26 is bad, but so is Windows 11...so unless you are willing to jump into Linux for desktop, there aren't many other options. And age verification is likely going to be an issue with any platform he chooses - are other companies not using credit card?

> getting rid of Alan Dye.

All the reporting I’ve seen indicates that he left of his own accord and that Apple was blindsided, indicating that they didn’t even consider getting rid of him.

> at least somewhat moving in the right direction by getting rid of Alan Dye.

Alan Dye left of his own volition to Meta. I 100% believe he would still be there if he had not left.

The author is complaining about the fact that there are a myriad of issues with Apple's ecosystem that have built up a level of frustration with their ecosystem where they can no longer tolerate it.

I find it infuriating I have to verify that I am older than 18 when my gmail account is 20+ years old.

Him moving to Android will do them no good as Google will be implementing similar controls in it. I suggest they get a Pixel Phone and install Graphene OS.

> but Apple needs to follow UK law

And the UK law doesn't ask for device-level age verification.

I guess it's written for people who never had to Apple, cause it just repeated reasons I'd never touch those products.

Why are you so deeply invested into defending the honor of a massive corporation that's callous to its users? Especially corporation that's supposedly proud of their UX?

> 3. Apple had a bug in their age verification protocol. Again, valid point, but Apple needs to follow UK law.

No they don't. They need to grow balls. They pay hefty tax rates in UK. If they would announce they are leaving UK market in 90 days, I bet you would find enough politicians to change the course of this terrible law.

There's a bizarre trend, especially on HN, of unjustified criticism against Apple. There are so many YC companies committing outright fraud, Palantir is building a surveillance state, a bunch of well known founders and VCs openly promote white supremacist ideology, but you'll never see more vitriol on this forum than someone complaining about the liquid glass UI or app store take rate.

Reading between the lines, the author of the blog post would have gone along with the verification with annoyance if the verification had worked. What seems to have prompted everything is the credit cards failing. The fact that they couldn't use Wallet and then tried manually with all five sort of illustrates that they would have gone along with it.

Edge cases like immigrants in a different land are typically unmet for these things. I remember once trying to re-activate my Google Fi SIM from my home in the UK before I returned to the US and getting a strange error message that didn't allude to the region. I got the rep on the line and they said "You're in the US, right?" and I had to bullshit something about "oh I had my VPN on" and then turned it on so I would like I was in the US and it worked then.

Anyway, there's clearly one cause and the rest is just kitchen sink argumentation.

> it is fundamentally the UK’s fault by requiring such draconian measures

It would appear the UK doesn't:

> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.

-- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...

I think Apple's hardware has good to great since the end of the "butterfly" keyboard fiasco, but their software has been in a persistent, slow decline - both in terms of quality and design. So depending on what you look at/care about you could make the case that Apple is getting better or Apple is getting worse.

That covers the good and the bad. The ugly is the increasing presence of ads in Apple software - Maps being the latest example. Something that's going to push me out of the ecosystem eventually. I'm probably ditching Apple Maps for Google Maps this summer, because if I'm going to use an ad-infested product I at least want to get reliable directions out of it.

Tapping a UK passport to your phone works just fine for ETA apps and it would work just fine for Apple as well.

The fact that you think American corporation punishing foreign users for their laws is acceptible is sick upon itself.

UK, California and Brazil, no?

My non-techie friends either barely notice Liquid Glass or go "ooo this is nice!". It has annoyed me on occasion, but I barely notice it any more. Much ado about nothing.

I don't understand the fuss around liquid glass. I've been using Apple stuff since before OS X and this just feels like another redesign; I understand that there are some accessibility issues (that I thought Apple had at least partially addressed) but I don't have any problems using it. In fact, I kinda like it. It feels like many people latched onto an extremely negative narrative early on, and can't let go of it.

I have much more of a problem with the terrible window management on the mac and ipad OSs. Not being able to snap and resize windows to the edges of the screen, like every other standard window manager that exists, is insane (I know they added some version of this recently, but unsurprisingly it sucks). And the entire mac OS is starting to feel slow, bloated, and janky. They completely ruined the cmd-space search in their most recent major release. They need to get their house in order.

