I Said No and Apple Said Yes

Surely he didn't mean "no." He meant "Not Now" at best. Probably more like "ask me later" or "no, but thank you so much and be sure to change my defaults on the next update."

"No." is not an option I've seen in any software in a long time, certainly not from any public company.

This isn’t OK. This is what we get for tolerating Apple’s increased encroachment on our control over our computers. Like making it harder to install apps from outside the app stores, blocking us from deleting their pre-installed apps, forcing apps to be signed to launch, reduced ability to boot off external drives or boot third party operating systems, the list goes on

This is a violation of our privacy and security which they implemented under the pretense of improving security

A 22.28 GB unremovable brick for Apple Intelligence! Obscene.

Another year on Sequoia it is, then.

Never accept a drink from an Apple employee. Companies behave as their employees think, and Apple does not understand, or respect consent.

Remarkable that this was posted here *today* with a link Hacker News, where *nine days ago* Bushell’s assertion “[…] a feature that was phoning home every 15 minutes with personal data” was refuted by someone who’s got a clue: .

The link that I meant to include in my comment was redacted. It’s item?id=49799512 on Hacker News.

Implying Apple employees are rapists because the company does shitty stuff is, to be blunt, absolutely insane. Get fucked.

Meta employees, though...

@Worf No, I will not.

Apple is well past time when every single person who works there needs to be held accountable, and face personal consequences for choosing to remain at the company, given its actions.

Boycotts, and social shunning work, that's why people get so vociferous in demanding to be able to live consequence free lives, when they are contributors to harmful behaviour.

An individual's salary is just as much profiting from crime, as a shareholder's dividends. An individual's choice in taking, or maintaining employment from a company, is a choice to stand by everything that company does.

No one gets to say "my company does evil things, but I'm a good person".

"BuT aPpLe Is DiFfErEnT!"

I get as angry as...well, apparently not anyone...about the state of software these days. But it's probably still useful to draw a distinction between enshittification and sexual assault. I'm not usually sure where the line is, but I'm pretty sure it's right in there somewhere.

Corporations absolutely have no accountability and regularly, purposely disregard what their users want to make number go up.

But that doesn't mean every person that works there is personally responsible for the C-suite's selfish decisions.

If people really stuck to their moral guns like they do e.g. about Musk, nobody would get any work done or buy anything because if you start really investigating the executives at basically every company we require in order to exist, it's gonna start looking pretty ugly.

Is there a website somewhere with a good compilation of all the toggles that we can switch for better privacy? (To at least minimize the problem pending some kind of revolution?)

I have personally decided to stick with MacOS 26 for now, to see if Apple rectifies this and gives us a way to turn off all the AI features. If they don't then I will probably move on to an open source operating system.

I personally don't want to, though, and I hope this gets addressed.

Apple claims they respect user choice and privacy but it has become abundantly clear that they only say this when it doesn't cost them money to say this. When they can make money by doing the opposite they do the opposite and they've become just as soulless and nearly as evil as every other corporation.

At this point slowly migrating off of Apple's stuff is my goal. Linux is my destination, it doesn't have the best user experience but my privacy and the right to decide how my own stuff works is more important than UX personally.

Still going to have to keep a Mac around for work but my personal life is leaving the Apple ecosystem slowly but surely. I also won't recommend Apple products to anyone anymore, I used to be the big Apple booster in my family but the last 5 years have really turned me off of the company.

Not the commenters' finest hour here.

@Benjamin
> Still going to have to keep a Mac around for work but my personal life is leaving the Apple ecosystem slowly but surely. I also won't recommend Apple products to anyone anymore, I used to be the big Apple booster in my family but the last 5 years have really turned me off of the company.

Me too. Apple isn’t the company they used to be. At all. They don’t have a focus on what users and customers want, they have a focus on how they can extract and control as much from us as possible. Why would I recommend that product to somebody?

The only thing that saves Apple right now is they started at such a high point compared to their competitors, which never had that user focus so they have slid even further. But at some point they’re all going to be at the bottom

That’s why I think we need to start building Linux up into what Mac OS seemed to be headed toward

> Not the commenters' finest hour here.

You know, if there ever was a "finest hour" for comments on this wretched hive of scum and villainy, I'd love to know when that was.

>You know, if there ever was a "finest hour" for comments on this wretched hive of scum and villainy, I'd love to know when that was.

I've learned a lot from comments here, but that's true enough. Still, the Cosby comparison is a low point.

Potentially relevant: https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person

Self-actualising little blighters.

