Did not know that, thanks for the info. But Apple lost me as a customer 10 years ago with their hostile actions. Even if they added back USB-A, I wouldn't go back.
Now when trying to activate the OS by attempting to call the phone number for Microsoft Product Activation, an automated voice response says the following: "Support for product activation has moved online. For the fastest and most convenient way to activate your product, please visit our online product activation portal at aka.ms/aoh"
It does require logging in (to the website) with a Microsoft account, but Microsoft claims:
By logging in with your account, it will not associate the account to the licenses.
From there, it's just a web version of phone activation (you enter your Installation ID and presumably they give you the Confirmation ID). No idea what happens when moving a licence between machines (with phone activation, the automated process would fail due to the existing activation and you'd be handed off to someone in a call center who would generate the Confirmation ID for you).
A lot of core functionality is implemented as bundled plugins (they ship with the IDE, but can receive updates separately). They can also be independently disabled (and older versions used to come with only some enabled and ask you which others you want enabled at first launch).
This trick is something we teach our students when we do 6809 assembly (mainly as a trick to do addition on the index registers). I had no idea it was used as an optimisation in x86.
Tinymist in VS Code does this out of the box (and looks like it can be set up in other editors). That or you can configure it to save out a new PDF automatically on save or as you edit the document and just open it in a PDF viewer that'll reload when the file changes.
The loss of the --no-gatekeeper option isn't that big of a deal. It just removed the com.apple.quarantine xattr from the installed cask (which you can easily do yourself, or just allow the app from System Settings after Gatekeeper blocks it).
The more impactful change is the move to require all casks[0] (not just new ones) to pass Gatekeeper checks (so signed and notarized through the Apple Developer Program)[1][2]. There are a multitude of open-source applications which aren't signed and notarized through the Apple Developer Program (some due to the $99 per year cost, some due to needing to provide a legal identity and having that in the certificate, some who object to needing to do it at all). What this means is that you'll have to install these manually or use a 3rd-party tap (package repository) to install them.
Of course, Apple could solve this by providing a way for open-source projects to sign and notarize their apps without having to pay $99 per year and associate a legal identity. They've already got Xcode Cloud, they could allow use of that to build, sign, and notarize only from the publicly available source.
[0]: These are GUI applications (i.e. .app), where Homebrew downloads the official build of the app. CLI tools are done differently (the Homebrew project builds these from source), and nothing's changing there.
Technically true, but misleading. The macOS kernel won't execute an Apple Silicon binary that doesn't have a signature, but as Apple documents, an ad-hoc signature is enough to meet that requirement. That won't get you past Gatekeeper, but that's no different to how it is with unsigned Intel binaries.
1. Yes. (Either that or they know something we don't about Apple's future plans.)
2. No, as Gatekeeper checks both for a valid signature from an Apple Developer Program certificate as well as notarization.
To clarify, the macOS kernel requires a signature on all Apple Silicon binaries, but this can just be an ad-hoc signature. Ad-hoc signed Apple Silicon applications are treated much the same as unsigned Intel ones.
> i can't even just install and run the docker CLI--docker on Mac requires Desktop and commercial use of Desktop requires a license.
That's not on Apple. Docker needs the Linux kernel (for Linux containers), so it's no different to needing something like Docker Desktop to use Docker on Windows. Yeah, Docker changed the license on Docker Desktop, but there's plenty of alternatives (Podman Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Colima, Apple's own container tool, or just running a Linux VM in Lima).
(I may be wrong here but) under the hood Docker on macOS runs a small Linux VM where all containers live, exactly because containers are basically Linux namespaces on steroids so not portable 1:1 to anywhere.
reply