You're far overstating the effect it has had.

Apple has gone from 68k to ppc to intel to arm. The look of their desktop has changed so much over the years that showing a screen shot instantly tells you roughly the date it was taken. A graphical change at this point isn't moving the needle significantly.

The reality is that Windows 11 continues to get worse. I was an embedded Linux dev for 15 years, and even I don't really want Linux on my desktop. Apple has better build quality, long support periods, simplified updates, and for the most part just works. My personal computer is just an appliance and a means to an ends, Apple still is the best of many bad choices.

The liquid glass debacle seems minor compared to the crappy keyboard debacle five or ten years ago and that didn't really hurt them in the long run.

I don't have a Mac but my tablet and phone are both running liquid glass and it's... fine. I lost my favorite Sudoku app (Enjoy Sudoku) when they updated and for me that's the worst thing about it.

I think on forums like this that tend to have a lot of Apple fans and haters, the impact of UI changes is overblown. Normies mostly don't care. They notice the change when it happens and then two days later they have already forgotten what the UI used to be.

I've heard this every UI update for the past 20 years.

I've been using Apple since 1995 on System 7.5 then through OSX to MacOS & iOS. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 and Liquid Glass do not bother me one bit. I rather still enjoy using my devices running these operating systems and think that the interface is great. I also know i am not the only one.

I think this sums up the disconnect between the devotees (I’ve been on Mac since 2005 or so, just long enough to buy the last PowerPC after a decade of Windows) and any corporation. I am not a devotee of any particular OS’ church but Apple’s market cap suggests there was a whole lotta nothing they got in return. I am a firm believer in the way European football fans see their clubs as belonging to them, but the reality with any brand is their loyalty is to money, not you.

As someone who was inspired to buy their first Apple laptop by the "send all other UNIX boxes to /dev/null" ad I feel like Apple is already done and we are just catching the last remaining tail of that legacy.

Seems underlying features such as kerberos, NFS, auto mount and others are just bit rotting by now and its a matter of time before MacOS becomes Windows 8.

Liquid Glass is fine now. I mean I don’t like it but I’m used to it.

It was very very bad during the beta though

> threw their hard-won reputational gains off a cliff for _nothing_

I imagine some executive’s ego was spared by not telling them their idea was bad. Priceless.

Almost any Linux distro will work find with any Thinkpad and has done so for almost two decades now.

Yeah Apple's hardware team still has the sauce. As someone who will not buy Apple products, I do have to give kudos where they're due. Their software is an ever-evolving dumpster fire. I just wish their hardware was friendly to Linux. And no, herculean reverse engineering efforts that will always be behind on feature parity and efficiency, do not count (impressive and respectable though it may be). I would totally buy a MacBook if running MacOS wasn't a requirement for it be fully capable.

I switched as a heavy Linux user to a MacBook because of this reason.

1. Battery is better than any other laptop out there

2. Touchpad is better than any other laptop out there. I don't even use a mouse anymore

3. Sound is better than any other laptop out there.

There is no other laptop that comes even close to this hardware.

Linux runs well on M2 (and hopefully also M3 in the future)

Apple Silicon was as potent a crack as SSDs and Chrome (both immense steps up from what we had before). I nearly left the Apple ecosystem but the M chips pulled me back...

You can get by just fine in the US without a credit card too. At least if you have a debit card (which can pretend to be a credit card in most situations). We were actually unscored by the credit bureaus for several years when we didn't own a house.

Other than the one from yesterday? https://support.apple.com/en-us/126793

Or last month? https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347

Or December? https://support.apple.com/en-us/125885

Or November? https://support.apple.com/en-us/125633

Or September? https://support.apple.com/en-us/125327

My dude, I don't know how much more patching you want.

No, this is an absolutely terrible idea. You're suggesting a giant, centralized, government-run data silo, with all of your online activity tied to your real-world ID. This is far worse for privacy than any data broker, it's hard to even compare.

Honestly I'd rather have private companies figure it out. Then at least you'll get multiple options, including from privacy-first companies. But that still sucks, and my preference strongly goes towards OS-level Age Indication. Just as effective in practice, 100% private and offline.

