We used to respect that credential/consent prompt fatigue resulted in worse security, then the lawyers got their way, engineers / product managers conceded, and now users are punished with useless prompting every 10 seconds.

The only way forward will be for some a-hole product managers to push back on this nonsense.

That was a sentence uttered with the misplaced confidence of a man who had no idea his real troubles were only just beginning.

Yeah, windows is also the king for that.

Almost every update reactivates the shortcut to change locale, even though I've removed it.

And they even added a new shortcut to change locale : Win+space.

So as I'm always juggling between mac and windows, Win+space is sometimes pressed instead of ctrl+space and then all of a sudden my keyboard is switched to another language.

Don't worry, there's a fix ! Modify all the installed language, add your keyboard layout and remove all the others. So now you can also have a an English locale with a non English keyboard layout.

The true reason is, as the recent norwegian report quipped: We love our tech, but it betrays us - that's an abusive relationship.

Consent prompts are a band-aid for users being exploited: They are not fixing the root but covering it with legal painkillers.

But the only true remedy is actually feeling in control of and empowered by your device - a vision that Apple once at least promised, but now has less and less legitimacy of heralding.

This is not accurate. There is a built-in factory reset option on macOS, just like on iOS.

Additionally, I cannot confirm the more subjective ideas - and I've been running Macbooks for almost 20 years, and specifically working with Python both for hobby, for research, professionally, for cybersecurity, etc.

I have an old 2013 laptop that is the "couch machine". It still works adequately. No issues with sleep/wake. Time machine outlasted the external HDD it was running on. I am writing this on an M1 Max, which will be 5 years old this year, and I hope I get 5 more years, it's just that good.

It is offering to install Apple's developer tools package which includes Python. The download is ~900MB, much of which consists of large Swift and C compiler binaries. That's pretty large if you only need Python, but in practice you probably do want the full dev tools because Python packages often compile C extensions when installed.

> Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.

There is no such security feature. Perhaps a TLS issue?

> Another "security" feature requires all apps on Apple computers to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.

You can also do it from System Settings. Or if you are actually building on the same machine, you can avoid the problem as described at the bottom of this page:

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/catalina-executables.htm...

> On some Apple systems, this fails to show any audio devices, "for security reasons".

While the implementation is somewhat janky, there are real and valid security reasons to require consent for using the microphone.

> There is no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.

Not proactive warnings (does any OS do that?), but there are plenty of ways to see how full the disk is, including the newish System Settings -> General -> Storage, which breaks down storage use and offers some ways to save space.

> There is no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.

System Settings -> General -> Erase All Content and Settings.

You can also just go into System Settings, Security and hit Approve.

Personally I prefer it if the software I use has been signed using the certificate of the developer. But it would be nice if Apple if they could lower the annual cost of membership (currently $99).

Unfortunately the major vendors are in a race to the bottom and the alternatives aren’t much better. Linux might be better in some ways, but I expect there will be enough minor frustrations that on net it will be a downgrade, especially considering hardware. Some of it is just needing to learn the right way for the given system - people (perhaps rightly) tolerate needing to learn to use Linux but don’t tolerate needing to learn to use Mac. Obviously the basics should be intuitive, but power user workflows need to be learned on any system - installing yt-dlp is a power user workflow.

I see loads of essentially disinformation about Mac on here, mostly about things that could be solved by Googling (I prefer Kagi) or opening the help documentation.