1. Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
2. mac OS26. I totally agree that this is a total fiasco from a design perspective, and liquid glass is unqualified shit. Still, I see Apple at least somewhat moving in the right direction by getting rid of Alan Dye.
3. Apple had a bug in their age verification protocol. Again, valid point, but Apple needs to follow UK law. I've seen a lot more missives arguing against requiring things like driver's licenses and other government ID, and so it seems like Apple is at least trying to go the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
To emphasize, I'm not apologizing for Apple here. In particular, much has been written about how Apple has lost their way regarding the "it just works" philosophy. But it seems like the author's main beef is against Apple's level of control, and this is just a fundamental difference in Apple's stance that has existed for about 2 decades.
> 1.Gatekeeping. OK, fine, but at the very least this has been Apple's stance for a very long time now (the author talks about faxing credit card details), so it's not like it's something new. If you wanted full unfettered installation rights, Apple was never the company for you. And while I think it's fine to argue against Apple's stance, I find most of the arguments are less than honest about the pros of things like developer verification for the end user.
Apple been tightening that control over time. For a long time on MacOS X you could simply run apps. Then came notarisation, but you could still disable it. Now, even with a certificate, it still shows a dialog. I wish that apps that went through notarisation would simply run like the ones from the app store without a dialog showing.
> 3. (...) the least restrictive route by choosing credit card verification.
But not everyone has a credit card. Those are not something you're born with or required to have or even required to have them issued from the same country you're living in. That is not the least restrictive, that is a very large assumption. What I would have liked to have seen is them providing you with options: "do you want to use credit card verification? National ID? Passport? Credit check? Etc" and then it is up to each user to decide on their risk profile and what they are okay with.
As of now, my only way to verify it is by literally ordering a credit card from my UK bank when I'm pretty happy with my debit cards already.
The Online Safety Act does not require device manufacturers to enforce age "verification" at the OS level. If Apple had not implemented this, it would still be in compliance with UK law. Apple is displaying anticipatory obedience here, which is the opposite of good citizenship.
Two things stand out from this fiasco:
1. Apple, and those who praise them for what they just did, don't appear to have learnt from history. Anticipatory obedience used to be known as "vorauseilender Gehorsam" during a particularly dark period in the history of a country a few hundred miles southeast of the UK. It was one of the factors enabling the darkness.
2. The UK is a small enough market for Apple to treat it as a test bed. Which it probably is in this case, and which means that removal of anonymity aka "OS-level age verification" is coming to a lot more devices in a lot more countries soon. See also the uncanny coincidence of lots of OECD countries pushing for online age verification at the same time.
Author started at System 8. They didn't start locking things down until the iPhone.
> To summarise for yous there are three main issues for me and the last one happened today and is what pushed me through the threshold.
The compounding led to this, not that individual issues existed (and have been a problem) for a while.
Are you sure you're not apologising for Apple?
Full disclosure: I've been in the Apple ecosystem since System 6, worked as an engineer there for 25 years. But I am as frustrated by many of the decisions Apple has made as many people I see posting.
Liquid glass? This too shall pass.
Locked down ecosystem? I imagine the blowback if they unlocked it and people's devices were suddenly being compromised by malware.
I guess I prefer the frying pan to the fire that I feel awaits me if I jump. As I mentioned though, seeing blog posts after the jump will be interesting.
And I’m still able to install any app I want with minimal fuss.
And herein lies the absurdity of the whole legal framework in the first place. Does it apply to tourists? Residents? Citizens? Citizens traveling abroad?
The boiling frog thing is a myth - most frogs realize the water's too hot at some point, and jump out.
All the reporting I’ve seen indicates that he left of his own accord and that Apple was blindsided, indicating that they didn’t even consider getting rid of him.
Alan Dye left of his own volition to Meta. I 100% believe he would still be there if he had not left.
And the UK law doesn't ask for device-level age verification.
I find it infuriating I have to verify that I am older than 18 when my gmail account is 20+ years old.
Him moving to Android will do them no good as Google will be implementing similar controls in it. I suggest they get a Pixel Phone and install Graphene OS.
