Consent Prompt Fatigue and overload is a serious problem. To perform the most basic task across my iPhone + watch I need to suffer half a dozen consent & pin prompts. Often at the most sensitive and difficult times: it's raining, I have gloves, I'm juggling a power tool or something dangerous. My devices continue pin prompt me every 30 seconds like I'm holding the Nuclear football.
We used to respect that credential/consent prompt fatigue resulted in worse security, then the lawyers got their way, engineers / product managers conceded, and now users are punished with useless prompting every 10 seconds.
The only way forward will be for some a-hole product managers to push back on this nonsense.
Back in the day, in Operating System Design class I dared to suggest the teacher that for some obscure inode related problem the system should ask the user what to do.
His answer was "We are designing an operating system, not a messaging solution".
This was circa 30 years ago of course, and the essence and complexity of what an OS is today is different, but the idea still resonates in my head every time macOS deploys one of these prompts at me.
>I live and work in a multi-lingual environment, and regularly switch between the German and English keyboard layout. Lately, the keyboard layout no longer sticks. It resets to English when I press shift. Sometimes it does work, sometimes it doesn't.
Yeah, windows is also the king for that.
Almost every update reactivates the shortcut to change locale, even though I've removed it.
And they even added a new shortcut to change locale : Win+space.
So as I'm always juggling between mac and windows, Win+space is sometimes pressed instead of ctrl+space and then all of a sudden my keyboard is switched to another language.
Don't worry, there's a fix ! Modify all the installed language, add your keyboard layout and remove all the others. So now you can also have a an English locale with a non English keyboard layout.
I was recently made aware you should be able to use Powertoys (as maybe the only way) to remove the innate win+space shortcut and override it with e.g. your launcher.
This works... it shows the launcher. But I still find myself with the wrong language selected every couple days, I have a feeling it does not fully work when I use win+space inside an RDP connection or.. somewhere else.
Mildly infuriating if you can't just disable OS-level shortcuts.
It's interesting how the sentiment around Apple has turned, for the first time in what feels like 20 years.
The true reason is, as the recent norwegian report quipped: We love our tech, but it betrays us - that's an abusive relationship.
Consent prompts are a band-aid for users being exploited: They are not fixing the root but covering it with legal painkillers.
But the only true remedy is actually feeling in control of and empowered by your device - a vision that Apple once at least promised, but now has less and less legitimacy of heralding.
Several ideas from this blog post are factually wrong.
Additionally, I cannot confirm the more subjective ideas - and I've been running Macbooks for almost 20 years, and specifically working with Python both for hobby, for research, professionally, for cybersecurity, etc.
I have an old 2013 laptop that is the "couch machine". It still works adequately. No issues with sleep/wake. Time machine outlasted the external HDD it was running on. I am writing this on an M1 Max, which will be 5 years old this year, and I hope I get 5 more years, it's just that good.
> I have an old 2013 laptop that is the "couch machine". It still works adequately.
Sure, because it is from when Apple still was good.
I am writing this right now on a 2014 Mac Mini (running 10.13). Works perfect! Great machine.
The newer stuff, not so much.
I have a 2021 15"? MacBook Pro, highest end very expensive, where the battery randomly goes into rundown and drains in no time, some days it is fine. This one also can't sleep, so must do a full shutdown if I need to close the lid for more than ~10 minutes. If I close it and put it on my backpack for longer, it heats up like an oven and drains the battery. The USBC ports only work half the time at best. It's been like this since 2023, so it really only lasted two years.
I have a 2022 13" MacBook Pro where the screen is completely dead and the trackpad no longer clicks. Using it as a desktop with an external monitor and mouse, but what a disappointment. Made the mistake of buying it without Apple Care shakedown money, so can't be fixed. (Apple wanted ~$1500 to fix it, obviously not worth it).
I have a 2023 MacBook Air which is my current portable. Works ok for now, but the USBC ports are super flaky. External monitors work on a whim, sometimes, or not, which is massively annoying.
Apple quality is just pretty terrible in the 2020s. When this MacMini dies, I'm going back to a Linux desktop.
Linux may soon not be an option because of age verification laws. The New York law, currently pending, requires age verification assurance from hardware vendors, not just OS suppliers. Locked-bootloader PCs are coming in order to comply with the laws.
