I've told this story before, but I'll tell it again. Years ago I worked for Apple retail when Bootcamp was a thing and it was "unsupported" and not only was it behind security switches, but you had to go out of your way to download and set it up.
I had a customer come in one morning steaming mad and demanding a refund for her new macbook. She was mad because (to paraphrase) she has been told that she wouldn't have all the problems and crashes her windows machine had and wouldn't have to deal with viruses and a host of other windows specific issues if she used a mac. But after a few weeks she was still having all of the same problems. The more she described the issue, the more it sounded like she'd never even bought a mac, but here she was with a 3 week old macbook in a box. And beyond that, she described having some hardware issues that had been corrected with a firmware update months earlier. The first boot and software update should have corrected all of that.
So I asked her to show me some of what it was doing. She took it out of the box, switched it on and it booted right into windows. And then proceeded to dump a ton of malware popups all over the screen just as she'd said. It turns out, she did indeed buy the macbook 3 weeks earlier, and then gave it to her "computer smart nephew" to setup for her. Well Mr. Nephew apparently decided in his infinite wisdom that is aunt didn't need macOS, she just needed an expensive windows machine. And so he'd downloaded bootcamp, shrunk the macOS partition to the smallest size it could be, and then installed windows and configured the machine to boot into windows by default. She'd never used macOS and didn't even know it was there, and so had never gotten the firmware updates for the hardware, and was of course having all the same problems she had in windows normally, because she was still using windows, only this time without any malware software because "macs don't need Norton".
The end result is I showed the customer what had happened, got them squared away with the mac OS side an asked them to give it a try for a few weeks with a personal guarantee we'd return it if she still didn't like it. She became one of our best customers. But the moral of the story is twofold:
1) Not everyone who uses tech makes the decisions for how that tech is configured
2) "no support" is a good way to ensure that those #1 people hate your product
What a great story.
I wonder at what stage of Idiocracy lore we’re at, to require locked down software to “protect” people from “smart nephews”.
The more I read from you people, the more I get amazed. I can’t believe how somebody would use such anecdotes with serious face against software freedom.
Who's "requiring" anything? Android is there if you want open smart phone computing. iOS is there if you don't. And at a near 50/50 split, that means both are about as close to continuously feature parity as you could hope for. Listening to all arguments over why iOS should open itself up when Android is right there for anyone that wants that sort of freedom feels like listening to a bunch of C programmers bitch about Rust's borrow checker or Java's Garbage Collector. Your "software freedom" goal is already here in the world's most popular smart phone OS and supported on more devices from more vendors than even the most "open" iOS version will ever be. But not everyone wants or needs to write code in C and not everyone wants or needs the sort of "software freedom" that Android is giving.
Ok, it's great that you want that, Apple clearly doesn't want to provide that for you any more than they want to provide you with Intel based macs, watches that run Linux, or touch screen laptops. No one has explained yet why Apple should be legally obligated to provide that for you. There's a lot of hand waving towards Apple having a monopoly on their own products, which is something of a tautology, but notably no one claims they have a smart phone monopoly or a smart phone OS monopoly because that's patently absurd given the sheer magnitude of the non-iphone smartphone market. Nor has anyone explained why they're not satisfied with getting those things from that non-iphone market.
This isn't like the late 90's computer era. Apple doesn't fine BestBuy and AT&T for carrying non-apple smart phones. They don't obligate Samsung and Sony to buy licenses to iOS for every phone they ship, regardless of whether iOS is installed on it. Heck, even though they're bundling the web browser with the OS you can't even reasonably make the argument doing so is giving them a monopoly in the web browser space.
Yes, and? The question asked was "how would a person [wind up with sketchy software installed] if it is behind a security toggle?". The answer I gave was that not every person that uses tech makes the decisions about setting it up, and that officially sanctioned routes imply support costs regardless of any disclaimers. Are you saying that if Apple had an official ability to root the OS that the number of people who wind up with unknowingly rooted would be the exact same as there are now when the only way to do that is with a jailbreak?
I had a customer come in one morning steaming mad and demanding a refund for her new macbook. She was mad because (to paraphrase) she has been told that she wouldn't have all the problems and crashes her windows machine had and wouldn't have to deal with viruses and a host of other windows specific issues if she used a mac. But after a few weeks she was still having all of the same problems. The more she described the issue, the more it sounded like she'd never even bought a mac, but here she was with a 3 week old macbook in a box. And beyond that, she described having some hardware issues that had been corrected with a firmware update months earlier. The first boot and software update should have corrected all of that.
So I asked her to show me some of what it was doing. She took it out of the box, switched it on and it booted right into windows. And then proceeded to dump a ton of malware popups all over the screen just as she'd said. It turns out, she did indeed buy the macbook 3 weeks earlier, and then gave it to her "computer smart nephew" to setup for her. Well Mr. Nephew apparently decided in his infinite wisdom that is aunt didn't need macOS, she just needed an expensive windows machine. And so he'd downloaded bootcamp, shrunk the macOS partition to the smallest size it could be, and then installed windows and configured the machine to boot into windows by default. She'd never used macOS and didn't even know it was there, and so had never gotten the firmware updates for the hardware, and was of course having all the same problems she had in windows normally, because she was still using windows, only this time without any malware software because "macs don't need Norton".
The end result is I showed the customer what had happened, got them squared away with the mac OS side an asked them to give it a try for a few weeks with a personal guarantee we'd return it if she still didn't like it. She became one of our best customers. But the moral of the story is twofold:
1) Not everyone who uses tech makes the decisions for how that tech is configured
2) "no support" is a good way to ensure that those #1 people hate your product