I'd rather have a mechanism to remove the 100 GB of old simulator images for Apple Watch and TVOS, which I never use and which can't be uninstalled without disabling security and rebooting to safe mode all the time.
For me once it redownloaded and the next time xcode just refused to work and didn't even redownload. So it seems it has changed (or for me). The problem is, with Apple you don't even know it was done hostilely or it was just their, now well-establisehd, software incompetence. Because in their case both are aplenty.
In Xcode, go to Window > Devices and Simulators in the menu bar (or press Shift+Cmd+2), then select the Simulators tab in the sidebar to open the list of simulators. Here you can select and delete simulators.
People should really know how to delete sims, but there's a ton of obscure Xcode nonsense that in the "old days" people would blindly trust Stackoverflow answers or even blogs to fix. If Xcode is a tractor, it's the old thing you whack with a wrench and say "come on Bessie" to make it temporarily work again, not something most devs really understand.
`xcrun simctl delete unavailable` will delete unavailable simulators. `xcrun simctl list` and `xcrun simctl delete <device-uuid>` will delete specific devices. I run unavailable all the time after updating to get disk space back.
`xcrun simctl runtime list` and `xcrun simctl runtime delete <runtime-uuid>` will clean up actual runtimes.
I went from pre windows operating systems -> Slackware -> Apple as my main squeeze in 2001 since it was based on BSD -> And in 2026 I'm back to Linux full time. Apple's Intelligence is so bad, their operating system SO BLOATED, and their products SO LOCKED DOWN, they no longer fit my digital needs. Good bye Apple, I really don't miss you.
I have an iPad so I can get all the apps (like banking and governments ID stuff), but other than that it's GrapheneOS and Linux. I only miss things that are put on only the closed platforms (iOS and Android). Other than that I experience clean minimalism all day. Bless Gnome, bless NixOS, Bless GrapheneOS. They just get out of my way on the road to being productive.
...Ok there is bliss... and the pain of having to use MS365 through the browser which "just doesn't work" [tm] (constant log-outs, you're logged out but you don't get an error until 5 minutes of wondering where chats are going, you're a guest in an org but that works 20% of the time in 20% of browsers, etc, etc , etc)
If the desktop-mode on GrapheneOS (Android 17) would have a bit less papercuts that would be a nice platform for my MS365 stuff, but is suffers from stuff like the keyboard taking half my ultra-wide in some apps, and poor window management. It's really is close to being a viable work env imho though. That'd be so cool... The dream since Ubuntu's Convergence...
For weeks I used Safari to access some homelab stuff that only have IPs because Firefox wouldn't work. I must have been through all possible settings in Firefox, nothing worked. Turns out macOS decided that Firefox didn't need access to the local network. I guess I was asked at some point and said "No" because Firefox shouldn't roam around on my network unsupervised, not in my wildest imagination would I have guessed that this "No" extend to things I type into the URL bar.
Apple continues to lock down things I need, there isn't a good package manager (NO! Brew sucks.) and terminal stuff just breaks across upgrades.
Sorry, this one's on you. You denied your browser access to local network devices and then complain that it didn't have access to local network devices.
I'd argue that you generally wouldn't expect that to include IPs you manually enter into the URL bar. In every other case what that does is prevent applications from going out and doing stuff in the background, so that's going to be the assumption for browsers as well. Now that's not how the safety feature is designed, but that's how I as a user experience it working.
Also it doesn't really work does it, because Firefox can still do a DNS lookup, from a DNS server, which is just an IP.
Clearly not, as it took me weeks to figure out. I don't think macOS informs the application that it's being restricted, so Firefox can't really tell me that somethings up. Now I get that macOS can really do that either, otherwise users would be spammed with "This application tried accessing the network", but there should be some feedback mechanism that informs the user that something is probably wrong. Maybe there is and I've haven't found it.
> I don't think macOS informs the application that it's being restricted, so Firefox can't really tell me that somethings up.
What APIs is Firefox using? If it's using the Unix/POSIX-y stuff, I don't think there's a way for that kind of feedback. Not sure about the Objective-C/Swift APIs.
Requiring users to independently remember small decisions from months ago is bad UI. The error message should’ve been correct, and maybe the OS should be surfacing a log or something.
This under the top-level comment stating they're switching to linux? Linux behaves the exact same. If you edit a config file, expect the configuration to be set accordingly.
Is this a mac user thing? "Apple should know better than to trust the configuration the users try to set" lol
I’m honestly having a hard time understanding you through all the tribalism.
Asking who to blame is simplistic and unproductive, the right question is what to do. As a user, obviously that involves things like updating your understanding of the network stack and the many different places config is stored. I was commenting from a UI designer’s perspective, because I am one and I find that more interesting.
I think Linux for consumers has been historically quite bad at this, and Apple has at least recently also been bad at it. “You’re holding it wrong” is the same mistake.
> Requiring users to independently remember small decisions from months ago is bad UI. The error message should’ve been correct, and maybe the OS should be surfacing a log or something.
What was Firefox's error message?
macOS does have local network access logging:
log show --predicate 'subsystem == "com.apple.networkextension"
OR eventMessage CONTAINS[c] "local network"' --info --last 1h
FYI, a few months ago Firefox finally put local network access behind a per-site permission, so websites can’t port scan you even if Firefox itself has this perm. Chrome has had this forever. There’s also a uBlock Origin filter list to block LAN access, which I think would not prevent top level navigation to it.
Honestly, how do you experience those two? Because my personal experience is opposite.
What does it mean for you for a product to be 'locked down'? Mac OS has amazing range of customizability, with endless options to change it with APIs and third party apps. So far I didn't encounter behaviour I don't like and wasn't able to change. What is your list? Or it means something different for you?
And what does "bloated" means for you? I understand what it means in regards to Windows. It constantly gives me options I didn't ask for. Like when I press Start button I feel like I am at the Time Square with ads and stuff I didn't ask for yelling at me. I don't have such expericense with macOS. And apple intelligence fits right in - if you don't ask for it it won't show itself.
I don't want to navigate a dark pattern to avoid accidentally deleting a downloaded program, followed by opening settings and entering my password just to run it.
And if there is a way to stop Mac OS from spamming hidden dot-underscore files everywhere, I haven't found it yet.
macOS went from a very prominently Linux-alike (Snow Leopard era) to locked down North Korean iOSification over the span of 15 years. I agree, it's in such a bad state right now. Can't do much of anything in the OS without having to jump through 5-10 consent prompts.
Funny. I was happy to leave Linux to Apple for things that just worked. I need an ecosystem. Phone. Pad. Photos. Storage. Works out of the box with Apple. If didn’t have a life I would spend all my time configuring Linux to be half of what Apple provides. But I have a life.
When Apple started soldering their RAMs and SSDs, I predicted that Macs and macOS would be slowly locked down like other iDevices. I was mocked here and elsewhere for pointing this out. With Apple Silicon, Mac hardware is now like iPhones and iPads (with only the bootloader remaining to be locked). With it, they have ensured that all non-Apple OSes can only run crippled on Macs. So now they've also started taking away our control through the ios-ification of 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.
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.
Spotlight search has sucked from Day 1 of OSX. You need to use Find Any File [0] or some equivalent tool if you want to search the actual file system without being limited by Spotlight's never-properly-updated "index."
The functionality of Find Any File was built in to Mac OS 9 and earlier. It was rock-solid reliable. So of course Apple removed it and now to get reliable search you have to use a third-party tool. Or 'find' in the Terminal.
Find Any File is solid, but it scans on demand, so it never quite feels like Everything. The closest I've found is Cling from lowtechguys: it keeps its own index of the whole disk, including the hidden files and app data Spotlight skips, and results show up as you type with fuzzy matching.
The new spotlight search replaced what I previously used, made it function worse for what I used it for, and uses 30GiB of already very scarce disk space.
For many users, it is a strict downgrade that was forced on them against their consent.
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.
No, this is downloaded and installed upon installation of MacOS 27. The 30 GiB of "Apple Intelligence" is sitting on my disk against my consent. I've even taken pains to do all of the hacks (save for the novel one in this repo) to disable Siri AI.
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.
Yeah in macOS 27 it's finally been really good about prioritizing the Applications folder, including with indexing, apps show up in search now right after you installed them
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?
I’m not making any judgement on whether you should or should not like the feature.
I’m stating that the Windows problem was very different. Your machine would be loaded up with software for various vendors that the manufacturer did deals with to lower the price of the machine. They were all trials.
> I’m stating that the Windows problem was very different. [...] They were all trials.
Except it isn't and they weren't. MS Windows never came with trials, it came with shortcuts. OEMs bundled with their Windows image more of their (crap) full software than trials.
And to this day debloating tools are tasked with removing full MS bundled (or auto installed) software like Teams, Outlook, DevHome, Copilot, M365, Recall, etc. So exactly the same problem as Apple Intelligence. Whether you consider it useful is up to you. Whether it's bundled is up to Apple.
Fair point. It was OEMs. But that’s normally how you got windows. I don’t use windows much these days so I have no idea what the modern annoyances are.
> [On Windows] Your machine would be loaded up with software for various vendors that the manufacturer did deals with to lower the price of the machine.
So the only difference is that the vendor here is Apple itself. Honestly, not seeing much difference.
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.
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.
It's also not the full extent of disk usage by built-in apps which aren't removable by normal means on macOS. An empty macOS installation is like 35 GB. NixOS is not known for being particularly space efficient, but 30-40 GB is how much space I use on it for the OS and all applications, including a ton of developer tools, on my graphical systems. For the base OS with a full fat desktop environment, most Linux distros have you looking at less than 10 GB. So this comes as a massive increase on an OS that already burns a ton of disk space before you even get to touch it.
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.
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.
That doesn’t work unless you’re actually able to offload stuff from disk, which is only the case when you store stuff in your iCloud Drive / photos / etc.
Case in point: the AI models can’t be offloaded to iCloud.