I disagree. This feature protects people who do not know better. Those who do, instead of raising their blood pressure by writing rants, can simply disable this feature.
> We wanted to download a clip using yt_dlp (a Python program). Terminal told us, this would require dev tools (which it doesn't).
It is offering to install Apple's developer tools package which includes Python. The download is ~900MB, much of which consists of large Swift and C compiler binaries. That's pretty large if you only need Python, but in practice you probably do want the full dev tools because Python packages often compile C extensions when installed.
> Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.
There is no such security feature. Perhaps a TLS issue?
> Another "security" feature requires all apps on Apple computers to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.
You can also do it from System Settings. Or if you are actually building on the same machine, you can avoid the problem as described at the bottom of this page:
> On some Apple systems, this fails to show any audio devices, "for security reasons".
While the implementation is somewhat janky, there are real and valid security reasons to require consent for using the microphone.
> There is no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.
Not proactive warnings (does any OS do that?), but there are plenty of ways to see how full the disk is, including the newish System Settings -> General -> Storage, which breaks down storage use and offers some ways to save space.
> There is no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.
System Settings -> General -> Erase All Content and Settings.
> This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.
You can also just go into System Settings, Security and hit Approve.
Personally I prefer it if the software I use has been signed using the certificate of the developer. But it would be nice if Apple if they could lower the annual cost of membership (currently $99).
I appreciate the sentiment of voting with your wallet and supporting alternatives.
Unfortunately the major vendors are in a race to the bottom and the alternatives aren’t much better. Linux might be better in some ways, but I expect there will be enough minor frustrations that on net it will be a downgrade, especially considering hardware. Some of it is just needing to learn the right way for the given system - people (perhaps rightly) tolerate needing to learn to use Linux but don’t tolerate needing to learn to use Mac. Obviously the basics should be intuitive, but power user workflows need to be learned on any system - installing yt-dlp is a power user workflow.
I see loads of essentially disinformation about Mac on here, mostly about things that could be solved by Googling (I prefer Kagi) or opening the help documentation.
The permissions thing regarding Accessibility or Network Access is the worst. Half the popups make no sense (even to a programmer) and it just feels clunky.
(Bonus point: why is a tiling window manager or anything controlling windows or controls even sorted under Accessibility?)
I recently wanted to control some things with a MIDI device (mostly hardware mute for Slack/Teams etc) and need AppleScript for that.
But of course `osascript` is a different thing than the `Script Editor` and if you want to add a binary in the dialog you click the + button as described in the manual but of course it does not give you a way to select /usr/bin or /bin - just the view with Applications etc. Showing "hidden" files or dirs is easier on Windows and that says a lot.
(I suppose there must be a way, but I gave up finding it and just exported my stuff as an App in ~/Applications, I can add those.)
24 comments
[ 5.8 ms ] story [ 48.0 ms ] threadWe used to respect that credential/consent prompt fatigue resulted in worse security, then the lawyers got their way, engineers / product managers conceded, and now users are punished with useless prompting every 10 seconds.
The only way forward will be for some a-hole product managers to push back on this nonsense.
His answer was "We are designing an operating system, not a messaging solution".
This was circa 30 years ago of course, and the essence and complexity of what an OS is today is different, but the idea still resonates in my head every time macOS deploys one of these prompts at me.
That was a sentence uttered with the misplaced confidence of a man who had no idea his real troubles were only just beginning.
Yeah, windows is also the king for that.
Almost every update reactivates the shortcut to change locale, even though I've removed it.
And they even added a new shortcut to change locale : Win+space.
So as I'm always juggling between mac and windows, Win+space is sometimes pressed instead of ctrl+space and then all of a sudden my keyboard is switched to another language.
Don't worry, there's a fix ! Modify all the installed language, add your keyboard layout and remove all the others. So now you can also have a an English locale with a non English keyboard layout.
This works... it shows the launcher. But I still find myself with the wrong language selected every couple days, I have a feeling it does not fully work when I use win+space inside an RDP connection or.. somewhere else.
Mildly infuriating if you can't just disable OS-level shortcuts.
