Comment by Wowfunhappy
Comment by Wowfunhappy 2 days ago
(I know I already replied in a different comment, but just thinking about this more.)
> Both can also be true of your elderly relative, or your partner, or your cousin, or your friend who doesn’t want to fiddle with the damn machine, they just want to get their shit done without having to worry about screwing up anything. Your other friend will want the freedom to do everything and ask you for help.
...you know, this is also why, as much as I love the hackability of Mavericks, I also kind of liked the way Apple initially implemented System Integrity Protection in El Capitan.
It was easy to turn off! Just boot into recovery mode, open the Terminal, type in a short command, and boom, SIP will never bother you again for the entire life of that computer! The process wasn't onerous, or even difficult as long as you knew how to open a Terminal in recovery mode, or were willing to learn. And if you couldn't do those things, well, you probably shouldn't turn off SIP!
Where I get annoyed is with the signed system volume stuff, because that consistently gets in your way! It is impossible for any type of user to "unlock" modern macOS.
Although then again, even going back to the original SIP without SSV... well, we did already have a system for this before SIP, didn't we? It was called UNIX permissions! If you didn't know what you're doing, or didn't want to learn, why were you using an administrator account? Why did your elderly relative ever have superuser privileges in the first place?
...the answer is kind of obvious, actually. Administrator accounts are the default, and even if you went out of your way to avoid one, you'd be unable to, for example, install Photoshop.
I wish that is the problem Apple had solved! Instead of introducing an entirely new layer on top of the UNIX security model, make non-admin accounts the default setting for new users, and then make those accounts a tad more capable (and lean on Adobe to stop being awful).
There is also another layer: when SIPS was introduced, there were tons of articles and videos teaching people to turn it off when they shouldn’t. This ranged from uninformed social media “developers” who confidently spewed dangerous bad advice, to outright bad actors trying to compromise your machine. Non-savvy users could still break their own systems by disabling these features easily.
But largely I agree with you. I wish Apple had taken longer to fully develop a robust solution from the ground up instead of the status quo of piling on year after year to a semi-broken system.