Anyway, yes, it really would be nice if apple gave people a choice, not just the feature itself and the space it consumes, but just like the OCSP preference, I suspect the idea of a choice will just be memory-holed and there will come a point where nobody remembers even having a choice. Apple can just tone down the more obnoxious context-menu garbage, and for the most part it will just disappear into the background, where it will measurably improve the lives of the intemperately lazy. Mark my words …

@Visiting It is a common occurrence, that people who personally align with oppressors feel personally attacked when the oppressed name the oppressors' crimes. This is an opportunity for you to examine the root causes of your own reactions, and perhaps learn something about yourself.

Maybe the reason you find the comments distasteful, is because they're correct, and that's making you feel bad about your own consumer loyalties (or you're an Apple employee). The natural reaction in that case is to attack the criticism, to focus on the lack of equivalence of extent (a Cosby victim has an inarguably worse experience, than an Apple victim), rather than structure; these are both abuses of power and consent.

The simple fact is; structurally, Apple's behaviour is that of the date rapist. The reason that Apple's behaviour is wrong, is the same reason Cosby's behaviour is wrong; ignoring consent, from a position of power.

To demand the stripping of metaphor, which provides insights to the structural nature of an abuser's actions, or to reach for tone-policing, is to side with the abuser, by removing the linguistic tools that provide an insight for people who may lack sufficient empathy with the victims to be able to recognise that a crime was committed at all.

i.e. "There's nothing wrong with what Apple does, because you can just go use a different operating system if you don't like it".

Moxon's quote on history not caring why people joined the NAZIs, is just as valid, for structural reasons, for employees of Apple.

"They joined what they joined. They lent their support and their moral approval. And, in so doing, they bound themselves to everything that came after. Who cares any more what particular knot they used in the binding?"

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10119319-historians-have-a-word-for-germans-who-joined-the-nazi

Another great thread; I like it. I'll add something to this:

"Implying Apple employees are rapists"

I don't think anyone said or implied anything like "all Apple employees are rapists". Obviously, they're not. What people are saying is that where you choose to work says something about you, and that the vast majority of people who work at Apple *chose* to work there. They don't have to. They want to.

Now, I personally don't think Apple, as a company, is diminished to the point where I would think particularly poorly of somebody merely for working there. A little bit, sure. Not more than I would for working at any large corporation, though.

But I don't think you can claim your workplace gives no indication of who you are.

If somebody told me they worked at xAI or Tesla or Meta or 37signals or Flock or Palantir (list not exclusive), and I knew that they had any choice in the matter, I would absolutely draw conclusions about them, and not want them anywhere near my family. Both because I would assign a higher probability to them behaving amorally, and also because I do believe that working, healthy societies must attempt to discourage antisocial behavior (see Someone's quote above: "that's why people get so vociferous in demanding to be able to live consequence free lives, when they are contributors to harmful behaviour").

"If people really stuck to their moral guns like they do e.g. about Musk, nobody would get any work done or buy anything because if you start really investigating the executives at basically every company we require in order to exist, it's gonna start looking pretty ugly."

I don't understand what that means. Because every large company in the history of the world has done bad things, we can't single out the worst ones and stop supporting them? Should we just give up and embrace our technocratic dystopian overlords?

@Benjamin
👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻

@Max Oakland
"The only thing that saves Apple right now is they started at such a high point compared to their competitors…"
I think the only thing still saving them is that alternatives are just a few and worse in many regards, for which most still-Apple users matter.

Shame on anyone defending Apple here and tone-policing the well-deserved critiques.

@Someone

Your position is clear. You've now compared Apple to rapists and to the Nazi Party. I think both analogies are vile. And that has nothing to do with defending Apple. If anything, your critique isn't radical enough for me. Read your Adorno. Attack the system that rewards Apple, not the individuals or organization that plays by the system's rules. Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

The problem with your comparisons isn't what it suggests about Apple. It's the way it trivializes genocide and rape. I'm done in this conversation. Have a nice day and good luck with your fight.

@Someone @Plume @freediverx I think we need to distinguish between Apple the company and the mix of employees. There are certainly longstanding people within Apple who joined with the best of intentions and who are still doing their part to make things better for us. That is prosocial, even when they lose internal battles. Apple is not going away any time soon, so shaming the good people into leaving is only going to leave the bad people with more power. I see the ones who stay not as joining a bad regime but as refusing to surrender.

"shaming the good people into leaving is only going to leave the bad people with more power"

I agree that many people stay at Apple with the best intentions, and I agree that this counts for something when judging people for where they choose to work.

But I don't think it makes a real difference for Apple's customers. I don't think it matters much whether these people stay or leave if the system they operate in has become dysfunctional. A good cog can't fix a broken watch; it'll just get chewed up in the movement.

@Plume I think @Visiting actually said it best, attack the system not the people who play by its rules.

The vast majority of people at these corporations have to work somewhere, and they likely are not nearly as troubled as their billionaire overlords.

