Great initiative. I recently got stung by an advert on reddit for "HBO Max for MacOS, 6 months free" from the official HBO user (don't get me started on how that slipped through). Front and center was a curl | bash copy to clipboard that obfuscated the payload source in base10. I knew better, but I think we've made this kind of thing way too acceptable. Of course it was malware and I realized the instant I pressed enter. Thankfully I didn't give it my password and immediately disconnected from the internet and killed the machine. I'm genuinely concerned these kind of attacks are going to become much more commonplace with AI, plus the ability to inject malicious code in to things that get run by trusted scripted installers.
It's easier to walk someone through a single command than adding a software repository, so it's a risk factor for someone that isn't paying attention or doesn't know what they're doing. But with that little attention/knowledge the complaints on this page are unlikely to save you.
And if you're in the state of mind to consider the security nuances of curl|bash verses other install methods, you're already past the "should I be installing this?" question and the complaints on this page won't save you. The delay is the thing mostly likely to make you rethink.
> If the project publishes a SHA-256 hash, use it. Non-negotiable on production machines.
They're pushing FUD around downloading a file but then suggest that we trust the same chain of complex things to display the right hash value? Integrity != authentication.
What’s your suggested installation method instead? Unless it’s “download and read the source before running it” this is no worse than npm install, or pip install, or clicking “trust” on a git repo in VSCode
It is actually worse than those examples. Pip and npm may be insecure, and that is a fault of those tools, but most user expect secure package managers and should demand it
Telling users it’s fine to raw dog arbitrary commands directly into their shell is dangerous and lowers the bar for all security. In fact by even making this comparison you are communicating that you are complacent with pip and npm’s issues and why shouldn’t you just execute arbitrary commands without even a second glance? Security doesn’t matter!
And for the record, even with pip and npm being the way that they are, they are still better than a curl pipe because they are versioned. In the case I get a compromised deployment I understand immediately if I got hit by the affected package, and the entire repo can then be audited. Not the case when I’m just curling whatever the internet wants to send into my process space
> In fact by even making this comparison you are communicating that you are complacent with pip and npm’s issues and why shouldn’t you just execute arbitrary commands without even a second glance
You said that, not me. I am not complacent with the security issues, I just don’t believe that the security theatre of “curl | bash” is productive unless you have an actual better alternative.
> they are still better than a curl pipe because they are versioned
pip install is running setup.py which is more than capable of calling exec(requests.get(url)) - except to _you_ that’s secure because you’re assuming it’s trusted. In both cases, if the delivery of the package is compromised or you don’t audit the script, you are screwed. It’s no different to running a binary that you’ve not verified.
Why is this even an app? It looks like it just generates a mobileconfig profile on the fly. Instead, seems like they could be offering a download of a pre-generated mobileconfig, which seems like it would be much safer than installing some app via curl|bash .... but then I guess there wouldn't be a chance to have an "app", get github stars, and do whatever else.
> Bash starts before the download finishes ... Drop the connection mid-transfer and you get partial execution: a command like rm -r /usr/share/program can truncate to rm -r /usr. Commands ran, cleanup didn’t.
curl | bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world.
> The server knows you’re piping — and can lie
This `sleep` based trick is always a cool demo to show freinds yes, but the server can also sneak in malware in a multitude of other ways given you're downloading code and binaries from them.
> You trust DNS, TLS, the CDN, and the origin simultaneously. A compromised CDN or BGP hijack delivers malware silently.
Well yes, that's how the internet works. If TLS of the server is really compromised, then the attacker will replace the checksum as well as the signing key. In real scenarios, you are going to be reading the signing key and checksum from the same domain. [1]
> You can’t reproduce what ran
`| tee inspect.sh | bash`
> Add sudo and it’s game over
Most credentials and important files live in the home directory, root is a red herring. If you're running it on shared server, then well... don't add sudo.
[1] Yes of course there are legitimate usecases for signing software. Common example: linux distros which are mirrored at many domains, but the checksum and signature are hosted on the canonical domain. But if I am curlbashing uv's install.sh from `astral.sh`, then doing signature verification using the public key hosted on the same astral.sh isn't adding much.
I think that's missing the forest for trees. The problem with these curl-to-bash approaches isn't that you literally can't intercept and inspect them given effort and planning.
The problem is that there's no verified "standard" artifact, which means my copy being checked safe doesn't say anything about whether your copy is safe too.
> curl | bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world.
Why would a convention often followed by good/careful actors bind what malicious/careless people create?
Well, if you're running software from someone you think can deliver malware to you (and not a middleman) then it's a lost cause anyways no? I don't see what the zip file adds. It's not like you're gonna be inspecting the code or binaries.
I reiterate: "Even if the shared artifact has sneaky covert logic to trigger in only some environments, the logic is detectable in everyone's copy."
> for the guy to give you a package that can explode when you get home
Would you rather receive a completely individualized risky-package that might explode, or would you rather get one which you know is identical to 10,000 other packages that have all already been taken to homes, opened up, and not exploded?
> Moving that if-statement to a hidden remote server is both significant and worse for security.
Fair enough, I guess I don't agree that that difference is significant. I can't imagine logic that doesn't trigger at all for most people being detected in any reasonable way.
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI/main/install.sh | pi -p 'Security-audit this shell script; output the script unchanged ONLY if safe to execute, otherwise output nothing and explain findings to stderr' | bash
the analysis part is essentially a summarization task, which LLMs are usually good at.
LLMs are less good at bit-for-bit reproduction by design. asking it to do this is asking for corruption in the output.
instead, you could have pi produce some output based on how insecure it thinks the shell script is then use coreutils to run the script as-is to avoid that.
I would have thought the Pi harness would have text editing abilities that can be used here, so that the language model itself doesn't have to do the copying.
Absolutely love the fact that they reference a "real package manager" like npm, which has been used in countless supply chain attacks, and brew, which can also run arbitrary scripts (though less likely in the mainline brew stuff, which many packages aren't able to be in).
This. curl | bash has never nuked my local Postgres db, unlike one of the recommended package managers. Nor stopped my wife’s computer from booting, unlike a certain well known browser installer from one of the world’s biggest companies.
I'm sick of juggling disk space on my 1tb laptop AND I don't want an llm attack vector anywhere near my machine, this things getting nuked from orbit or i'm not updating to golden gate, ever.
Really? GNOME is not what I would recommend to people.
I should applaud their efforts, and I get that much of it is voluntary, but their bugs are numerous, notable and the way they interact with the rest of the universe (both people with accessibility needs, and the wider developer ecosystem on linux) can most accurately be described as arrogant and hostile.
KDE is the bastion of maturity here, and I would agree that it is mature.
I’m not sure how the love for GNOME continues when KDE (while not my personal choice) has clearly been running circles around it since GNOME3 and the gap has only widened since that change too.
Both desktops are pretty mature. I've run both of their Wayland stacks, and Mutter/KWin both perform great these days. It really comes down to personal preference for most use-cases.
Because KDE looks and feels straight out of 2010 compared to GNOME? GNOME just suffers by leaving some (what should be integrated) features to its shitty extension system.
It's just an age old debate. Those like me who like GNOME find KDE cluttered and rough around the edges. Others who like KDE think GNOME is too opinionated and occasionally buggy.
Sure, but in one of these you can change the mouse pointer speed- and the other forced systemd to hide its bugs (thus forcing all distros that wanted to run it to shim those bugfixes forever or adopt systemd).
So...? It's 2026, the "I hate systemd" position has been circling the drain for years, now. Are we going to complain about Wayland being the default session, too?
Neither GNOME nor KDE are perfect. We could list out bugs in both for days and still not be done. But they are both usable, and have divergent design that gives users a meaningful choice between which desktop they prefer. They both have strong ideological underpinnings that ignore weaknesses in their tech stack to drive progress forward at any cost. It's not the end of the world for either desktop. Both projects have been plugging away for decades without issue.
I’m actually a fan of wayland, but I don’t have to like something just because its ubiquitous now and I don’t have to like the reasons it became that way. Just to be clear.
You still didn’t answer any question I posed about UX though, since that was what we were talking about and I have levied specific criticisms.
In GNOME, pointer speed and mouse acceleration both have settings by-default. A11Y is taken fairly seriously, and has API-level GTK features to accommodate A11Y-specific modes.
What other questions are there to answer? GNOME is benign, there's a reason why it's the default in mainstream distros like Ubuntu and Fedora.
I first saw it with Homebrew over a decade ago. It made it more linux, it's true. (Of course now that its for linuxes too, so they get to be more like macs.)
I see archive.today has the charming old ruby version on the bottom of a 2013 brew.sh page in 2013, when I must first have used it https://archive.ph/lCqJ1
Oh, things are about to get worse with the new macOS "privacy/security" measures. They are going to curb agentic workflows even more. I don't know how Apple just finds new ways to annoy developers, but we're in a minority after all. Of 200 million Mac users, probably just up to 1 million are developers, and the rest are normies who can't tell when they should authorize or cancel the pop-up.
It’s not about privacy, it’s about kneecapping competitors, just like when they blocked the advertising ID but exempted themselves from this because “Apple is not a third-party, we’re a second-party”.
Apple is an advertising company and thus inherently untrustworthy.
It's interesting to see more customisation tools appearing for macOS, as just a few years ago I was looking for ways to strip down the OS (CI related), and while such info was widely available in the Windows world, to the point that customised "distros" are available, it was nearly nonexistent for macOS; only the Hackintosh community had some useful articles on how things worked.
Could the rise of LLMs and vibe-coding have motivated people who otherwise wouldn't bother?
It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited. Admittedly this helps keep idiots from destroying their filesystem and also blocks many malware attacks on the system, but, for example. I don’t believe you can delete the chess program.
This is one of those things where you have to ask yourself "how do you get it so wrong?". I get the idea of protecting from malware/self-harm, but to not allow removal of such a pointless app is just befuddling. At least Microsoft trying to say that Explorer was core to the OS, but a chess app? I never did buy into Explorer being core until the day I accidentally pasted an URL into File Explorer's path and it rendered the webpage. I don't understand why someone thought that was necessary to allow to happen, but there it was, core to the OS.
I think it’s because all those apps use core technologies so their bundle size is tiny. You hide them and never think about them (like the old windows media player). Most of windows optional features are very much in your face all the time.
and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited
That's a half-truth at best; I can just open the disk image in a hex editor if nothing else understands the format.
Hackintoshers have figured out how to add/modify drivers etc. It's certainly not without obstacles, but that's still very far from "impossible". If I remember correctly, you need to re-snapshot the FS and tell the bootloader to boot from it.
(And necessarily, ignoring the countless cries of "it can't be done" was how I was able to accomplish my goal... I knew that it was possible since I could edit any bit of the FS; figuring out which files I could remove and patch was the hard and undocumented part.)
The entire system is signed and verified at boot. Any change to a macOS system outside of /Users, /Applications, and whatever else the OS lets you edit can't really be edited without disabling System Integrity Protection (which isn't recommended)
The sealing of the filesystem can be disabled trivially, though, via a command line tool that Apple ships with MacOS that you run from recovery mode.
And then you can remount `/` as read-write, and create a new blessed snapshot with your changes made to it.
This doesn't actually delete the signed snapshot though, so the space consumed by `/System/Applications/Chess` still is consumed. I'm not sure if MacOS will allow deleting the final sealed snapshot for `/`. It might, I don't know that anyone is clamoring for it though.
Ah okay, interesting, stuff has gotten slightly more complicated since the last time I tried this, but fundamentally it sounds about the same in terms of "boot into recovery, run a couple of custom commands, make changes, boot back".
