Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you.
Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
I have to agree, unfortunately. Macbooks have their issues, and give me violent tendencies like any piece of hardware every now and then, but when it comes to UX and reliability, they are far, far ahead of anything I tried, and I tried a lot of hardware.
Mac build quality is nice indeed. And Nvidia sometimes doesn't play along, but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.
My both parents use linux and are happy with it. 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 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.
Aluminium is not build quality. It makes lying stuff inside cheap. And feels horrible on skin contact.
The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.
The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.
Aside from that?
Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).
macOS has been on a downward trend since Apple started pushing "Services", basically iCloud. Now it's as bad as Windows when I last used Windows.
It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.
It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.
I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.
If you want to own your computer, linux is where it's at. Windows is rusty iron chains and MacOS's are gold-plated silver pretending to be gold, but they're still chains.
I would love to move my gaming PC to Linux but until the kernel devs permit kernel-level anti-cheats, or an equivalent, I refuse to give up games that I love. It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.
Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse. Valve claimed to be working on a solution, and if there is any company which can negotiate an accord, it's them.
It's worth having a look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/. I found that the most of the games I play which use anti cheat work on Linux. It's also not hard to dual-boot windows as a backup, though I haven't had a use for my windows partition yet.
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.
A Linux computer is so many things and also nothing at the same time that's is basically impossible that one or N AI company can impose you something like Apple, Microsoft or Google can.
With that said, also or instead using *BSD won't do any harm.
GPL is a more free license if one cares about having control over their computing. The BSD community cares a lot less about that in my (limited) experience and more about purely technical aspects. Which is fine, I just wouldn't expect them to hold if Linux is no longer an option somehow.
I don't have a solution, but on this topic I let Fable write a browser extension I called "Nee, krijg de tering". It's "No, fuck off" in English, but the Dutch feels more visceral for me. It's really rough, but it tries to find these "Maybe later", "No, thank you" etc. buttons and replace the No button.. I guess it's kind of self-explanatory. Does not really do anything, but it is cathartic (and also messes with a lot of UIs to the point where unfortunately the blocklist of domains this should not be used on is growing a lot :'( ).
I feel this pattern is really abusive. Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and "Maybe later/no, thank you". As though you have any obligation to be forced to answer this question again at some late time, or to be very polite while you refuse to be slapped in the face. The correct answer is obviously "No, fuck off".
Sensible. Add in a 'Nee, flikker op met je kutcookies' button for cookie consent banners, and you're golden.
This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.
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 (an excerpt of) 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...
I have this one notification asking me if I want to enable the Personal focus when I’m at home. I don’t want my iPhone to care if I’m at home or not, so the past two years whenever it pops up I click Later.
Not sure about the focus pop up but most/all of Apple’s other nags (like set up Siri, try Apple Music and the like) go away permanently if you go to the settings app and click “later” from there (as opposed to the button in the pop up which has the exact same label).
Google Play Store has a notification to enable notifications. You didn't read that wrong. It shows a badge and everything. I said no for years except that last time. Now I can't find how to turn it off again.
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.
This hostile behavior has unfortunately grown over the years.
Notice how often you cannot really unsubscribe from newsletters, because clicking the small link in the email will only unsubscribe you from 1 of 25 "topics" or whatever and they will gladly re-define the "topics" every 6 months and re-enable them all.
I get the annoyance at "ask me again later", but "maybe later" or "not now" is helpful - there's no way to trigger dialogs by yourself, so this is a promise that even if you say "no" in the dialog, you can still go into settings to change your mind. Gives me less anxiety about the choice.
A much better way would be “Yes” and “No” with a small message of “you can change this later in the Settings”.
Or have three buttons: “Yes”, “No”, “Remind me Later”. Apple does stuff like that in other parts of the OS, like when asking for app permissions, so they clearly know how to do it.
"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".
