curious: the bootable 12.1 installer won't boot my 8c last-of-the-x64 rMBP machine after a full internal drive wipe. it insists on internet recovery.
macs become less trustworthy by the day.
astounding to me that the tech press hasn't picked up on the fact that 12.1 is still shipping scaffolding for clientside privacy destruction by scanning your local files.
@m0xee this sort of bug you're mentioning has absolutely nothing to do with what i'm talking about, the same sort of bugs happen all the time on free software systems too. please don't @ me with red herrings
@m0xee i also don't agree with your basic premise having just given them six thousand dollars for their fastest available machine
@sneak I get it, trustworthy ≠ secure. I believe it's a matter of approach in general: less attention to detail = more bugs and inconsistencies. It's all the same in the hardware dept. I had a late 2011 17" MBP, this model came out with faulty GPUs. Apple refused to even acknowledge the problem first, but announced replacement program for this model in 2014 — in three years. Apple is hit or miss nowadays. I respect you having your own opinion though, I don't insist on mine.
@sneak does it mean there is no way to reinstall Mac OS without Internet?
@caliw if you fully wipe the drive (which includes the activation data) this has been true for a while now:
https://sneak.berlin/20201204/on-trusting-macintosh-hardware/
macs need activation (including the last few years of intel macs, they have an iphone6-ish ARM security chip called T2 which handles boot) to run. they do this by receiving an activation from apple, only if the device doesn't have an activation lock ("find my") tied to an apple id.
it prevents reformatting and reinstall on stolen hardware.
@caliw if the device has an activation lock tied to an apple id, when it tries to activate it will notice and prompt for authentication of that apple id before allowing activation, thus preventing reinstall on stolen-but-still-locked devices.
@caliw BUT! apple supports something called DEP which enrolls devices in MDM automatically on install by serial! this amounts to RCE (by design) so corps can autoprovision machines automatically when they are restored.
nothing stopping apple/FBI from using this to install surveillance on your machine during install, which you cannot prevent by eg using verified "same as everyone else" media and doing an offline install, because there are no offline installs.
@sneak wow, thanks for the detailed explanation.
@sneak Trustworthy? When 10.13 came out it permitted root login without password: https://twitter.com/lemiorhan/status/935581020774117381
Man, they've even released the CPU which allows interprocess data exchange, bypassing all the sandboxes.
UI design aside, software-wise Apple's been steadily rolling downhill at least since 10.4