All software should provide something meaningful for anybody to diagnose, if they’re inclined to. It’s particularly bad in the (Apple) mobile ecosystem, including AppleTV.
I have AdGuard Home but one of my spouse’s streaming services wouldn’t work. “There was a problem.” Gee thanks. Eventually figured out that I had to unblock a few hosts so it would work. Only found which ones by googling and finding some other poor soul who fixed it and documented it.
Apple is all about walled-off, locked-down, black box, just-works (when it does) etc. It's supposed to seem like magic. You're not supposed to tinker with magic, it makes it pedestrian. Apple as a brand is a lifestyle, a feeling. The slick, polished brand. Remember "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC"? PC is where you tinker, and there is screws and nuts and bolts and jargon and troubleshooting etc. In Apple land, you just take it to a slick genius bar and they do their magic. Or you just buy a new one.
As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US. You do it to yourself by buying this stuff. It's for people who don't want to spend one second thinking about actual technical issues.
There's a difference between Apple's mobile devices which are an actual walled garden, and Mac OS which (begrudgingly) still lets you install and run pretty much anything. It has a nice terminal, no driver issues, and is not nearly as distracting and annoying as modern Windows (still has more than enough bugs and quirks though). And once update support runs out I can install Linux on it.
iPads are a completely different world and really feel not just restrictive but the whole ecosystem constantly tries to push you towards subscriptions for everything, including the OS which conveniently offers the only sane backup solution that can cover all apps. It incentivises content consumption and giving up control over one's data. Not my cup of tea.
There is a self-regulating loop that Apple users quickly learn not to "draw outside the lines" and just use the thing as designed and intended by Apple. If you use stuff like AdGuard, custom DNS etc, that's tinkerer tier stuff. A good Apple user either watches the ads or pays not to see them.
I haven’t seen a YouTube ad on my machine in years. I download all the videos that I watch and skip through the ads that content creators bake in. I control my dns and network to restrict what can get to my browser and other apps. I have a highly customized Bash environment (I see no reason to switch to zshell when I’ve got Homebrew).
But paint the nerds who like MacOS and the wonderful third-party app ecosystem of developers who care about fit and finish as a bunch of mindless rubes if it makes you feel better.
You're baffled because you appear to be uninformed and/or willfully ignorant. macOS is Unix-based and 90% functionally equivalent to Linux for software development and tinkering purposes. iOS, while less customizable than Android, is overall very good software for a phone. Apple hardware is superior across the board, especially for durability.
Meanwhile, I'm baffled why any techie would voluntarily use an OS that force-enables telemetry and advertising. The fight for privacy and ad-free experiences is hard enough without your OS fundamentally working against you.
Yeah, that stuff is not great by any means either. Still, it's not as bad as Windows's telemetry, and it's not OS-native advertising like Windows, and it can be substantially mitigated with firewall software (call it a bit of tinkering, if you will).
Other than obvious advertising, it is not proven that it is not as bad. Firewall software is often bypassed by design on macos/windows. Further, data is logged so even an external firewall is not foolproof, as the first time you connect to another wifi the data is sent.
It's almost as if they demand the data, and won't be denied it.
As someone who came up in the Slashdot M$ era, if nothing else the PR and communication style of Satya is a masterclass is delivering a message to the public. The dude presents like a Zen master. The message is baffling and the strategy is nonexistent, but people think there’s a new gentle Microsoft.
Somehow angry Europeans (at least in this thread) are running into the embrace of Windows as the defender of the tinkerers. Certainly not in n my bingo card.
Windows is enshittifying too but at least carries some of the pre-walled-gardens mentality of computing, when users expected a bit more agency. I personally use Linux, but I also know it's not practical for average regular people like my family members. I tried. Unfortunately when they run into some problem they demand to get back their windows. It's not like they never have trouble with windows, but they are used to that shape of trouble and don't really see it as unusual or even if they are annoyed by it, they feel like it's just the nature of things like a muddy rainy day every once in a while.
I once tried to put an mp3 on a relative's iPhone. I tried connecting it to our PC, and do it with iTunes, but it turned out I couldn't do it. Or it was some ridiculous contortion performance. I just told my relative that he shouldn't ask me to help with Apple devices. If you want one apple device you have to replace all your infra with apple devices, and learn to live in the walls built by apple and forget about files or any kind of agency independent of your apple overlords.
> As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US. You do it to yourself by buying this stuff. It's for people who don't want to spend one second thinking about actual technical issues.
Why only the US? I'm in Europe and I've switched from Linux to Mac OS as my daily driver when I got tired of waiting for the mythical "linux on the desktop year".
Note that a good part of my career involves arm linuxes for industrial applications so I never actually stopped using linux if i was paid for it.
Mac OS is indeed becoming more and more annoying, but then so is desktop Ubuntu. And Windows is out of the question. I know firsthand, I have a contract for a windows application right now.
If Apple management continues to not take their dried frog pills as prescribed, I will eventually switch back to Linux, but for the desktop I'll probably have to check out some more niche distributions, or at least Debian.
And even then I'll probably keep the macbook pro and switch to Linux only on the desktop machines.