And Sync Immediately's only affirmative option is "For Today", so I get to set a daily reminder to remind the setting that I do in fact want it to be ON.
I had a similar thing with Xcode the other day. I unticked the "download a code assistance model" thing, clicked to continue and it started downloading it anyway (which, to be fair, you can just X out of).
The answer is simple: Regulation to grant users the right to refuse during installation/setup of a system. This must also include updates. This feel like a repeat of the EU browser choice rule!
> The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it.
I posted a thread on thr MacRumors forum making a similar point. I tried to couch it in the language of Apple being inconsistent with Apple Intelligence. You can’t turn it off anymore globally but Apple provides the user the ability to block, not turn off, some parts of it. Even then you can’t block everything, like the Apple Intelligence parts of the Photos app. Even if you turn off Siri that stuff sticks around. But iOS 27 does not require Apple Intelligence to function or anything like that because my 4th gen iPad Air can’t run Apple Intelligence but can run iPadOS 27 just fine.
I make it a point to never install the first versions of major macos releases. they are usually buggy and have annoying new features that are either removed, improved or made optional in the following minor releases. Currently on 26.6.2, it's pretty good.
These are reasons enough. I switched to Asahi recently on my Macbook Pro M1
My fingerprint reader doesn't work, nor does my speaker. But hey, its way better than having to use MacOS. Atleast, linux lets me use my computer the way I want.
It feels like consent is being undermined in so many places. The anti-Meta Glasses ad with a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and the strap line "Glasses for people who don't do consent" hits the nail on the head for me. It's a profoundly inhuman stance in the name of profits.
> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer.
In several years, the GDPR enforcers (national information commissioners) may eventually wake up to this and start talking about fines. But I suspect everyone is too cowed by the AI inevitability narrative.
> But that’s a trivial cost compared to the consent problem. [..] AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
This is barking at the wrong tree. If you value things like your privacy or the ability to strictly control what runs on your computer then perhaps it would be a good idea to not run a proprietary operating system that's primarily designed not to provide you with the best user experience possible but to slowly extract more and more value out of you?
You must be talking about someone other than Apple. Apple has been falling into value extraction lately (which I hope Ternus will change), but their operating systems very much have never been designed for that from the outset. Rather the opposite. Apple is the only company that comprehensively documents platform security and privacy. I can't think of anyone else who doesn't just say "trust me bro". Maybe GrapheneOS. Nobody actually proves they are who they say they are better than Apple does.
Apple is also one of the only companies to focus on user experience above all else (nearly, anyway). Again, I can't think of a single other example (maybe Framework comes close), but while Apple has incredible technology, they have always been fairly measured with it to attain just the user experience they want. IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance, and iPhone a reputation for having low memory, because Apple gave them the specs they needed to run well and have a terrific UX, not necessarily the specs to push the frontier of what you can run at home.
Apple has been learning that frontier is important, though, and they've been leaning more into it lately. Part of why Apple Silicon has been such an incredible shock to the industry.
You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork. 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". 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. 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.
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?
> 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.
> IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance
Desktops maybe, but on mobile, Apple has always outclassed most Windows laptops that ordinary people might buy - alone because the full-aluminium case allows for far more heat input until saturation kicks in.
Sure - my MacBook Pro from 2015 could run BeamNG.drive playably when my previous Windows laptops absolutely could not. Turns out that 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 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.)
The author is complaining that his OS doesn't let him say "no". This would never happen with an OS which actually respects you. Of course, it's not Apple's fault, it never is -- it's those "AI bros"! It's incredibly ironic that the author writes "I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires", yet he kowtowing to a company with a market cap of 5 trillion USD.
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 entirely possible that this is just a ripple, and they're going to get themselves under control again.