Apple was late to the AI party. Usually, that's their strategy - let everyone else innovate, when the ecosystem is mature, steal it and claim it as their own. That worked well for decades. But, the pace of AI is too fast to pull this trick off again, so now they're in panic mode. So they do what every shitty corporate does - shove AI down everyone's throat, whether they want it or not. Which is ironically against their founder's motto - build stuff that people want.
I'm not sure there were enough people looking at finder and thinking "I wish I could talk to an AI to open a file on my desktop which I could've simply double clicked on anyway"
As far as I recall, Apple does not do reproducible builds or show you the checksum of the built product, so how would one know that the software installed is the software they saw the source for?
I mean, that sounds a lot more like you're concerned about Apple shipping you insecure software, because it's strictly harder to audit what you have from them compared to what you'd get from this tool.
That doesn't seem to do much in the `curl | bash` setting, given that you're not verifying the attestation in that case. You still need to download it separately and run `gh attestation verify` first.
(Note that the attestation does not appear to cover the shell script either, it only covers the script's final payload. The shell script is also referenced via `main`, so it's mutable even if the underlying payload is properly attested. That's not good!)
Not a lot of good reasons to upgrade to 27. They removed Rosetta and you have to reinstall that if you want it. So is MacOS turning into something that more regular people are going to have to maintain in the future or end up with something like Windows 11?
I switched to MacOS 3 years ago because of Microsoft and the writing on the wall seems to say I got another year left before I'm forced into Linux. Because if I have to maintain my own OS then I might as well install Linux and do it once.
If a temporary tool being retired is the reason you switch, then wait until you find out how many LOC are being deleted from the linux kernel this year and next
I wish I could revert to the old Siri on my iPhone 15 Pro. “Remind me in 2 hours to do XYZ” is dramatically slower now: not only does the operation take longer, but Siri consistently forgets the action and asks what I want to do in 2 hours.
There's a singular very good reason to upgrade to 27 and any new version (at least when a .1 minor version is out and the kinds have been ironed): the whole ecosystem works better when you are on the latest stuff.
So unless you have legacy app needs, or need ultra stability for stuff like running a video shop or something, it makes sense to keep up, or at least don't fall more than 1-2 versions behind.
>They removed Rosetta and you have to reinstall that if you want it.
And they'll kill it entirely in a future version. It's been like 6 years for getting apps to Apple Silicon versions. And it's generally not ideal to run both AS and Intel programs if you can avoid it (wastes double the system lib memories, Intel misses some extra protections, etc).
>I switched to MacOS 3 years ago
OK, this explains it. So macOS is not like Windows where you can have even 15 years old version of the OS and programs still work forever.
If you're on 26, you should definitely upgrade to 27. So many small bugs and UI issues are fixed. Spotlight finally works again. The Wi-Fi indicator in the menu bar even shows when you're on Ethernet.
If you're on a version before 26, then, eh, you can probably wait.
Another thing that bit me is that automatic updates reserve disk space even if no update is available. It makes sense when you have plenty of disk space but on my MacBook Air with 256gb of storage it was about 10% that I got back after turning off automatic updates. I’ll get a Mac with more storage next time so I don’t have to do that.
Reminds me of all the de-crufting you've always needed to do when you install Windows. Looks like we've gotten to the point on macOS too, where you need to run third party scripts on a new OS installation to gain back control of your system resources and remove unwanted crapware.
How was it "against their consent?" The Siri AI / Apple Intelligence feature required a user to explicitly enable it. It didn't just get enabled for you.
I know this because I just explicitly enabled it, and now I have the new Spotlight search. I didn't have it before I enabled it.
I made my own “pseudo spotlight” and mapped it to ⌘-Space specifically for this. It just goes against old fashioned locate/updatedb, but with a very quick check against /Applications first + running the search query through bc and if it’s valid syntax, showing the math result.
True that, win11debloat is 'mandatory' nowadays.
The time that OS makers competed with each other with features users actually wanted is long gone, alas..
This is why Linux is now making more serious momentum. Even a long term 'Microsoftie' like myself is now standing on the brink of making the leap. Just a bit more Steam compatibility first please...
I got an old disk with a win10 installation on it. It lasted only three days. It was because of all the pinging from notifications and all the CTA buttons (like Sign in to Onedrive in the settings). It felt like a minefield where a click can blow your whole setup.
I wipe the whole thing and installed Fedora.
I could tolerate windows if I needed a particular set of software on it, but no way that I could use it as a daily driver.
Mandatory for what? I run stock Win11 for the most part, haven’t have had any real issues with it. I think I disabled/modified a few mouse hotspots and key combos, and that’s been about it. Sure during major updates there’s the “buy our shit” rigmarole, but at this point I just click through and then forget about it for another month or two. Annoying yes, but compared to actual annoyances in my life…I just can’t be bothered to care or get mad, to be honest.
Fully functional feature consuming multiple gigabytes of storage and has questionable functional value. Maybe people don't want bloated AI crap on their desktops?
Apple's AI and harnesses are trash and a complete waste of space
Also suggesting that sacrificing 1/20 of your disk space is NBD is crazy. I have to prune space on my drive all the time because macs ship with the least amount of disk space that apple imagines they can get away with as possible.
Are you arguing that the icons did not occupy a scarce resource that could have been used for other things? Or that the value is so obvious it we worth it?
This is going to shock you I suspect, it seems to be something many here fail to consider in any number of circumstances: You don't represent a majority of anything. A majority of people buying Macs, a majority of people they market to, a majority of who they design for, a majority of who they product test against. In fact I'd venture to guess that you like many here represent a vocal portion of a tiny minority that are almost impossible to please without the sort of full customization of hardware and software you want. It's much easier to neglect that small market in favor of the one that prints them money, and I'm always baffled that so many don't understand that.
People here misunderstand just how different they are to the norm. "I want x, y, z to be free so I can modify it!" Most people buying Apple products don't, hell most people buying any phone doesn't want that, they want a smartphone that works out of the box and never fails to be a smartphone. The walled garden is largely a feature and not a bug, it's just not a feature you want, just like the aesthetics, social factors, ease of use, etc don't matter to you as much as function.
> a majority of people they market to, a majority of who they design for, a majority of who they product test against
As if Apple is always right and knows what their users want. Sure they are more often than other companies but stuff like the touchbar and Siri itself for that matter prove that they do in fact make mistakes.
They’re certainly closer to what their users want than people here are. You can argue minutiae, but the numbers speak for themselves. That’s not the same as being perfect, as should be obvious; this is a comparison to all of you, not perfection.
As always if you think you can beat them at their own game, give it a shot. Many have tried and somehow despite everyone from Google to MS, to idealistic hackers giving it a shot Apple remains the begrudging leader because they’re better than the rest at just working.
It’s easy to compare things to an ideal in your head, “Reality has a surprising amount of detail” that gets in the way though.
Couldn’t have said it better myself. HN and Reddit are the kings of delusion in thinking they’re remotely close to even 1% of the market Apple and others are concerned about. And rightly freaking so, they represent an rounding error in revenue and generally are never happy with anything, at least anything short of a product that would be, in turn, undesirable for the other 99% of the market.
5% is huge. And the way app bundles work on macOS, tons and tons of disk space gets burned up for each application relative to on an OS like Linux distros, so each GB doesn't go as far in the first place.
True. In a highly tweakable / customizable OS you only get what you want. But you first need to understand what that means.
If you understand what that means, you can strip down any OS to the bone and will still be productive with it.
Local LLM’s take up a bunch of space today, where Apple believes this is valuable for their users. 12 GB is still smaller than the regular coding models, so they are trying to keep disk space usage in check.
By "base system", I didn't mean what you can achieve through tweaks. I meant what you end up with after a default install. I'm talking something like a vanilla openSUSE KDE install that comes with a full desktop environment; a web browser; and graphical applications including a file manager, a complete office suite, an archive manager, multimedia players, a text editor, a photo gallery, a local music player/manager, a package/update management frontend, system settings app, fat email client, etc.
The primary factor isn't that Linux distros can include fewer components, it's that traditionally they actually make proper use of shared libraries because everything installed on the system is part of a single software distribution with a unified dependency tree.
I say "traditionally" here because distros that use Snap or Flatpak for applications that ship with the OS as part of the "base system" introduce massive redundancy in a similar way to macOS. That's why I chose openSUSE for an example rather than Ubuntu.
But you can get something like a 1:1 comparison if you compare install media (which is typically compressed) to install media. Linux distro installers and Linux live media often still fit on a single DVD:
macOS is more comparable here to the Linux distros than to Windows, because it comes with a more complete suite of end user applications than Windows does. It's also true that Linux distros are really good at compression when it comes to installation media and live media. But the other piece that I think is clear from these (AI slop, feel free to gather your own) numbers is that traditional Linux distros just make better use of the space in terms of the ratio of number of graphical applications to total disk usage than macOS or Windows do. They have dramatically smaller install media and dramatically smaller base installs than Windows, even though they come with an application suite more comparable to that of a Mac. macOS meanwhile just uses a ton of space both for its install media and its base installs. The difference is in significant part due to the benefits a unified software distribution offers on terms of resource sharing across packages/applications.
That's all completely aside from things like non-graphical installs or foregoing applications like an office suite (let alone foregoing a whole DE). Distros that actually try to optimize disk usage like you're suggesting end up with disk footprints way smaller (e.g., a 792 MB installer image for PuppyLinux, 1.3 GB for Bodhi Linux 7 Standard, 694 MiB for DSL 2024).
This benefit is also the footgun that let Linus Sebastian of LTT (in)famously uninstall his desktop environments with a careless package management command. Applications and the base OS form one system with heavy internal dependency sharing.
Things like app bundling and containerization have lots of advantages, especially when it comes to deployment. But they also have costs, and relative to a normal Linux distro with just one package manager, disk usage is a huge one.
The above also gives us another comparison for macOS 27: just the new machine learning models alone take up more than enough space for a complete, modern graphical operating system AND a graphical end user application suite.
Yes, but it’s death by a thousand cuts. I encourage you to see how much BS space is taken up by iMovie or Live Photos or whatever on your iPhone. If every team at Apple wants their percentage you end up with less.
Wrong. 12GB is potentially 9.4% of your disk. At the very least, the original M1 MacBook Air (perhaps others) could be purchased with 128GB of storage.
Bruh the entire Mac OS used to fit in 20 GB and nothing they have added since has meaningfully improved my life, though some has made it more difficult.
People have been doing the same thing with Cortana on Windows for ages. "Debloating" tools don't primarily target OEM add-ons like free trials of this or that; they very much target Windows components.
IIRC, the antitrust case against them (or a planned antitrust case) caused them to invest in apple, so they actually have a competitor, thus bringing the resurgence of apple in the early naughts
On Windows there are lots of fully features features/applications people turn off. It's not all trial versions and it's disingenuous to pretend it's just that.
Automatically downloading AI models into disk space with no user-facing way to turn it off is especially hostile considering Apple as vendor of both the OS and the hardware is the same entity that overcharges for non-upgradable SSD storage in their machines.
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic, but what you're calling "good, holistic customer service" is more commonly described as "inventing a problem and then selling you the solution".
Google is doing the same on Android - there's no native tool to search for large images and videos by date. There's a Purchase Google Cloud Storage type of header that pops up when you start to get full, and you can delete whatever is quick to find or remember to delete, like WhatsApp media, which you find through an annoying directory structure with a broken tool. It's terrible.
“Siri” has existed for a long time, yes. Apple Intelligence, not so much. It really is just an arbitrary AI model, since I’ve had Siri for a decade and not needed whatever this extra 13GB model is.
Siri didn’t always have a multiple gigabyte installation surface.
Sure, it doesn’t bother me that I can’t uninstall Siri or Apple News or Stocks on my Mac because those programs take up a trivial amount of space. I can just disable or remove them from the dock and move on with my life.