No they don't. They need to grow balls. They pay hefty tax rates in UK. If they would announce they are leaving UK market in 90 days, I bet you would find enough politicians to change the course of this terrible law.
The only other complaint seems to be liquid glass? It really feels strange because Apple feels on the upswing with their new office and their cheap, repairable mac.
Edge cases like immigrants in a different land are typically unmet for these things. I remember once trying to re-activate my Google Fi SIM from my home in the UK before I returned to the US and getting a strange error message that didn't allude to the region. I got the rep on the line and they said "You're in the US, right?" and I had to bullshit something about "oh I had my VPN on" and then turned it on so I would like I was in the US and it worked then.
Anyway, there's clearly one cause and the rest is just kitchen sink argumentation.
It would appear the UK doesn't:
> Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, praised Apple for the decision, especially since it’s not required to implement age verification for the iOS or its App Store under the region’s Online Safety Act.
-- https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...
That covers the good and the bad. The ugly is the increasing presence of ads in Apple software - Maps being the latest example. Something that's going to push me out of the ecosystem eventually. I'm probably ditching Apple Maps for Google Maps this summer, because if I'm going to use an ad-infested product I at least want to get reliable directions out of it.
The fact that you think American corporation punishing foreign users for their laws is acceptible is sick upon itself.
Once the dust settles, this will be a case study for decades to come. Apple threw their hard-won reputational gains off a cliff for _nothing_.
I have much more of a problem with the terrible window management on the mac and ipad OSs. Not being able to snap and resize windows to the edges of the screen, like every other standard window manager that exists, is insane (I know they added some version of this recently, but unsurprisingly it sucks). And the entire mac OS is starting to feel slow, bloated, and janky. They completely ruined the cmd-space search in their most recent major release. They need to get their house in order.
The reality is that Windows 11 continues to get worse. I was an embedded Linux dev for 15 years, and even I don't really want Linux on my desktop. Apple has better build quality, long support periods, simplified updates, and for the most part just works. My personal computer is just an appliance and a means to an ends, Apple still is the best of many bad choices.
I don't have a Mac but my tablet and phone are both running liquid glass and it's... fine. I lost my favorite Sudoku app (Enjoy Sudoku) when they updated and for me that's the worst thing about it.
I think on forums like this that tend to have a lot of Apple fans and haters, the impact of UI changes is overblown. Normies mostly don't care. They notice the change when it happens and then two days later they have already forgotten what the UI used to be.
Seems underlying features such as kerberos, NFS, auto mount and others are just bit rotting by now and its a matter of time before MacOS becomes Windows 8.
It was very very bad during the beta though
I imagine some executive’s ego was spared by not telling them their idea was bad. Priceless.
I'm told ThinkPads are getting to parity and have primo Linux support, but barring accident, my M3 MBP will probably last me a decade. Another reason I prefer Apple hardware.
1. Battery is better than any other laptop out there
2. Touchpad is better than any other laptop out there. I don't even use a mouse anymore
3. Sound is better than any other laptop out there.
There is no other laptop that comes even close to this hardware.
Or last month? https://support.apple.com/en-us/126347
Or December? https://support.apple.com/en-us/125885
Or November? https://support.apple.com/en-us/125633
Or September? https://support.apple.com/en-us/125327
My dude, I don't know how much more patching you want.
The UK, and Brazil who passed a similar law, 'cheated' by just forcing private companies to figure it out.
Honestly I'd rather have private companies figure it out. Then at least you'll get multiple options, including from privacy-first companies. But that still sucks, and my preference strongly goes towards OS-level Age Indication. Just as effective in practice, 100% private and offline.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-ver...
I really don't like this perfect law enforcement future, but this EU initiative is about the best design one can have.
It will be fun when (not if) the database is leaked.
If the goal really is to just help parents prevent their kids from accessing inappropriate material, that's plenty. Anything else, and you're admitting the real goal is Big Brother style surveillance.
At least on the Brazilian case, it's outright illegal for a private company to implement the thing you are describing. So, if the government doesn't provide the service, there isn't much for them to figure out.
