Indeed. TBH if I was running a Google- or even OpenAI-scale company (3000+ devices) I'd probably invest into creating a useful Linux distribution and hardware configuration myself (at that scale, it could maybe start to make sense).

I pulled out my old windows laptop to debug why my Linux machine is giving me issues, and the mouse was unusable, making clicking anything impossible. It was adding momentum, and any precise movement or click just couldn't be done because it wouldn't move with small touches, and added 'weight' to anything bigger.

Anyway, I was sure something was up, checked settings, and found a new feature akin to 'more accurate mouse'. I disabled it and my trackpad started working again. Everytime I have to use that PC I get angry about something unbearable windows thought was a good idea. Tbh my Linux has been driving me up the walls recently. I think I just don't like computers at all.

I can't say I've ever been impressed by an Apple track pad. Or their insistence on removing actual buttons for them.

The peak was my high school Gateway laptop.

>If you mostly use just the browser and reading e-mails, I don't see any better system even for someone who is non-technical.

If thats all you do you might as well just use macos. Something comes up you can just send your parents to the apple store. Probably one of the last places on earth you can get a real life human in a real life building from a real life major company to sit down with you and walk you through your issue. They will do this for free, you only pay for an actual repair job, which you can also of course do there for a relatively fair price all things considered for oem quality work. Not sure where I would take any other laptop for repair. Do people even repair laptops as a business?

> but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.

Running an AMD card on my Dekstop system. It's invisible as an Intel on-board graphics card, and this is a great thing.

Much greater than rebooting to a black screen because NVIDIA decided to not support your GPU anymore because it finished its economic life for the company, not you.

False. Get one with Linux pre installed (Dell developer edition, system 76, framework) and it just works as well.

> and have enough Linux know how to fix the occasional hick up

> but it can sometimes "just work" for a long time without any issues

These are defining qualities of something that does not "just work"

One thing Windows did right is keyboard based navigation. Most of the general public does not know or appreciate how close to productivity nirvana the alt key brings you.

WSL is such a pain compared to just using a unix os from the get, which is of course what macos is. People forget that it is in fact a unix distro.

> This has changed recently

I've probably heard "this time is different" on the topic of PC laptops catching up to Macs a hundred times over the last decade, but it never is...

It's hard to rebuild trust after selling a computer (without a CD drive) without networking drivers and no indication of which wireless chipset it has, but including a CD with said drivers.

I will never buy/use DELL again. Even if the company completely reinvents itself, stops selling computers and just rebrands toasters, these combination of letters make me distrust anything they are physically printed on.

I'm not exaggerating, I had so many horrible experiences.

YMMV. I never had any issues holding a mac laptop. I know people think they are sharp but I genuinely struggle to replicate this when it comes up. As I am typing this comment the laptop is resting on my chest with the entire weight of either hand resting on the sharp side edge of this mac. When I type I move my right arm so that the soft fleshy part under the wrist is now resting with full weight on the sharp edge of the mac. No pain or any discomfort doing this. Currently pressing down as hard as I can on that edge just so see. Again, no clue what people are doing to be in discomfort here. Lead hands? Skin condition? Not sure.

I haven't abused this m series mac as much. But my old original aluminum unibody from 2012, that thing lasted about 12 years until water damage took it out. It fell to the floor on every corner multiple times. None are perfectly round anymore due to the force of the impacts. Never shattered the screen or affected anything with the computer.

I have a friend who ran over his with his f150. That did end up putting some cracks into the screen, but it still worked and he still used it in that state for a couple years at least.

Consent-O-Matic handles those kutcookies for me, but an interesting feature would be to use these fancy new "decision models" to determine the correct explitive to use in the No,-button text based on (the context of the element on) the current page.

> not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive

In their refusal, while (accidental) acceptance is always definitive...

EDIT: In another thread this is called the ratchet of consent. Apt.

I think this should be called the ratchet theory of consent because it only tightens.

Can’t you just disable notifications for the Google Play Store app? Maybe it’s because I’m on GrapheneOS, but I can just enable/disable notifications like any other app.

And "no, never" would irreversibly remove the option from settings?

"Remind me later" means "bug me again with a dialog in the future", which is not what I want. I don't need to be reminded, but if I change my mind in the future, I want to be able to proactively go and change it.

Yes, more text can be another way to provide the message, but if you've ever done any user testing, you'll know that people at best scan through your UI. I know I wouldn't read that, or at least would prefer not to have to read that.

I guess I don't see why "No" combined with "You can change this later in settings" is so much less offensive than "Not now".

What if those games are the only games they and their friends play together? I wouldnt want to stop that.

Psst. Macos is bsd in a trenchcoat. Don't let the others see this comment or they will get angry.

Running FreeBSD on a Lenovo Thinkbook 16 G7 ARP that was bought brand new less than a year ago. Everything except the wifi works flawlessly (daily driver for working).

And the wifi is easily fixable either buying a non expensive dongle or waiting for the next release.

Also running bhyve as daily driver with Ubuntu for development purposes. Everything works without issues, perfectly.

We all have a line, it's just in a different place. Mine is strongly at the "forcibly stealing huge amounts of disk space for features you don't want" point. As a happy Mac and Android user, I don't recognise the 'make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem"' description; maybe you can give an example?

> "good dog, here's a cookie"

Ha, funnily enough that's not far off. (Vulpine)

> You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork.

I hated Apple for a really long time. I don't know exactly why, but if anything, it was all the Apple haters that got me. And of course, the general idea of devices not being locked down to the company, and some other stuff. Having a rooted Android phone made me prone to confirmation bias too.