That’s not the case now that “Siri” is a double digit gigabyte installation, especially if you assume that my computer has 256GB of storage, which was almost certainly Apple’s most popular MacBook Air configuration within the last 5 years.
That is now a new change where Apple is using 5% of my storage space for something I don’t even want to use.
Many arbitrary features can be turned off: I haven't turned on Siri on a phone for many years, because the utility was minimal vs the annoyance of errors in voice activation. Taking very significant space in your drive is just as important. I can uninstall Pages and Garage Band. I should be able to uninstall apple intelligence
Yes.
I'm sure these overpaid minds apple can come up with a package manager and dependency system system. It's not rocket science. A lot of force-fed features should actually be on-demand installable rather than baked in.
Meanwhile, other people are complaining about companies making you rely on cloud compute for AI. The exciting thing about Apple Intelligence is the prospect of writing apps with the assumption that it exists on everyone’s computer.
Apple Intelligence, for better or worse, runs on every Apple silicon Mac.
Any machine which can run macOs 27 can run the local models. Some machines may run better local models if they gave 12+GB of ram, but I don't think it's accurate to say that Apple Intelligence is not supported universally.
In this context we are talking about macOS 27. If your app requires 27, then it can correctly assume every machine will work.
On the other hand, a whole lot of machines that can run macOS 27 and Apple Intelligence were sold with 256GB of storage standard, and those are the users that will be rationing disk space because of these models being downloaded by default.
These machines were actively criticized for providing lower base storage compared to competing hardware.
there's a third option youre missing here that people are consistent on: AI shpuld be opt in and nothing prevents opt in being default. AI isnt reliable or universally useful enough to include it defacto.
I don't think so, this argument stands in line eith the current stste of AI, if my statement of "not reliable or universally useful enough" stops being true, my claim loses its base, it stands fine on current evidence and is conditional on it, so it'll never look quaint.
I'm big on AI and have it deeply incorporated into every facet of my life but it _is_ an early tech with a lot of roygh edges, it is not ready to be forced into every aspect of public infrastructure and life yet. That's a simple fact of the tech's infancy.
There was a time saying forcing everyone to use the internet and closing all paper/phone lines for banking is a bad thing, would have been the right call. Now it's more defensible, still the wrong move for some in our social cohorts, but there is merit to that move now, However, at the internets infancy it was no different.
Trial versions are installed by the OEMs so that's not a Windows problem.
Microsoft has given you the tools (Group Policy) for the last 25+ years to customize most of this.
My last install of Windows 11 was shockingly frustrating but with a little patience and discipline it's customized to Windows 7 levels of sanity using nothing but out of the box tools. Shockingly, it works better than writing angry blog posts about it.
> Microsoft has given you the tools (Group Policy) for the last 25+ years to customize most of this.
Morally, why should Home users have to pay a $70 upgrade (or whatever it is) to the company extorting them with forced-on crap they didn't originally have and don't want?
It is a Windows problem because Microsoft allowed OEMs to do it and when you bought a computer, it included Windows and from the end user perspective Windows thus included this software.
> Microsoft has given you the tools (Group Policy) for the last 25+ years to customize most of this.
Most people including me don’t know what this is and more importantly they just don’t care. The frame of reference is “I buy (vendor) laptop and Windows comes with all this stupid stuff I have to uninstall”. It is never “I bought Windows and I just use the Group Policy to do XYZ, and then….”.
> It is a Windows problem because Microsoft allowed OEMs to do it and when you bought a computer
No, it is not. It's still an OEM problem and you can go with another vendor (Framework for example) that doesn't do that.
Actually in this case Microsoft does a better thing than Apple because you can actually choose as a consumer which vendor to use for your HW.
> Trial versions are installed by the OEMs so that's not a Windows problem.
I'm 90 % sure I had trial apps on a clean desktop windows install. Or maybe after some update. All desktop with no pre-installed windows. I think it was candy crush and maybe spotify? I can't remember.
I don't need a more bloated operating system or greater resource usage for things I don't want, use, or need. i'd prefer a calendar app that doesn't suck, and an OS that doesn't decrease performance by 5-15% on every new upgrade for slightly older machines
It's the same reason IDEs have been largely supplanted by plugin-based editors & discrete toolchains. Integrating everything the user might want wastes lots of resources and includes things the user will never want.
I currently have alternative versions of these tools. I would rather run the latest qwen model or SOTA models than whatever outdated model Apple wants me to use.
Because Apple keeps on selling devices with 256GB SSD and this takes between 8-14GB of very valuable disk space, for a feature that most of us don't really use.
It doesn't help that Apple never understood what Siri is and how it should work.
Lots of Linux options is actually a bad thing for most people. They want just one that does something reasonable. Right now I can't name one to bet on, not even Linux Mint cause of the whole XOrg vs Wayland thing.
What do you mean by macOS being rented? It's been the same for about a decade, still not forcing me to update like Windows does on my spare PC running Win10 (well did until I told Claude to rip that out lol). And yeah Win11 is terrible, not even an option.
All of this is a different discussion. Trying to simplify my point even more, one side you have options, the other you don't, and the side you don't corrodes with time.
I mean the side with options corroded over time too. There was a time when you could pretty much safely pick Ubuntu, and they threw that away. Having other Linux distros doesn't fix that, or at least, it isn't an advantage over using a Mac now and being able to switch to Linux if it gets bad.
> Lots of Linux options is actually a bad thing for most people. They want just one that does something reasonable.
Yep, exact reason (among quite a few others, but one of the primary ones) myself and so many other devs I know ultimately quit desktop Linux. It’s such a bad experience to not have one single reproducible, standardized option that the entire industry supports like Mac or windows. Check out the stackoverflow survey, which reflects it as well. Hell, I spent many years at Red Hat and probably 50% of devs and technical staff are running Mac’s for their work machines for that exact reason, and they all prefer it despite working at the most notable Linux company. They don’t care either, since RH makes virtually zero money off of desktop Linux.
Having options isn't a silver bullet and it won't make everybody happy. It's also not intended to make everyone happy, but to solve a problem of software ownership.
The problem isn't when adopting a closed platform, but when people start expecting it to respect their preferences. It's always a matter of time for the experience to degrade little by little with no option to run to.
This is to say, we should use the tools that get the job done, but always be vigilant with coupling to any vendor, but specially proprietary ones.
Recently switched to KDE on a linux laptop (600 USD lenovo) and stopped using my macbook (m1 16" pro).
Speakers, touchpad and battery life are inferior. Speakers are OK after installing EasyEffects and I don't use the touchpad while programming. And battery life is close enough
Cachyos with KDE is 10x better than MacOS. So it doesn't make sense to use macbooks for programming anymore IMO.
You can't even see the update download speed or progress percentage on MacOS, and have to approve 3 times to run a downloaded program, brew is terrible in terms of performance etc. etc. etc.
Interesting. Why do you call out KDE? Does it add to the experience specifically for you?
I usually use XMonad, but then I nearly do everything in the command line, and I don't like to move my windows around via mouse. (Though XMonad supports that, too.)
XMonad works for me, but I wouldn't call it out specifically as contributing to the experience.
> You can't even see the update download speed or progress percentage on MacOS, [...]
What program are you talking about? You can customise eg Firefox on Mac, just like anywhere else, with extensions to look however you want.
> [...] brew is terrible in terms of performance [...]
I'm trying to fix at least brew's Python performance a bit:
I used to use XMonad (now on Hyprland) and feel that the tiling window manager experience you can get on Linux doesn't have an equivalent on macos. KDE is solid but yeah it's plain jane.
Aerospace is very good. I'm not some tiling pro but it's been working perfectly for me for a year or so. Such an improvement over just using spaces on macos.
I have been using KDE for 4-5 years on desktop by now and didn't have any big issues with it so far. I was able to solve every single issue I had with it using a web search or an LLM in a couple minutes.
Only major issue I had was because of cachyos (I think) or just some LLM commands I ran that broke my sound output so I had to reinstall the OS. I probably had more but was using other OS like EndeavorOS/Manjaro before and don't think it was related to KDE.
Also I just like the UI of it and can find any setting I want easily.
> What program are you talking about? You can customise eg Firefox on Mac, just like anywhere else, with extensions to look however you want.
I mean the Software Update thing that updates the OS itself. I also had issues like ghost updates for xcode tools with it (updates come even after I uninstall xcode tools).
> I'm trying to fix at least brew's Python performance a bit:
> I mean the Software Update thing that updates the OS itself. I also had issues like ghost updates for xcode tools with it (updates come even after I uninstall xcode tools).
I usually use something like 'nice sudo softwareupdate --all --install --force
' on Mac for updates. But yeah, it can be a bit of a pain.
Battery life optimization on Lenovos often involves installing and activating the correct GPU kernel module. My battery life on my P53 improved measurably after doing this, though installing new kernels involved a small build step. Are you just running with all the defaults?
I just installed cachyos normally and didn't do any tweak for GPU. The laptop just has an amd CPU and doesn't have a GPU. Do need a specific GPU kernel module for this?
With AMD, most GPUs including the integrated ones will just default to the `amdgpu` module which is maintained by AMD themselves. You pretty much have the best possible experience on Linux right now.
I can't speak from personal experience since my only laptop is an Intel Framework 13 with no dGPU, but there'll be two other main cases both involving Nvidia that tend to bite people.
1. "Gaming" laptops usually with integrated Intel GPU + Nvidia discrete GPU. Not sure what advancements have been made in power management, there. I know there's some incantations one can put in .desktop files to prefer the discrete GPU for like, games, but not much more I can speak to.
2. General fun involving the fact that Nvidia's "gold-standard" drivers are not mainlined in the kernel, but maybe the fact that they are "open source"* means at some point there'll be parity with them. I think that is the goal of Red Hat's Nova driver in development.
* these days, the GPUs got complicated enough they have management processors on them that can actually run most of the complicated algorithms via a firmware blob. So the current open-source drivers basically bridge the gap between the kernel's various subsystems and that little processor to work the magic.
On another note, Intel Xe/i915 have been pretty good, I've used both for integrated GPUs and an Arc Alchemist-generation discrete card of theirs. The framework 13 12th gen intel GPU struggled at the start with a lot of hangs but within a few months of launch, some smart cookies at Intel managed to fix various bugs and it was smooth sailing from there, with the exception of thermals just being in a rough spot on that generation.
> Speakers, touchpad and battery life are inferior.
I suppose it depends upon the model, but I find my Lenovo Yoga's touchpad vastly superior to my MacBook Pro's touchpad. Tracking is fine on both, yet I'm having trouble trouble with the MacBook Pro consistently handling clicks. Granted, that is probably a software thing. As an added bonus, the Yoga has a touch screen which folds back, both of which are nice to have. (Agreed on the Mac speakers being significantly better though.)
> Cachyos with KDE is 10x better than MacOS.
That is subjective. I definitely agree with you, but a lot of people won't. Then again, I have been using Linux for about 30 years so modern macOS feels limiting and there is very little I can do about it.
I use both macOS and Linux (NixOS + gnome/niri) regularly. When everything is working properly--and, to be clear, I'm talking about the macOS side--I see almost no difference between the two operating systems. I'm on a ThinkPad on one side and an M2 Macbook Pro on the other. The only meaningful difference not attributable to something like different screen size is that Apple displays are damn good, and their speakers are otherworldly.
I was running Asahi/NixOS on a Macbook Air for a long time, and that experience was also top notch--only battery life was a few percentage points worse on NixOS--but the aarch64 software situation and emulation experience were just not there. I expect they've improved a bit since.
If someone would make a quality laptop that doesn't look like a Honda street racer and has excellent audio, I'd be very happy.
> The point is if a Linux distro setup isn't feeling 10x better than MacOS then that person can actually go ahead and either tweak that distro, or pick another one, and tweak that to possbily make that 1000x beter than MacOS.