I never really understood the craze for the overpriced Apple products. After many years of using PCs with Linux and Windows, I got forced to use a MacBook Pro as the company laptop and I found it hard to use. The OS is so limiting, Finder so crappy, oh my. There are some advantages, like the hardware is good, but on the other hand there are countless tiny issues where "Apple knows better" such as tying mouse scroll direction to the trackpad direction which is awkward for me. And now this what you're describing. So no, thanks, I'll stick to ThinkPad.
You don't buy Apple because it's good. You buy it because it's what the cool people use.
Imagine applying for a SF startup job and letting them know you use a Windows computer.
At best they will politely tell you to fuck off. But they might blog/X about the idiot Windows user who imagined they could be cool enough to work for them, all coated in a plausible "a craftsman takes care of using good tools, sharp knifes, ..."
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... Apple should develop a separate version of their system, that doesn't include AI anywhere? Because Siri AI is not the only part of the system that uses the onboard models. The moral panic is just ridiculous at this point
I don't think anyone's asking for a separate version, just an option to turn the AI features off. Even totally aside from the moral points, some of us simply don't have the disk space.
it is off, Apple Intelligence and Siri AI IS NOT the name of the models. The worst they're guilty of here is confusing denominations, something hardly new to Apple
You're mixing up Siri AI and Apple Intelligence with the models... Siri AI and Apple Intelligence are PRODUCTS, the tech behind it, the models, are called Apple Foundation Models and they're used in many places in the system. It's not a matter of consent, it's people not understanding the tech they're using and doing spurious analogies.
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.
I see the dangers of AI and agree that many companies don’t value our privacy and do what’s best for them and not us, but…
…this is an emotional dogmatic post. „All of this garbage“ clearly shows that the author is stuck in the past. The banners on the website confirm this. It’s the figurative fanatic complaining about those black steam devils and their tracks that nobody needs and that destroy nature. Yeah, steam trains were noisy and created smoke, but the age of horses was over. No emotional outburst would have stopped that, and won’t stop AI now.
The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point he is trying to make.
If something can't be stopped, does that mean it's good? Reading accounts of the industrial revolution, huge swathes of nature in the north of England were destroyed. This article is an argument that it should be different, and is mostly focused on consent, not whether AI should exist or not (although the author's position on that is pretty clear too).
As a side note, I would argue you're being just as "emotional" (which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing despite your aspersions) by calling it "fanatic".
Agree. Anyone should be allowed to disable generative AI features on their device, especially a general computing device such as Mac. It's not some hysterical outburst about the industry to be upset when you can't do that, especially when the option used to exist but was removed.
If you honestly can't see the blatant and absolute anti-AI rhetoric in his post (I provided a citation) and the banners, then there really is no reason to continue this discussion.
Not trying to start flamewars, but more and more I wonder how much are people willing to put up with such practices. On linux for 15+ years and everytime I try to use mac or win, it is an ordeal. And ads. F*cking ads in a system someone has purchased. And spying. Really user hostile environment. No, thank you.
Because Mac laptops are lightyears ahead of any other hardware.
Build quality (aluminum), charging (magsafe), screen resolution, battery life, noise (or lack thereof), trackpad…
It’s like other vendors aren’t even trying.
Also the OS mostly “just works”, just last week my Linux laptop disabled NVIDIA GPU (and almost bricked itself?? Not sure, had to fix apt) during automated updates
I have to agree, unfortunately. Macbooks have their issues, and give me violent tendencies like any piece of hardware every now and then, but when it comes to UX and reliability, they are far, far ahead of anything I tried, and I tried a lot of hardware.
Mac build quality is nice indeed. And Nvidia sometimes doesn't play along, but that is a small price to pay for an everyday peace of mind.
My both parents use linux and are happy with it. 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 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.
Not to mention that once you're in this ecosystem, it's usually pretty reliable.
It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.
At work we can choose between Apple laptops or Thinkpads, I choose thinkpads, using Windows and WSL.
Previously either VMware Workstation or Virtual Box.
Also I am not speaking from a position of no experience, as some projects require being assigned Mac Books, that I gladly return after delivery.