To gain the same effect as one that is soldered down, while giving themselves a simpler portfolio of assemblies and a cheaper FRU to swap in the event of failure.
My understanding is that the controller is integrated into the SoC.
You can actually replace the storage on Apple desktops but it’s a bit of a pain and isn’t as cheap as m.2 2280 drives.
I don’t really know why Apple does this when their solution doesn’t seem to offer an obvious advantage. They aren’t faster than existing solutions or anything like that.
Vendor lock-in increases their profit margins. If people could purchase a 128GB Mac mini and install their own 2TB drives they wouldn't make as much money.
Longer traces and contact connectors require more power and generate more heat to maintain the same level of signal integrity as shorter traces and soldered connections. All modern Apple hardware is downstream of its phone division. They don't make a specialty PC that runs a very different O/S (macOS instead of Windows) anymore, they make a scaled-up phone that runs a slightly different O/S (macOS instead of iOS) now.
It’s not actually serial locked, you can replace SSDs by desoldering and resoldering a NAND chip. But basically their SSD controller is integrated into the M-series chips (mostly because cheaper, less connectors to manufacture). But it’s a very specialized process
I think most consumers would happily pay a bit extra for these controllers if it meant that they could manually upgrade their SSDs. I can’t help but have the feeling that it’s also quite convenient for Apple that all this stuff is effectively non-replaceable / upgradable.
I don’t think the benefits are the same as with their RAM being part of their SoC, as that gives them real speed improvements, right?
> it’s also quite convenient for Apple that all this stuff is effectively non-replaceable / upgradable
On the other hand, I’m happily banging away on my ca. 2020 M1 MacBook Pro. It just got a warranty service, free to me, that replaced the screen. It will probably get replaced around 2030. That simply isn’t the norm with the alternatives.
The hypothesis that this is self serving isn’t supported by the evidence. Instead it’s more parsimonious to conclude that this is Apple being Apple with pushing design to the limit when it comes to executing a vision. User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned.
> Macs were quite repairable and most parts were replaceable until ~2012. So it’s hard to blame Jobs for that
Not "blaming" because I'm not convinced it's the wrong move. Soldering memory directly onto the logic board has advantages relative to a fully-encapsulated drive.
Apple learned this, in part, from designing the iPhone. And Jobs always had this penchant for pushing design to its limits even when it sacrifices conventional (and in some cases, probably necessary) functional requirements.
What I am convinced about is the lunacy of the planned-obsolescence argument. The longevity of Apple's products simply doesn't support it.
I've had good luck with AppleCare and warranty service, and most of my Macbook's have lasted well.
On the other hand my sons 2021 Mac Mini M1 with an estimated < 20% writes remaining on the SSD is not looking very cool. In fact, rather disappointing and the computer will be junk soon due to the SSD only.
> User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned
Steve Jobs literally got up on stage and proudly showed off the PowerMac G3 with a side door you could hinge down to open up the machine as it was running.
It was once Jony Ive got more power that everything went to pot. The first Macs with soldered-in storage were released after Jobs' death.
They could easily give us a system that can be easily upgraded. At least the SSD.
And I would inmediately put an order for a 256GB Mac Studio with 1TB SSD, if I were to know that SSD can be upgraded later on. I dont even mind if I have to buy premium SSD upgrades from Apple.
But locking the system in and knowing the decision is final? No thanks. And no way I am shelling 18k or whatever outrageous sum they ask for 8 extra TB.
It might be they are leaving money off the table with their greed.
Note that before the Mac mini socketed SSDs, Retina MacBook Pros had socketed SSDs as well. They were not standard M.2 either though, you had to get specific aftermarket parts from the likes of OWC
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.
Like it or not, Siri is one of the features of macOS and has been for a long time. It's not just some arbitrary AI model that Apple decided to store on your disk.
“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.
You've had a previous version of Siri for a decade that didn't do what the current version of Siri does. Whether you use it or not is not germane to whether the model is justified – it's what Siri needs to do what Apple wants it to do.
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.
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.
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.
They have to give you a choice because they have surly enterprise customers who would be upset otherwise.
> 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.
They did, and it's a matter of time they'll do it again, but that was then, now we have lot's of options for distros and desktops, and what about the private sector? Win11 is in shambles, macOS becoming more and more a cloud terminal you rent...
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. Ubuntu is free and still betrayed its users. If the answer is you're supposed to switch distros at that point, why don't I just use a Mac now and switch to Linux if it ever gets bad?
And Windows is an even bigger boat where everyone had ample time to jump ship if they wanted, like Win10 is still de facto supported and Win7 had support for a very long time.
> 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:
For the future, it shouldn't be necessary to reinstall Linux just to fix a sound card. Pipewire et. al are a bit of a mess and sprinkle config files in /etc and your home dir. If it happens again start with deleting those and doing a restart.
> 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. Even if they don't know how to do it they can seek help in a forum and they will find hundreds who are already doing that. Unlike in a Apple forum where they would be first booed and then told they are holding it wrong.
> 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.
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. Every winner must walk this path, nothing to do with Apple and that’s why it looks similar to previous winners.
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 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.
> 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.
The point is that it downloads a multi-gig model automatically without providing an easy way to reclaim that storage space if you don't intend to use that feature.
This is very much an anti-user behavior. Certainly having models run on-device is preferred when possible, but if you don't want to use the Apple Intelligence this is an anti-feature. Especially on devices with small storage capacities which are impacted the most by this.
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.
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.
Intentionally eliminating a choice that they used to provide that many people would still like the ability to choose is not a new phenomenon, you're correct. That doesn't make it any less user hostile when it happens though, and I think plenty of people don't think "well plenty of other sucky things happen in similar ways" to be a good reason not to be upset when a new unnecessary sucky thing happens.
My instinct is that the use of the word "consent" is getting used a bit more aggressively lately with regards to AI features because of how pervasive they've become despite very often not having much user desire for them. It's certainly possible for someone object to something in a way that's worse than the thing they're unhappy about, but this doesn't seem anywhere close to that level IMO.
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.
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.
Even with the battery charge limit the device will charge to 100% every so often. To claim that this “didn't seem to do anything” is just Apple Derangement Syndrome. The algorithms were engineered to know more than you about battery chemistry.
I programmed industrial LiFePo4 batteries before and we solved it by monitoring the amount of electricity that went to the cells through the wire and the voltage of the cell blocks. You don't need to charge to 100% to balance. You can charge also to a lower voltage with a special balancer (resistors that reduced incoming electricity). If you have good hardware and a good software, it is possible. So it is just apple's crap charging hardware.
Resistors used like that are notorious for being both large, and getting hot when used. Both things that are tricky to cram into a small handheld device.
You also have to wonder what the point of doing all this faffing is. Mobile phone batteries are optimised for energy density above almost anything else, which comes with tradeoffs, include much more rapid natural degradation overtime that can’t be reduced or limited by gentle charging cycles. A phones battery is basically guaranteed to be unhealthy after 4-5 years regardless of what you do or don’t do.
Just because two batteries have the same basic chemistry (Lithium-ion of example), doesn’t mean their behaviour is the same. There’s a lot of possible customisation and tweaking within that single chemistry envelope.
You can kill a battery much faster than 5 years if you don't treat it right.
My personal experience is that modern devices are far better about battery management, my phones used to wear out much sooner than 5 years back when smartphones were a new concept and Li-Ion was new and fancy tech. So all that "faffing" seems to be doing something useful, because even my quite old and forgotten tablet that I forget to charge seems to be doing quite well.
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. Balancing is also important for longevity and requires a trip to the top.
The rest of the time, when things are neither being calibrated nor balanced, then it can stay at no more than 80% -- yeah? 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 and it's programmed to present a nerfed value.
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.
It's 28GB for me. For the same Mac for two other friends it's 14 and 18GB each. So yeah, if this alone hasn't told you a part of "why", then I suspect you didn't really come here to know the "why". But I will write further, assuming you are not here as representive of "but why won't you just buy a new pair of AirPods instead of trying to repair it" crowd.
- They don't really work. Yes, they are really bad (almost pathetic).
- They take up RAM - somtimes lots of it. RAM matters, more so on a Mac. This matters more if you want to use and try local models (I suspect even a 500MB to 2GB model might work infinitely better than whatever one or more Apple ships). Also because a lot of "Apple" things start and remain started and can take whimsical amount of RAM at any given point (and you have practically no control on it whatsoever).
- And did you by any chance miss that they take anythiing from 10-15GB to 30GB or so.
- Then Apple being Apple it might downlaod another 30GB or more as part of next update and then forget deleteing the old ones (or, again, Apple being Apple, they might not have left a way to delete the old ones - this has higher probability).
- I also don't remember signing up for this (but probably that doesn't make sense for you, ignore this point).
- Did you notice the UI? You clearly switch OFF Siri and it still isn't switched off.
- Then you have to go to Screen Time and then you have to first set it on as classic and disable all kinds AI feature there and then there's word on the street that even that is not enough and you have to go to inidvidual apps and disable every feature there. Even after that one is not sure it's disabled. Or it might get magically reenabled in then next patch/update.
- There are other places where you have to disable it - in notifications, in email… I lost clount.
- In case the second last point didn't hit home, let me try again: there's a global settings option and you turn Siri off (it doesn't turn it off), then there's in Screen Time and there's marking it "Not Allowed" doesn't disable it either).
And I am sure this is not the end of it. (Yes, I am tired of Apple's pretty shite software and other OEMs' shite or almost shite hardware).
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 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.
Not that the are core technologies, more like they use whatever default libraries (Frameworks in Apple parlance) that are already there. Just like no one bothered to remove paint or wordpad in the old days (even with only 20gb of hdd)
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"
It's so hard to manage storage space on mac as well. Every app leaves massive amounts of crap in deep system directories that are hard to find and persist after you delete the app. My 512gb mac is always running out of space so I have to use 3rd party tools to find where all the space went since macos just lumps it in "Applications" or "Documents" with no real way to see anything.