Which may be great for you. I do it as well, though I'm not sure I would choose that path if I were starting out today. After all, modern systems are much more complex. At least I had the benefit of starting out with Linux in the 1990s, so my abilities grew as the operating system grew.
Yet even in those simpler times, most people would consider operating systems that they felt compelled to tweak as inferior. I many ways, they would rather deal with an operating system where everything is ready to go, whether they need it or not.
While being able to customize everything is nice, I prefer a curated experience that nails the defaults so I don't have to tweak it.
macos used to be that way from leopard to mountain lion IME. Now I'm considering switching back to a linux workstation bc I can't stand liquid glass and the devolution of a desktop OS becoming a mobile OS
The single thing I had in macOS I can't replicate in Linux is Preview. Other than that, literally everything is better on this side. I expected to have a bad adaptation period, but the experience has truly caught up.
I went for fedora kde version. Super happy with it, but do mind that "I could get it to equal macOS functionality" does not mean it behaves that way out of the box.
It wasn't hard to set it up either, I actually had more trouble removing ads and similar crap from windows (it's a dual boot for gaming). But I wouldn't say it's grandma-friendly if that's what you're after.
Or a server version. I have an M1 Mac mini as my home server and it really feels like I'm fighting the fact that it's a desktop OS with a GUI and full of components that really, really, really can't deal with being run on a headless system. Not much fun when your super efficient ARM processor suddenly uses 100% CPU for 6 days straight because WindowServer and CoreAudio are having a panic attack due to being unable to find any outputs.
And so much useless crap you can't turn off without disabling SIP, which it doesn't feel like you're meant to, because who knows what daemon will bring down the entire system when another it expects to be there isn't…
> Or a server version. I have an M1 Mac mini as my home server and it really feels like I'm fighting the fact that it's a desktop OS with a GUI and full of components that really, really, really can't deal with being run on a headless system. Not much fun when your super efficient ARM processor suddenly uses 100% CPU for 6 days straight because WindowServer and CoreAudio are having a panic attack due to being unable to find any outputs.
In theory I'd prefer a MacBook Neo as a Plex server over my current cheapo Acer laptop with an Alder Lake-N CPU, for lower power draw and better hardware encoding, but in practice, I don't really want to try that with macOS instead of Debian.
Vista had an undeserved bad rep IMO, it was an important 1.0 milestone for many new technologies and improvements especially in the security model. It effectively was a beta of Windows 7, with 7 being Microsoft's "Snow Leopard".
Windows 11 still ships with the installer from Vista.
I remember the OSX animated wallpaper update (that updated lighting as the time of day changed or something) eating up like 10-15% of my macbook air's small drive. After removal they would re-add themselves every update as important protected system files.
Maybe this just how winning looks like? Apple won but still needs to keep increasing the profits and the stock price. We can expect enshittification to follow since Apple already did exceptionally well with their products therefore the only way forward is to milk users harder and hype the stock with the latest trends.
I think this applies across the industry. All the easy innovations have been innovated, most people own a computer or several, and they get what they want out of it. Enshittification is desperation - businesses can't accept ups and downs, they only need ups, forever. So they will go to increasingly desperate lengths to juice more profits out of the same customer base and dress themselves up to the investors to show that they still got it. We can safely expect most big publicly traded tech companies to go this way earlier or later.
Apple is going down the same path as Microsoft only at a slower pace and a decade behind. I fear they will turn OSX into something like Win 11 but with slightly better design in the next decade.
I also realized that I still call it OSX even though it is macOS nowadays.
Apple Intelligence and even more so Siri isnt worth the disk space. Regular user of chatGPT's Voice/Conversational AI (while driving) and comparably the new Siri is training wheels Voice AI. You can not have a seamless, back and forth conversation with it, so I wont call it Conversational AI.
Now you may ask who talks to AI? Well this dork does in time I bet more will. Especially, for giving me directions like "That new sub shop is across the street to your favorite McDonalds." No need to fiddle with a phone or look at a screen just drive to a familiar place. I believe, talking to AI is safer while driving then us on our phones or messing with screens.
> Now you may ask who talks to AI? Well this dork does in time I bet more will. Especially, for giving me directions like "That new sub shop is across the street from your favorite McDonalds." No need to fiddle with a phone or look at a screen just drive to a familiar place. I believe talking to AI is safer while driving then us on our phones or messing with screens.
I've been driving for some decades, and probably still have some decades remaining, and these are just never scenarios I've needed, or will ever need. When I get in my car, if I don't know how to get to my destination, I set it on my nav, and then I drive there. My phone stays in my pocket. I never need to use my phone or mess with my screen to find some unknown destination mid-trip.
That's cool everyone is different and I have used my phone in my car since my first iPhone for streaming music and following Google map directions. Now personally myself I dont have to look at my phone as I am now just talking something similar to another person in the car - one who knows it all.
Ihave three screenshots on my iPhone taken two weeks apart. I have one point Apple Intelligence, while it’s turned off mind you, takes up four gigs of space, then it disappeared, and now it’s back to four gigs again. Can someone please explain this to me?
The enshittification of Apple is going on. Debloating Windows, degoogling Android. MacOS/iOS was still decent a few months ago. And now they've put banners on iPhones, real advertisements trying to force you to subscribe to Apple This, Apple That. And you can't close the banner. Now they remove the option for you to remove the models. And Apple storage space is darn expensive. Now we have to use a 3rd-party tool to debloat Apple's OS too? To hell with that. Is this really the year to go full-time Linux? Steve must be squirming down there with the enshittification of Apple too. Let's shove AI (SI is different stuff, Bozo) down your throats. Jesus Christ. I suppose that's what the board members want. More revenue. Maybe it's time to start parting ways with Apple if they keep it like that. Corporate greed has taken over and user experience has gone down the drain.
AI is literally everywhere now. Even my washing powder is ‘AI’. It’s not only ‘the board’, its spread much further. I am not anti-ai, but seriously fatigued
Would you like to use that in your AI washing machine, which is AI-powered with our smAIrt wAIsh app? It features a helpful chatbot that will tell you helpful things you could never find out before, such as what wash settings to use for your load. Don't forget to download our limited-time AI-optimized wash cycle on the way out! And then you can rest easy, kick back and watch some AI-made content on your AI smart TV while the AI robot vacuum handles another one of your chores. Got any questions? Just contact our helpful AI assistant (human agent service no longer available) and it will help you with all your AI needs.
The investors were getting nervous, because the tech market was about to stop looking so hot. But now they have a savior. This is what made them collectively go "WE WANT AI!!!!!" This is why every company is now trying to AI-ify itself, no matter how absurd that is. This is just what companies do now. Hopping on the bandwagon is no longer optional. Good, stable companies are worthless if there's a compAIny promising riches because of how AI they are.
My wife and I bought a new washing machine earlier this year, and we ended up picking out a model that's incredibly "dumb"; two analog dials with only a few settings each for water heat and strength of wash, one button for pausing, and one button to start (which can be held to cancel). It's so old-fashioned that there isn't even any visible display for the amount of time left. Compared to the one we had before with like 50 different combinations of settings on a digital display with dozens of different LED lights that I had no clue how to interpret, I absolute love our new monstrosity. It even continues working if it's opened mid load to chuck something else in.
I did laundry earlier today, which literally was just tossing a bunch of stuff in and hitting one button, then coming back in an our to move it to the dryer (which is still one of the dozens of settings and LED light appliances for the time being, unfortunately). It was glorious.
My parents had a habit of keeping appliances as long as possible as long as they still technically worked despite generally being in a financial position to update them around the time everyone else did. Even though I was born in the early-to-mid 90s, the microwave we had for at least the first decade of my life (maybe more) had a mechanical dial that literally had a physical bell of some sort inside that would ding when the dial hit zero (which literally would happen just from turning the dial past to any arbitrary non-zero point and then back to zero). We also had a TV with only a physical dial (and no remote) until I was around 10 as well, which my parents still insist they would have kept using longer if the color didn't start getting distorted on it. They also were avid VHS users even up until I moved out for college in like 2016, when the cable company gave them a box with a built-in DVR for them to record shows on instead of the shelf full of VHS tapes that they had continued reusing for decades.
Same. 5 years ago my parents got rid of their fridge from the 1960’s…. My microwave has a physical bell in it! I think its atleast 20 years old at this point
Whenever our current microwave dies, I'll need to think about what type I want to get next. My wife loves to joke that the "popcorn" buttons on microwaves are useless because every pack of microwave popcorn she's ever seen has instructions not to use the popcorn button.
actually, apple has had a LOT of nonsense going on for a LONG time.
of the 693 processes running on my macos machine, I hand picked a bunch (60+) that I think are nonsense, and would probably make my machine run faster and more privately without:
I no longer have a Mac as I’ve moved over to Linux, but my iOS device leaves me very frustrated that I can no longer disable this AI stuff with a simple toggle.
It seems insane given that Apple’s competitors (Microsoft, Firefox, probably others) moved toward a global AI switch to make the choice easy for their customers.
You can indeed disable it on ios and ipados. Turn off siri and change the language to the one that does not match your phone language and the models will be removed.
This is simply not true. Things like "writing tools" were moved out of the global siri checkbox and enabled by default, and now require you to use screen time content restrictions or modify settings in individual apps to turn off these features.
> change the language to the one that does not match your phone language
You do realize how ridiculous that is as a "solution", right? It's good if it works, but you can't possibly think that this is anything other than user-hostile
I do realize that this is the opposite of a solution defined as an ugly hack. Someone asked, I decided to share my personal experience. Also, replying to other two unhappy hners who accuse me of something immoral: ios 27, no writing tools found in context menu, local model is gone and doesn’t consume expensive iphone storage. I don’t see genmoji and other shit like that. The rest I have not checked. If apple devices will ever start to interfere with my peace of mind because of “siri” “ai” I will not bother either and will just throw them out the window and call it a day. Wish you the same. We as customers vote with a wallet.
Sadly not updating the OS is very bad from a security perspective. Especially with AI increasingly finding vulnerabilities and exploits.
Though it's frustrating that Apple rarely provides any sort of "security fix only" updates, and to fix security issues you just have to install all the other new stuff.
I recently sold a nine year old iPad running iOS 17 that is still getting security updates (17.7.11 a few months ago). Even iOS 15 (released 2021) got a security update in May.
I believe if you have a much older iDevice that no longer supports the latest OS, they will keep releasing security updates for that device for a long time, which is good on them. But if you have a newer device, after awhile the only way to get security updates is a major version upgrade. You luck out if your device happens to be old enough not support to newer iOS versions.
My experience has been that they do provide those updates, but they intentionally make it hard to notice compared to getting the major version updates that are available for the OS. I distinctly remember a new junior engineer out of college joining my team back in maybe 2022, seeing there were security updates, and then not noticing the button saying something like "more updates" to be able to get them without updating to the latest major version of MacOS.
More recently, at the end of August, by the dates on my screenshots on my work laptop (the only Apple device I use) I took screenshots because I was incredulous of the sheer audacity of the UI shown for updating from MacOS 15.7.7 to 15.7.9 along with, in the words of the update UI, "1 more" update. When I clicked the button to view all of the available updates, it showed three available updates, which were, in order, MacOS 26.6.2 (which was checked), MacOS 15.7.9 (which was unchecked), and Safari 26.6.1 (which was checked). They literally previewed the only update that was not checked despite not even sorting it at the top of the list of updates available to install. I have absolutely no clue what would have happened if I clicked the "Update now" button next to the prompt for 15.7.9 rather than the identically-styled-to-non-link-element text for viewing the full set of updates, but at absolute best it would have just done something entirely different than what I'd get from the default options when viewing the expanded list, and it seems far more likely that it would have just also done the default options of the expanded view and updated to a completely different version that it put next to the update button.
on MacOS they provide security fixes for two years for unsupported OSes (after that the only remaining security protection is Gatekeeper/Notarization). On iOS you generally get no security fixes unless the vulnerability is really bad
AFAIK Apple has no published policy. Their last several macOS releases have received 3 years of security fixes.
iOS now seems to get 5 years of security updates, but only for devices that can't upgrade to newer iOS versions - so iOS versions that don't strand any devices get cut off early. e.g. iOS 15 received 3 updates in 2026, but iOS 17 hasn't been updated since 2025.