We're 30+ years into trackpads on laptops and they're still terrible on Windows machines. Make it make sense.
Aluminium is not build quality. It makes lying stuff inside cheap. And feels horrible on skin contact.
The good ThinkPads with Magnesium feel much better (both for hand and lap) and are lighter. And the expensive and complicated build allows maintenance (replacing a keyboard is a bless on the X13). Lenovo is just stupid and also allows to purchase low quality screens, low quality frames and even a Windows. A thing that Apple never allows, you cannot purchase a bad configuration.
The MBAs at Apple figured out much earlier, that a rigid metal frame is cheap and gives the impression of quality.
Aside from that?
Customers are guilty, wanting a shiny and quick solution. And governments and companies by following ultra rigid and outright stupid purchasing guide (ISO craziness and “we can drop Windows, we invested another 300.000 in a Windows only Application).
This has changed recently
For example this dell is superb, has tandem oled with 200% scaling and runs linux (dhh runs this on onarchy)
https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/laptop-computers/spd/xps14da...
macOS has been on a downward trend since Apple started pushing "Services", basically iCloud. Now it's as bad as Windows when I last used Windows.
It's not just privacy violations. Those are the tip of the iceberg. I used to open the Activity Monitor and see a couple pages of processes. Now it's in the hundreds.
It's stuff that was badly done even before AI. The industry has been drunk on SaaS for way too long, and with SaaS comes the junk/slop and the privacy violations.
I've been doing my part and cancelling all my subscriptions apart from power, water, internet and garbage.
if you are happy on Linux, why do you even "try to use a mac or win"?
When those unfortunate ones need my help. Or when teaching kids in school.
my work offers win or mac only.
If you want to own your computer, linux is where it's at. Windows is rusty iron chains and MacOS's are gold-plated silver pretending to be gold, but they're still chains.
I would love to move my gaming PC to Linux but until the kernel devs permit kernel-level anti-cheats, or an equivalent, I refuse to give up games that I love. It's nearly impossible to play multiplayer games now without KLAC. The cheating is out of control.
Unfortunately this is an ideological hill that many Linux devs are willing to die on, so we're at an impasse. Valve claimed to be working on a solution, and if there is any company which can negotiate an accord, it's them.
It's worth having a look at https://areweanticheatyet.com/. I found that the most of the games I play which use anti cheat work on Linux. It's also not hard to dual-boot windows as a backup, though I haven't had a use for my windows partition yet.
FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are your friends too!
Let me know if any of them work well on a laptop that's never than 5 years old.
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.
For now.
My gut is we'll have to start learning BSD soon.
A Linux computer is so many things and also nothing at the same time that's is basically impossible that one or N AI company can impose you something like Apple, Microsoft or Google can.
With that said, also or instead using *BSD won't do any harm.
GPL is a more free license if one cares about having control over their computing. The BSD community cares a lot less about that in my (limited) experience and more about purely technical aspects. Which is fine, I just wouldn't expect them to hold if Linux is no longer an option somehow.
You ever notice how Apple never really lets the user say "no" to their nudges?
It's always "maybe later" and never "no seriously, I don't want this, go away"
I don't have a solution, but on this topic I let Fable write a browser extension I called "Nee, krijg de tering". It's "No, fuck off" in English, but the Dutch feels more visceral for me. It's really rough, but it tries to find these "Maybe later", "No, thank you" etc. buttons and replace the No button.. I guess it's kind of self-explanatory. Does not really do anything, but it is cathartic (and also messes with a lot of UIs to the point where unfortunately the blocklist of domains this should not be used on is growing a lot :'( ).
I feel this pattern is really abusive. Like I am offering to slap you in the face, giving you two answer options: Yes and "Maybe later/no, thank you". As though you have any obligation to be forced to answer this question again at some late time, or to be very polite while you refuse to be slapped in the face. The correct answer is obviously "No, fuck off".