Yo. I feel ya. I am the founder behind the studio that made Diskaroo, which we made for this exact reason. We're giving it away free lifetime for it right now. https://bravely.dev/diskaroo if you're interested.
It feels like so much software was just anticipating storage to keep getting cheaper and processors to keep increasing in performance forever. Now that we have hit a significant road block on that path, we are seeing the big disconnect.
I realized that in 2005(ish) my work station was a fully decked out Dual 2Ghz G5 Powermac that had 8GB of RAM. Yes, that was OBSCENE at the time but it was being used for generating light maps on 3D scenes and we were going to use all the memory we could get and 64bit processors with their memory addressing was a nice to have. But it was 8GB, a size that is still common today.
New laptops and even desktop still come with 8GB some 21 years later, who could have seen that coming? It would be like selling a PC in 2005 with 2MB of RAM.
yes, it's totally bizarre. And RAM used to be a commodity, well sort of prior to the past two years. It definitely didn't drive the bulk of the bill of materials, however manufacturers honed in on it as a way of segmenting the market.
It's also the ridiculous cost of the upgrades. I recently purchased an entire (second hand) PC with a Xeon, 16Gb RAM and 1TB NVMe in it for 5% less than the cost of the 256 to 512Gb upgrade. And 1/3 of the price of a second hand M1 Mini with 256Gb in it.
The fact that tools like these exist show how bad the AI integration is. It's outdated and does nothing helpful really. There's a ton of other AI providers that offer more powerful features. The AI integration in Google devices is miles ahead of Siri. This has always been the case. iOS and macOS have terrible Siri features. I've been a believer in Apple for a really long time. I've been using Siri even before Apple acquired them. I've used it for long enough and this year has been the final nail in the coffin. I give up. I can't wait for Apple to "finally" make it better. It's not happening.
For years people have been begging Apple to make Siri respond to basic requests, and Siri could not do it. Now the technology that allows them to fix Siri is handed to them on a silver platter, yet they still mess it up.
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. 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 new things at once.
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.
Nope. The only people who notice or care about any of this are those who can't accommodate the storage. Outside that, it all just works better now (especially Siri).
Also "those who can't accommodate the storage" is funny.
What's that? You didn't pay Apple's 1200% markup on storage, just so you can have enough room for your actual work after the OS fills your disk with a bunch of bloat? What are you, poor?
I ran into another Electron app the other day that also downloads a 400MB or so LLM.
The irony here is that Apple tried to make an AI framework to specifically avoid this, but I think the future will simply be 10 copies of Qwen 0.6B running on my computer.
You most probably end up paying for Apple. I don’t think they would offer unlimited Siri AI as a free tier. Most probably they will tie it to an iCloud+ plan
Sure, but I'm okay paying for Apple (or not getting unlimited usage - I've been perfectly fine with Siri non-AI so far). It's specifically OpenAI and Anthropic that I'm not interested in giving my money to.
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.
To be honest, I wish the GNOME team completely halted development and exclusively focused on bug fixing for at least a year. For example, Nautilus sometimes leaks memory and get killed by the kernel.
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
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
This one is easy. Find its updater service plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, delete it, and create a directory with the same name so it won't be able to overwrite it.
Those are often files not directories. In that case I zero out the file (no bytes) then change ownership to root and -w it. Ridiculous you have to jump through these hoops to manage your own machine and Apple doesn’t bother to expose this anywhere.
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
The alternative is maintaining backwards compatibility forever and then everyone will complain about some weird behaviour that still happens to retain that compatibility.
Keep in mind this is the second time they have switched arches and the second round of complaints of Rosetta removal.
Exactly, I remember getting similar replies - though probably on /. then - when the PPC emulator was removed, there are always some people eager to ridicule the idea and portray it as not being feasible. But it is. It is perfectly doable for a company like Apple with a net worth around $4.87 trillion and would probably take less disk space then the AI models their customers now try to remove because they don't need them. As ridiculous as this may sound to the naysayers, I desire very much for an operating system to keep backwards compatibility forever, it can be done and would be very useful for many people.
I didn't want the PPC emulator removed and I don't want the x86 emulator to be removed either. If that makes me a weirdo, so be it.
Rosetta 2 is going to be removed entirely just like Rosetta has been removed. Complete removal is scheduled for macOS 28, except, oddly, for a few legacy games.
Third switch. 68000 series to PPC to Intel to Apple Silicon.
Now that they have stopped supporting Intel-based Macs, I understand the desire to not have to port new code and features to x86-64 to keep legacy apps happy.
That is why Intel-based Mac App support is going away, but Rosetta 2 as infrastructure will remain - a much smaller footprint of system functionality will be addressable by x86-64 code that they can reasonably maintain going forward.
That's actually better than where I thought we would be now - I thought by M6 they would remove the hardware extensions that allow Rosetta 2 function from Apple Silicon.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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?
“You wouldn't run a stranger's code without reading it.” Yes I would. We all do it all the time. macOS itself is closed source, and even if it weren't, there’s way too much code to read.
Code from trusted repositories is an entirely different thing compared to running 'wget some_github_repo_shell_script | sh' . That said, the likes of Tailscale are setting a bad example.
But then again, I'm a bit paranoid. At a minimum I would download the script and read it, and if it was too long or not written clearly enough then I would just drop it and find something better.
You download a dmg and run it blindly? You download an exe and run it blindly. I wish it were in an rpm or deb coming from signed repos, but it's not so here we are
App bundles (what's inside most DMGs) and Windows executables are signed, have been for a long time, and are required to be, by the O/S, in order to execute "normally". Apple uses centralized PKI (the developer's key must be signed by Apple) while Microsoft uses distributed PKI (the developer's key must be signed by a code-signing CA who in turn is approved by Microsoft).
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 is not that you are literally unable to intercept and inspect them with enough effort and planning.
The problem is that:
1. The effort and care needed to test is unnecessarily high. You've got to guard against way more tricks from an interactive source that can see you and choose what it's going to deliver and how.
2. With no "standard" artifact that can be exactly compared, that work cannot be shared.
In contrast, release_1.2.3.zip isn't going to mutate under you and everybody can agree on what its size/hash/bytes ought to be, and if it deviates from that it sets off alarm-bells.
> 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.
Consider this analogy: You need to meet a stranger to get their signature on a legal document, and the stranger could be a rapist murderer. Which option sounds better?
1. Meet them in a crowded convention center with cameras.
2. Meet them alone in an abandoned building.
Sure, they could whip out a knife and stab you in either situation, but the difference is not a "lost cause." If they have any rationality, the public place deters them because the risk of being detected and caught is higher.
> I don't see what the zip file adds.
A process based on public single-signature releases means that the author must choose to either release something benign to everyone, or malicious to everyone. Even if the shared artifact has sneaky covert logic to trigger in only some environments, the logic is detectable in everyone's copy.
In contrast, this bad curl-to-bash process means a savvy villain could give a perfect veneer of respectability to the world at large, while sending tailored attacks to a minority of visitors, even a targeted minority. Their risk of detection is way lower. Not only that, but victims who follow the flawed process will lose some of the best clues for figuring out who hacked them later.
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."
Moving that if-statement to a hidden remote server is both significant and worse for security.
> 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.
Hold up, if you're going to mutate the metaphor like that, then the nearby crowd becomes other people also getting packages.
I refuse to believe you don't have a clear preference between:
A: You want a standard product. You get a package that might be secretly "personalized" for you by the dodgy sender.
B: You want a standard product. You get a package which you know is identical to 10,000 other packages being given out... Many of which have already been taken to homes, with no reports of explosions or strange devices inside.
_____
The analogy-free basics are:
1. Consistency of behavior is important for good security, and curl-to-bash is bad that way.
2. Shared visibility of what actors do is important for good security, and curl-to-bash is bad that way.
3. Those are important to security because they deter and limit what malicious actors can attempt or get-away with.
> 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, in the common setting where curlbash is used.
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
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.
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.
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.
They love the ones that buy Apple hardware to develop apps for iDevices, pay the dev subscription and store fees for apps, or simply because they wanted a shiny UNIX and don't consider BSD/Linux OEMs worth their money.
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.
The average consumer of Apple products 100% does not care about this, it’s only an “issue” in hyper niche places like here. In the real world the average user doesn’t care or notice or more likely uses Apples Intelligence features.
This whole thread is made up of people living in a bubble.
The bubble is people watching every GB or MB. Regular people run out of space and wonder why their "256GB" disk is already full from much less than that. Ask my wife about her two laptops and phone.
Yes apple intelligence is pretty bad. https://alma.inc/ aims to be what Apple intelligence should have been by building a new interface to your computer. And certainly, it won't take up much disk space.
I'd rather have a mechanism to remove the 100 GB of old simulator images for Apple Watch and TVOS, which I never use and which can't be uninstalled without disabling security and rebooting to safe mode all the time.
Isn’t there a UI to remove those inside Xcode? I just used to trash them in Finder but it sounds like that changed.
For me once it redownloaded and the next time xcode just refused to work and didn't even redownload. So it seems it has changed (or for me). The problem is, with Apple you don't even know it was done hostilely or it was just their, now well-establisehd, software incompetence. Because in their case both are aplenty.
I think the tool DevCleaner can do it
In Xcode, go to Window > Devices and Simulators in the menu bar (or press Shift+Cmd+2), then select the Simulators tab in the sidebar to open the list of simulators. Here you can select and delete simulators.
Can’t you just ask claude to remove it?
"Claude, that thing they just said."
Name checks out.
Sure if you've fried your brain so much you're incapable of doing anything at all for yourself.
It's not about brain. Time is limited. If you chase all these little things you die - death by a thousand cuts.
Chasing maximum productivity in an attempt to outrun time sounds a lot worse if you ask me.
When I read things like this all I can imagine is a farmer responding in a similar fashion to people talking about using tractors.