However my Apple ID verified me based on my account age, I didn't need to provide anything.
The UK government proposed that and was met by the usual resistance to it.
I learned quickly that "Find My" was far superior in remote tracking of airtag-equivalents, and switched some of my convertible tags to their network.
I flew out of O'Hare last month, and there were advertisements all over the airport announcing that Illinois id/drivers license import into Apple Wallet, so I did it, and that works.
Supposedly, passports can be imported. I haven't been able to make that work, even after a few hours on the phone with Apple.
I also added a new CTA Ventra card, and I lost my ATM card while out of the country and instantly added a new one to Apple Wallet.
Apple devices allow biometrics to be disabled for unlocking the phone. That is an important requirement for me to use these features.
I would never, ever trust Google with any of these things. Ever.
That being said, if I want to run a torrent client on my phone, I should be able to do so. Apple will never allow that.
If I want a Bourne/POSIX shell, I should be able run one. Apple will never allow that [AFAIK].
There are important reasons that Apple products will never, ever be my primary communication devices.
Why do you trust Apple with them? What guarantees Apple will not do evil?
> If I want a Bourne/POSIX shell, I should be able run one. Apple will never allow that [AFAIK].
I believe you can accomplish the latter (via an emulator) with “ish”, and then use that to accomplish the former (with e.g. rtorrent)
In the UK most people use debit cards instead for most things.
https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/data-and-research/data/card-spe...
Credit card usage is a small fraction of debit card usage. This is very different to the USA where there are more credit card transactions than debit card ones.
(They also accept an ID scan.)
If this means they would need to geofence + start disabling devices to the extent required by law, good. The laws will immediately be repealed.
The whole platform is a smoldering fire at this point, so nothing in the article is particularly surprising. I've hit 10x as many bugs as the user mentioned. Liquid glass (as bad as it is!) barely makes the top 10 daily issues I have with iOS 26. In any other release, it'd be #1.
Maybe "Flood the zone" should be the word of the year for 2026?
UK passed age verification law and people still find a way to blame the US.
https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/apple-introduces-age-verif...
There isn't some American principle that human = credit score. Americans just don't want their government ID required to do basic things.
See discord age verification controversy.
"Age" verification was a wonderful trojan horse that has fooled a lot of people.
> First it attempted to check my Apple Wallet, it failed even though I have five cards in it and am able to use the App Store fine.
> Then it moved onto wanting me to manually add a card to verify myself. It failed with all my five cards. Four were debit cards, and one was a credit card from another country, cause you know I am an immigrant who has accounts still in my own original birth place.
Is it surprising that people blame the company and the culture that fostered it, instead of the country that is trying to "protect itself", regardless of how misdirected that "protect itself" is?
And if I'm being frank, my time with Linux (Debian 13 on an N100 NUC w/ Docker) has really opened my eyes to just how excessive modern compute is, specifically to power increasingly bogged-down operating systems and woefully inefficient software. The N100 sips energy while happily transcoding 4K video streams on Jellyfin, running my IRC server for friends to hop off Discord, reverse proxying my entire home network, letting me stream game nights via Owncast, host some image board shitposts for various friend groups, host my RSS Aggregator, and still yawns with 75% excess capacity left over.
I'll still have a Mac because that's what my family uses (if they want free tech support from me, that is), and I'll still have my Windows gaming PC, but I'm already drafting up cyberdeck plans for my first primary Linux box, with just a CLI to get me by. Realizing I don't actually need ten cores and 32GB of RAM and a hefty GPU to do daily work is pretty damn revelatory - and shows how grotesque mass-market software and OSes have become in the name of marketing cycles and advertising dollars.
30 days later they canceled the ABM company account and deleted all the associated users along with the Apple ID which I used to log into a testing device, which now became a fairly expensive paperweight: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47516266
The sad story is, that I would rather go caveman mode than use MS Windows.
In other words: Apple’s complacency will be left unpunished since there has never been a worse situation for an alternative.
I see none. None at all.