The EU is already implementing this in the best way it's ever going to be implemented:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...

I really don't like this perfect law enforcement future, but this EU initiative is about the best design one can have.

Wrong, because then that government knows exactly what services you have accessed. It's a huge and extremely dangerous privacy violation. The real solution to the age verification problem is not to have one. The Internet has existed for over 30 years without it; it's solution to a problem that does not exist.

Now your government knows you are a registered user of PornHub.

It will be fun when (not if) the database is leaked.

Ironic that Brazil government tends to pay lip service to digital sovereignty while forcing their own citizens to handle their data to Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel.

> The UK, and Brazil who passed a similar law, 'cheated' by just forcing private companies to figure it out.

At least on the Brazilian case, it's outright illegal for a private company to implement the thing you are describing. So, if the government doesn't provide the service, there isn't much for them to figure out.

Fuck that. California's way is the absolute maximum that should be done: When accounts get created on an operating system, allow the user to provide a completely unproven age. Then that age should be the only age check.

If the goal really is to just help parents prevent their kids from accessing inappropriate material, that's plenty. Anything else, and you're admitting the real goal is Big Brother style surveillance.

UK Gov sometimes likes to do things in very awkward ways, against any sort of worldly grain established. See the covid app.

However my Apple ID verified me based on my account age, I didn't need to provide anything.

Some kind of Digital ID?

The UK government proposed that and was met by the usual resistance to it.

If the US had this, Trump would definitely be using it right now to send ICE to arrest people that said mean things about him on social media, didn't drop out of college, didn't bribe him enough, etc.

To add on... No ability to firewall their iOS devices leaves use of the network vulnerable. Siri and other unkillable daemons always running. My favorite is when the cpu fan "stopped working" on an old A1278 after an update. Turns out that was just a change in the fan profile so the machine would cook first before the fan would wheeze out a puff of effort.

> I would never, ever trust Google with any of these things. Ever.

Why do you trust Apple with them? What guarantees Apple will not do evil?

> 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].

I believe you can accomplish the latter (via an emulator) with “ish”, and then use that to accomplish the former (with e.g. rtorrent)

Depending on your definition of shell there are some: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/a-shell/id1473805438

You traded convenience for control. That is how all these big companies lock you in.

This is roughly the point where we should throw things out and begin again. We need to evolve. Again. Perhaps some sort of re-evolution.

You can have a debit card in your own name when you're under 18, but not a credit card, meaning credit is a proxy for age but debit isn't. It's the same in the UK and the US.

(They also accept an ID scan.)

A good proportion of people have the credit card even if they don't use them. 65% of adults have a credit card in the UK.

https://www.merchantsavvy.co.uk/uk-credit-card-statistics/

A smartphone is a tool that is all but required for modern life, it gets it's hooks into every detail of your life, and you have very little choice in providers, features, and functions. It makes a lot less sense to not care like this.

This adds nothing to the conversation other than to dismiss the post entirely.

"don't worry about itt, brooo"

> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.

https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...

It's not about some American cultural attachment to credit cards. It's another classic Apple frustration move where they make the experience worse for their users in the hopes they'll blame someone else like the UK govt. They do the same thing with green bubbles.

It's more out of convenience that credit card is used.

There isn't some American principle that human = credit score. Americans just don't want their government ID required to do basic things.

See discord age verification controversy.

We need to start calling it identity verification. Because that's what it is, anything that requires you to hand over an ID or credit card.

"Age" verification was a wonderful trojan horse that has fooled a lot of people.

You conveniently left this part out:

> First it attempted to check my Apple Wallet, it failed even though I have five cards in it and am able to use the App Store fine.

> Then it moved onto wanting me to manually add a card to verify myself. It failed with all my five cards. Four were debit cards, and one was a credit card from another country, cause you know I am an immigrant who has accounts still in my own original birth place.

His complaints are that Apple only supports credit cards for age verification. Please read more carefully.

A law can be bad and its implementation can be worse.

They were expected to fight the evil, not to join.

The credit score line is just about the stupidest thing I've read in a long time. Some people desperately need to get off mainstream social media.