Because the Macbook Air still comes with only 512 GB of SSD in its default config. A feature that you rarely use probably isn't worth even 1/50th of your meager storage.
The neo comes with 256gb, which would be fine if they used it sparingly, I don't have any issue with this much storage on my phone, but on macos the space just gets eaten up by junk and is hard to manage.
I love the Neo for what it does at its price point, but on the other hand it's absolute robbery to have a 256 gb SSD and an 8 gb or 12 gb or whatever RAM. MacOS totally uses less RAM than Windows, but man. It's still not enough in this day and age.
It's not just a question of experience though. The Neo can be perfectly sufficient for you right now but that doesn't change the fact that Apple obsoletes devices based on RAM.
E.g., the iPhone 15, released 3 years ago, doesn't get Apple Intelligence because it has just 6GB of RAM.
I wouldn't buy a device that is already at the very lowest end of supported hardware the day it's released. It could cut the years of meaningful OS upgrades by half or perhaps even by two thirds.
>doesn't get Apple Intelligence because it has just 6GB of RAM.
This sounds like a feature to me: Apple should provide a upgrade path that disables AI for older hardware that can't run it, and thus not download the models.
macOS doesn't necessarily use less RAM than Windows (if Windows is properly debloated), but since the storage is highly integrated with and in close proximity to the SoC it is much faster (both in terms of bandwidth and physical latency) than most Windows laptops.
Basically, with storage directly attached to the SoC you can use the SSD as a decent-enough swap without the user noticing it too much, but if every access has to go through the platform chipset and then physically travel many centimeters until it arrives at the disk, being bandwidth-restricted by physics (aka, link training)? Whoops.
And on top of that, your typical Windows SSD has its own controller doing translation from SATA/NVMe to the flash layer (including wear level management etc), but IIRC with Apple M devices, this functionality is integrated into the SoC.
Yeah, that's the issue though. If I have to fiddle about with debloating and system config I'd rather just use NixOS. It's easier because I don't have to debug random things and poke around in the registry, I just put what I want in one file.
Some first edition educational airs came with 128gb of ssd. You can barely install 26 on them, I had to spend a good amount of time removing so much to get one usable for a low income friend who couldn't afford to upgrade.
Here are a few reasons someone would want that. You might not value them the same, but that does not make them wrong.
1) They have issues with the ways these models were trained. They may consider it unethical to use models trained on what they consider plagiarized material or on material that used a lot of energy for training.
2) They may have higher value uses of the storage space and compute resource.
3) They may view installation of apps and features without consent to be an infringement on running their device the way they would like.
4) They may find the general technology and its impact on society to be concerning, anxiety inducing, frustrating, or irritating. And simply not want to participate.
5) They think it sucks. Like, out just doesn't work or doesn't help them.
I don't want AI, at all, and especially not on my operating system. I am leaving my Macbook Pro at version 26 and will not update to 27 until there is some kind of master off switch. If that is not provided by Apple by the time I am ready to replace my computer than I will be going the open source route.
I am personally tired of Apple and Microsoft fattening up operating systems.
Because I don't like features being shoved down my throat. Simple as that.
I'd be much more willing to try the stuff if they gave me control over when I do so LIKE THEY DID IN THE VERSION LITERALLY PRIOR TO THIS ONE.
Apple did the same thing with watchOS by the way. They forced a stupid new quick actions menu that always pops up before getting to the all apps screen and removed the app switcher. if you want to terminate non-working apps that are prone to not working, like Apple Music, the solution now is "well, tough shit."
I don't use and don't want to use any feature that is listed there. I don't use Siri on my Macbook, I don't need writing tools run on every single thing I write, I hate text predictions, I don't want summaries on the content I want to read, I don't need models analyzing my photos in the background.
In fact I don't want models doing anything in the background that I didn't explicitly ask them to do.
No it’s the attitude of “I don’t know why you don’t want it” and “just deal with it” and “learn to love it” and all the other things they say to accept technology. There’s no reason to force a multi gig file on someone’s computer when it’s a purely optional feature.
Plus there was a way to disable it easily, now it’s gone. That _is_ a consent issue.
What is the consent line being drawn here? From handwriting recognition and mail filtering from back in 2002, face detection in iPhoto back in 2009, text to speech and Siri, dictation, NLP, text to speech, the vision framework, and Core ML are all examples of AI/ML tech that have shipped at some point standard on new Macs long before Golden Gate.
If you are still going on about the consciousness debate, I can put you in a jail cell and strap you down to a chair too. Can I claim you no longer have consciousness now and are an inert machine? If this procedure is not enough we can put electrodes in the brain and further restrict you for the thought experiment.
Because I could use the same space (12 GB, not something I'd consider "relatively small" on my work laptop with only 500 GB) for things that I actually use? I don't have any need for basic off-cloud AI tasks.
First of all, an OS needing to download multiple gigabytes of nonsense that the vast majority of users will never touch, is an absolute non-starter. Nobody wanted nor uses this AI crap.
Also, a 256GB Mac Mini literally cannot function with this garbage installed. There isn’t enough disk space.
I love local models, but the AFM advanced or whatever its called (the 20B local one) sucks. And it's not really used in MacOS outside of "fm" and very niche stuff. Siri is always cloud even if you're offline.
Because if I'm already using AI, I need and probably have access to something better than a primitive local model. And if I don't use AI, then I don't need it.
In the nicest possible way, why should someone have to justify themselves to control a machine they’ve paid for?
If you can’t control something so basic about your computer such as removing things you don’t want how can you be sure it’s acting in your interests in general?
The discourse around Apple products is bizarre. I was recently looking up why the setting to stop charging my Macbook at 80% didn't seem to do anything and the answer is that the computer can choose to ignore the setting at its discretion, effectively making the setting worthless. The common sentiment about this I found online was that the computer knows better than you and if you want to always limit charging to 80% you're obviously wrong.
What if I told you that unless the battery is occasionally charged to 100% to calibrate the readings, the firmware actually can't tell if it's truly charged to 80%?
What if I told you that the goal of limiting charging to 80% is not to very precisely hit that particular percentage, but to avoid the damage resulting from going all the way to 100%? If total battery capacity has degraded to the point where the voltage level that used to correspond to 80% now is 85%, then so be it. At least it's not a full charge.
An alternative is to reckon the percentage relative to the design capacity, so that a full charge can be less than 100%. That's what the i3 window manager's status bar shows by default, for example: https://i3wm.org/docs/i3status.html#_battery
Lithium batteries are tricky that way, though. The whole middle of their voltage curve (typically from ~20% to ~80%) is very flat. It falls off pretty rapidly below ~20%, and it rises rapidly above ~80%.
So the extremes at top and the bottom are easy to detect, but the middle is hard.
Coulomb counters are often used to keep track of state-of-charge around the middle, but they don't keep track of battery aging, self-discharge, or some other stuff. So an occasional trip up to 100% is a useful calibration function.
If the top (100%) SoC of a cell was, say, 4.2v at the beginning of its life, then it's still 4.2v near the end. That part doesn't change as time moves on and things age.
And yeah: Cell longevity is maximized by avoiding extremes in charge state, but that's also a function of the duration it is held at that extreme. Briefly charging to 100% is a very different thing than bringing it to 100% and leaving it that way for -- say -- days, weeks, or months.
It's alright. Part of keeping the battery at 80% (or 60%, or any other figure) means knowing where 80% is. Taking a brief trip up to 100% and down towards 0% every now and then is a requirement of knowing the present capacity, and therefore where 80% lives, and isn't particularly traumatic -- even for well-aged cells.
And the rest of the time, it can stay at no more than 80% -- yeah?
(And sure, I hear you. You want it to be some other way, and that's fine. You're allowed to want things. I'd offer to apologize on behalf of physics but physics doesn't care about apologies.)
Going all the way to 100% doesn't automatically damage your battery. It's charging it to 100% all the time, and also operating it at 100% at long periods of time that reduces the lifespan.
I'm sure there's some arithmetic where more accurately charging to 80% instead of 85% wins out over never going to 100% in terms of battery life. Not saying Apple engineers did this, but I wouldn't assume they hadn't.
A few replies explained that the machine has a good reason to ignore you. I'm sold, they seem like good arguments!
But can empathize with your frustration. It looks like a bug, and I'd like the machine to explain that it's acting intentionally rather than having to dig around to figure out what's going on. It's like having an employee who simply ignores the spec rather than pointing out where it's not going to work.
On the other hand, maybe we're not the target demographic: a lot of people are happier with clicking a box and assuming everything will go to plan. The risky part of the design is that it requires enormous trust in the brand and minimal hacking from the user (which apple mostly has these days): the moment people have reason to believe their system is buggy, they need a bit more feedback.
User wants to see nothing above 80%? Fine. The charging system does whatever it needs to do, and the number on the screen never exceeds 80%. Done.
(The coolant temperature gauge on the E36 BMW is nerfed this way. A whole wide range of coolant temperatures don't move the needle at all from its nominal operating position of a bit less than 12 o'clock. It's deliberate because they don't want questions about why the engine temperature visibly varies, and it's annoying because it makes things harder to troubleshoot than they could be on an old car. The needle on the gauge is driven by a stepper motor and can display any value its controller is programmed to make it display.
A non-zero number of folks have un-nerfed it by using different driver electronics.)
It's an interesting parallel with cars: the target consumer pays a bunch of money for a new model, takes it in for service when something is wrong, and sells it before any problems come up.
The 2nd, 3rd, 4th hand buyer, on the other hand, wants all the data, and is happy to know that the internals are a bit more complicated than "full" vs "empty". I guess one explanation for this phenomena is that the 2nd hand buyers aren't the main profit stream.
It should be legally required that apple release the drivers and spec sheets and signing keys for their hardware such that i can build my own drivers and run linux on my iPhone and airtag and macbook.
I'm paying for the hardware, I should be able to use it.
Same for my closed-source fridge, air conditioner, and nintendo switch, all of those should be legally compelled to allow running any software.
For people with the baseline storage who couldn't afford to pay the Apple Tax on SSDs, the featurebloat consumes pretty significant parts of their storage. First it was the (admittedly high quality) screensaver animations, now it's ML models. What next?
Those “small” models take up 25 gb. On an entry level mac that’s a double digit percentage of available space. It is very rude of apple to claim that much space in an OS upgrade and offer no easy way to get it back.
You don't see why people would want to free up a bunch of disk space that's taken up by a feature they never use..? Are you sure? Have you seen Apple's storage upgrade pricing?
Imagine a world where every company feels entitled to silently install a multi gig model on your hardware, oh you don't have to imagine because we already live there.
Right now Chrome is now quietly installing a 4-5 GB model on everyone's computer, Microsoft is doing the same.
Are you happy with tying up most of your memory, and everyone else's, in order to maybe use a local model one day? Seems suboptimal.
You're losing a lot of space on a device where disk space is a premium, even more so with the chip shortages. You get 128GB of storage, now almost half is taken by the OS and an AI model
It's nice that the tool is open source tool. You can actually see what it's doing and not end up downloading something sketchy
What worries me is that Apple might to be heading in a bit of a bloatware direction with this stuff. Having to give up tens of GB of storage for an AI model that I may not even use feels pretty far from the old Apple approach of keeping the OS lean
Does anything like this exist for iOS, if you wanna nuke some AI crap you have no desire for and get some space back? My notebook is fine but my phone is painfully tight on storage.