The true reason is, as the recent norwegian report quipped: We love our tech, but it betrays us - that's an abusive relationship.
Consent prompts are a band-aid for users being exploited: They are not fixing the root but covering it with legal painkillers.
But the only true remedy is actually feeling in control of and empowered by your device - a vision that Apple once at least promised, but now has less and less legitimacy of heralding.
This is not accurate. There is a built-in factory reset option on macOS, just like on iOS.
Additionally, I cannot confirm the more subjective ideas - and I've been running Macbooks for almost 20 years, and specifically working with Python both for hobby, for research, professionally, for cybersecurity, etc.
I have an old 2013 laptop that is the "couch machine". It still works adequately. No issues with sleep/wake. Time machine outlasted the external HDD it was running on. I am writing this on an M1 Max, which will be 5 years old this year, and I hope I get 5 more years, it's just that good.
Sure, because it is from when Apple still was good.
I am writing this right now on a 2014 Mac Mini (running 10.13). Works perfect! Great machine.
The newer stuff, not so much.
I have a 2021 15"? MacBook Pro, highest end very expensive, where the battery randomly goes into rundown and drains in no time, some days it is fine. This one also can't sleep, so must do a full shutdown if I need to close the lid for more than ~10 minutes. If I close it and put it on my backpack for longer, it heats up like an oven and drains the battery. The USBC ports only work half the time at best. It's been like this since 2023, so it really only lasted two years.
I have a 2022 13" MacBook Pro where the screen is completely dead and the trackpad no longer clicks. Using it as a desktop with an external monitor and mouse, but what a disappointment. Made the mistake of buying it without Apple Care shakedown money, so can't be fixed. (Apple wanted ~$1500 to fix it, obviously not worth it).
I have a 2023 MacBook Air which is my current portable. Works ok for now, but the USBC ports are super flaky. External monitors work on a whim, sometimes, or not, which is massively annoying.
Apple quality is just pretty terrible in the 2020s. When this MacMini dies, I'm going back to a Linux desktop.
It is offering to install Apple's developer tools package which includes Python. The download is ~900MB, much of which consists of large Swift and C compiler binaries. That's pretty large if you only need Python, but in practice you probably do want the full dev tools because Python packages often compile C extensions when installed.
> Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.
There is no such security feature. Perhaps a TLS issue?
> Another "security" feature requires all apps on Apple computers to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.
You can also do it from System Settings. Or if you are actually building on the same machine, you can avoid the problem as described at the bottom of this page:
https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/catalina-executables.htm...
> On some Apple systems, this fails to show any audio devices, "for security reasons".
While the implementation is somewhat janky, there are real and valid security reasons to require consent for using the microphone.
> There is no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.
Not proactive warnings (does any OS do that?), but there are plenty of ways to see how full the disk is, including the newish System Settings -> General -> Storage, which breaks down storage use and offers some ways to save space.
> There is no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.
System Settings -> General -> Erase All Content and Settings.
You can also just go into System Settings, Security and hit Approve.
Personally I prefer it if the software I use has been signed using the certificate of the developer. But it would be nice if Apple if they could lower the annual cost of membership (currently $99).
Unfortunately the major vendors are in a race to the bottom and the alternatives aren’t much better. Linux might be better in some ways, but I expect there will be enough minor frustrations that on net it will be a downgrade, especially considering hardware. Some of it is just needing to learn the right way for the given system - people (perhaps rightly) tolerate needing to learn to use Linux but don’t tolerate needing to learn to use Mac. Obviously the basics should be intuitive, but power user workflows need to be learned on any system - installing yt-dlp is a power user workflow.
I see loads of essentially disinformation about Mac on here, mostly about things that could be solved by Googling (I prefer Kagi) or opening the help documentation.
I recently wanted to control some things with a MIDI device (mostly hardware mute for Slack/Teams etc) and need AppleScript for that.
But of course `osascript` is a different thing than the `Script Editor` and if you want to add a binary in the dialog you click the + button as described in the manual but of course it does not give you a way to select /usr/bin or /bin - just the view with Applications etc. Showing "hidden" files or dirs is easier on Windows and that says a lot.
(I suppose there must be a way, but I gave up finding it and just exported my stuff as an App in ~/Applications, I can add those.)