Comment by latexr
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.
> 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.
...see, I actually had the opposite frustration with SIP. So many people were so hesitant to turn it off, even when they had a clear use case.
This is where the argument looses me. I agree that it's good to protect people from screwing up by accident. But if someone has taken the time to reboot their computer into recovery mode, find the Terminal app, and run a very specific command, that is not an accident! That is a user clearly requesting that the training wheels be removed. And sure, maybe the user was following bad advice, but it wasn't an accident!
People are allowed to do stupid things, that's how we learn. Again, it's great to have guardrails for people who want them, and it's great to have those guardrails on by default for people who don't want to think about them or even know they exist. But deciding which users are savvy enough to be worthy of disabling SIP feels Gatekeepy to me.