I'm trying to find this myself. Since I upgraded to the latest version of iOS, I have found no way to disable these stupid writing tools. Whenever I try to take a screenshot, the AI tries to give me suggestions on what to do with the photo before I can properly crop it, and speech to text continues to insert grammar into the output after removing the toggle that disables the auto insertion of grammar (it also seems worse now).
My guess is that we need some tailored configuration profile that will run on the device, which seems to be how this project solved it for macOS.
I remember 15+ years ago having to remove gigabytes of printer drivers from OSX. This was at a time where “drivers” were a whole, horribly frustrating thing and Apple wanted stuff to “just work.”
Lots of opinions for sure, but I’m curious how Apple actually tries to decide the cost-benefit of these kinds of things. Obviously they know they need added disk usage and some people will be upset. Do they have a model to estimate or do they just A/B test and see how it goes?
I have no trouble imagining real-world users being incredibly frustrated when printers don't work out of the box. I have a lot of trouble imagining real-world users being frustrated because Apple left in a checkbox that let them reclaim the disk space for an unwanted feature that existed in the previous version of the OS.
Ah yes, more enshitification. The other day Visual Studio 2026 brought in a mandatory update, lots of CoPilot stuff I didnt ask for, but they broke code search so finding who uses a structure is now harder to find. No way to revert to older version of VS2026.
It analyzes your text messages and tells you to say "lolol" back to people a lot. Also it periodically swamps the GPU in order to analyze all your photos.
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[ 20.3 ms ] story [ 415 ms ] threadhttps://nocurlbash.com/#en
Like I get why it’s bad, but also homebrew package installation is a more organized version of this.
Hashes are cool but also in a lot of systems you’re trusting the hash to be provided by the same website you don’t trust the binaries from…
And if you're in the state of mind to consider the security nuances of curl|bash verses other install methods, you're already past the "should I be installing this?" question and the complaints on this page won't save you. The delay is the thing mostly likely to make you rethink.
> I realized the instant I pressed enter
Are these not mutually exclusive?
They're pushing FUD around downloading a file but then suggest that we trust the same chain of complex things to display the right hash value? Integrity != authentication.
Excuse me, they are TLS certs.
Thanks Arialdomartini, as I was saying… we need to renew the SSL Certs
"Did you know there's no pumpkin in pumpkin spice?"
"Next you're going to tell me what's not in baby powder, aren't you?"
Telling users it’s fine to raw dog arbitrary commands directly into their shell is dangerous and lowers the bar for all security. In fact by even making this comparison you are communicating that you are complacent with pip and npm’s issues and why shouldn’t you just execute arbitrary commands without even a second glance? Security doesn’t matter!
And for the record, even with pip and npm being the way that they are, they are still better than a curl pipe because they are versioned. In the case I get a compromised deployment I understand immediately if I got hit by the affected package, and the entire repo can then be audited. Not the case when I’m just curling whatever the internet wants to send into my process space
You said that, not me. I am not complacent with the security issues, I just don’t believe that the security theatre of “curl | bash” is productive unless you have an actual better alternative.
> they are still better than a curl pipe because they are versioned
pip install is running setup.py which is more than capable of calling exec(requests.get(url)) - except to _you_ that’s secure because you’re assuming it’s trusted. In both cases, if the delivery of the package is compromised or you don’t audit the script, you are screwed. It’s no different to running a binary that you’ve not verified.
curl | bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world.
> The server knows you’re piping — and can lie
This `sleep` based trick is always a cool demo to show freinds yes, but the server can also sneak in malware in a multitude of other ways given you're downloading code and binaries from them.
> You trust DNS, TLS, the CDN, and the origin simultaneously. A compromised CDN or BGP hijack delivers malware silently.
Well yes, that's how the internet works. If TLS of the server is really compromised, then the attacker will replace the checksum as well as the signing key. In real scenarios, you are going to be reading the signing key and checksum from the same domain. [1]
> You can’t reproduce what ran
`| tee inspect.sh | bash`
> Add sudo and it’s game over
Most credentials and important files live in the home directory, root is a red herring. If you're running it on shared server, then well... don't add sudo.
[1] Yes of course there are legitimate usecases for signing software. Common example: linux distros which are mirrored at many domains, but the checksum and signature are hosted on the canonical domain. But if I am curlbashing uv's install.sh from `astral.sh`, then doing signature verification using the public key hosted on the same astral.sh isn't adding much.
Please take a look at this before making any assertions... https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI/blob/main/install.sh
The problem is that there's no verified "standard" artifact, which means my copy being checked safe doesn't say anything about whether your copy is safe too.
> curl | bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world.
Why would a convention often followed by good/careful actors bind what malicious/careless people create?
That can also be done with a if statement in the actual code as well.
Per your analogy, no point of a public place if it's as easy for the guy to give you a package that can explode when you get home in either case.
I reiterate: "Even if the shared artifact has sneaky covert logic to trigger in only some environments, the logic is detectable in everyone's copy."
> for the guy to give you a package that can explode when you get home
Would you rather receive a completely individualized risky-package that might explode, or would you rather get one which you know is identical to 10,000 other packages that have all already been taken to homes, opened up, and not exploded?
Surely you prefer the second, right?
Fair enough, I guess I don't agree that that difference is significant. I can't imagine logic that doesn't trigger at all for most people being detected in any reasonable way.
Isn't that a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted?
>> reproduce what ran
LLMs are less good at bit-for-bit reproduction by design. asking it to do this is asking for corruption in the output.
instead, you could have pi produce some output based on how insecure it thinks the shell script is then use coreutils to run the script as-is to avoid that.
>Drop the connection mid-transfer and you get partial execution: a command like rm -r /usr/share/program can truncate to rm -r /usr.
With truly terrible timing it might truncate to that, yes, but since the pipe broke at that point there'd be no final CR to launch it.
Or am I wrong on this?
I should applaud their efforts, and I get that much of it is voluntary, but their bugs are numerous, notable and the way they interact with the rest of the universe (both people with accessibility needs, and the wider developer ecosystem on linux) can most accurately be described as arrogant and hostile.
KDE is the bastion of maturity here, and I would agree that it is mature.
I’m not sure how the love for GNOME continues when KDE (while not my personal choice) has clearly been running circles around it since GNOME3 and the gap has only widened since that change too.
Because KDE looks and feels straight out of 2010 compared to GNOME? GNOME just suffers by leaving some (what should be integrated) features to its shitty extension system.
Can you name a UI/UX improvement in desktop design (that KDE doesn't have) since 2010 to warrant this being a negative?
Neither GNOME nor KDE are perfect. We could list out bugs in both for days and still not be done. But they are both usable, and have divergent design that gives users a meaningful choice between which desktop they prefer. They both have strong ideological underpinnings that ignore weaknesses in their tech stack to drive progress forward at any cost. It's not the end of the world for either desktop. Both projects have been plugging away for decades without issue.
You still didn’t answer any question I posed about UX though, since that was what we were talking about and I have levied specific criticisms.
What other questions are there to answer? GNOME is benign, there's a reason why it's the default in mainstream distros like Ubuntu and Fedora.
Personally, my limited experimentation with Apple AI has left me quite liking it.
The contents of the Exportable’Privacy Report’ are interesting to look through
I see archive.today has the charming old ruby version on the bottom of a 2013 brew.sh page in 2013, when I must first have used it https://archive.ph/lCqJ1
But the form of incantation is now pervasive.Apple is an advertising company and thus inherently untrustworthy.
What's going on at Apple product strategy?
Could the rise of LLMs and vibe-coding have motivated people who otherwise wouldn't bother?
That's a half-truth at best; I can just open the disk image in a hex editor if nothing else understands the format.
Hackintoshers have figured out how to add/modify drivers etc. It's certainly not without obstacles, but that's still very far from "impossible". If I remember correctly, you need to re-snapshot the FS and tell the bootloader to boot from it.
(And necessarily, ignoring the countless cries of "it can't be done" was how I was able to accomplish my goal... I knew that it was possible since I could edit any bit of the FS; figuring out which files I could remove and patch was the hard and undocumented part.)
And then you can remount `/` as read-write, and create a new blessed snapshot with your changes made to it.
This doesn't actually delete the signed snapshot though, so the space consumed by `/System/Applications/Chess` still is consumed. I'm not sure if MacOS will allow deleting the final sealed snapshot for `/`. It might, I don't know that anyone is clamoring for it though.
Does disabling SIP, rebooting, making changes, then turning it back on and rebooting again not work anymore?
But that's it.
I'm not sure there were enough people looking at finder and thinking "I wish I could talk to an AI to open a file on my desktop which I could've simply double clicked on anyway"
Huh cool. They're doing curl | bash properly.
(Note that the attestation does not appear to cover the shell script either, it only covers the script's final payload. The shell script is also referenced via `main`, so it's mutable even if the underlying payload is properly attested. That's not good!)
I switched to MacOS 3 years ago because of Microsoft and the writing on the wall seems to say I got another year left before I'm forced into Linux. Because if I have to maintain my own OS then I might as well install Linux and do it once.
There's a singular very good reason to upgrade to 27 and any new version (at least when a .1 minor version is out and the kinds have been ironed): the whole ecosystem works better when you are on the latest stuff.
So unless you have legacy app needs, or need ultra stability for stuff like running a video shop or something, it makes sense to keep up, or at least don't fall more than 1-2 versions behind.
>They removed Rosetta and you have to reinstall that if you want it.
And they'll kill it entirely in a future version. It's been like 6 years for getting apps to Apple Silicon versions. And it's generally not ideal to run both AS and Intel programs if you can avoid it (wastes double the system lib memories, Intel misses some extra protections, etc).
>I switched to MacOS 3 years ago
OK, this explains it. So macOS is not like Windows where you can have even 15 years old version of the OS and programs still work forever.
If you're on a version before 26, then, eh, you can probably wait.
Does apple not realize there is an SSD crisis happening? Used to love apple (Apple IIc was my first computer). But now? Terrible.
I know this because I just explicitly enabled it, and now I have the new Spotlight search. I didn't have it before I enabled it.
That's revolutionary.
I made my own “pseudo spotlight” and mapped it to ⌘-Space specifically for this. It just goes against old fashioned locate/updatedb, but with a very quick check against /Applications first + running the search query through bc and if it’s valid syntax, showing the math result.
I wipe the whole thing and installed Fedora.
I could tolerate windows if I needed a particular set of software on it, but no way that I could use it as a daily driver.
This is a fully functioning feature that people don’t like for what ever reason.
Old classmates back in the day used to hate the 128 × 128 px icons macOS shipped. A waste of space for eye candy.
12 GB is at most 4.68% of your Mac. Improving on Apple Intelligence is something of value, as is consumerizing local-first AI.
We’re not talking adware here.
Also suggesting that sacrificing 1/20 of your disk space is NBD is crazy. I have to prune space on my drive all the time because macs ship with the least amount of disk space that apple imagines they can get away with as possible.
Is the marketing really getting this good?
People here misunderstand just how different they are to the norm. "I want x, y, z to be free so I can modify it!" Most people buying Apple products don't, hell most people buying any phone doesn't want that, they want a smartphone that works out of the box and never fails to be a smartphone. The walled garden is largely a feature and not a bug, it's just not a feature you want, just like the aesthetics, social factors, ease of use, etc don't matter to you as much as function.
Most people aren't like that.
As if Apple is always right and knows what their users want. Sure they are more often than other companies but stuff like the touchbar and Siri itself for that matter prove that they do in fact make mistakes.