Sensible. Add in a 'Nee, flikker op met je kutcookies' button for cookie consent banners, and you're golden.
This 'maybe later' dark pattern seems to have gained so much traction that UX folk just use it because everyone uses it. There is probably some handwavy reason for it that amounts to not wanting to give the user the feeling they are doing something definitive, but it just ends up being another grain of sand on the micro-annoyance pile of today's tech.
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 (an excerpt of) 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...
I’ve noticed that most companies do that, not just Apple.
Apple claims to be the privacy king. They deserve scrutiny.
Most companies did that before Apple, yes. I hate that trend.
I have this one notification asking me if I want to enable the Personal focus when I’m at home. I don’t want my iPhone to care if I’m at home or not, so the past two years whenever it pops up I click Later.
It will probably never stop asking.
It will. Once you accidentally mis-click once and then suddeny there is no way to back out of it.
I think this should be called the ratchet theory of consent because it only tightens.
I beat you to it by a couple of years :)
https://jacquesmattheij.com/dark-patterns-the-ratchet/
Haha! Great minds think alike. (Although they do also say that fools seldom differ...)
Not sure about the focus pop up but most/all of Apple’s other nags (like set up Siri, try Apple Music and the like) go away permanently if you go to the settings app and click “later” from there (as opposed to the button in the pop up which has the exact same label).
Google Play Store has a notification to enable notifications. You didn't read that wrong. It shows a badge and everything. I said no for years except that last time. Now I can't find how to turn it off again.
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.
This hostile behavior has unfortunately grown over the years. Notice how often you cannot really unsubscribe from newsletters, because clicking the small link in the email will only unsubscribe you from 1 of 25 "topics" or whatever and they will gladly re-define the "topics" every 6 months and re-enable them all.
i see this virtually everywhere, and worked at several places where PMs proactively changed text banners to not equate to "no"
severe industry brainrot
Feature: Apple does not phone home. Enable this feature?
Would you like to enable the feature where you opt out of disabling telemetry?
I get the annoyance at "ask me again later", but "maybe later" or "not now" is helpful - there's no way to trigger dialogs by yourself, so this is a promise that even if you say "no" in the dialog, you can still go into settings to change your mind. Gives me less anxiety about the choice.
How about a choice: both "no, maybe later" and "no, never"
And "no, never" would irreversibly remove the option from settings?
It would never prompt again.
That's is the same as what "Not now" and "Maybe later" would (should) do.
Only "ask me again later" is the one that prompts you again. That's why I do mind that one, and appreciate the other ones.
A much better way would be “Yes” and “No” with a small message of “you can change this later in the Settings”.
Or have three buttons: “Yes”, “No”, “Remind me Later”. Apple does stuff like that in other parts of the OS, like when asking for app permissions, so they clearly know how to do it.
"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".
And Sync Immediately's only affirmative option is "For Today", so I get to set a daily reminder to remind the setting that I do in fact want it to be ON.
I had a similar thing with Xcode the other day. I unticked the "download a code assistance model" thing, clicked to continue and it started downloading it anyway (which, to be fair, you can just X out of).
I feel the same way. I'm not completely against the technology, but please let me say "no" and remove the models and kill the processes.
I'm done with Apple. Got rid of my iPhone and back on android (GrapheneOS) and very impresses after playing with Omarchy for a few weeks.
I think we will keep reading more and more of these Apple stories and it feels like shit is getting worse as time goes by
The answer is simple: Regulation to grant users the right to refuse during installation/setup of a system. This must also include updates. This feel like a repeat of the EU browser choice rule!
> The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it.
I posted a thread on thr MacRumors forum making a similar point. I tried to couch it in the language of Apple being inconsistent with Apple Intelligence. You can’t turn it off anymore globally but Apple provides the user the ability to block, not turn off, some parts of it. Even then you can’t block everything, like the Apple Intelligence parts of the Photos app. Even if you turn off Siri that stuff sticks around. But iOS 27 does not require Apple Intelligence to function or anything like that because my 4th gen iPad Air can’t run Apple Intelligence but can run iPadOS 27 just fine.
> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them
Yes! The most consentless (don't underline this in red firefox!) technology that I can think of certainly.
edit: also install and use Linux
I see non-consensual more often, tbf.
What's more interesting is his "No AI" policy
https://dbushell.com/ai/
“Workaround to avoid downloading AI models and save storage”
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49787535
https://www.reddit.com/r/MacOSBeta/comments/1vlnf13/workarou...
I make it a point to never install the first versions of major macos releases. they are usually buggy and have annoying new features that are either removed, improved or made optional in the following minor releases. Currently on 26.6.2, it's pretty good.
Is this happening only when upgrading the os or does it force enable apple intelligence on clean re-installs too?
These are reasons enough. I switched to Asahi recently on my Macbook Pro M1
My fingerprint reader doesn't work, nor does my speaker. But hey, its way better than having to use MacOS. Atleast, linux lets me use my computer the way I want.
This is a very interesting shift with Apple where customers are starting to perceive it as hostile company.
Maybe Little Snitch can be helpful in this sort of case ? Consent or not, it must be possible to kill the phone home line.
It feels like consent is being undermined in so many places. The anti-Meta Glasses ad with a photo of Jeffrey Epstein and the strap line "Glasses for people who don't do consent" hits the nail on the head for me. It's a profoundly inhuman stance in the name of profits.
You said yes when you bought their shit
Is it normal that I am enraged by this new process…is there a MacBook version of Graphene or something we can use if things keep boiling this way?
Asahi Linux. It'll take some years to reach the latest devices, but the effort is helping the whole of the Linux ecosystem on Apple silicon.
> The “AI” industry has many flaws, the word “consent” being seemingly missing from training data and company handbooks is one of them. AI bros do not take “no” for an answer.
In several years, the GDPR enforcers (national information commissioners) may eventually wake up to this and start talking about fines. But I suspect everyone is too cowed by the AI inevitability narrative.
> But that’s a trivial cost compared to the consent problem. [..] AI bros keep telling me “just turn it off” and when I do they remove the choice.
This is barking at the wrong tree. If you value things like your privacy or the ability to strictly control what runs on your computer then perhaps it would be a good idea to not run a proprietary operating system that's primarily designed not to provide you with the best user experience possible but to slowly extract more and more value out of you?
You must be talking about someone other than Apple. Apple has been falling into value extraction lately (which I hope Ternus will change), but their operating systems very much have never been designed for that from the outset. Rather the opposite. Apple is the only company that comprehensively documents platform security and privacy. I can't think of anyone else who doesn't just say "trust me bro". Maybe GrapheneOS. Nobody actually proves they are who they say they are better than Apple does.
Apple is also one of the only companies to focus on user experience above all else (nearly, anyway). Again, I can't think of a single other example (maybe Framework comes close), but while Apple has incredible technology, they have always been fairly measured with it to attain just the user experience they want. IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance, and iPhone a reputation for having low memory, because Apple gave them the specs they needed to run well and have a terrific UX, not necessarily the specs to push the frontier of what you can run at home.
Apple has been learning that frontier is important, though, and they've been leaning more into it lately. Part of why Apple Silicon has been such an incredible shock to the industry.
"good dog, here's a cookie"
You're repeating fruit factory propaganda as if it is gospel, the marketing department can be proud of their handiwork. 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". 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. 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.
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.
> IMO, that's what earned Mac a reputation for having poor performance
Desktops maybe, but on mobile, Apple has always outclassed most Windows laptops that ordinary people might buy - alone because the full-aluminium case allows for far more heat input until saturation kicks in.