It would be more accurate to describe it as farmers renting out their fields and no longer practicing farming, so they forget how to farm.
People should really know how to delete sims, but there's a ton of obscure Xcode nonsense that in the "old days" people would blindly trust Stackoverflow answers or even blogs to fix. If Xcode is a tractor, it's the old thing you whack with a wrench and say "come on Bessie" to make it temporarily work again, not something most devs really understand.
I just don’t have enough time for that.
I don’t have enough tokens for that so I have to do it for myself.
You don’t have enough tokens for time pressure?
This is how I always did it. Why would the alternative involve going into safe mode? Pretty sure I've manually deleted those files before too.
Because it would definitely be too difficult to do both for a ~$5T market cap company?
they have a ui/tool for that, but ok.
lol seriously, this is a solved problem
`xcrun simctl delete unavailable` will delete unavailable simulators. `xcrun simctl list` and `xcrun simctl delete <device-uuid>` will delete specific devices. I run unavailable all the time after updating to get disk space back.
`xcrun simctl runtime list` and `xcrun simctl runtime delete <runtime-uuid>` will clean up actual runtimes.
While I agree, that affects an order of magnitude smaller number of people.
I am so done with Apple.
I went from pre windows operating systems -> Slackware -> Apple as my main squeeze in 2001 since it was based on BSD -> And in 2026 I'm back to Linux full time. Apple's Intelligence is so bad, their operating system SO BLOATED, and their products SO LOCKED DOWN, they no longer fit my digital needs. Good bye Apple, I really don't miss you.
I have an iPad so I can get all the apps (like banking and governments ID stuff), but other than that it's GrapheneOS and Linux. I only miss things that are put on only the closed platforms (iOS and Android). Other than that I experience clean minimalism all day. Bless Gnome, bless NixOS, Bless GrapheneOS. They just get out of my way on the road to being productive.
...Ok there is bliss... and the pain of having to use MS365 through the browser which "just doesn't work" [tm] (constant log-outs, you're logged out but you don't get an error until 5 minutes of wondering where chats are going, you're a guest in an org but that works 20% of the time in 20% of browsers, etc, etc , etc)
If the desktop-mode on GrapheneOS (Android 17) would have a bit less papercuts that would be a nice platform for my MS365 stuff, but is suffers from stuff like the keyboard taking half my ultra-wide in some apps, and poor window management. It's really is close to being a viable work env imho though. That'd be so cool... The dream since Ubuntu's Convergence...
For weeks I used Safari to access some homelab stuff that only have IPs because Firefox wouldn't work. I must have been through all possible settings in Firefox, nothing worked. Turns out macOS decided that Firefox didn't need access to the local network. I guess I was asked at some point and said "No" because Firefox shouldn't roam around on my network unsupervised, not in my wildest imagination would I have guessed that this "No" extend to things I type into the URL bar.
Apple continues to lock down things I need, there isn't a good package manager (NO! Brew sucks.) and terminal stuff just breaks across upgrades.
Sorry, this one's on you. You denied your browser access to local network devices and then complain that it didn't have access to local network devices.
I'd argue that you generally wouldn't expect that to include IPs you manually enter into the URL bar. In every other case what that does is prevent applications from going out and doing stuff in the background, so that's going to be the assumption for browsers as well. Now that's not how the safety feature is designed, but that's how I as a user experience it working.
Also it doesn't really work does it, because Firefox can still do a DNS lookup, from a DNS server, which is just an IP.
How would macOS know if the request is coming from the URL bar or not in some untrusted software?
These permissions are clearly all-or-nothing, or else they wouldn’t work.
> These permissions are clearly all-or-nothing
Clearly not, as it took me weeks to figure out. I don't think macOS informs the application that it's being restricted, so Firefox can't really tell me that somethings up. Now I get that macOS can really do that either, otherwise users would be spammed with "This application tried accessing the network", but there should be some feedback mechanism that informs the user that something is probably wrong. Maybe there is and I've haven't found it.
> I don't think macOS informs the application that it's being restricted, so Firefox can't really tell me that somethings up.
What APIs is Firefox using? If it's using the Unix/POSIX-y stuff, I don't think there's a way for that kind of feedback. Not sure about the Objective-C/Swift APIs.
Requiring users to independently remember small decisions from months ago is bad UI. The error message should’ve been correct, and maybe the OS should be surfacing a log or something.
This under the top-level comment stating they're switching to linux? Linux behaves the exact same. If you edit a config file, expect the configuration to be set accordingly.
Is this a mac user thing? "Apple should know better than to trust the configuration the users try to set" lol
I’m honestly having a hard time understanding you through all the tribalism.
Asking who to blame is simplistic and unproductive, the right question is what to do. As a user, obviously that involves things like updating your understanding of the network stack and the many different places config is stored. I was commenting from a UI designer’s perspective, because I am one and I find that more interesting.
I think Linux for consumers has been historically quite bad at this, and Apple has at least recently also been bad at it. “You’re holding it wrong” is the same mistake.
> Requiring users to independently remember small decisions from months ago is bad UI. The error message should’ve been correct, and maybe the OS should be surfacing a log or something.
What was Firefox's error message?
macOS does have local network access logging:
This is pretty much "problem" with every OS.
Windows - you make one setting change somewhere, you forget about it. Half year later boom.
Linux - you make one setting change somewhere, you forget about it. Half year later boom.
You're wrong. It's not on OP.
macOS automatically revokes these permissions even after you set them, requiring you to re-approve.
FYI, a few months ago Firefox finally put local network access behind a per-site permission, so websites can’t port scan you even if Firefox itself has this perm. Chrome has had this forever. There’s also a uBlock Origin filter list to block LAN access, which I think would not prevent top level navigation to it.
Honestly, how do you experience those two? Because my personal experience is opposite.
What does it mean for you for a product to be 'locked down'? Mac OS has amazing range of customizability, with endless options to change it with APIs and third party apps. So far I didn't encounter behaviour I don't like and wasn't able to change. What is your list? Or it means something different for you?
And what does "bloated" means for you? I understand what it means in regards to Windows. It constantly gives me options I didn't ask for. Like when I press Start button I feel like I am at the Time Square with ads and stuff I didn't ask for yelling at me. I don't have such expericense with macOS. And apple intelligence fits right in - if you don't ask for it it won't show itself.
I don't want to navigate a dark pattern to avoid accidentally deleting a downloaded program, followed by opening settings and entering my password just to run it.
And if there is a way to stop Mac OS from spamming hidden dot-underscore files everywhere, I haven't found it yet.
macOS went from a very prominently Linux-alike (Snow Leopard era) to locked down North Korean iOSification over the span of 15 years. I agree, it's in such a bad state right now. Can't do much of anything in the OS without having to jump through 5-10 consent prompts.
Funny. I was happy to leave Linux to Apple for things that just worked. I need an ecosystem. Phone. Pad. Photos. Storage. Works out of the box with Apple. If didn’t have a life I would spend all my time configuring Linux to be half of what Apple provides. But I have a life.
I was happily using Apple in the 90s before everyone came on board
Stock price aside, I’ll be happy using them when everyone moves on
When everyone moves away from it, there will be no Apple ...
When Apple started soldering their RAMs and SSDs, I predicted that Macs and macOS would be slowly locked down like other iDevices. I was mocked here and elsewhere for pointing this out. With Apple Silicon, Mac hardware is now like iPhones and iPads (with only the bootloader remaining to be locked). With it, they have ensured that all non-Apple OSes can only run crippled on Macs. So now they've also started taking away our control through the ios-ification of macOS.
Well, the soldering is more for benefiting unified memory. The high speeds require soldered RAM unfortunately.
So this is just a wrapper around another project https://github.com/4evy/pared
Are we doing chicken and egg now? :) Though it's strange to see the disparate number of Guthub stars
I would call this Matrioshka(Матрёша) not chicken and egg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matryoshka_doll
Would be nice for iOS too: less than 64GB devices are unusable due to Apple storing a huge ton of useless stuff as "system"
Changing Siri’s language worked for me
Care to elaborate?
For me, changing Settings > Siri > Language to German freed up the space reserved for Apple intelligence after some time.
Is there any iPhone Apple Intelligence-compatible with less than 64 GB?
The lowest storage tier ever sold for Apple Intelligence-capable iPhones is 128GB.
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?
And language packs for 30 languages one would never use!
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.
Simplicity to the point of hostility towards the user. This is a recurring pattern with Apple, and a reason why I don't use their equipment.
I imagine the calculation goes something like this:
* Benefit: Printers "Just Work", customers are pushed towards higher storage tiers where we have fantastically high margins
* Drawbacks: None
When people open up their brand-new Mac for the first time and look at available storage, they can be disappointed.
Only if they haven't already fainted twice just by the first two glances of the brand new Apple logo marking.
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.
What makes you call it crapware? The new spotlight search (from Siri) is amazing and super convenient.
I don’t want to make my search more ambiguous. That is the opposite of what I want.
The existing search on macOS was almost completely useless to be fair
Spotlight search has sucked from Day 1 of OSX. You need to use Find Any File [0] or some equivalent tool if you want to search the actual file system without being limited by Spotlight's never-properly-updated "index."
The functionality of Find Any File was built in to Mac OS 9 and earlier. It was rock-solid reliable. So of course Apple removed it and now to get reliable search you have to use a third-party tool. Or 'find' in the Terminal.
[0] https://findanyfile.app/
This is why I rip out spotlight on my mac and replace it with FZF
Would you have a guide? Particularly on the rip out part. Fzf is no nice unless you trigger it on a dir too big (e.g. your entire home).
I also resort to
Spotlight was really good on Tiger idkwym
I desperately need something like Everything¹ for macOS!
¹https://www.voidtools.com/
Find Any File is solid, but it scans on demand, so it never quite feels like Everything. The closest I've found is Cling from lowtechguys: it keeps its own index of the whole disk, including the hidden files and app data Spotlight skips, and results show up as you type with fuzzy matching.