But my school had Mac, and after using them, I knew that Mac was for me. I still hated iOS at the time, but I knew I needed Mac. So I got one, and I was absolutely right.

The Mac broke down constantly though, didn't seem designed for the abuse I put it through. People begged me to go back to Windows because of the constant repairs, and I did, but I eventually got fed up with Windows again and tried Linux. I eventually got fed up with Linux too, went back to Windows, continued to be relentlessly fed up with Windows, and then eventually got a Mac again, with my own money this time.

At some point, it just clicked for me that the company is what I need, rather than Mac alone. I realized that iOS had the exact same philosophy that I liked so much about Mac. I got an iPhone and got to benefit from the ecosystem with my Mac. And at that point, my mind was fully made up. All in on Apple.

Note that at basically none of these points did marketing become a factor in my decisions. So no it's not the marketing. Though that is a great way to discredit opinions, I think Apple is genuinely the best for me.

> In reality they're one of the most profit-maximisation centred companies out there in computing land, they don't really care all that much about what their users want and do their best to make it as hard as possible to escape from their "ecosystem".

To me, this feels kind of like the argument that Steam is an abusive monopoly. I choose and prefer them because the alternatives kinda suck in comparison. Apple is like that for me. I'm not locked into their ecosystem the same way that I'd be locked into an online game that I've poured thousands of hours into. Or locked into a social network where all my friends have been for over a decade. I can easily move somewhere else, and I even did recently, before moving back because I couldn't bear it.

I noticed just how much my habits changed to adapt to Windows, as opposed to Mac. I naturally used the system differently because it just wasn't capable of things I could rely on Mac to do for me. Spotlight is a big part of Mac for me, and none of the third-party software out there quite replicates that experience on Windows. In addition, the file management is far more primitive, and I found myself using directory structure in place of search. You could call this a skill issue, but to me, it's just a mismatch. Given how much I've used both sides my whole life -- I mean for much of my early life it was only Windows, but Mac has always been far more intuitive and expressive for me -- if they were comparable, I'd use them comparably, but I don't, so I think they're not.

I'm leaving Linux out of this because they don't have an ecosystem, they just rely on you bringing your own, I guess. You want file sharing, you install something like KDE Connect. You want organization, just find a file manager that has that, or make one. I've tried a few distributions, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Fedora Silverblue. I preferred Arch on my MacBook, eventually preferred Fedora Silverblue on my later PC, but nothing's quite right, even when I put the effort into curating (like the time I tried KISS Linux).

To be honest, I'm not quite sure why people say Apple's ecosystem is this terrible walled garden that's super hard to leave. Maybe they're hostile to a user experience that they prefer over the alternatives. Maybe they think that their preference is a sign that the walled garden is manipulative. I guess I just don't get it yet. Maybe they want to leave but it's inconvenient, they think Apple could make it easier, and that makes them conclude it's designed to trap them. In my experience, the alternatives simply are less convenient, it's nothing about Apple that makes it more difficult to leave.

> They fell into "value extraction" a long time ago and I don't see them stopping in any way as long as they have loyal apologists like you seem to be.

I don't think there's any evidence that Apple cares whether or not there are "apologists". Maybe if nobody in the world liked them they would decide to change their minds. But I don't think it's as simple as people just rationalizing their bad decisions and excusing them, therefore enabling them. I think they're just as likely to make bad decisions that are universally bad, and it takes about as long for them to go back on them as bad decisions with "loyal apologists". Like that fiasco with the butterfly keyboard repair programs.

> Why would they? The money keeps rolling in, the congregation keeps on buying fruit phones and related paraphernalia, they'd be mad to stop from a business perspective.

I do agree on one point, that Apple is unlikely to realize their mistake when it keeps generating profit, regardless of how many users complain. That's why I'm hoping for top-down action. I hope the new CEO sees that their more recent enshittifications like "Apple Creator Studio" are a mistake, a betrayal. I have no evidence that'll ever happen, though. Maybe that's the loyalty you're talking about. Or just the last shred of hope I have for what seems like the last company on earth I can rely on.

You wrote as if the entire operating system was designed from the start to extract value from you. That's what I'm disputing. I'm not trying to say that removing a disablement option that literally already existed had the user's best interest in mind. Just that it's not a sign of some core fundamental disrespect that the company has. We've already seen that Apple's been getting swept up by generative AI bullshit, like with the iPhone 16 marketing, and it is entirely fair to hold them accountable for all the shit they're doing, but it's also entirely possible that this is just a ripple and they're going to get themselves under control again.

Technically correct then, he's kowtowing to trillionaires.

Sure - my MacBook Pro from 2015 could run BeamNG.drive playably when my previous Windows laptops absolutely could not. I think it wasn't necessarily that competitive with the best gaming laptops at the time, but it was far better for me as a user in general, even if in retrospect, it was more of a middle class machine, but it absolutely got the job done and I don't think it deserved the bad reputation at all. (Then again, it's entirely likely people dissing Mac for having low specs were not talking about their top of the line pro machines.)

There is no contradiction. I agree Apple hardware is good. But it's not why you buy it (well, maybe you personally do, but you are not representative of the median Apple client)

So if I upgrade to the next version of the OS, I absolutely won't get that 20GB+ file downloaded against my wishes, absolute guarantee?

I am doing nothing of the sort; you're shadow-boxing, and nothing you wrote has any bearing on the point under discussion here: a privacy-sensitive feature that the user explicitly disabled was silently re-enabled and the toggle removed.