I have a question I want to ask a group of smart, knowledgeable people who are grown up, open-minded, and as unbiassed as possible (towards Apple fandom in particular). AskFedora seems about the only one I know of left! I’m therefore very interested to hear people’s views in here, but I was hesitant to post in case it’s not appropriate/permitted. I am sure someone will say or remove it if that’s the case, and I’ll understand of course.
Preamble:
It’s a Mac OSX question. I know there are people in here who have used Mac extensively before moving to Fedora, some still do use it. The opinions of such people has great value for me just due to their membership of this board. I have moved to Fedora for all my personal computing and slowly moving as many family and friends to it as well.
This is a major step forward for me in terms of privacy (thanks so much to so many people on here, hammerheadcorvette, boredsquirrel and many others), but for business purposes I think I have to remain on MacOSX for at least another year or two. I hate that idea, but I also know the huge workload I am undertaking if i move to Fedora for business machine, so I have to make a pretty enormous decision right now, which I’ll get to shortly.
I completely distrust Apple for reasons which are not just rational, but based on fact and personal knowledge/experience. I detest how they collect and handle the data of their often overly-trusting users (thanks to multi million dollar marketing campaigns with just ONE word:
To give at least a brief idea of the reasons (and aside from those discussed by TheHatedOne), here’s just a few of the less contentious ones:
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Their bowing down to CCP demands which are complex but roughly amount to ensuring “all data collected in China is stored on servers in China”, as demanded by the Chinese government where warrants are either not needed at all or are trivial to obtain for any reason, ensuring govt access any time they want for any purposes they want. Link and Link
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Apple’s massive income from Google for various purposes, from pre-installing Google apps like YouTube into phones, to making Google the (very non privacy respecting) default search engine in Safari and who knows what else. ‘Oh but they are just a big business with shareholders…’ - I KNOW! That’s why they should not CLAIM to be unlike all other big businesses! Fess up, say you want more money and will do whatever necessary, and I will respect you again. I won’t use you, but I will respect you at least for your honesty! Link and Link.
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The many launch daemons, telemetry and other junk connections to Apple servers even for services that the user has explicitly turned off (iCloud for example). I battled with this stuff for years, starting with this and later various others like this and this. The number of times my system has shown processes using ‘300%’ of CPU, whilst doing something I didn’t even want it doing, the machine gets hot and wastes power while stopping me working.
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Right to repair/planned obsolescence. On the former, Louis Rossman covered it well. On the latter - Grr. I have several damn good pieces of hardware which are all now just expensive paperweights according to Apple. I remember when it went ‘silicon’. My friend (big apple fan) told me I’d need new machines soon and i really should because bla bla. I remember questioning this (mainly due to poverty more than any technical/preferential reasons!) and was told (by what I thought was a both trusted and knowledgable source) the hardware is so different that the newer OS’s won’t run on the older tech. For the past, hmm, not sure, 5-8 YEARS I beleived that. Until recently finding OCLP, and realising not only that this was BS, but that my beloved and utterly reliable 2012/2013 iMac 27" (i7 with expensive upgrades) indeed CAN run any OSX version, including the latest Sonoma, you just have to ‘bypass the hardware flags set by apple to prevent installation’ (… to force users to buy new hardware). As I said, Grrr.
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About a billion tiny things I noticed but can’t recall the specifics of, over nearly two decades of use of Macs for 8-14 hours a day, 7 days a week. (Bear in mind I used LittleSnitch for a decade of that, and checked pretty much EVERY outgoing connection that I didn’t recognise (not easy for me, I am no dev), it built a very concerning picture over those years, but it’s impossible for me to cite any particular one example from that loooong list of ‘things I spotted’ that were so often:
- Far from necessary for my machine to function properly
- Far from necessary for my own usage needs
- Suspicious or outright invasive from a privacy perspective.
Ok, that’s enough reasons for my distrust. There are more but the examples above are more than sufficient to demonstrate the sheer dishonesty of Apple in my opinion. These days I have more respect for MS and Google and maybe even FB (not that I use any of them), for ONE reason: They at least didn’t build their business on a LIE, fooling their users into a false sense of security. That is perhaps my biggest gripe with Apple, their blatant hypocrisy, something comically referred to by Gervais. But moving on…
My Dilemma:
Thing is, and it’s why I am posting this, I probably CAN switch to Fedora for business, but it will be a big upheaval. I will need to find alternatives for software I use (which isn’t on Linux), or I may need to keep an iMac in the office (possibly offline) for records/files/software. I am basically trying to find out other opinions in here about some of my beliefs (the ones I am not 100% certain of), to see which big leap to take. To stay on mac means buying a newer iMac, to leave means a huge time investment (and possibly a machine although I’d probably use my old powerful imac for Fedora if I switched). So…
My question:
Is it possible to use Apple Mac OSX in 2024, using latest OS’s, whilst preserving privacy?
I know the (brainwashed) Apple-Fanboy answer:
‘Yeah, you can trust Apple, because they say you can.’
I also know the most obvious intelligent answer:
‘Yes, avoid icloud and Apple apps and you are much more private’.
But ‘more private’ is relative, and when it’s up against what I believe is a huge privacy invasion, I’m not convinced it’s enough. But that said, I don’t know much about the newer operating systems. I suspect they are only worse than ever before, Apple never improves on this stuff, and with these new apps, TV, Health and nanny state type crap pre-installed, I assume it’s far worse now. But I don’t know that for sure.
I want full privacy, as close as possible anyway. And the other thing is, 99% of Apple users I have asked about this (over many years) respond with a variety of answers that all push the same general point, that Apple ‘protects’ users from privacy invasive stuff from all companies, EXCEPT Apple themselves. I want protection FROM them!
A brief aside:
For years I encrypted my HDD/SDD using Disk Utility and choosing a very secure password/key which i stored safely in physical form. Then some years back they enforced the process of installing the OS on an unencrypted drive, followed by letting the OS encrypt the data and generate a key. Now this could be one time you can accuse me of ‘paranoia’ but I have always had a sneaky suspicion this could have been done to get keys to people’s drive encryption. I know the counter arguments to this, very well. Ostensibly Apple did this (as the PR’s state) ‘To make it easier for people to use encryption and help people protect their data’. But you know what I think of Apple’s ‘statements’ already! (Especially when they ‘help’ their users get hooked into the Google Ecosystem.)
I actually resisted updating OS’s for YEARS based on this ‘slight suspicion’. But to carry on, I will have to bend over and accept this sort of stuff. Whether it’s nefarious or not, it grates me that I can’t encrypt my own drive, the OS has to do it ‘for me’.
Summary:
I want to SHUT OFF my data pipe to Apple, the tracking, the learning and analysing my stuff (iphotolibraryd, trustd, photoanalysisd and all the other evil ‘d(a)emons’ that ostensibly ‘protect me’ while actually feeding the Apple machine)
Does anyone here think you can use modern MacOSX while reducing the personal data/tracking etc to zero, or anywhere close?
If you’re here then thanks for reading, and thanks even more if you reply!