Thanks for the heads-up!
The new spotlight search replaced what I previously used, made it function worse for what I used it for, and uses 30GiB of already very scarce disk space.
For many users, it is a strict downgrade that was forced on them against their consent.
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 never asked for it, I had to disable it
No, this is downloaded and installed upon installation of MacOS 27. The 30 GiB of "Apple Intelligence" is sitting on my disk against my consent. I've even taken pains to do all of the hacks (save for the novel one in this repo) to disable Siri AI.
Can it now consistently find things in /Applications when I type the full name?
That's revolutionary.
No.
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.
You’re missing the entire new world of personal context retrieval.
How so?
Yeah in macOS 27 it's finally been really good about prioritizing the Applications folder, including with indexing, apps show up in search now right after you installed them
Just because something is convenient or necessary for you, it doesn't mean it is convenient or necessary for everyone
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.
Depending on how much you value your privacy or not being annoyed, some people see it as mandatory.
Mandatory if you don’t want to see ads in your start menu and search
On windows you got garbage like trial versions of Blah software.
This is a fully functioning feature that people don’t like for what ever reason.
Fully functional feature consuming multiple gigabytes of storage and has questionable functional value. Maybe people don't want bloated AI crap on their desktops?
I’m not making any judgement on whether you should or should not like the feature.
I’m stating that the Windows problem was very different. Your machine would be loaded up with software for various vendors that the manufacturer did deals with to lower the price of the machine. They were all trials.
> I’m stating that the Windows problem was very different. [...] They were all trials.
Except it isn't and they weren't. MS Windows never came with trials, it came with shortcuts. OEMs bundled with their Windows image more of their (crap) full software than trials.
And to this day debloating tools are tasked with removing full MS bundled (or auto installed) software like Teams, Outlook, DevHome, Copilot, M365, Recall, etc. So exactly the same problem as Apple Intelligence. Whether you consider it useful is up to you. Whether it's bundled is up to Apple.
Fair point. It was OEMs. But that’s normally how you got windows. I don’t use windows much these days so I have no idea what the modern annoyances are.
> [On Windows] Your machine would be loaded up with software for various vendors that the manufacturer did deals with to lower the price of the machine.
So the only difference is that the vendor here is Apple itself. Honestly, not seeing much difference.
“Some people” arguments always hold true.
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.
Not if you didn't use apple intelligence in the first place (and/or aren't interested in using it going forward).
If and only if there is actual demand for it. If most users do not want this, it's a bad feature.
That’s a whole 4% of my disc. Get that out of there.
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?
Useful or not there should be an option to turn it off and get space back (plus avoid LLM) if you want.
4% of my disk on a computer with soldered storage hardware?
Is the marketing really getting this good?
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.
Most people aren't like that.
> 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.
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.
It's also not the full extent of disk usage by built-in apps which aren't removable by normal means on macOS. An empty macOS installation is like 35 GB. NixOS is not known for being particularly space efficient, but 30-40 GB is how much space I use on it for the OS and all applications, including a ton of developer tools, on my graphical systems. For the base OS with a full fat desktop environment, most Linux distros have you looking at less than 10 GB. So this comes as a massive increase on an OS that already burns a ton of disk space before you even get to touch it.
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.
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.
iMovie isn't installed by default, and live photos are an option at least. Apple Intelligence requires ripping out with sketchy scripts.
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.
The M1 MacBook Air did not have a 128 GB storage option.
> The M1 MacBook Air did not have a 128 GB storage option.
There was an 128 GB model [1] that was only sold to schools.
[1]: https://everymac.com/systems/apple/macbook-air/specs/macbook...
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.
That extra space is for my media.
IE is also a fully functioning feature, so are snap packages.
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.
Cortana was heavily integrated with bing. It was essentially a way to get people to use bing.
I swear didn't they lose a big antitrust case for doing this once already?
When have any antitrust cases have had any effect on Microsoft?
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
"fully functioning feature" -- more like fully functioning forceware/crapware which holds significant space.
So, it's not for "what ever reason", it's quite a reason to reject this.
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.
I just don't use it. I'm on a laptop with 500gb. I don't want to lose on so much disk space for a feature I won't use.
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.
They'll rent you more iCloud space when you fill up the SSD. That's good, holistic customer service.
That doesn’t work unless you’re actually able to offload stuff from disk, which is only the case when you store stuff in your iCloud Drive / photos / etc.
Case in point: the AI models can’t be offloaded to iCloud.
Maybe someone can explain why their SSDs, when not soldered down, are a proprietary form factor and can't be replaced with a standard M.2 device?
To gain the same effect as one that is soldered down, while giving themselves a simpler portfolio of assemblies and a cheaper FRU to swap in the event of failure.
So vendor locking to make more money. :)
I believe they have a special kind of SSD, where the controller is locked into the motherboard. This is serial locked in some form.
(Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is how I understand it)
My understanding is that the controller is integrated into the SoC.
You can actually replace the storage on Apple desktops but it’s a bit of a pain and isn’t as cheap as m.2 2280 drives.
I don’t really know why Apple does this when their solution doesn’t seem to offer an obvious advantage. They aren’t faster than existing solutions or anything like that.
Vendor lock-in increases their profit margins. If people could purchase a 128GB Mac mini and install their own 2TB drives they wouldn't make as much money.
Longer traces and contact connectors require more power and generate more heat to maintain the same level of signal integrity as shorter traces and soldered connections. All modern Apple hardware is downstream of its phone division. They don't make a specialty PC that runs a very different O/S (macOS instead of Windows) anymore, they make a scaled-up phone that runs a slightly different O/S (macOS instead of iOS) now.
It’s not actually serial locked, you can replace SSDs by desoldering and resoldering a NAND chip. But basically their SSD controller is integrated into the M-series chips (mostly because cheaper, less connectors to manufacture). But it’s a very specialized process
I think most consumers would happily pay a bit extra for these controllers if it meant that they could manually upgrade their SSDs. I can’t help but have the feeling that it’s also quite convenient for Apple that all this stuff is effectively non-replaceable / upgradable.
I don’t think the benefits are the same as with their RAM being part of their SoC, as that gives them real speed improvements, right?
I disagree. I think 90% or more wouldn't care.
Indeed,
> manually upgrade
or “average Apple customer”, pick one
btw something beautiful about the YouTube videos of shops in China doing those SSD deletes with the power tools
I'd be amazed if even 1% care
> it’s also quite convenient for Apple that all this stuff is effectively non-replaceable / upgradable
On the other hand, I’m happily banging away on my ca. 2020 M1 MacBook Pro. It just got a warranty service, free to me, that replaced the screen. It will probably get replaced around 2030. That simply isn’t the norm with the alternatives.
The hypothesis that this is self serving isn’t supported by the evidence. Instead it’s more parsimonious to conclude that this is Apple being Apple with pushing design to the limit when it comes to executing a vision. User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned.
> User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned.
Macs were quite repairable and most parts were replaceable until ~2012. So it’s hard to blame Jobs for that.
> Macs were quite repairable and most parts were replaceable until ~2012. So it’s hard to blame Jobs for that
Not "blaming" because I'm not convinced it's the wrong move. Soldering memory directly onto the logic board has advantages relative to a fully-encapsulated drive.
Apple learned this, in part, from designing the iPhone. And Jobs always had this penchant for pushing design to its limits even when it sacrifices conventional (and in some cases, probably necessary) functional requirements.
What I am convinced about is the lunacy of the planned-obsolescence argument. The longevity of Apple's products simply doesn't support it.
I've had good luck with AppleCare and warranty service, and most of my Macbook's have lasted well.
On the other hand my sons 2021 Mac Mini M1 with an estimated < 20% writes remaining on the SSD is not looking very cool. In fact, rather disappointing and the computer will be junk soon due to the SSD only.
> User-upgradable parts have not been part of that vision since Jobs returned
Steve Jobs literally got up on stage and proudly showed off the PowerMac G3 with a side door you could hinge down to open up the machine as it was running.
It was once Jony Ive got more power that everything went to pot. The first Macs with soldered-in storage were released after Jobs' death.
They could easily give us a system that can be easily upgraded. At least the SSD.
And I would inmediately put an order for a 256GB Mac Studio with 1TB SSD, if I were to know that SSD can be upgraded later on. I dont even mind if I have to buy premium SSD upgrades from Apple.
But locking the system in and knowing the decision is final? No thanks. And no way I am shelling 18k or whatever outrageous sum they ask for 8 extra TB.
It might be they are leaving money off the table with their greed.
Note that before the Mac mini socketed SSDs, Retina MacBook Pros had socketed SSDs as well. They were not standard M.2 either though, you had to get specific aftermarket parts from the likes of OWC
My understanding is that they are not SSDs - they lack a disk controller, instead providing flash memory more directly to the SoC
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.
Gosh, maybe there are two companies that are both doing the same bad thing, rather than the thing being good?
> Google is doing the same on Android - there's no native tool to search for large images and videos by date
This is completely untrue.
Android Files app.
I just went to the very top, selected images and videos, and set a custom date. (And then sorted by filesize)
Like it or not, Siri is one of the features of macOS and has been for a long time. It's not just some arbitrary AI model that Apple decided to store on your disk.
“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.
You've had a previous version of Siri for a decade that didn't do what the current version of Siri does. Whether you use it or not is not germane to whether the model is justified – it's what Siri needs to do what Apple wants it to do.
> Whether you use it or not is not germane to whether the model is justified
Huh.. well yeah, who cares what users need or want. Perfect attitude for a company making money by selling products to consumers.
If you say so.
And yet somehow they managed to not take up 12 GB of disk space that required running multiple manual steps to get back for a while.
Superfluous details
The majority of Macs sold have tiny SSDs. So not really.
My impression was that the comment you're responding to was intended ironically, but I've been wrong about this sort of thing before
macos has tons for features. you expect them to provide a way for users individually turn off each feature in the os ?
