Mac As Appliance

Recently, the Mac rumor mill has suggested that Apple is about to shrink the Mac Mini to the size of an Apple TV. Perfect timing, because it shows exactly how Apple thinks you should use its devices—like an appliance.

Over the past 40 years of the Mac operating system, in its many forms, the goal was to make this thing an appliance for your life. Which was a great start, but ultimately does not account for the users that have other ideas. But I sometimes worry, seeing the directions they take this thing, if Apple is too committed to this goal at the cost of its current user base.

As I wrote recently about the CrowdStrike situation, Apple has spent the past few years hardening its kernel layer of its desktop operating system in favor of having a lot of formerly boot-level functionality live at the user level. In combination with all that, the company has put the onus on the user for what can gradually become hundreds of permission-related settings—settings that I’ve found the operating system sometimes “forgets” at boot. Pretty much every third-party app that does anything more sophisticated than a text editor now requires your direct consent before the app can do anything like connect to your mic, read your disk, or even access your Downloads folder. If an app records your screen or turns on your mic, a tiny orange dot shows up, and getting rid of it is a total pain.

On top of this, MacOS has implemented a feature in recent years called Gatekeeper, which effectively means that you have to give express permission through this menu option to confirm that yes, you want to download this weird app you found on GitHub. For much of this tool’s history, you could work around this by holding the Control button when clicking to bring up the context menu (rather than right-clicking, which doesn’t allow this), but it’s still an inconvenience, if an intentional one.

The problem is, Apple has added so many of these settings and requirements and workarounds at this point that it kind of feels like a full-time job for end users. It gets you away from what you’re actually trying to do with your computer. Unfortunately, the issue is getting worse, not better: Recently, it was revealed that Apple was removing the Control-click loophole for unsigned apps, and additionally, it was adding a weekly approval requirement for apps that record the screen.

An example of one such nag screen. (via St. Clair Software)

For regular people who may not have a million apps open at all times, this is all well and good, but stuff like this just gets in the way of power users, or even longtime regular users, and pisses them off.

I’m not the only one to notice this. At Six Colors, Jason Snell gets a lot of mileage out of pointing out that these changes are comparable to, of all things, Windows Vista, even as he admits that there’s a method to this madness. As he writes:

Here’s Apple’s problem: Apps that track your location, record the contents of your screen, or access your video camera or microphone have the potential to be deeply invasive and violate your privacy in innumerable ways. Since those features are also useful, Apple has built a system of permissions that Apps must request, and then users are prompted to be sure that an app should be granted that kind of access.

You can imagine the scenarios: A domestic abuser installs an app on their partner’s device and grants blanket permission without their knowledge, giving them access to everything they do. Or a scammer convinces a user to install software via social engineering, including clicking exactly the right permissions buttons to grant their software complete control over the user’s system.

One clear way to combat these abuses is to not allow permanent approval but prompt the user later, when they might realize what’s been happening without their knowledge. I get it. It’s a smart approach.

However, the problem is, many people that have been using Mac apps for a long time are smart enough to avoid most of these scams or schemes. Apple appears to be building for the edge cases rather than the daily use cases that have been common for literal decades. And the result is, they just end up frustrating the people who have been using the company’s software forever. Maybe some of these people are power users, sure, but it’s much more likely that they’ve just been using the operating system for 20-plus years.

In a lot of ways, this is a new manifestation of an issue that Apple has slowly crept towards for years. It’s an attempt to try to put the appliance back in the bottle as it builds computing devices for the masses. The presumption that users don’t want to open up their devices, upgrade their RAM, or change their storage has been met at the software end with attempts to make loading persistent apps harder. For a company that is investing so much time into “intelligence” right now, it doesn’t seem to be using much of that intelligence to determine how important a given application actually is for your needs. Apple is doing no work to understand the difference between what on your computer represents an essential tool, and what represents a piece of spyware. It’s just broad-brushing everything in the dumbest way possible.

At some point, the high level of security evolves into a lack of trust of your own users.

And if you’re doing something like recording your screen, you’re likely doing it all the time. If you’re presenting on a Zoom or recording a YouTube video or doing a podcast, you’re just going to start pulling out your hair at some point because of these over-the-top annoyances.

If Apple wants to continue to go down this road of permissions hell, they really need to figure out a way to strike a balance. I might suggest an interface redesign that actually matches how people use these tools, rather than this cumbersome mess of submenus that the company has forced its users into over the past half-decade.

You shouldn’t have to go into an obscure settings menu every time you want to use your computer the way you want to use it.