What you’re allowed to do

John Gruber linked to a piece by Sam Henri Gold entitled “This Is Not the Computer for You”, which both is and isn’t an article about the MacBook Neo. It’s a reflection on how kids get started with computers, and how when he was a kid, “every limitation was just the edge of something I hadn’t figured out yet.” It’s lovely writing, but these few lines struck an unexpected chord of recognition:

The limits you hit on the Neo are resource limits—memory is finite, silicon has a clock speed, processes cost something. You are learning physics. A Chromebook doesn’t teach you that. A Chromebook’s ceiling is made of web browser, and the things you run into are not the edges of computing but the edges of a product category designed to save you from yourself. The kid who tries to run Blender on a Chromebook doesn’t learn that his machine can’t handle it. He learns that Google decided he’s not allowed to. Those are completely different lessons.

What I recognize in this is the most common charge I see against Apple products on places like Hacker News, and from HN-minded people: that the only thing you can do with them is what Apple allows you to do. That they’re all so locked down, you’ll be constantly fighting against arbitrary restrictions.

Yet, I’ve seen few good responses to the challenge, “What can’t you do on a Mac that’s impossible because of arbitrary Apple-imposed restrictions?” If someone responds at all, they often respond with something that is possible and simply isn’t as easy to do as they’d like, or can’t be done in the way they’re accustomed to. The rest mostly fall into three buckets: UI preferences (for instance, “no focus follows mouse”); limitations that aren’t deal-breakers for non-Apple products (non-user-replaceable batteries, anemic gaming performance); fact-free insistence that macOS either will be or already is “just as locked down” as iOS is. The most valid criticism is that Apple is ruthless than other companies in cutting backward compatibility; I have one remaining 32-bit Intel Mac application that I wish I could still run.

What Gold’s article made me reflect on is that, in a quarter-century of owning Macs, I’ve never felt “arbitrarily restricted” from doing anything meaningful. I have a plethora of scripting systems and utilities that hook into the OS and applications at deep levels. I can install tens of thousands of Unix apps via Homebrew. Sure, the tightening of various security models eliminated Unsanity’s Haxies, but losing those weren’t dealbreakers.

As for the iPhone: of the Android users I know, few have ever installed an application from anywhere other than the Google Play Store. I doubt many others regularly do things they couldn’t do on an iPhone, even when they think they are. There are definitely areas where Android is ahead for “normal” users, like pairing with smart accessories that aren’t made by the phone manufacturer. Or as a friend who went into a rant about this some time ago would point out, Bluetooth file transfers. (Most iPhone users would likely have the same response to that I did: “they don’t support floppy disks, either; what year is this again?”) But in practice, I suspect most acquaintances of mine who specifically chose an Android phone because “it’s more open”—because of vibes—would have been just as happy with an iPhone. And bluntly, nobody should choose an Android tablet over an iPad unless they have a very specific need, like running an app that simply doesn’t and can’t exist on iOS, or because they want an e-ink display. (I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a Boox and trying to install Emacs on it to get a nerdy “writing deck,” but it sounds like more of a capital-P Project than I want to take on.)

It does feel like I face an ever-increasing amount of restrictions in my computing life, but with few exceptions, they don’t come from Cupertino. They’re imposed by moving not just services but applications to subscription-based models, and by rising digital surveillance. It’s hard to simply own your media and your software now, to browse the web without suspecting all your movements are being harvested to give to marketers, to data brokers, to ICE. While I trust Linux distributions to be at least as privacy-respecting as Apple, I certainly wouldn’t extend that trust to Windows or Android—and if you’re browsing the web with Chrome and using Google web services, it doesn’t matter which OS you’re using.

The MacBook Neo isn’t the computer for me, but it may well be the best first computer for Sam Henri Gold’s imagined child. Maybe they will become a developer, or a designer, or a filmmaker. But we need them to also become a digital rights activist. It’s not the Mac that will box them in⁠—it’s the rest of the tech world that’s made that their business model.