Apple is the new Windows XP for me. It is as crappy as it gets, but compared to any alternative it still leads by a fair margin.
Apple before the glossy crap was the amount of boring beauty, I loved to work with on a daily basis. Decent visuals without any distractions.
Glossy suddenly put me over the edge and I am glad to get a discount for mainly using the devices as business machines.
Otherwise: luxurious rot.
But OT: it makes me realize my Yahoo Mail account is turning 30 this year, because in 1997 Yahoo wanted to compete with Hotmail and I thought "Having a @yahoo.com email, that's a very good nerd badge!". Nowadays the ridicule is deserved, and they've silently lost all my mail from 1990s...
Also curious what Linux distro and desktop you're going to. Flatpak makes it matter a lot less these days, so long as the base stays pretty current.
Change my mmind
So despite the claims in the article, it's not credit card centric.
However, they did not accept my passport as a scannable ID, and so luckily I had a credit card somewhere that I have used recently for a single large purchase otherwise I'd be stuffed, as I don't drive
Your phone, which you own, updated during the night, and now demands you tell it who you are through a credit card, which you may not have, or you're locked out of features. On your phone. This is outrageous.
We can jump ship -- for now -- but it's only a matter of time before these laws cover every kind of Internet access, if they remain unchecked.
Does them quitting Apple mean they're going to stop supporting MacOS users?
Honestly it sounds like Apple is far from lost here, but I'm excited to see updates on how the transition is, if it ever does happen.
They have 5 days to unfuck this or I'm literally rolling out Pixels + Graphene to the family.
Exit plan for the Mac is a Linux desktop.
What "unfucking" looks like though? The law is mandated in the UK. What other way of age verification would work better for them?
For instance, I've had a ton of issues with Airpods Max so I moved over to the Sony WH-1000XM6, and they do a much worse job sharing connections between multiple devices to the point where I have to reset them constantly to get sound to reliably play from both my phone & computer.
Same for moving to macOS to linux - the issues on add up to the point where the papercuts from macOS are still worth it.
Anyway: Not sure why fairphone. While i like the concept it's still an android phone, eos is not much better than lineage. If i had to change today i would go again for a Pixel 8A (or a series 10) and graphene. But if the OP can wait and see, next year we should get replaceable batteries everywhere because EU, and maybe wait and see whatever motorola is cooking for graphene. Or check out the pinephone and go full linux.. i guess, when i'll have some spare cash to throw away..
"curl -LsSf https://acme.tld/install.sh | sh" and "xattr -c" ?
Far from ideal and safe but it's still a very common pattern.
Indeed. I'm honestly impressed that he lasted this long. My first "I'm very displeased moment" was when Java became a second-class citizen on macos. I was a Java dev at that time and had written some non-trivial apps. They weren't native perfect, but they were close enough that my highly-Apple-fan relatives didn't realize they weren't "native" until I told them. The write-once-run-anywhere dream of desktop UI software (without getting into Qt) was there in a very real way for me. I ran it on my windows machine at work, and my mac laptop and linux desktop at home. The hoops at that point were nothing compared to what they are now, and it began souring me.
For me the final straw was when I got the latest macbook pro with the latest mac monitor (all from Apple mind you) and yet there was a horrific bug that about half the time when you plugged in to the monitor, the laptop screen shut off and would never come back on until you did a hard reboot (holding the power button). That was never supposed to be possible since it was Apple hardware/software controlled top to bottom, the original promise of the vertical integration and one of the reasons we accepted the heavy lack of cross-platform compatiblity.
A little before that I used to put my macbook on the nightstand and listen to podcasts at night to fall asleep. I would dim the screen to off and have the volume at low levels. Apple rolled out a software update that suddenly caused the screen to kick on at FULL BRIGHTNESS after about 5 to 10 minutes (when the screensaver would have normally kicked in), while I'm sleeping in a completely dark room. It was so bright that it would wake me up. That bug was there for years, and myabe still is (I replaced it with a Linux laptop).
My user experience on macs was never close to bug-free, and was frankly worse than almost everything else out there. It took me a while to figure that out though.
