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MacOS Catalina

The OS is increasingly about services and pairing. I have everything I can find related to iCloud turned off, and Spotlight is set to bare minimum (doesn't require internet search). I also access .Me mail with a browser. The number of in/outbound services requesting access through Littlesnitch is obscene, and most of it related to commerce. And I don't use iTunes or the App store.

While you can't find out anything of substance about these services, I'm pretty sure touristd (supposedly for your 'new to mac' experience) and helpd, and several others, don't require repeated internet access. And I can still trigger outbound access requests through Spotlight with all of that set to 'no'. Mail? I gave up after never getting smart mailboxes to function correctly -- they would routinely hide messages from views that weren't spam on two different macs. What's pitiful is those smart boxes were constructed using only date parameters.
 
I just got hold of an old mid-2011 27” iMac for my Daughter’s school use - I’m not Apple Savvy outside of iPhones/iPads - machine had an admin account i didn’t know, so I simply blatted Catalina .2 onto it without knowing about any issues...

Seems OK - processor ran away with itself sometimes during setup of O365 for each of my daughters, but fixed with a shutdown and restart. Integration with their iDevices is a very nice touch, and they all now have their own accounts linking to them. Outside of Office and Chrome (Safari is rubbish - tab descriptions can’t be read easily!), nothing else installed so far :)
 
Well that's good news for you tony!

His macbook is brand new out of a box with one email account. And at some point the main window disappears. In fairness it does not happen on mine either. But it does go to show that in this respect macs don't 'just work', they 'just work for most'

Well windows 'just works for most' as well.

I am pleased the keyboard thing is sorted, its repairability score is still shocking, but my wife needs a new laptop and mac laptops are otherwise good in my opinion.
 
Marky-Mark said:
The OS is increasingly about services and pairing. I have everything I can find related to iCloud turned off, and Spotlight is set to bare minimum (doesn't require internet search). I also access .Me mail with a browser. The number of in/outbound services requesting access through Littlesnitch is obscene, and most of it related to commerce. And I don't use iTunes or the App store.

While you can't find out anything of substance about these services, I'm pretty sure touristd (supposedly for your 'new to mac' experience) and helpd, and several others, don't require repeated internet access. And I can still trigger outbound access requests through Spotlight with all of that set to 'no'. Mail? I gave up after never getting smart mailboxes to function correctly -- they would routinely hide messages from views that weren't spam on two different macs. What's pitiful is those smart boxes were constructed using only date parameters.
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There does come a stage where one can look a little bit tin foil hatty.
 
Yeah, I suppose. But I just can't bring myself to ignore Apple's persistent BS pertaining to its HW issues (video a few posts back and many others like it) and conclude that sort of blatantly anti-consumer stance just can't possibly exist with user data because Jobby-Jobs or some_shit.
 
Marky-Mark said:
Yeah, I suppose. But I just can't bring myself to ignore Apple's persistent BS pertaining to its HW issues (video a few posts back and many others like it) and conclude that sort of blatantly anti-consumer stance just can't possibly exist with user data because Jobby-Jobs or some_shit.
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There is to my knowledge no evidence of Apple harvesting or reselling personal data, unlike say GMail, Hotmail or whatever where it is actually the price of usage. If I lived in a police state I would certainly be far happier owning an iPhone than an Android mobile along with an Apple email account etc. Their security and encryption so far seems legitimate (the odd root access blunder not withstanding) and I see no evidence yet of them breaching what is after all a primary selling point of the platform.
 
Tony L said:
There is to my knowledge no evidence of Apple harvesting or reselling personal data, unlike say GMail, Hotmail or whatever where it is actually the price of usage. If I lived in a police state I would certainly be far happier owning an iPhone than an Android mobile along with an Apple email account etc. Their security and encryption so far seems legitimate (the odd root access blunder not withstanding) and I see no evidence yet of them breaching what is after all a primary selling point of the platform.
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If they don't harvest data then how did they get it and what do they do with it? What part of no longer paying for OS X upgrades but accepting a terse AF TOS to use the OS is not a price? I guess we'd have to turn the TOS over to a lawyer, never mind reading it!

And how does something seem legitimate if you don't know what the hell it is?

