Apple Just Lost Me

superkuh

>Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score. 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.

ltbarcly3

Apple has gone from a company with a long term vision of the future and their part in it to a quarterly financial report gradient climber. This is what happens to every company when it loses it's founder(s). They have enough money and market influence to be a problem for all of us for the next 30 years or so.

lynndotpy

The space allocated for "Apple has lost their way" has been maxed out for decades, so it bears stressing that this time is different. This Liquid Glass debacle has disillusioned everyone from hardcore Apple fans to normal people who otherwise don't follow tech. 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_.

dgxyz

We just got fucked by this today. My 22 year old daughter doesn't have a driving license or a credit card but does have a passport and it didn't work. She's now got a kids phone. I haven't tried the 20 year old yet who is in the same situation... 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.

dionian

I like liquid glass. I liked it since the first betas i tried. Am i the only one

daedrdev

Any system of age verification will fail to satisfy the writer, because it is fundamentally the UK’s fault by requiring such draconian measures. Credit cards don't work ever time, but the other options of using AI or sending your data to a third company who will resell it are also not great. 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.

everdrive

Another nail in the coffin, but the author fails to realize that the only viable answer here is to move towards relying on your smartphone as little as possible. You can get a fairphone, or whatever, but will anything in the real world (outside of old fashioned websites) actually talk to the thing?

pfraze

Age verification has been put into law across the world over the last year. Apple doesn’t have a choice.

hn_throwaway_99

I found this to be a very odd and strange rant. The author's three issues with Apple are: 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.

txdv

Worst part about liquid glass changes is that it was probably rushed so they could cover for lack of AI features that they promised a year ago

freedomben

> Even though my software is packaged and notarised as per their requirements, they still show my users a dialog box confirming they want to run my app, something they do not for apps installed through their walled garden. This is just friction to punish developers outside their store. I am very tired of it. 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.

stego-tech

This is honestly why I've been getting deeper into Linux and self-hosting since early COVID. As much as I've loved my M1 Pro MBP, Apple's OS decisions - and my career expectation to always be on the latest version of OSes/software to help vet organizational migrations - have basically killed my enthusiasm for their kit. The hardware is phenomenal; the software does not spark joy. 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.

pier25

I don't hate iOS 26 as much as I thought I would but macOS 26 has been a disaster. I'm staying with Sequoia for as long as I can. Hopefully Apple will fix this mess in macOS 27 or 28.

hedora

I wish they'd just show some backbone and refuse to implement age verification. 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?

bronlund

Yeah, it has pretty much all gone to shit.

raincole

> Credit cards are not documents. Many people don’t have them. Apple don’t provide any other way to verify your age because they are a stupid American company with American values in which you’re just as human as your credit score. UK passed age verification law and people still find a way to blame the US.

mayhemducks

Can we all just agree that cyber criminals suck? Especially if you are a legit developer who wants to offer useful apps to the world? 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.

netsharc

Article says his account is 25 years old, but I guess the laws don't care about such metadata. 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...

ApolloFortyNine

Any age verification should come with an OAUTH style government run API. The idea being you verify your ID with the government, and the service that required age verification gets back a true or false for does this user meet this age requirement. That way the amount of data shared is kept to a minimum. The UK, and Brazil who passed a similar law, 'cheated' by just forcing private companies to figure it out.

josefritzishere

I see the arguments are mostly attempts to needle the individual points. But it's clear the writer has reached a personal tipping point; the last straw as it were. Some of us gave up Apple over lesser offenses years ago.