Complaining about Musk and virtue signaling about not buying a Tesla (for example) isn’t really changing anything.

I don’t have a lot of suggestions for what will because it seems like without an enormous amount of money and power the answer is, not much.

I didn’t realize people here consider Apple so evil now. Surely the vast majority of the people there just want to work on what they consider to be the best platform. It’s just a few nut jobs who live in a different world in California that cause the problems.

@bart It doesn't really matter if they think they are working on what they consider to be the best platform. The company is becoming rather evil and has on more than one occasion directly supported evil. A company like Apple has the kind of money that they should be willing to stand up to Trump, they don't. Instead they give him golden awards, pay for his innaguration, and generally seem quite happy with the trend towards oligarchicy in the US. If you work for Apple I'd say you're part of the problem.

The thing is we don't look back at ordinary Germans from WW2 and say that they were all Nazis, but it was ordinary Germans just going about their lives and doing their jobs that helped the Nazis wage their war. Mass protest just doesn't seem to be something US citizens can do anymore. They are all too comfortable, too dstracted, and too self interested to really organize walkouts anymore. Despite protests the contrary the US is trending towards that level of evil. The US killed hundreds of Venezuelans and kidnapped their president. Evil or not, he was a foreign leader and the precedent the US sets is that if another country doesn't like your leader and they have the capability to do so kidnapping and murdering them is a legitimate tactic. The US set the same precedent again in Iran not months later. Yet another war your government has done nothing to punish those who undertook it.

The US is broken and yet instead of trying to do something about it Apple is one of many companies that seem to be happy to work with and enable the further breaking of the system. Their attacks on installing apps to devices you own, their controlling ways, these all undermine freedom and concentrate power. Their ignoring of user choice and chasing services revenue has already mostly destroyed the company in my eyes.

"The vast majority of people at these corporations have to work somewhere"

Yes, and I'm sure the person cleaning the offices has little choice. Almost everybody else, though, did make an intentional decision to work at Apple.

"Complaining about Musk and virtue signaling about not buying a Tesla (for example) isn’t really changing anything."

First, when you use terms like "virtue signaling" to discredit people who try to make better decisions in their lives, you only discredit yourself. It immediately makes me think that:

1. You don't believe that people genuinely want to make prosocial decisions, which reveals something about how *you* make decisions.

2. You really don't understand other people at all, which makes me dismiss your opinions.

But second, your point is just wrong. Of course not buying a Tesla changes something, and many people not buying a Tesla changes even more.

@Visiting Quit clutching your pearls about the comparisons people are making. You’re obviously doing that in an attempt to discredit their obviously valid points, but what they’re saying is true

I do agree with your point that the *system* is worth critiquing more than Apple. You’re right that the system is what’s rewarding bad behavior that encourages companies (and people) to act badly. We do need to change that, but it takes a lot more work and energy to change a system than it does to change a company.

We have the power to create alternate incentives that counter the systems toxic incentives by complaining about bad corporate behavior. And then leaving or giving them less money. And that’s one reason I’m so vocal about anti-consumer and anti-human actions by corporations. They only get to act this way as long as we consent to it and keep giving them money despite it

And people pointing out the complicity in banal evil by Apple employees are creating another powerful counter incentive: you work for a bad company, you sacrifice your social standing. That’s a great way to encourage people to either leave bad companies or pressure the one they work at to treat people better

Manx: I wish you good luck in your project of convincing people that working for Apple is like being a rapist or being Eichmann. I disagree that your assertion that these comparisons are obviously valid.

I agree with you that it's easier to change a company than to change a system. But (1) changing the company accomplishes very little in the scheme of things; and (2) I don't think you can change the company with these overheated comparisons. But please, prove me wrong.

@Plume there's a difference between making prosocial decisions and the kind of groupthink that's going on today, where people stick to the party line and don't make decisions for themselves, they just do what their herd told them is the popular opinion today. Happens to both sides.

Let's ignore Tesla and say Twitter then. How many times has everyone loudly declared that they're done with Twitter because of him? Well, everday I continue to get dead end links to Twitter.

My only point is that there is a clear disconnect between everyone loudly proclaiming that they have the "correct" opinion online vs what people are actually doing in the real world.

To be clear, those links are dead ends to me because I actually do not use Twitter, and not just because of Elon Musk personally. Yet the tech circles who are the most upset about it to hear them talk, are the same ones that still post there.

Yes, I realize people are trying with Mastodon, but the point of Mastodon seems to be to loudly declare onself to be part of a specific group. It does work better than Twitter because it doesn't actively try to stop me from reading it, but it's a good example of the kind of reaction to a corporate problem that seems more concerned with philosophical issues than practical ones.

