You can turn it on or off, but if you want to do anything on your own you have to turn it off as your can't sign anything. If they were really giving you what you say they should make signing your own apps as easy as turning it on/off.
This can't be stressed enough. Freedom (indeed "ownership") means that I should be able to run any app I want on my device without having to create an account with Apple. It would be great if I could have both freedom and security, but Apple has decided that is not an option. I have to choose one or the other.
That's literally what I said. There's a checkbox for you to choose freedom inside System Preferences. You, as a device owner, can check that box. Someone with temporary access to your computer cannot.
This is a step forward for most users and not a step backwards for any users. Sure, it would be better to let you enroll your own keys. But as it is you have more options than you have previously, and you as device owner are the only person who can decide between those options - attackers have no more options than they had previously.
With UEFI Secure Boot, you can enroll your own "Machine Owner Key" and use the private part for signing, thus having both, freedom and to a certain degree security (the hardware has firmware, that with high degree of probability won't be signed by your key, so you will have to keep someone else key enrolled too; so it is not perfect either).
Platforms like T2, which allow only on/off, but not key enrollments, are a step back.
I can't argue with the notion that this adds an option for users, and increases the security of users who choose to use the functionality.
I can't help but think that you're suffering from some kind of IT Stockholm Syndrome, however. Characterizing a secure boot option that only allows MacOS to be booted securely, (with no option to enroll your own keys) as "freedom" sounds to me like characterizing the 2002 Iraqi presidential referendum as a "free election".
Apple's agenda isn't aligned with user freedom. There's no place for the word "freedom" in characterizing Apple. They arguably have a user security and privacy agenda, but they have no user freedom agenda.
Without T2: You don't have the option of booting anything securely.
With T2: You can boot macOS securely, but everything else is still insecure.
If Apple had denied the option to disable secure boot, and didn't make any affordances to boot other OSes (albeit insecurely), we would indeed have lost freedom. The way they did it, we gained security within the macOS ecosystem without losing any freedom elsewhere.
I'm not characterizing the presence of the switch as freedom - I'm characterizing the existence of the choice "Do things the old way" as containing as much freedom as you previously had, and pointing out that a) such a choice exists b) the ability to make the choice is in the hands of the owner only.
You can't meaningfully characterize the 2002 Iraqi election as a loss of freedom. You can characterize it as a farce, sure. You can call it evidence that you had no freedom all along. (And if people want to say that the lack of user-enrolled secure boot has been a freedom problem with personal computers since forever, I will certainly agree with them.) But you can't meaningfully say, "We had more freedom before this election, and I want to go back to how things were." So arguments about giving up essential liberty and temporary safety just don't technically make sense. If you don't have essential liberty now, you certainly didn't have it before.
I also think that there will be some users who will choose freely to use macOS because they genuinely believe that's better for their computing freedom, and they're not manifestly wrong in reaching that conclusion (whereas I would be much more skeptical of someone saying "I voted for Saddam because I think he's going to do good things for the country"). As I mentioned there is no competent free software implementation of an OS secure against evil maid attacks, with secure boot and TPM-locked full disk encryption. You can, in theory, fiddle with tpm-tools and cryptsetup and shim (or coreboot?) and build something of your own; I've never seen anyone do it, and I've certainly not seen a distro that provides a one-click option in the installer to do it. macOS on a system with a T2 chip provides this out of the box. Windows with BitLocker does. Chrome OS does. (I suppose Chromium OS does, but doing binary builds of that seems at least as tricky as getting cryptsetup and tpm-tools working.) A user who decides to use a proprietary platform as a tradeoff for knowing that their machine is only running software they've chosen (even though their choices are limited) is not obviously making a mistake.
(I will admit that I have a Chromebook for secure stuff and a normal Debian stable laptop for everyday stuff, and I am considering the purchase of a Mac with a T2 chip, for roughly these reasons. I've wanted to figure out TrouSerS / tpm-tools for years but at this point it's clear I won't get around to it.)
> This is a step forward for most users and not a step backwards for any users.
Maybe. What happens when the check box goes away on a future version of MacOS? If my freedom depends entirely on an obscure checkbox rather than the ability to install my own keys, that seems like a thin reed to me.
That depends on how that option is deployed and how it interacts with the hardware. It is at least possible to deploy a key-based option that Apple could not arbitrarily rescind. It's not possible to do that with a check box in a control panel.