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
Not Chess.app though!
Its no one independent app like garage band though. Like safari has features baked into it that use it ( eg: creating extensions with text)
If it consumes valuable disk space (especially with current insane market prices), yes.
To be fair.. why not?
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.
You can’t assume that though, Apple Intelligence is not supported 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.
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.
Disk space is there to be used.
Are these files particularly hard to clean out if your disk is getting full and you need the space?
Particularly hard for who? Why hard at all for anyone? Don't let the overtone window to slip.
How about stop deciding for me. I love to see my disk free space.
So true, also unused RAM is wasted RAM!
This simply isn't true.
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.
They have to give you a choice because they have surly enterprise customers who would be upset otherwise.
> 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.
You can install different operating systems on the Apple machine.
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”.
> 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.
That's how it was in like 2000-2008. Modern Windows bloat is the OS itself.
I don't like it cause it uses 12GB
Maybe they don't like it because they don't have any desire to use it, and they didn't ask for it?
> a fully functioning feature that people don’t like for what ever reason
I’m genuinely struggling to use it on my Mac.
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.
On macos you get ads for icloud and are impossible to disable, no thank you.
This will always be the case with proprietary software, invariably. Just a matter of time.
Linux distros have shot themselves in the foot plenty of times too. I was using Ubuntu when they rolled out the Unity update.
They did, and it's a matter of time they'll do it again, but that was then, now we have lot's of options for distros and desktops, and what about the private sector? Win11 is in shambles, macOS becoming more and more a cloud terminal you rent...
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. Ubuntu is free and still betrayed its users. If the answer is you're supposed to switch distros at that point, why don't I just use a Mac now and switch to Linux if it ever gets bad?
And Windows is an even bigger boat where everyone had ample time to jump ship if they wanted, like Win10 is still de facto supported and Win7 had support for a very long time.
That's really not my experience, the UX in Linux has only gotten better with time
> 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.
Not gonna lie, I would like a "Black Edition" of macOS. There is a decent OS buried under tons of rubble.
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:
https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/158283
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:
Nice!
For the future, it shouldn't be necessary to reinstall Linux just to fix a sound card. Pipewire et. al are a bit of a mess and sprinkle config files in /etc and your home dir. If it happens again start with deleting those and doing a restart.
> 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.
> but a lot of people won't
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. Even if they don't know how to do it they can seek help in a forum and they will find hundreds who are already doing that. Unlike in a Apple forum where they would be first booed and then told they are holding it wrong.
> 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.
Same here, only switching to a desktop.
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.
Just curious, what distro & DE did you choose? I'm always looking for a friendly distro to recommend to people.
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.
Which model is it? And what's the RAM/VRAM it ships with or can be extended upto?
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.
Maybe it will behave better if you plug in a little HDMI EDID dongle that tells the OS it's a display. Dirty hack maybe, but if it works it works.
Sorry where's the rubble? The OS is pretty thin feature-wise. It's not like certain other OS that literally ship with ads and third-party games.
I'm not a Mac user, but maybe he is talking about Apple Intelligence, as one example :D
We have arrived at the Windows Vista era for Mac OS.
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.
Vista was especially good if you had high-memory-use workloads. Vista 64-bit was miles better than XP x64 Edition.
Looking at you Logic Pro.
Windows is a little worse since there is so much more enshittification to disable, but, yeah, _sigh_.
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. Every winner must walk this path, nothing to do with Apple and that’s why it looks similar to previous winners.
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.
And now the war that we'll get in to as they enforce keeping the cruft and then the tools to remove it.
> Reminds me of all the de-crufting you've always needed to do when you install Windows.
To be like Windows, Apple would have to constantly change the OS so that the workarounds no longer function.
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?
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.
Ever since Snow Leopard it's been downhill
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 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.
> 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.
Sure, but that's not a need. There was never a need to fiddle on your phone while driving.
macos seems weird anyway.
Well, they had some Windows Vista inspiration for the last UI revamp.
I don't understand why you would want to remove well-balanced and relatively small local-inference models that ship with every mac.
Sure, not frontier levels but fine for basic tasks and they are off-the-cloud.
Even if you don't want to personally remove them, it should be easy and front and centre to do so.
It's my disk space, processing power and electricity. Apple shouldn't get to use it as they please
The point is that it downloads a multi-gig model automatically without providing an easy way to reclaim that storage space if you don't intend to use that feature.
This is very much an anti-user behavior. Certainly having models run on-device is preferred when possible, but if you don't want to use the Apple Intelligence this is an anti-feature. Especially on devices with small storage capacities which are impacted the most by this.
Of course it means you will feel compelled to get a new Mac and upgrade your storage next time too. Coincidence.
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.
I can confirm from personal experience that the Neo slaps and your perspective is uninformed.
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.
It's uneconomical.
I've already got my money's worth out of my Neo, so I'm not stressed.
You would have gotten your money's worth out of an Air as well, but it would get support for many more years.
Yeah I've got one of those too...
>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.
You only learn after the fact which features you're not getting though. It's not an informed a choice.
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.
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.
That's why: https://imgur.com/a/1vaUMi5
Let me juggle juggle with the small space I have the way I want.
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 Apple still sells 256 gb base models like the m6 Mac mini
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.
i am looking forward to building safari extensions by typing words
You see I find this interesting, as I don't run any extensions these days, so have no idea what I'd. ask for. What am I missing?
I've recently had a hard time reading black text on a white background due to eye floaters so global dark mode is amazing for me.
You don't use an ad blocker?
I don’t know why pro AI people have such a hard time understanding consent.
Did you consent to every other feature of macOS, the many thousands of them?
This has nothing to do with consent. A product you use is going in a different direction than your personal preference. Nothing new here.
Intentionally eliminating a choice that they used to provide that many people would still like the ability to choose is not a new phenomenon, you're correct. That doesn't make it any less user hostile when it happens though, and I think plenty of people don't think "well plenty of other sucky things happen in similar ways" to be a good reason not to be upset when a new unnecessary sucky thing happens.
I agree, but labeling it a "consent" issue is completely stupid imo.
My instinct is that the use of the word "consent" is getting used a bit more aggressively lately with regards to AI features because of how pervasive they've become despite very often not having much user desire for them. It's certainly possible for someone object to something in a way that's worse than the thing they're unhappy about, but this doesn't seem anywhere close to that level IMO.
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.
Some pro AI people have hard time understanding free will and what makes humans different from walking meat LLMs. Everything else stems from that.
Sibling comments are a sofist parade.
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.
Ow, I've got my personal stalking maniac, such an honor :)
Tell me more about your fantasies about strapped people, darling. Let youself go!
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.
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.
If you don't have a 256 gig mac, you'll never realize how scarce the space is.
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.
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.
maybe its some battery quirk so thats why it was not allowed to always limit charging to 80%
Even with the battery charge limit the device will charge to 100% every so often. To claim that this “didn't seem to do anything” is just Apple Derangement Syndrome. The algorithms were engineered to know more than you about battery chemistry.
You need to charge to full to balance the individual cells in the pack once in a while.
How does it determine what "80%" is ?
I programmed industrial LiFePo4 batteries before and we solved it by monitoring the amount of electricity that went to the cells through the wire and the voltage of the cell blocks. You don't need to charge to 100% to balance. You can charge also to a lower voltage with a special balancer (resistors that reduced incoming electricity). If you have good hardware and a good software, it is possible. So it is just apple's crap charging hardware.
> resistors that reduced incoming electricity
Resistors used like that are notorious for being both large, and getting hot when used. Both things that are tricky to cram into a small handheld device.
You also have to wonder what the point of doing all this faffing is. Mobile phone batteries are optimised for energy density above almost anything else, which comes with tradeoffs, include much more rapid natural degradation overtime that can’t be reduced or limited by gentle charging cycles. A phones battery is basically guaranteed to be unhealthy after 4-5 years regardless of what you do or don’t do.
Just because two batteries have the same basic chemistry (Lithium-ion of example), doesn’t mean their behaviour is the same. There’s a lot of possible customisation and tweaking within that single chemistry envelope.
You can kill a battery much faster than 5 years if you don't treat it right.
My personal experience is that modern devices are far better about battery management, my phones used to wear out much sooner than 5 years back when smartphones were a new concept and Li-Ion was new and fancy tech. So all that "faffing" seems to be doing something useful, because even my quite old and forgotten tablet that I forget to charge seems to be doing quite well.
Good luck balancing lifepo cells in the middle of the charge curve tho
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. Balancing is also important for longevity and requires a trip to the top.
The rest of the time, when things are neither being calibrated nor balanced, then it can stay at no more than 80% -- yeah? 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.
>The common sentiment about this I found online was that the computer knows better
The problem is that neither you nor the computer knows what 80% is without occasionally charging to 100%.
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.
An alternative is to nerf the number.
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 and it's programmed to present a nerfed value.
A non-zero number of folks have un-nerfed it by using different driver electronics.)
Many, many vehicles do this with their gauges.
Plug in an obd reader and just get the raw number
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.
Remember U2 Songs of Innocence album offe^forcibly downloaded on every iTunes library?
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.
In the house that I pay for, I decide who to let in and who not to.
Similarly, I pay for the disk, RAM, compute and network. I think I should say what I want it running.
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.
Bundled hardware+software should be illegal.
It shouldn’t be illegal. You simply shouldn’t buy it if you don’t like it.
If we pay for the machine, I think we have a basic right to decide which AIs go on it and which ones don't.
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.
Is this a joke?
Would you carry 100kg of very nice powerlifting weight plates in your car because they're very nice even though you never use them?
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.
Because Apple sells machines which can not have their disk upgraded and start at just 256 GB.
It's 28GB for me. For the same Mac for two other friends it's 14 and 18GB each. So yeah, if this alone hasn't told you a part of "why", then I suspect you didn't really come here to know the "why". But I will write further, assuming you are not here as representive of "but why won't you just buy a new pair of AirPods instead of trying to repair it" crowd.