But yeah, absence of evidence and reversed and all like that. Again, I don't know how one thinks their thought process critical when the object is revealed over and again to be unworthy of trust in one business sector (HW) but think it unimaginable they'll act that way in the other. It defies common sense. Mine, anyway.

edit: you should know pretty well how TOS, or AUP in your case, works. Someone winds up with ultimate power of discretion whether to enforce it or not. It's just as easy for an Apple lawyer to massage that document as it is for you to massage yours. It provides the user Foo -- it's all for the owner. But you'd have me believe in their case this TOS protects me. You have to laugh at that it's so logically ass backwards.
 
Marky-Mark said:
If they don't harvest data then how did they get it and what do they do with it? What part of no longer paying for OS X upgrades but accepting a multi-page TOS to use the OS is not a price?
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To my understanding the price for the OS has always been factored into the hardware, which is obviously a lot more expensive than the competition. I have no issue with that, I can afford it and view it as a reasonable business expense. I’d also argue that I knowingly store things like my email on Apple’s server rather than say Google’s, Microsoft’s or my ISP’s as I’ve never once received any spam or seen any evidence whatsoever of it having been tapped into.

Can I 100% trust Apple? No, of course not, but given the alternate options the only thing I’d trust more is to run my own email server on my own server. I do have that option, but don’t use it as I actually trust Apple’s security systems far more than my somewhat outdated IT skills! I end up just redirecting my various pinkfishmedia.net email addresses to my Apple account as it makes life a lot easier and to be honest I’m remarkably boring and self-sufficient to the extent no one would want to data-mine me anyway!
 
chartz said:
What OS do you use Mark? Linux?
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Both of them. But here's the thing - I get where that's coming from, I really do. But what I don't think you understand is that one doesn't have to bury their head up something's ass to enjoy it. I don't have to evangelize Apple to use the stuff. Unless that's part of the TOS now.
 
Tony L said:
To my understanding the price for the OS has always been factored into the hardware, which is obviously a lot more expensive than the competition. I have no issue with that, I can afford it and view it as a reasonable business expense. I’d also argue that I knowingly store things like my email on Apple’s server rather than say Google’s, Microsoft’s or my ISP’s as I’ve never once received any spam or seen any evidence whatsoever of it having been tapped into.

Can I 100% trust Apple? No, of course not, but given the alternate options the only thing I’d trust more is to run my own email server on my own server. I do have that option, but don’t use it as I actually trust Apple’s security systems far more than my somewhat outdated IT skills! I end up just redirecting my various pinkfishmedia.net email addresses to my Apple account as it makes life a lot easier and to be honest I’m remarkably boring and self-sufficient to the extent no one would want to data-mine me anyway!
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So all those $80 upgrades from Panther upwards - until the iPhone took off - were pure gravy? Nice work if you can get it! I don't want to seem any more cynical than I already do, I'm sure I'm Mr. TinFoil Cynicism at this point, so ... whatever is cool. Not being flippant, but there's really no axe to grind here. I happen to think Apple no better than any of the other tech giants you've mentioned - so difference of opinion is all.
 
Marky-Mark said:
So all those $80 upgrades from Panther upwards - until the iPhone took off - were pure gravy? Nice work if you can get it! I don't want to seem any more cynical than I already do, I'm sure I'm Mr. TinFoil Cynicism at this point, so ... whatever is cool. Not being flippant, but there's really no axe to grind here. I happen to think Apple no better than any of the other tech giants you've mentioned - so difference of opinion is all.
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Explain to me with evidence that Apple are harvesting personal data and utilising it in any way the end user might object to and I’ll very happily agree with you. All I can say at this point I see no evidence of that, nor any willing collusion with state authorities etc. I have serious scepticism regarding Apple’s direction of travel (they have certainly lost me as a laptop customer), but no tinfoil hat as yet. Obviously if Apple are data-mining to the degree you imply they’ll send me one...
 
chartz said:
Agreed. I too use several OS’s but I keep preferring the Mac UI and general experience.
I also work as an admin on a Windows 2012 server. Basically a simplified W10 !
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That's me as well. I wasn't a big fan of early Macs but I really liked 10x soon after it was introduced. There was a Linux window manager I used for its slight similarity, AfterStep, that was modeled after Nextstep. That seems like a long time ago now!
 