Ubuntu may have issues, but at least the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish. This is effort but we are in a thread discussing the problem of opaque errors and the impossibility of troubleshooting. Yes troubleshooting is tinkering. It is effortful and nerdy and sweaty, not slick and effortless.
> the logs are there and you have freedom to open up the hood and reconfigure things as you wish
I don't know. There's a lot of friction like gnome hiding or removing configuration options, kde becoming a third class citizen, different packaging systems every 2 years... app stores being pushed instead of apt-get install...
The command line and server side stuff is fine of course, I wouldn't dream of running anything but linux for that.
Tried late last year to set up a new linux server with the help of "AI". Unfortunately it couldn't decide what distribution it's talking about in spite of me specifying it in the prompt. And when it got it right it mixed LTS Ubuntu versions.
So... i don't know about "AI". Might have to still write the config files by hand.
People have widely different experiences regarding this. All I can say is that Claude is working great for me for doing drudgery sysadmin stuff but I'm also somewhat experienced in these things and that helps in telling it specifically what I want. I think it depends on what model you tried, but also I know people are tired of being told that it's about the model or skill issue, so I'll just note that this is your experience and I'll just carry on living my own experience which is working well.
Sysadmin as a day job I'm not. Being able to bring up a kernel on a rev 0 arm board doesn't make me an expert in apache configuration :)
And linux on the server works well enough that I decided to replace the home box only after like 10 years, so I'm not even sure what services I need to migrate, and the safe option is to start from a clean slate and redo all the configuration from scratch.
Probably don't remember what questions to ask. Or if i should dump apache and install nginx instead.
> As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US.
Linux, historically, was terrible and then some; lots of us simply want to get on with life and not dork with the OS every day. If you didn't want to use Windows at your day job, that left OS X.
And, for a while, Apple hardware was quite nice. For a remarkably long time, you could get way cheaper high resolution laptop displays than the competition. The trackpads have always been far superior on Apple than Linux. And then the M-series came along and was also quite nice.
However, over time Linux has gotten better so it's now functional as a daily driver and reasonably reliable. And macOS has deteriorated until it's now probably below Linux in terms of reliability.
So, here we are. macOS and Windows do seem to be losing share to Linux, but only Linux cares. At this point, desktop/laptop revenue is dwarfed by everything else at both Microsoft and Apple.
People make decisions based on their own value system. I’m glad to have choices. I can get everything done with the tools we call computers.
When I view the logs on my Apple systems they make sense to me. One does have to understand the logs which implies understanding the system under diagnosis.
> As a European I'm always baffled how Apple got so much market share among the actual techies and power users in the US.
I know exactly how this happened, I was there. It filled a gap for a practical desktop UNIX when none existed.
In the old days, there many flavors of proprietary UNIX, like Solaris, IRIX, HPUX, AIX, et al plus a few open source versions like FreeBSD and early Linux. The early Internet was a purely UNIX world (still mostly is) but UNIX was a fragmented market of dozens of marginally interoperable OS.
During the dotcom boom, Solaris on Sparc became the gold standard for large servers. These are very expensive machines and not particularly user friendly. If you were a dev in those days, you were either using some type of Sparc workstation or FreeBSD or Linux (which wasn’t very good in those days). You wanted your desktop environment to be UNIX-ish but the good + cheap options were limited. Linux became better on the server and started to displace FreeBSD there but was still very limited as a desktop OS. Linux was much worse than Windows NT on the desktop at the time but Windows NT wasn’t UNIX.
MacOS X came along and offered UNIX on the desktop with a far better experience than Linux (or any other UNIX) on the desktop, and much cheaper than a Solaris workstation. It filled a clear gap in the market, and so Silicon Valley moved from a mix of Solaris and Linux desktops for development to MacOS X desktops, which were better in almost every way for the average dev. It was UNIX and it ran normal business applications like Microsoft Office.
MacOS X was a weaker UNIX than many of the other UNIX OS but it offered a desktop that didn’t suck and it was cheap. For someone that had been using Linux or Solaris at the time, which many devs were, it was a massive upgrade.
MacOS still kind of sucks as a UNIX but that’s okay because we don’t use it as a server. Silicon Valley needed a competent UNIX desktop that didn’t cost a fortune and Apple delivered.
Apple is just a remote UNIX system for manipulating the other UNIX systems your code actually runs one.
I think thats about the first era of Apple. They faded in the background in the consumer mind from the mid 90s to the mid 00s. It was the iPod/iPhone/iPad trilogy that brought Apple back to the mainstream. In ~2002 for regular people Apple and Mac had a dusty sound, like Commodore.
> It’s particularly bad in the (Apple) mobile ecosystem
It's been years since I've significantly used Apple software, but when I had to use a Mac at work, or helped friends or family troubleshoot some problem on Mac OS, I had a similar experience. When things don't "just work", it was very difficult to figure out why it didn't work.
I have AdGuard Home but one of my spouse’s streaming services wouldn’t work. “There was a problem.” Gee thanks. Eventually figured out that I had to unblock a few hosts so it would work. Only found which ones by googling and finding some other poor soul who fixed it and documented it.