- They don't really work. Yes, they are really bad (almost pathetic).
- They take up RAM - somtimes lots of it. RAM matters, more so on a Mac. This matters more if you want to use and try local models (I suspect even a 500MB to 2GB model might work infinitely better than whatever one or more Apple ships). Also because a lot of "Apple" things start and remain started and can take whimsical amount of RAM at any given point (and you have practically no control on it whatsoever).
- And did you by any chance miss that they take anythiing from 10-15GB to 30GB or so.
- Then Apple being Apple it might downlaod another 30GB or more as part of next update and then forget deleteing the old ones (or, again, Apple being Apple, they might not have left a way to delete the old ones - this has higher probability).
- I also don't remember signing up for this (but probably that doesn't make sense for you, ignore this point).
- Did you notice the UI? You clearly switch OFF Siri and it still isn't switched off.
- Then you have to go to Screen Time and then you have to first set it on as classic and disable all kinds AI feature there and then there's word on the street that even that is not enough and you have to go to inidvidual apps and disable every feature there. Even after that one is not sure it's disabled. Or it might get magically reenabled in then next patch/update.
- There are other places where you have to disable it - in notifications, in email… I lost clount.
- In case the second last point didn't hit home, let me try again: there's a global settings option and you turn Siri off (it doesn't turn it off), then there's in Screen Time and there's marking it "Not Allowed" doesn't disable it either).
And I am sure this is not the end of it. (Yes, I am tired of Apple's pretty shite software and other OEMs' shite or almost shite hardware).
In my opinion, AI belongs in the application level, not the operating system level. I hope Apple will revert their decision soon.
Some people just don't want AI, any AI, at all, can you imagine that?
because it is my hard drive and i will never use them
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
This is stuff on the level of O&O ShutUp10. Which is a good tool, but also, a Windows tool for very (back in the day) Windows-specific nonsense.
What's going on at Apple product strategy?
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.
please explain how a chess game is core technology
Not that the are core technologies, more like they use whatever default libraries (Frameworks in Apple parlance) that are already there. Just like no one bothered to remove paint or wordpad in the old days (even with only 20gb of hdd)
Just like no one bothered to remove paint or wordpad in the old days (even with only 20gb of hdd)
Trivial to remove (just delete the files), but also very little in the way of savings --- less than 1MB each.
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.
I don't have my detailed notes from when I did this, but I believe you should be able to copy everything you want to keep to a new filesystem.
> It’s hard to strip it down these days as the OS image and its core, immutable filesystem cannot be edited.
Does disabling SIP, rebooting, making changes, then turning it back on and rebooting again not work anymore?
One has to also `csrutil authenticated-root disable`, and then to get changes to stick use `bless` to create a new snapshot to boot.
But that's it.
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"
Why would you expect Apple X strategy to be different from Microsoft X strategy?
Decades of precedent of them doing stuff differently, I imagine
They had a massive ad campaign about "think different", were you not paying attention? /s
I think the problem isn't the AI, it's the ridiculously small SSDs you can get on Apple products that make one quibble about 12GB in 2026.
It's so hard to manage storage space on mac as well. Every app leaves massive amounts of crap in deep system directories that are hard to find and persist after you delete the app. My 512gb mac is always running out of space so I have to use 3rd party tools to find where all the space went since macos just lumps it in "Applications" or "Documents" with no real way to see anything.
Yo. I feel ya. I am the founder behind the studio that made Diskaroo, which we made for this exact reason. We're giving it away free lifetime for it right now. https://bravely.dev/diskaroo if you're interested.
It feels like so much software was just anticipating storage to keep getting cheaper and processors to keep increasing in performance forever. Now that we have hit a significant road block on that path, we are seeing the big disconnect.
I realized that in 2005(ish) my work station was a fully decked out Dual 2Ghz G5 Powermac that had 8GB of RAM. Yes, that was OBSCENE at the time but it was being used for generating light maps on 3D scenes and we were going to use all the memory we could get and 64bit processors with their memory addressing was a nice to have. But it was 8GB, a size that is still common today.
New laptops and even desktop still come with 8GB some 21 years later, who could have seen that coming? It would be like selling a PC in 2005 with 2MB of RAM.
yes, it's totally bizarre. And RAM used to be a commodity, well sort of prior to the past two years. It definitely didn't drive the bulk of the bill of materials, however manufacturers honed in on it as a way of segmenting the market.
Which models? MacBook Pros start out at 1TB nowadays. Even the MacBook Neo starts at 256GB.
It's also the ridiculous cost of the upgrades. I recently purchased an entire (second hand) PC with a Xeon, 16Gb RAM and 1TB NVMe in it for 5% less than the cost of the 256 to 512Gb upgrade. And 1/3 of the price of a second hand M1 Mini with 256Gb in it.
They are taking the piss.
Both are problems.
So macOS has debloat scripts now too?
Still heard from 2026 despite that: <something something> Linux is only free if your time is free.
The fact that tools like these exist show how bad the AI integration is. It's outdated and does nothing helpful really. There's a ton of other AI providers that offer more powerful features. The AI integration in Google devices is miles ahead of Siri. This has always been the case. iOS and macOS have terrible Siri features. I've been a believer in Apple for a really long time. I've been using Siri even before Apple acquired them. I've used it for long enough and this year has been the final nail in the coffin. I give up. I can't wait for Apple to "finally" make it better. It's not happening.
For years people have been begging Apple to make Siri respond to basic requests, and Siri could not do it. Now the technology that allows them to fix Siri is handed to them on a silver platter, yet they still mess it up.
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.
Fair enough, I mistakenly inferred what your position on this was; I apologize for that
This is objectively false on the 27 OSes.
Stop updating the OS. It gets a tad annoying that not all apps will continue to work, but that's what the web is for.
Sadly not updating the OS is very bad from a security perspective. 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 new things at once.
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.
Ah, good to know. I didn't know about the iOS security updates for devices that can't upgrade
Yeah, this is very clearly the 1-3 years of updates you have to just skip while they figure it out. Like Win11 or the Touch Bar.
Something horrible must have happened, if macOS users are curling shell scripts from the internet to make their desktops more like Linux.
Nope. The only people who notice or care about any of this are those who can't accommodate the storage. Outside that, it all just works better now (especially Siri).
Saying that Siri "works" is peak Apple fanboism.
Also "those who can't accommodate the storage" is funny.
What's that? You didn't pay Apple's 1200% markup on storage, just so you can have enough room for your actual work after the OS fills your disk with a bunch of bloat? What are you, poor?
The new one just works. Do try it.
It damn well better, for using 14gb+ of storage.
>do try it
Thank you, I might. I never have, the launch was such a mess, I've never looked back and fastidiously turn it all off.
What's changed, for you to say it now works? And what do you successfully and regularly do with it?
People with 256GB laptops care when the 27 AI stuff burns up 10-20% of their storage.
So don't install Chrome.
Most people want Chrome for the inevitable site that doesn’t work in Safari.
The problem is Apple intelligence is decent, but not worth 20% of your storage decent.
Chrome downloads a large LLM without warning or permission.
Frankly, the only company attempting to create websites that only work in Chrome is Google.
I ran into another Electron app the other day that also downloads a 400MB or so LLM.
The irony here is that Apple tried to make an AI framework to specifically avoid this, but I think the future will simply be 10 copies of Qwen 0.6B running on my computer.
I figure that people writing Electron apps are less likely to adopt a platform specific framework like CoreAI anyway.
Do people actually use Siri AI on the Mac? Whenever I need something done that needs AI on a mac I just use Claude Code.
I can imagine Siri AI being useful on iOS because of its deep integration to the OS. But for MacOS there’s better tools
> Do people actually use Siri AI on the Mac?
I'll probably use it at some point. I don't have any interest in installing apps from, or paying money to OpenAI or Anthropic.
You most probably end up paying for Apple. I don’t think they would offer unlimited Siri AI as a free tier. Most probably they will tie it to an iCloud+ plan
Sure, but I'm okay paying for Apple (or not getting unlimited usage - I've been perfectly fine with Siri non-AI so far). It's specifically OpenAI and Anthropic that I'm not interested in giving my money to.
(And I pay for iCloud+ already.)
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.
curl|bash is now standard way to install packages on both macOS and Linux. It’s maddening, but it is now.
Meanwhile on Windows we mostly use the store or winget, funny times.
Yeah. I think of Windows as basically “homebrew comes preinstalled”.
Uncomfortable, but true.
GNOME has reached maturity and hasn't changed significantly in years, while Apple is busy destroying macOS.
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.
> I’m not sure how the love for GNOME continues
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.
> looks and feels straight out of 2010
Can you name a UI/UX improvement in desktop design (that KDE doesn't have) since 2010 to warrant this being a negative?
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.
To be honest, I wish the GNOME team completely halted development and exclusively focused on bug fixing for at least a year. For example, Nautilus sometimes leaks memory and get killed by the kernel.
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.
The want some disk space back.
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 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
But the form of incantation is now pervasive.
Their world view that "Apple can do no wrong" is slowly shattering, it seems
Is there a way to do this manually?
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-250012366
Could you maybe look at the script and copy and paste the important parts?
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
I'd love to be able to stop Chrome from auto-updating/installing as well.
This one is easy. Find its updater service plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, delete it, and create a directory with the same name so it won't be able to overwrite it.
Those are often files not directories. In that case I zero out the file (no bytes) then change ownership to root and -w it. Ridiculous you have to jump through these hoops to manage your own machine and Apple doesn’t bother to expose this anywhere.
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
It's not a temporary tool for people who need it.
The alternative is maintaining backwards compatibility forever and then everyone will complain about some weird behaviour that still happens to retain that compatibility.
Keep in mind this is the second time they have switched arches and the second round of complaints of Rosetta removal.