Sure - my MacBook Pro from 2015 could run BeamNG.drive playably when my previous Windows laptops absolutely could not. Turns out that 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 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.)
The author is complaining that his OS doesn't let him say "no". This would never happen with an OS which actually respects you. Of course, it's not Apple's fault, it never is -- it's those "AI bros"! It's incredibly ironic that the author writes "I’ve chosen not to kowtow to billionaires", yet he kowtowing to a company with a market cap of 5 trillion USD.
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 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.
I never really understood the craze for the overpriced Apple products. After many years of using PCs with Linux and Windows, I got forced to use a MacBook Pro as the company laptop and I found it hard to use. The OS is so limiting, Finder so crappy, oh my. There are some advantages, like the hardware is good, but on the other hand there are countless tiny issues where "Apple knows better" such as tying mouse scroll direction to the trackpad direction which is awkward for me. And now this what you're describing. So no, thanks, I'll stick to ThinkPad.
You don't buy Apple because it's good. You buy it because it's what the cool people use.
Imagine applying for a SF startup job and letting them know you use a Windows computer.
At best they will politely tell you to fuck off. But they might blog/X about the idiot Windows user who imagined they could be cool enough to work for them, all coated in a plausible "a craftsman takes care of using good tools, sharp knifes, ..."
> You don't buy Apple because it's good
You do, because their hardware is very good. Denying this is just silly.
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)
Guess it's time to switch back to Linux... Shame, I'll miss the macbook build quality.
So... Apple should develop a separate version of their system, that doesn't include AI anywhere? Because Siri AI is not the only part of the system that uses the onboard models. The moral panic is just ridiculous at this point
I don't think anyone's asking for a separate version, just an option to turn the AI features off. Even totally aside from the moral points, some of us simply don't have the disk space.
it is off, Apple Intelligence and Siri AI IS NOT the name of the models. The worst they're guilty of here is confusing denominations, something hardly new to Apple
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?
Do you believe that adding a "no" button _and then honoring it when the user clicked on it_ requires developing a separate version of their system?
Regardless: they already did, because Apple intelligence is not available in the EU.
You're mixing up Siri AI and Apple Intelligence with the models... Siri AI and Apple Intelligence are PRODUCTS, the tech behind it, the models, are called Apple Foundation Models and they're used in many places in the system. It's not a matter of consent, it's people not understanding the tech they're using and doing spurious analogies.
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.
I see the dangers of AI and agree that many companies don’t value our privacy and do what’s best for them and not us, but…
…this is an emotional dogmatic post. „All of this garbage“ clearly shows that the author is stuck in the past. The banners on the website confirm this. It’s the figurative fanatic complaining about those black steam devils and their tracks that nobody needs and that destroy nature. Yeah, steam trains were noisy and created smoke, but the age of horses was over. No emotional outburst would have stopped that, and won’t stop AI now.
The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point he is trying to make.
If something can't be stopped, does that mean it's good? Reading accounts of the industrial revolution, huge swathes of nature in the north of England were destroyed. This article is an argument that it should be different, and is mostly focused on consent, not whether AI should exist or not (although the author's position on that is pretty clear too).
As a side note, I would argue you're being just as "emotional" (which I don't necessarily see as a bad thing despite your aspersions) by calling it "fanatic".
> The unconditional and emotional rejection of AI undermines the actual valid point
No it doesn't, one can hate LLMs with a passion and still not want features they don't use take 20GB of the storage they paid a premium for.
He's not talking about AI in general. He's talking about a device he owns.
Agree. Anyone should be allowed to disable generative AI features on their device, especially a general computing device such as Mac. It's not some hysterical outburst about the industry to be upset when you can't do that, especially when the option used to exist but was removed.
If you honestly can't see the blatant and absolute anti-AI rhetoric in his post (I provided a citation) and the banners, then there really is no reason to continue this discussion.
The "unstoppable" narrative may or may not be correct but it's certainly maximizing the backlash.