Apple could’ve opted to use the same (open, portable, privacy respecting) mechanism the euID architecture offers for such cases but of course Apple doesn’t do privacy, portable or open.

Right, Apple is a US company, with typical US culture, and they always try to "follow the letter of the law but not the spirit" when it comes to privacy and also when it comes to the age checks. In this particular case, they seem to have implemented the check in the worst possible way too, even the account age is above the age limit, what's hard to figure out here?

Is it surprising that people blame the company and the culture that fostered it, instead of the country that is trying to "protect itself", regardless of how misdirected that "protect itself" is?

When you move to Android, I'd definitely recommend getting a Pixel for GrapheneOS. It's really highly polished and most things should just work once you press the button to enable sandboxed Google Play.

Also curious what Linux distro and desktop you're going to. Flatpak makes it matter a lot less these days, so long as the base stays pretty current.

Age verification is just a way to finally tell advertisers you're not an AI, so they can stop wasting money on purchasing AI-flooded-views.

Change my mmind

Could you emit a virtual credit card for them that you then cancel after the verification is done?

What "unfucking" looks like though? The law is mandated in the UK. What other way of age verification would work better for them?

You are aware that the law applies to Linux desktops and will likely be included in a system update soon?

This seems like a rational approach as opposed to say, calling Apple support.

The last straw for me was around 2009. I was in college minoring and interning in media production. Invested pretty heavily in Final Cut, which was long in the tooth, and hoping for better I/O in Macbooks to support better ingest. That was when Apple announced the following:

- Final Cut X. Its first incarnation was a huge slap in the face for features and workflow. They completely cut a large swathe of the rest of Final Cut studio, and knew they were shipping shit with the new pricing.

- The first Unibody Macbook came out. Very little could be upgraded, the keyboard was a leap backward, and all they had for I/O was a half-baked USB3. It's usage for pro video workflows was severely hobbled compared to the last generation.

- Mac OS Lion came out, which was when it started showing signs of user hostility. Power-user features were getting locked down or removed, the app store was being pushed harder, and it was consuming more base resources for the privilege. The tend was clear that advanced users were no longer welcome in Apple land.

These things made me change majors back to computing, and a full return to Linux. I've never regretted that.

It's really gotten better in the last few years. Try a spin of Fedora sometime to see the latest polish.

It makes it less distracting, but doesn't fix the broken layouts.

I believe Android will be blocking installations from outside Google play except through adb

Just send me a message when you've landed.

(Enjoyed your phrasing here.)

I doubt they will. I suspect the rumours of a touch screen MacBook are likely true and that's the reason for the shitshow that is Tahoe's UI.

Linux is a pretty good choice these days, and requires you to sacrifice nothing in terms of functionality :)

Pray tell, to what utopia should we move?

Jobs died 15 years ago. So your predicting 45 years after the death of a founder a company loses influence.

I'm the author, some of the tahoe issues can be seen in:

https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/

https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-...

there are a lot more, but I don't have the links handy.

Author is going to Linux, which has really gotten smooth in the last few years. I've been able to hand it to tech illiterate friends and not once get a tech support call. Everything you might need has a working, polished implementation. Give it a try sometime :)

I’m using Windows 11 and prefer it to current macOS by quite a margin. But OP is moving to Linux, so it doesn’t matter either way.

The article did not say anywhere that Windows is even under consideration, so your criticism doesn't apply.

A lot of people agree with the sentiment and therefore upvote it, but don’t bother engaging in the comments.

Because possible voted it to the top. You don't have to agree, but it helps to understand.

author here. Yeah, they make their laptops by hand in their lil shop in Berlin, low volumes makes things more expensive. I get it you can get a lot more performance per buck elsewhere, but I want to support a company that creates open hardware and open source software. Also it is the most repairable and upgraded laptop in the world atm.

I think it's also related to the fact that the US and the UK don't have ID documents the way that a lot of EU countries have and many people don't have passports, so the only other way left that has an API and is checking periodically that you are who you claim is your bank before giving you a fresh credit card

I think it’s a lot simpler than that. Verifying a credit card is probably the easiest and cheapest reliable method to verify identity.

