Unpopular opinion, but if I wanted multiple app stores (and all the associated benefits and risks) then I would have opted for an Android.

The walled garden approach works for me, and I don’t want to be inconvenienced and my data put at risk because a particular, necessary app is only available through a 3rd party platform.

Now, Apple being forced to reduce the % of app sales down from 30% to a more reasonable number I am all for.

and also introducing hardware backdoors, courtesy of Going Dark

Apple "opinion" -> discarded.

It's the "Apple Way"

As much as I dig at Apple, this is a fair observation. However I will say that I have Android and have never actually used a 3rd party app store or felt the need to.

Mac is only a safe platform due to obscurity.

Apple has always said this about their users. Too stupid to allow choices outside of a few curated options.

I choose the highway.

I want to hard agree with Apple that people are, in fact, too stupid to choose their own apps, but not following Apple's greedy logic.

Look at the top apps and sites people use. The tech billionaires. It's stupid as hell

Same. I agree that people are too stupid to know what apps they should use. But that also includes those using some of apples closed down, limited apps and features haha

To be fair that's not really true. Gatekeeper is deeply integrated into the OS and is extremely strict.

As opposed to windows, macOS will effectively refuse to run any software that is not signed and notarized by Apple themselves.

I'm not a fan of this behaviour but that's the way it is.

If Apple cashes in less than 30% next iPhone will be like:

Sorry, we can’t include a box OR wire for savings the wellbeing of the environment

I use F-droid to get my open source apps. Much more trustworthy than Google play. It's my first stop for anything I'm looking for.

The EU like any large government is filled with people of varying quality. Some of them are absolutely amazing at their jobs and some of them can barely operate at light switches.

Normally whenever some dumb tech related regulation comes in you usually find it's being pushed by the idiots. You can usually tell by reading the text of the legislation and by the end of it you will have come up with about 300 problems.

A good example of this is reading the Tracking Cookies legislation (bad) and the GDPR legislation (good), the difference in the size of the text of the bill is visually apparent.

As opposed to windows, macOS will effectively refuse to run any software that is not signed and notarized by Apple themselves.

You can put Windows in strict mode but it makes the computer virtually unusable. The other thing been is it there are techniques that attackers can use to bypass these checks thus making the signatures irrelevant anyway.

You can also use an immutable Linux distro (SteamOS being the most popular) and install software with flatpak, which is sandboxed using bubblewrap.

Yeah, but I still feel like the majority of people are stupid. That's kind of how apple got such a huge market share to begin with. People just happily locked themselves in to a closed garden with shit for options.

I’m pretty sure that can be turned off in security stings.

If not, you can hold down control or command when launching the so the first time to have the option to run the software anyway.

Is there a way to send and receive SMS and send/receive phone calls through a computer? Like if I wanted to ditch a phone for a cyber deck could I? And just use like a mobile hotspot for Internet?