It’s easy to compare things to an ideal in your head, “Reality has a surprising amount of detail” that gets in the way though.
> they’re better than the rest at just working.
Yes, exactly what I said.
If you understand what that means, you can strip down any OS to the bone and will still be productive with it.
Local LLM’s take up a bunch of space today, where Apple believes this is valuable for their users. 12 GB is still smaller than the regular coding models, so they are trying to keep disk space usage in check.
The primary factor isn't that Linux distros can include fewer components, it's that traditionally they actually make proper use of shared libraries because everything installed on the system is part of a single software distribution with a unified dependency tree.
I say "traditionally" here because distros that use Snap or Flatpak for applications that ship with the OS as part of the "base system" introduce massive redundancy in a similar way to macOS. That's why I chose openSUSE for an example rather than Ubuntu.
But you can get something like a 1:1 comparison if you compare install media (which is typically compressed) to install media. Linux distro installers and Linux live media often still fit on a single DVD:
• openSUSE Tumbleweed Live (GNOME|KDE): 1.2 GiB • openSUSE Tumbleweed Installer (can install KDE or GNOME, plus optional applications): 4.4 GiB • Fedora 44 Workstation (GNOME): 2.7 GB • Fedora 44 KDE: 3.1 GB • Ubuntu 26.4.0.1 Desktop: 6.0 GiB • Windows 11 25H2 ISO: 8.4 GB • macOS 27.0.1 InstallAssistant.pkg: 18.4 GB
macOS is more comparable here to the Linux distros than to Windows, because it comes with a more complete suite of end user applications than Windows does. It's also true that Linux distros are really good at compression when it comes to installation media and live media. But the other piece that I think is clear from these (AI slop, feel free to gather your own) numbers is that traditional Linux distros just make better use of the space in terms of the ratio of number of graphical applications to total disk usage than macOS or Windows do. They have dramatically smaller install media and dramatically smaller base installs than Windows, even though they come with an application suite more comparable to that of a Mac. macOS meanwhile just uses a ton of space both for its install media and its base installs. The difference is in significant part due to the benefits a unified software distribution offers on terms of resource sharing across packages/applications.
That's all completely aside from things like non-graphical installs or foregoing applications like an office suite (let alone foregoing a whole DE). Distros that actually try to optimize disk usage like you're suggesting end up with disk footprints way smaller (e.g., a 792 MB installer image for PuppyLinux, 1.3 GB for Bodhi Linux 7 Standard, 694 MiB for DSL 2024).
This benefit is also the footgun that let Linus Sebastian of LTT (in)famously uninstall his desktop environments with a careless package management command. Applications and the base OS form one system with heavy internal dependency sharing.
Things like app bundling and containerization have lots of advantages, especially when it comes to deployment. But they also have costs, and relative to a normal Linux distro with just one package manager, disk usage is a huge one.
The above also gives us another comparison for macOS 27: just the new machine learning models alone take up more than enough space for a complete, modern graphical operating system AND a graphical end user application suite.
There was an 128 GB model [1] that was only sold to schools.
[1]: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook...
That extra space is for my media.
so it's not for "what ever reason", it's quite a reason to reject this.
Huh.. well yeah, who cares what users need or want. Perfect attitude for a company making money by selling products to consumers.
Sure, it doesn’t bother me that I can’t uninstall Siri or Apple News or Stocks on my Mac because those programs take up a trivial amount of space. I can just disable or remove them from the dock and move on with my life.
That’s not the case now that “Siri” is a double digit gigabyte installation, especially if you assume that my computer has 256GB of storage, which was almost certainly Apple’s most popular MacBook Air configuration within the last 5 years.
That is now a new change where Apple is using 5% of my storage space for something I don’t even want to use.
In this context we are talking about macOS 27. If your app requires 27, then it can correctly assume every machine will work.
These machines were actively criticized for providing lower base storage compared to competing hardware.
I'm big on AI and have it deeply incorporated into every facet of my life but it _is_ an early tech with a lot of roygh edges, it is not ready to be forced into every aspect of public infrastructure and life yet. That's a simple fact of the tech's infancy.
There was a time saying forcing everyone to use the internet and closing all paper/phone lines for banking is a bad thing, would have been the right call. Now it's more defensible, still the wrong move for some in our social cohorts, but there is merit to that move now, However, at the internets infancy it was no different.
Are these files particularly hard to clean out if your disk is getting full and you need the space?
Trial versions are installed by the OEMs so that's not a Windows problem.
Microsoft has given you the tools (Group Policy) for the last 25+ years to customize most of this.
My last install of Windows 11 was shockingly frustrating but with a little patience and discipline it's customized to Windows 7 levels of sanity using nothing but out of the box tools. Shockingly, it works better than writing angry blog posts about it.
Morally, why should Home users have to pay a $70 upgrade (or whatever it is) to the company extorting them with forced-on crap they didn't originally have and don't want?
> Microsoft has given you the tools (Group Policy) for the last 25+ years to customize most of this.
Most people including me don’t know what this is and more importantly they just don’t care. The frame of reference is “I buy (vendor) laptop and Windows comes with all this stupid stuff I have to uninstall”. It is never “I bought Windows and I just use the Group Policy to do XYZ, and then….”.
No, it is not. It's still an OEM problem and you can go with another vendor (Framework for example) that doesn't do that. Actually in this case Microsoft does a better thing than Apple because you can actually choose as a consumer which vendor to use for your HW.
It’s still perceived as a “Windows” problem. It might actually be an OEM problem, but the consumer goes “Windows came with all this stuff, it sucks”.
I'm 90 % sure I had trial apps on a clean desktop windows install. Or maybe after some update. All desktop with no pre-installed windows. I think it was candy crush and maybe spotify? I can't remember.
I’m genuinely struggling to use it on my Mac.
It doesn't help that Apple never understood what Siri is and how it should work.
What do you mean by macOS being rented? It's been the same for about a decade, still not forcing me to update like Windows does on my spare PC running Win10 (well did until I told Claude to rip that out lol). And yeah Win11 is terrible, not even an option.
Yep, exact reason (among quite a few others, but one of the primary ones) myself and so many other devs I know ultimately quit desktop Linux. It’s such a bad experience to not have one single reproducible, standardized option that the entire industry supports like Mac or windows. Check out the stackoverflow survey, which reflects it as well. Hell, I spent many years at Red Hat and probably 50% of devs and technical staff are running Mac’s for their work machines for that exact reason, and they all prefer it despite working at the most notable Linux company. They don’t care either, since RH makes virtually zero money off of desktop Linux.
The problem isn't when adopting a closed platform, but when people start expecting it to respect their preferences. It's always a matter of time for the experience to degrade little by little with no option to run to.
This is to say, we should use the tools that get the job done, but always be vigilant with coupling to any vendor, but specially proprietary ones.
Speakers, touchpad and battery life are inferior. Speakers are OK after installing EasyEffects and I don't use the touchpad while programming. And battery life is close enough
Cachyos with KDE is 10x better than MacOS. So it doesn't make sense to use macbooks for programming anymore IMO.
You can't even see the update download speed or progress percentage on MacOS, and have to approve 3 times to run a downloaded program, brew is terrible in terms of performance etc. etc. etc.
I usually use XMonad, but then I nearly do everything in the command line, and I don't like to move my windows around via mouse. (Though XMonad supports that, too.)
XMonad works for me, but I wouldn't call it out specifically as contributing to the experience.
> You can't even see the update download speed or progress percentage on MacOS, [...]
What program are you talking about? You can customise eg Firefox on Mac, just like anywhere else, with extensions to look however you want.
> [...] brew is terrible in terms of performance [...]
I'm trying to fix at least brew's Python performance a bit:
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/158283
Only major issue I had was because of cachyos (I think) or just some LLM commands I ran that broke my sound output so I had to reinstall the OS. I probably had more but was using other OS like EndeavorOS/Manjaro before and don't think it was related to KDE.
Also I just like the UI of it and can find any setting I want easily.
> What program are you talking about? You can customise eg Firefox on Mac, just like anywhere else, with extensions to look however you want.
I mean the Software Update thing that updates the OS itself. I also had issues like ghost updates for xcode tools with it (updates come even after I uninstall xcode tools).
> I'm trying to fix at least brew's Python performance a bit:
Nice!
I usually use something like 'nice sudo softwareupdate --all --install --force ' on Mac for updates. But yeah, it can be a bit of a pain.
I can't speak from personal experience since my only laptop is an Intel Framework 13 with no dGPU, but there'll be two other main cases both involving Nvidia that tend to bite people.
1. "Gaming" laptops usually with integrated Intel GPU + Nvidia discrete GPU. Not sure what advancements have been made in power management, there. I know there's some incantations one can put in .desktop files to prefer the discrete GPU for like, games, but not much more I can speak to.
2. General fun involving the fact that Nvidia's "gold-standard" drivers are not mainlined in the kernel, but maybe the fact that they are "open source"* means at some point there'll be parity with them. I think that is the goal of Red Hat's Nova driver in development.
* these days, the GPUs got complicated enough they have management processors on them that can actually run most of the complicated algorithms via a firmware blob. So the current open-source drivers basically bridge the gap between the kernel's various subsystems and that little processor to work the magic.
On another note, Intel Xe/i915 have been pretty good, I've used both for integrated GPUs and an Arc Alchemist-generation discrete card of theirs. The framework 13 12th gen intel GPU struggled at the start with a lot of hangs but within a few months of launch, some smart cookies at Intel managed to fix various bugs and it was smooth sailing from there, with the exception of thermals just being in a rough spot on that generation.
I suppose it depends upon the model, but I find my Lenovo Yoga's touchpad vastly superior to my MacBook Pro's touchpad. Tracking is fine on both, yet I'm having trouble trouble with the MacBook Pro consistently handling clicks. Granted, that is probably a software thing. As an added bonus, the Yoga has a touch screen which folds back, both of which are nice to have. (Agreed on the Mac speakers being significantly better though.)
> Cachyos with KDE is 10x better than MacOS.
That is subjective. I definitely agree with you, but a lot of people won't. Then again, I have been using Linux for about 30 years so modern macOS feels limiting and there is very little I can do about it.
I was running Asahi/NixOS on a Macbook Air for a long time, and that experience was also top notch--only battery life was a few percentage points worse on NixOS--but the aarch64 software situation and emulation experience were just not there. I expect they've improved a bit since.
If someone would make a quality laptop that doesn't look like a Honda street racer and has excellent audio, I'd be very happy.
Which may be great for you. I do it as well, though I'm not sure I would choose that path if I were starting out today. After all, modern systems are much more complex. At least I had the benefit of starting out with Linux in the 1990s, so my abilities grew as the operating system grew.
Yet even in those simpler times, most people would consider operating systems that they felt compelled to tweak as inferior. I many ways, they would rather deal with an operating system where everything is ready to go, whether they need it or not.
While being able to customize everything is nice, I prefer a curated experience that nails the defaults so I don't have to tweak it.
macos used to be that way from leopard to mountain lion IME. Now I'm considering switching back to a linux workstation bc I can't stand liquid glass and the devolution of a desktop OS becoming a mobile OS
The single thing I had in macOS I can't replicate in Linux is Preview. Other than that, literally everything is better on this side. I expected to have a bad adaptation period, but the experience has truly caught up.
It wasn't hard to set it up either, I actually had more trouble removing ads and similar crap from windows (it's a dual boot for gaming). But I wouldn't say it's grandma-friendly if that's what you're after.
And so much useless crap you can't turn off without disabling SIP, which it doesn't feel like you're meant to, because who knows what daemon will bring down the entire system when another it expects to be there isn't…
In theory I'd prefer a MacBook Neo as a Plex server over my current cheapo Acer laptop with an Alder Lake-N CPU, for lower power draw and better hardware encoding, but in practice, I don't really want to try that with macOS instead of Debian.