- Final Cut X. Its first incarnation was a huge slap in the face for features and workflow. They completely cut a large swathe of the rest of Final Cut studio, and knew they were shipping shit with the new pricing.
- The first Unibody Macbook came out. Very little could be upgraded, the keyboard was a leap backward, and all they had for I/O was a half-baked USB3. It's usage for pro video workflows was severely hobbled compared to the last generation.
- Mac OS Lion came out, which was when it started showing signs of user hostility. Power-user features were getting locked down or removed, the app store was being pushed harder, and it was consuming more base resources for the privilege. The tend was clear that advanced users were no longer welcome in Apple land.
These things made me change majors back to computing, and a full return to Linux. I've never regretted that.
Someone make it make sense.
-Accessibility options
-Display & Text Size
-Turn on “Reduce Transparency”
I forgot glass was even a thing as I immediately turned it on day one.
You can't install Google Wallet - it does not work, but also defeats degoogle mindset. There were curve company that people seem to have used in the past, but seems like the company was sold to someone and now it's dead. So I have to use physical card like a boomer.
---
My story is similar, somehow my air managed to update to 26' (maybe I just clicked that stupid notification window button to make it go away). I will keep my opinions on glass to myself.
Facts are: docker broke again, app launcher is whatever the hell it is, firewall with started messing up with my dns blacklists. I know you can somewhat fix it, but nixos/asahi on m2 with hyprland gives me a workflow that is superior. I just won't go back. AeroSpace just can't match.
Then the credit cards... I have my original store country elsewhere. I've then moved a few times and changed banks. Now, apple does not like my card. It won't accept it. That's it. Nothing you can do about that. And I couldn't really change the country because I have had some subscriptions and I had to wait until they expire. Meanwhile, apple killed my apple subscription I lost Music, I lost cloud storage, I lost some backups.
The thing that incredibly pissed me off is that as soon as my apple subscription got cancelled I could not even see my music library in the app. It would just prompt me with "gotta subscribe buddy" screen, which I can't.
And yes, the hardware is very good. I love my m2. But the whole software part is becoming messier and messier and I don't want to deal with it anymore.
(Enjoyed your phrasing here.)
The other issues are more serious, especially macOS 25, but again, how much of that deeply affects the vast majority of actual paying customers who buy Macbooks? As long as Apple learned their lesson and will do another one of those bugfix OS releases they've done before, no long lasting harm done.
Using credit cards for age verification is certainly dumb, but age verification is coming and most people see the need for it. You can disagree that there is a need for it (entirely different discussion), but you must acknowledge the broad support for it at least.
Can't use my expired provisional license to confirm my age.
Can't use my Croatian ID to confirm my age.
Can't use a credit card, because I never have had nor do I ever want to have a credit card.
So I'm fucked.
This problem is everywhere in your products and it’s clear the passion for high quality work is gone from the company.
Apple will not survive at luxury prices and Google level service.
This is the way ID verification is going in the USA and the reasons for it seem clear. A human person is only useful to a corporation if they have money to give the corporation. If you don't have provable money, either through a third party corporate payment service willing to pay for you sometime later (a credit card) or by giving a corporation your login details to your bank account (ie, Plaid), then you're not a human.
It clear what a bot is now: anything that doesn't have provable money.
If you look at it this way: they’re trying to identify somebody, and they don’t want to do a massive amount of work in house. Do you go to a company that verifies identity? Or… you can use credit cards as a proxy for identity. Most of your users already have them.
Credit cards require no additional infrastructure, no additional corporate approval, no additional expenses, and no additional auditing. It’s good enough for the company and who cares if it’s good enough for the users.
Corporate greed is a massive problem, but you’re giving people too much credit to assume they have some kind of grand conspiracy for every decision. That requires far too much intelligence.
Corporate laziness is a far better explanation for this one.