> the kind of groupthink that's going on today

Don't make these kinds of vague statements. If you have an actual point, make it.

> everyone loudly proclaiming that they have
> the "correct" opinion online vs what people
> are actually doing in the real world.

I'm not using Twitter "in the real world" or in any world.

>Trawling the web I discovered Apple has hidden settings under “Screen Time” restrictions.

What annoys me about this is I can't even tell if it's a bug, a design issue (as in they couldn't really figure out where else to shove those settings), or a choice they're happy with. Just a few years into the macOS System Settings era, they don't just feel annoying to navigate (as shown by e.g. Snell's mockup of how much nicer a three-pane System Settings app would be); they aren't just so confusingly organized you frequently have to search and then get poor results (quick: where did the settings for turning the display off after a few minutes go? If you guessed "Battery", the apparent successor to "Energy Saver", no, it's "Lock Screen", of course); they also now come with a serving of settings that are buried multiple levels deep and feel like they don't belong.

The file system has also been getting less and less transparent. I gather that the models are stored in /System/Library/AssetsV2/com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF*, which, first of all, what? …and second of all creates multiple levels of indirection that, in early Mac OS X days and _especially_ with System 7 were something Apple software engineers tried to avoid. Why isn't there a /System/Library/FoundationModels/…(various bundles)? What does "mobile" have to do with anything? Why underscores instead of dots? What's with the abbreviation? Why can't I just delete these, and have Siri detect "this feature isn't available" and offer to re-download? Why are we constantly reverse-engineering something Apple could instead document?

Having said all that, I wouldn't equate the obvious consent problem here with rape. Nor do I see, in this context, what makes Apple's choice not to let you (easily) remove the models "evil". I don't think there's a grand "we're gonna make them buy bigger storage next time because they need 20+ Gigs just for the models" conspiracy here. They simply didn't deem it a priority, which sucks, but doesn't deserve some of the strange comparisons in this thread.

Related: https://github.com/omlahore/RemoveMacAI

I don't understand why those models need to be wrapped by "Unified Assets Framework". Sounds overengineered und intransparent to me. What was wrong with NeXT-style bundles?

(Sounds like the above tool uses UAF to cleanly remove the respective assets. Good. Not so good that those APIs are private.)

@Plume kind of thought I did and even gave an example. The reaction to a perceived bias on Twitter was to create Mastodon where the bias is quite explicit. The instances are literally based around a groupthink mentality. If you don’t belong to the declared group they literally don’t want you there, federation or not.

Echo chambers like that, and like Silicon Valley, are what lead to things like the original topic of this post. Everyone in their own little worlds convincing themselves they’re right.

The people in Silicon Valley who make these decisions don’t have to deal with the consequences of them.

You still use terms like "perceived bias" and "groupthink mentality" without saying what you mean.

"there's a difference between making prosocial decisions and the kind of groupthink that's going on today, where people stick to the party line and don't make decisions for themselves, they just do what their herd told them is the popular opinion today"

I have no idea what you're referencing here.

>The reaction to a perceived bias on Twitter was to create Mastodon where the bias is quite explicit.

If your implication here is that Mastodon was created by and is chiefly used by left-wing people, that is historically inaccurate. Pretty broad spectrum, really, including some servers that are banned by other servers for being perceived as far-right.

You're not wrong, though, that a fair amount of people and organizations loudly proclaimed "we're leaving Twitter", only to eventually return. But just as much as they might be asked "why didn't you stick to your guns?", perhaps Twitter's management should as well ask itself "what did we, self-proclaimed free speech defenders, do to cause such an exodus to begin with". (Not that I imagine they care.)

In any case, I imagine Plume's point was that the tech, space, etc. industries offer enough high-salary jobs that working for an employer with certain character traits _is_ a choice, more so than many "what do you want me to do; I have to make ends meet" jobs out there. By that same token, to attempt to somewhat bring that back on-topic, software+hardware engineers who work at Apple have got to be somewhat OK with upper leadership's choices, because they probably _could_ get a job elsewhere.

Apple looks like hypocrites because they made privacy a big part of their brand... I'm not sure about evil though. The way they treat their factory workers deserves more outrage than this. Far as engineers working at Apple go, well if you still buy a Mac and an iPhone and you don't consider yourself evil, I don't think you can call them evil for working on products you're still willing to buy.

> perhaps Twitter's management should as well ask itself "what did we, self-proclaimed free speech defenders, do to cause such an exodus to begin with".

Reinstating Trump's Twitter account? Elon publicly supporting Trump? Social media sucks anyway and is bad for your health. If you got something interesting to say start a blog.

How bad am I going to have it when my phone gets the 27 update?

I don't use AI, nor do I have any need for it.