Windows 11 still ships with the installer from Vista.
How many times did users find a way to enable local user accounts on Windows, only to have Microsoft force online accounts on them again?
I also realized that I still call it OSX even though it is macOS nowadays.
Now you may ask who talks to AI? Well this dork does in time I bet more will. Especially, for giving me directions like "That new sub shop is across the street to your favorite McDonalds." No need to fiddle with a phone or look at a screen just drive to a familiar place. I believe, talking to AI is safer while driving then us on our phones or messing with screens.
I've been driving for some decades, and probably still have some decades remaining, and these are just never scenarios I've needed, or will ever need. When I get in my car, if I don't know how to get to my destination, I set it on my nav, and then I drive there. My phone stays in my pocket. I never need to use my phone or mess with my screen to find some unknown destination mid-trip.
Would you like to use that in your AI washing machine, which is AI-powered with our smAIrt wAIsh app? It features a helpful chatbot that will tell you helpful things you could never find out before, such as what wash settings to use for your load. Don't forget to download our limited-time AI-optimized wash cycle on the way out! And then you can rest easy, kick back and watch some AI-made content on your AI smart TV while the AI robot vacuum handles another one of your chores. Got any questions? Just contact our helpful AI assistant (human agent service no longer available) and it will help you with all your AI needs.
The investors were getting nervous, because the tech market was about to stop looking so hot. But now they have a savior. This is what made them collectively go "WE WANT AI!!!!!" This is why every company is now trying to AI-ify itself, no matter how absurd that is. This is just what companies do now. Hopping on the bandwagon is no longer optional. Good, stable companies are worthless if there's a compAIny promising riches because of how AI they are.
I did laundry earlier today, which literally was just tossing a bunch of stuff in and hitting one button, then coming back in an our to move it to the dryer (which is still one of the dozens of settings and LED light appliances for the time being, unfortunately). It was glorious.
of the 693 processes running on my macos machine, I hand picked a bunch (60+) that I think are nonsense, and would probably make my machine run faster and more privately without:
adprivacyd amsaccountsd amsengagementd analyticsagent appstoreagent ASPCarryLog audioanalyticsd betaenrollmentagent betaenrollmentd businessservicesd cloudphotod CloudTelemetryService com.apple.geod commerce EscrowSecurityAlert feedbackd financed findmybeaconingd findmydeviced findmylocateagent FindMyMacd FindMyWidgetItems FindMyWidgetPeople generativeexperiencesd geoanalyticsd geodMachServiceBridge homeenergyd HomeWidget icloudmailagent inputanalyticsd itunescloudd knowledge-agent knowledgeconstructiond liquiddetectiond mediaanalysisd mobileactivationd nearbyd NewsTag NewsToday2 nfcd online-auth-agent osanalyticshelper PeopleWidget_macOSExtension PerfPowerTelemetryClientRegistrationService proactiveeventtrackerd promotedcontentd rtcreportingd searchpartyd siriknowledged spotlightknowledged StocksWidget studentd swtransparencyd Terminal tipsd triald triald_system UsageTrackingAgent weatherd WeatherWidget WorldClockWidget
It seems insane given that Apple’s competitors (Microsoft, Firefox, probably others) moved toward a global AI switch to make the choice easy for their customers.
You do realize how ridiculous that is as a "solution", right? It's good if it works, but you can't possibly think that this is anything other than user-hostile
This is a misperception.
The things you mention only disable some parts of Apple Intelligence...
Though it's frustrating that Apple rarely provides any sort of "security fix only" updates, and to fix security issues you just have to install all the other new stuff.
More recently, at the end of August, by the dates on my screenshots on my work laptop (the only Apple device I use) I took screenshots because I was incredulous of the sheer audacity of the UI shown for updating from MacOS 15.7.7 to 15.7.9 along with, in the words of the update UI, "1 more" update. When I clicked the button to view all of the available updates, it showed three available updates, which were, in order, MacOS 26.6.2 (which was checked), MacOS 15.7.9 (which was unchecked), and Safari 26.6.1 (which was checked). They literally previewed the only update that was not checked despite not even sorting it at the top of the list of updates available to install. I have absolutely no clue what would have happened if I clicked the "Update now" button next to the prompt for 15.7.9 rather than the identically-styled-to-non-link-element text for viewing the full set of updates, but at absolute best it would have just done something entirely different than what I'd get from the default options when viewing the expanded list, and it seems far more likely that it would have just also done the default options of the expanded view and updated to a completely different version that it put next to the update button.
iOS now seems to get 5 years of security updates, but only for devices that can't upgrade to newer iOS versions - so iOS versions that don't strand any devices get cut off early. e.g. iOS 15 received 3 updates in 2026, but iOS 17 hasn't been updated since 2025.
Sure, not frontier levels but fine for basic tasks and they are off-the-cloud.
E.g., the iPhone 15, released 3 years ago, doesn't get Apple Intelligence because it has just 6GB of RAM.
I wouldn't buy a device that is already at the very lowest end of supported hardware the day it's released. It could cut the years of meaningful OS upgrades by half or perhaps even by two thirds.
It's uneconomical.
This sounds like a feature to me: Apple should provide a upgrade path that disables AI for older hardware that can't run it, and thus not download the models.
Basically, with storage directly attached to the SoC you can use the SSD as a decent-enough swap without the user noticing it too much, but if every access has to go through the platform chipset and then physically travel many centimeters until it arrives at the disk, being bandwidth-restricted by physics (aka, link training)? Whoops.
And on top of that, your typical Windows SSD has its own controller doing translation from SATA/NVMe to the flash layer (including wear level management etc), but IIRC with Apple M devices, this functionality is integrated into the SoC.
Yeah, that's the issue though. If I have to fiddle about with debloating and system config I'd rather just use NixOS. It's easier because I don't have to debug random things and poke around in the registry, I just put what I want in one file.
1) They have issues with the ways these models were trained. They may consider it unethical to use models trained on what they consider plagiarized material or on material that used a lot of energy for training.
2) They may have higher value uses of the storage space and compute resource.
3) They may view installation of apps and features without consent to be an infringement on running their device the way they would like.
4) They may find the general technology and its impact on society to be concerning, anxiety inducing, frustrating, or irritating. And simply not want to participate.
5) They think it sucks. Like, out just doesn't work or doesn't help them.
Let me juggle juggle with the small space I have the way I want.
I am personally tired of Apple and Microsoft fattening up operating systems.
I'd be much more willing to try the stuff if they gave me control over when I do so LIKE THEY DID IN THE VERSION LITERALLY PRIOR TO THIS ONE.
Apple did the same thing with watchOS by the way. They forced a stupid new quick actions menu that always pops up before getting to the all apps screen and removed the app switcher. if you want to terminate non-working apps that are prone to not working, like Apple Music, the solution now is "well, tough shit."
In fact I don't want models doing anything in the background that I didn't explicitly ask them to do.
This has nothing to do with consent. A product you use is going in a different direction than your personal preference. Nothing new here.
Plus there was a way to disable it easily, now it’s gone. That _is_ a consent issue.
Also, a 256GB Mac Mini literally cannot function with this garbage installed. There isn’t enough disk space.
If they wanna fill roughly 10% of your usable space with stuff you don't really use, with option to remove, you'd be mad too.
If you can’t control something so basic about your computer such as removing things you don’t want how can you be sure it’s acting in your interests in general?
An alternative is to reckon the percentage relative to the design capacity, so that a full charge can be less than 100%. That's what the i3 window manager's status bar shows by default, for example: https://i3wm.org/docs/i3status.html#_battery
So the extremes at top and the bottom are easy to detect, but the middle is hard.
Coulomb counters are often used to keep track of state-of-charge around the middle, but they don't keep track of battery aging, self-discharge, or some other stuff. So an occasional trip up to 100% is a useful calibration function.
If the top (100%) SoC of a cell was, say, 4.2v at the beginning of its life, then it's still 4.2v near the end. That part doesn't change as time moves on and things age.
And yeah: Cell longevity is maximized by avoiding extremes in charge state, but that's also a function of the duration it is held at that extreme. Briefly charging to 100% is a very different thing than bringing it to 100% and leaving it that way for -- say -- days, weeks, or months.
It's alright. Part of keeping the battery at 80% (or 60%, or any other figure) means knowing where 80% is. Taking a brief trip up to 100% and down towards 0% every now and then is a requirement of knowing the present capacity, and therefore where 80% lives, and isn't particularly traumatic -- even for well-aged cells.
And the rest of the time, it can stay at no more than 80% -- yeah?
(And sure, I hear you. You want it to be some other way, and that's fine. You're allowed to want things. I'd offer to apologize on behalf of physics but physics doesn't care about apologies.)
I'm sure there's some arithmetic where more accurately charging to 80% instead of 85% wins out over never going to 100% in terms of battery life. Not saying Apple engineers did this, but I wouldn't assume they hadn't.
The problem is that neither you nor the computer knows what 80% is without occasionally charging to 100%.
But can empathize with your frustration. It looks like a bug, and I'd like the machine to explain that it's acting intentionally rather than having to dig around to figure out what's going on. It's like having an employee who simply ignores the spec rather than pointing out where it's not going to work.
On the other hand, maybe we're not the target demographic: a lot of people are happier with clicking a box and assuming everything will go to plan. The risky part of the design is that it requires enormous trust in the brand and minimal hacking from the user (which apple mostly has these days): the moment people have reason to believe their system is buggy, they need a bit more feedback.
User wants to see nothing above 80%? Fine. The charging system does whatever it needs to do, and the number on the screen never exceeds 80%. Done.
(The coolant temperature gauge on the E36 BMW is nerfed this way. A whole wide range of coolant temperatures don't move the needle at all from its nominal operating position of a bit less than 12 o'clock. It's deliberate because they don't want questions about why the engine temperature visibly varies, and it's annoying because it makes things harder to troubleshoot than they could be on an old car. The needle on the gauge is driven by a stepper motor and can display any value its controller is programmed to make it display.
A non-zero number of folks have un-nerfed it by using different driver electronics.)
Plug in an obd reader and just get the raw number
The 2nd, 3rd, 4th hand buyer, on the other hand, wants all the data, and is happy to know that the internals are a bit more complicated than "full" vs "empty". I guess one explanation for this phenomena is that the 2nd hand buyers aren't the main profit stream.
This is the same kind here: there should be a simple opt-in button saying "Yes I want it / No I don't want it".
Not because it's a feature, but because it consumes comparatively so much disk space, memory and computing power.
Similarly, I pay for the disk, RAM, compute and network. I think I should say what I want it running.
I'm paying for the hardware, I should be able to use it.
Same for my closed-source fridge, air conditioner, and nintendo switch, all of those should be legally compelled to allow running any software.
Bundled hardware+software should be illegal.
Punishing the root of the crime should be a law, a victim shouldn't be blamed for this.
Right now Chrome is now quietly installing a 4-5 GB model on everyone's computer, Microsoft is doing the same.
Are you happy with tying up most of your memory, and everyone else's, in order to maybe use a local model one day? Seems suboptimal.
What worries me is that Apple might to be heading in a bit of a bloatware direction with this stuff. Having to give up tens of GB of storage for an AI model that I may not even use feels pretty far from the old Apple approach of keeping the OS lean
My guess is that we need some tailored configuration profile that will run on the device, which seems to be how this project solved it for macOS.
Lots of opinions for sure, but I’m curious how Apple actually tries to decide the cost-benefit of these kinds of things. Obviously they know they need added disk usage and some people will be upset. Do they have a model to estimate or do they just A/B test and see how it goes?
* Benefit: Printers "Just Work", customers are pushed towards higher storage tiers where we have fantastically high margins
* Drawbacks: None