If you look at it this way: they’re trying to identify somebody, and they don’t want to do a massive amount of work in house. Do you go to a company that verifies identity? Or… you can use credit cards as a proxy for identity. Most of your users already have them.

Credit cards require no additional infrastructure, no additional corporate approval, no additional expenses, and no additional auditing. It’s good enough for the company and who cares if it’s good enough for the users.

Corporate greed is a massive problem, but you’re giving people too much credit to assume they have some kind of grand conspiracy for every decision. That requires far too much intelligence.

Corporate laziness is a far better explanation for this one.

> A human person is only useful to a corporation if they have money to give the corporation.

This is spot on. This is the same tactic used by the affiliate marketers back in the day to qualify leads - Free book, just pay for shipping! Or, get this e-book for just $1 (so we can upsell you a $97 product later)

I think it’s fine. It definitely needs some polish and there are other, unrelated changes like the big round corners that I dislike, but Liquid Glass itself is just… different. And appearance aside, I genuinely like some of the updated UI patterns, such as making buttons look like things you can interact with instead of undifferentiated text.

It’s OK to dislike glass, of course. I’m not saying doubters are wrong. A lot of it, though, feels like piling on to sound like one of the cool kid skeptics.

At this point I am pretty sure it's the loud vocal minority that hates it. Vast majority is either indifferent or actually likes it (but liking something doesn't sell).

I didn’t like it at first. Now it doesn’t bother me.

its not super bad, but it needs a lot of refinement (especially on iPad and mac), and also its a performance hog (or at least iOS26 is a performance hog) so they have a lot of work to do imo

No. I kinda like it. I can understand people’s dislike for it though.

I loved Liquid Glass too. It gave a refreshing look from the UI that I was seeing for quite some years. It drew the line that separated itself from rest of the competitors UI wise. It felt good, I don't much remember the older UI of iOS now, every now and then when checking for compatibility with older versions, I test through older UI and it feels very awkward.

I like it as well, although it was and is very buggy in certain instances.

There are problems with it but I think the complaints are overblown.

I was sure I’d hate it. But I actually think it’s pretty good

I agree with this as well. The only things I really need on my "smartphone" are a browser, mail client (offline that does IMAP), organic maps, whatsapp and obviously a phone. I can do everything else some other way without too much inconvenience.

Edit: wow are people really that tied to their technology? You're fucked if anything worse happens geopolitically than is happening today.

author here, the post was mostly about desktop. I don't rely on my phone much but I need it to work as expected when needed.

The worst cybercriminals are allowed on the app store. Facebook and Google are two obvious examples.

Even if avoid installing their apps, take a look at all the third-party data harvesting malware that iOS apps bundle. You'll find you have plenty of stuff installed from them, and even worse actors.

Linux doesn't have any of this developer certification bullshit, and it has (almost) none of these issues.

"X decides to not use products from Y after longstanding loyalty, because Z"

This is a so generic template that you cannot criticize a post for matching it. It'd be like criticize a story for matching "X happens to Y, leading to Y doing Z which leads to a (happy|unhappy) ending"

What is it that bothers you about this type of discussion? For myself I just switched back to Android after a decade of iOS so I'm always interested in what it was that was the last straw for others.

(for me it was interop issues around wearables and trackers; I want to use chipolo and a pebble watch and not feel punished every day for going out of the ecosystem)

The problem is that when they start using $PLATFORM, they realize that it can't do many of the things that they've taken for granted since $EARLY_YEAR.

Wow, this seems to have hit a nerve, based on the early downvotes.

Apple has to do age verification because of dumb laws, but they decided to do age verification in a dumb way.

The author tried to go along with the age verification system with five different cards and failed five times. For an account that's older than the legal age that would need to be verified in the first place, mind you.

There are many ways to do age verification, most of them bad, but that's why most companies complying with these laws use multiple methods.

They certainly have more choices than implementing in this manner, and can choose to not implement it as well.

Absolving Apple of responsibility gives more than they deserve.

Random nobody here, I can write whatever I want on my own personal blog, you're not required to read it.

So you expected them to provide insurance which you hadn’t purchased?