I think they have a lot more reason to keep it around this time. PowerPC was a dead-end and x86 is most definitely sticking around.
Exactly, I remember getting similar replies - though probably on /. then - when the PPC emulator was removed, there are always some people eager to ridicule the idea and portray it as not being feasible. But it is. It is perfectly doable for a company like Apple with a net worth around $4.87 trillion and would probably take less disk space then the AI models their customers now try to remove because they don't need them. As ridiculous as this may sound to the naysayers, I desire very much for an operating system to keep backwards compatibility forever, it can be done and would be very useful for many people.
I didn't want the PPC emulator removed and I don't want the x86 emulator to be removed either. If that makes me a weirdo, so be it.
I’m not saying it’s not feasible. See Windows. The effort that Microsoft put into backwards compatibility was incredible. But it’s also questionable.
Even a good emulator might fix bugs that some piece of software relied on.
It’s certainly a shame if they got rid of Rosetta forever so hopefully it’s still available as an optional download.
Rosetta 2 is going to be removed entirely just like Rosetta has been removed. Complete removal is scheduled for macOS 28, except, oddly, for a few legacy games.
Third switch. 68000 series to PPC to Intel to Apple Silicon.
Now that they have stopped supporting Intel-based Macs, I understand the desire to not have to port new code and features to x86-64 to keep legacy apps happy.
That is why Intel-based Mac App support is going away, but Rosetta 2 as infrastructure will remain - a much smaller footprint of system functionality will be addressable by x86-64 code that they can reasonably maintain going forward.
That's actually better than where I thought we would be now - I thought by M6 they would remove the hardware extensions that allow Rosetta 2 function from Apple Silicon.
Nearly everything is improved and the new Siri is great.
Unless you're not running an M-series chip, then it's not really improving anything
That's 6+ year old hardware then, so even in Apple's world, that's pretty old.
If you're not running an Apple Silicon chip, you can't run macOS 27 at all.
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.
>Not a lot of good reasons to upgrade to 27.
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.
Codex already eats a ridiculous amount of disk, so a 256gb MacMini was getting tight timely.
I need this for my ipad
And don't forget about the 40 gb of background videos
How do we believe this tool? Is it secure?
It’s open source, go find out and report back.
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.
Honestly, I could do without Spotlight too. Just let me turn off the stuff I don’t use
That's not how Apple works. It's the Steve way or the highway!
my system still takes about +50gb, is that normal?
We need macOS 28 Snow Golden Gate
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
> Even my washing powder is ‘AI’.
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.
On top of that, all the startup pitches i see here is just AI marketing tool. Literally the snake that eats itself, Ouroboros
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.
Dails are underrated for sure. Omg i hated my number pad microwave. Need to press like 12 keys… instead of just wacking ONE dial
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:
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
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.
Until next update.
What does it actually do?
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.
finally, thank you!
I need 12 GB back
> Every release is built from its tag by GitHub Actions and carries a build provenance attestation.
Huh cool. They're doing curl | bash properly.
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!)
This should have been a prompt.
Was hoping we'd get Snow Tahoe. Oh well, wake me up when macOS 31 Folsom Prison is out.
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.
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?
Wow. 12gb?! Huge. That’s almost a third of an added worktree’s rust target dir!
Stop the curl | bash insanity.
https://nocurlbash.com/#en
Good message but AI generated text is so grating to read.
there's a homebrew alternative
Which installs via a random 3rd party tap, which honestly isn't much better than yolo curl|bash.
“You wouldn't run a stranger's code without reading it.” Yes I would. We all do it all the time. macOS itself is closed source, and even if it weren't, there’s way too much code to read.
Lol, thinking the exact same thing. No, we don’t read next to 0.0001% of the code we run.
Code from trusted repositories is an entirely different thing compared to running 'wget some_github_repo_shell_script | sh' . That said, the likes of Tailscale are setting a bad example.
The script, and the code the script downloads, both come from the same repo and were written by the same developer.
If you've already decided you trust the author, what's the actual threat here?
I would not trust the author just like that.
But then again, I'm a bit paranoid. At a minimum I would download the script and read it, and if it was too long or not written clearly enough then I would just drop it and find something better.
I think the point is that when a repo contains:
It seems rather pointless for me to thoroughly inspect the install script before I run the program.
You download a dmg and run it blindly? You download an exe and run it blindly. I wish it were in an rpm or deb coming from signed repos, but it's not so here we are
App bundles (what's inside most DMGs) and Windows executables are signed, have been for a long time, and are required to be, by the O/S, in order to execute "normally". Apple uses centralized PKI (the developer's key must be signed by Apple) while Microsoft uses distributed PKI (the developer's key must be signed by a code-signing CA who in turn is approved by Microsoft).
Don’t be obtuse, the intended audience is developers with enterprise credentials sprinkled throughout their environment.
Its a different threat model. You should not curl bash.
Developers with enterprise credentials sprinkled throughout their environment running anything from the Internet deserve what they get.
But I assumed the intended audience are home users with entry level macbooks/minis with 128 GB RAM where this patch actually helps them.
This isn’t really that much of an issue when we have tls tbh.
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…
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.
They all dump env and ship it off so check for any keys you might have had in there if anything was able to send at all.
You curled and executed bash code allegedly from _HBO_?
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.
>I knew better
> I realized the instant I pressed enter
Are these not mutually exclusive?
> 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.
I bet this is the guy on the call who has to correct someone who calls them SSL certs.
Excuse me, they are TLS certs.
Thanks Arialdomartini, as I was saying… we need to renew the SSL Certs
> I bet this is the guy on the call who has to correct someone who calls them 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?"
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.
Fed the source to LLM for analysis?
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.
> curl | bash scripts all define a function and then call it on the last line. This is a non issue in the real world.
Please take a look at this before making any assertions... https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI/blob/main/install.sh
Hey thats not the worst curlbash script i've seen
I think that's missing the forest for trees. The problem with these curl-to-bash approaches is not that you are literally unable to intercept and inspect them with enough effort and planning.
The problem is that:
1. The effort and care needed to test is unnecessarily high. You've got to guard against way more tricks from an interactive source that can see you and choose what it's going to deliver and how.
2. With no "standard" artifact that can be exactly compared, that work cannot be shared.
In contrast, release_1.2.3.zip isn't going to mutate under you and everybody can agree on what its size/hash/bytes ought to be, and if it deviates from that it sets off alarm-bells.
> 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.
> it's a lost cause anyways no?
Consider this analogy: You need to meet a stranger to get their signature on a legal document, and the stranger could be a rapist murderer. Which option sounds better?
1. Meet them in a crowded convention center with cameras.
2. Meet them alone in an abandoned building.
Sure, they could whip out a knife and stab you in either situation, but the difference is not a "lost cause." If they have any rationality, the public place deters them because the risk of being detected and caught is higher.
> I don't see what the zip file adds.
A process based on public single-signature releases means that the author must choose to either release something benign to everyone, or malicious to everyone. Even if the shared artifact has sneaky covert logic to trigger in only some environments, the logic is detectable in everyone's copy.
In contrast, this bad curl-to-bash process means a savvy villain could give a perfect veneer of respectability to the world at large, while sending tailored attacks to a minority of visitors, even a targeted minority. Their risk of detection is way lower. Not only that, but victims who follow the flawed process will lose some of the best clues for figuring out who hacked them later.
> tailor to a minority
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.
> if statement
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."
Moving that if-statement to a hidden remote server is both significant and worse for security.
> 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.
Hold up, if you're going to mutate the metaphor like that, then the nearby crowd becomes other people also getting packages.
I refuse to believe you don't have a clear preference between:
A: You want a standard product. You get a package that might be secretly "personalized" for you by the dodgy sender.
B: You want a standard product. You get a package which you know is identical to 10,000 other packages being given out... Many of which have already been taken to homes, with no reports of explosions or strange devices inside.
_____
The analogy-free basics are:
1. Consistency of behavior is important for good security, and curl-to-bash is bad that way.
2. Shared visibility of what actors do is important for good security, and curl-to-bash is bad that way.
3. Those are important to security because they deter and limit what malicious actors can attempt or get-away with.
> 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, in the common setting where curlbash is used.
`| tee inspect.sh | bash`
Isn't that a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted?
That's what they wanted to do
>> reproduce what ran
there's no way to guarantee that the model won't change the script after processing it...
If I trust it to do this analysis in the first place, it can probably manage the copy+paste?
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).
Avoiding curlbashing is masking a deeper problem.
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 don't see the issue. you can view the script before you run it. shoot, you can feed the script to an LLM and have it do a security check beforehand
I'm on board, but this doesn't sound right:
>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?
this is awesome!!
Does apple not realize there is an SSD crisis happening? Used to love apple (Apple IIc was my first computer). But now? Terrible.
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.
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.
I'd argue that a lot of developers can't determine if an LLM generated command is actually safe or not.
Ah, if only that meant that there'll be less slop in the macOS code itself..
Apple hates developers
They love the ones that buy Apple hardware to develop apps for iDevices, pay the dev subscription and store fees for apps, or simply because they wanted a shiny UNIX and don't consider BSD/Linux OEMs worth their money.
With LLMs, everyone's a developer now. Welcome to the mainstream.
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.
So many crybabies. It’s “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.” levels of disconnect from what the average consumer actually wants
Average consumer wants disk to not be full
The average consumer of Apple products 100% does not care about this, it’s only an “issue” in hyper niche places like here. In the real world the average user doesn’t care or notice or more likely uses Apples Intelligence features.
This whole thread is made up of people living in a bubble.
The bubble is people watching every GB or MB. Regular people run out of space and wonder why their "256GB" disk is already full from much less than that. Ask my wife about her two laptops and phone.
In my opinion, rising storage costs make it even less excusable that opt-out is not even an option.
Yes apple intelligence is pretty bad. https://alma.inc/ aims to be what Apple intelligence should have been by building a new interface to your computer. And certainly, it won't take up much disk space.