This is spot on. This is the same tactic used by the affiliate marketers back in the day to qualify leads - Free book, just pay for shipping! Or, get this e-book for just $1 (so we can upsell you a $97 product later)
Anyway, he's free to choose whatever, but I have to nitpick here:
1. macOS 26 - a fiasco? Come on. A lot of like the liquid glass. On macOS I hardly notice it, but on iOS is actually beautiful to me. Also a long time macOS user, since 2003 btw. You can always dampen it using accessibility settings.
2. Age verification ? First time I've heard of it. Also on latest iOS. But then I'm also not in the UK.
3. "Interfaces built with AppKit or SwiftUI that rendered perfect, are now overlapping controls and clipping stuff. They have no consistency at all in terms of icons, placement, corners…". I'm all for constructive criticism. But where are you seeing this? I've got 8-9 apps open and none are inconsistent in my view. I'm picky about these things too. Genuinely I'd like to know.
https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/
https://noheger.at/blog/2026/01/11/the-struggle-of-resizing-...
there are a lot more, but I don't have the links handy.
I know, this exists in some form or another, eg Dell, but meh.
And I know Jony Ive / Altman are working on something but Altman, uhg.
Seems to happen a lot with "ragequitting" posts. I feel like I could write "Microsoft Just Lost Me" and it could get to the top.
The laptops seem... crazy enough. And what you get for your buck is even less than with normal PC manufacturers, let alone Apple. You get CPU that is slow for a phone. For 1300 USD.
On the other hand I have a weird urge to buy one and use as a daily.
Anonymity allows one to behave in ways they would not "in public", with your neighbors, or co workers (for the most part). Be that building malware, or kids doing things they should not, and the people and business that take advantage of that.
I don't think the UK law is a good one, but when major companies continuously fail at their social responsibility I understand why people want the government to step in. I don't think the friction apple creates is a great user experience but it is better than the old approach that ended up with systems riddled with malware and spyware because normal users don't think like the folks who built technology.
Could the law have been written better: sure. "More control" over their Childs devices would have been the way. Is there a solution to the friction with apple... maybe but I'm not sure it would be that much of an improvement (its purpose IS to slow you down).
I was never an Apple maximalist to begin with, I just have an iPhone and use a Mac at work because I have to (and will continue to), but I just turned off auto-updates on my iPhone and will never buy a new Apple device.
It’s OK to dislike glass, of course. I’m not saying doubters are wrong. A lot of it, though, feels like piling on to sound like one of the cool kid skeptics.
Edit: wow are people really that tied to their technology? You're fucked if anything worse happens geopolitically than is happening today.
Don't get me wrong, I can't stand surveillance, and I think age verification is virtue signaling and will have very little affect on actual cyber crime. We need a better way to stop online abuse.
But certificates, GateKeeper, app certification, app stores etc. are all supposed to mitigate serious harm from bad actors.
We need to get much better at security in general if we want to have nice things.
Even if avoid installing their apps, take a look at all the third-party data harvesting malware that iOS apps bundle. You'll find you have plenty of stuff installed from them, and even worse actors.
Linux doesn't have any of this developer certification bullshit, and it has (almost) none of these issues.
"I'm done with Apple. I've been a Mac user since since $EARLY_YEAR. I loved using $OLD_APPLE_HARDWARE to work on $VARIOUS_INTERESTING_PROJECTS. I fondly recall $FORMATIVE_APPLE_MEMORY.
But they've gone too far. $NEW_APPLE_ENSHITTIFICATION is the last straw, I can't do this any more. This will be hard because $REASONS. But I'm going to adopt $PLATFORM because it's the right thing to do."
Most of them mention Steve Jobs but this one didn't actually.
(for me it was interop issues around wearables and trackers; I want to use chipolo and a pebble watch and not feel punished every day for going out of the ecosystem)
This is a so generic template that you cannot criticize a post for matching it. It'd be like criticize a story for matching "X happens to Y, leading to Y doing Z which leads to a (happy|unhappy) ending"
The author tried to go along with the age verification system with five different cards and failed five times. For an account that's older than the legal age that would need to be verified in the first place, mind you.
There are many ways to do age verification, most of them bad, but that's why most companies complying with these laws use multiple methods.
Absolving Apple of responsibility gives more than they deserve.