Tony L said:
Explain to me with evidence that Apple are harvesting personal data and utilising it in any way the end user might object to and I’ll very happily agree with you. All I can say at this point I see no evidence of that, nor any willing collusion with state authorities etc. I have serious scepticism regarding Apple’s direction of travel (they have certainly lost me as a laptop customer), but no tinfoil hat as yet. Obviously if Apple are data-mining to the degree you imply they’ll send me one...
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If we're to believe them, and that the data they harvest is encrypted with a random identifier to protect identity, then we can't really know, can we? We have to take their word for it. I assume most all of it serves their purposes anyway, so no real reason (yet) to monetize it by farming it out for sale. I was just looking for a link that goes into this but couldn't find it. I did find this one, but it's not apple directly per se, but a condition of the app store that's caused some concern.
 
I think you are somewhat off bat mark to be honest. I don't know how you are interpreting icloud data as commercial. Apple have been a disappointment these past few years but they have delivered a strong policy on privacy. When I had a note 9, pi hole told me it had 70% more blocks than anything else on the network, so that pretty much should be ruling out android for you if you are so upset with apple.

Oh and dont even look at windows :)
 
Marky-Mark said:
I did find this one, but it's not apple directly per se, but a condition of the app store that's caused some concern.
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That was rather poorly researched IMHO, the article fails to third-party apps from Apple, and obviously every ‘free’ app is going to have a price somewhere. I would sincerely hope a clean iPhone install with just the Apple basics on it would do nothing more than update software, enabled cloud services (mail, calendar, contacts, notes, photos etc) with whatever settings the user had enabled. Obviously location services too assuming the Maps, Notes or other apps that use it were active.

As soon as you install things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Chrome etc obviously all bets are way off. As with any viable Internet service they need to generate revenue, and as ever if you aren’t actually paying money (as of course you are to Apple) then you are the product, e.g. I honestly regard Amazon’s Alexa etc as an always-enabled home bugging device! There is very good reason it cost £50 and an iPhone £1000 despite both containing cutting edge technology! I certainly view a fair chunk of that £1k as paying for privacy, which I realise as a website owner is an exceptionally unpopular viewpoint as next to no one is prepared to pay a realistic fee to use a website (hence pfm using Google ads etc).
 
I for one am absent of any social network. I don’t miss them, I think. I’m the only member of my family that refuses to give in. My 3 kids are on various social networks and so is my other half.
 
Tony L said:
That was rather poorly researched IMHO, the article fails to third-party apps from Apple, and obviously every ‘free’ app is going to have a price somewhere. I would sincerely hope a clean iPhone install with just the Apple basics on it would do nothing more than update software, enabled cloud services (mail, calendar, contacts, notes, photos etc) with whatever settings the user had enabled. Obviously location services too assuming the Maps, Notes or other apps that use it were active.

As soon as you install things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Chrome etc obviously all bets are way off. As with any viable Internet service they need to generate revenue, and as ever if you aren’t actually paying money (as of course you are to Apple) then you are the product, e.g. I honestly regard Amazon’s Alexa etc as an always-enabled home bugging device! There is very good reason it cost £50 and an iPhone £1000 despite both containing cutting edge technology! I certainly view a fair chunk of that £1k as paying for privacy, which I realise as a website owner is an exceptionally unpopular viewpoint as next to no one is prepared to pay a realistic fee to use a website (hence pfm using Google ads etc).
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Ok, I found the link I was looking for, which addresses your concerns about the first link I posted -

https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...les-hypocritical-defense-data-privacy/581680/

But I don't own an iPhone, any smart phone, and if you look back, my complaint isn't about smart phones but rather turning Mac OS X into a facsimile of one. Which is to say data concerns currently relegated to the phone are soon, or already are, to be on the desktop. I'm not a fan of it.
 
In a perfect world I’d like my OS to warn me before purchase that an application is incompatible with my hardware, and then give me the option to download a previous version that is.

That’s the kind of user friendly I’d get enthusiastic about.
 
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