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macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

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2603 points mattsolle | 5 comments | 12 Nov 20 21:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.865s | source
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elmo2you ◴[12 Nov 20 22:26 UTC] No.25076037[source]▶
Sincerely and without any intention to troll or be sarcastic: I'm puzzled that people are willing buy a computer/OS where (apparently) software can/will fail to launch if some central company server goes down. Maybe I'm just getting this wrong, because I can honestly not quite wrap my head around this. This is such a big no-go, from a systems design point of view.

Even beyond unintentional glitches at Apple, just imagine what this could mean when traffic to this infra is disrupted intentionally (e.g. to any "unfavorable" country). That sounds like a really serious cyber attack vector to me. Equally dangerous if infra inside the USA gets compromised, if that is going to make Apple computers effectively inoperable. Not sure how Apple will shield itself from legal liability in such an event, if things are intentionally designed this way. I seriously doubt that a cleverly crafted TOS/EULA will do it, for the damage might easily go way beyond to just users in this case.

Again, maybe (and in fact: hopefully) I'm just getting this all wrong. If not, I might know a country or two where this could even warrant a full ban on the sale of Apple computers, if there is no local/national instance of this (apparently crucial) infrastructure operating in that country itself, merely on the argument of national security (and in this case a very valid one, for a change).

All in all, this appears to be a design fuck-up of monumental proportions. One that might very well deserve to have serious legal ramifications for Apple.

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1. strawberrypuree ◴[12 Nov 20 22:32 UTC] No.25076108[source]▶
This is a soft failure. If the computer didn't have access to the Internet, it would still open.
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2. elmo2you ◴[12 Nov 20 22:44 UTC] No.25076255[source]▶
That's all nice and well, but what if some country decides that your country will still have Internet access, but a "degraded experience" to Apple's central infrastructure?

Still sounds to me like Apple rolled out a huge (logical) trojan horse, as a potential weapon in terms of nation state cyber warfare.

Probably not at all with that intention. But I doubt that any government willing to abuse this "opportunity" will give a fuck about that. Don't underestimate the power (and disruptive) effects of being able to practically disable a whole brand of popular computer hardware. Heck, even the ability to threaten with it (privately, through diplomatic channels) can (and probably should) be considered a serious weapon. So yeah .. "thank you" Apple.

3. nnwright ◴[12 Nov 20 22:56 UTC] No.25076380[source]▶
From my experience during this outage, the ability for the computer to "open" may not actually mean much. While trying to fix what I assumed was a localized software issue I rebooted my machine. Typically this takes a minute or two. However during Apple's systems outage my rebooting took approximately an hour before my computer was in any way functional again.
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4. pacificmint ◴[13 Nov 20 00:02 UTC] No.25077039[source]▶
In this case, any app would take five to ten minutes to open. While that technically means "it still opens", it effectively renders the computer unusable.

(And that's after I realized that they will eventually open. Originally I rebooted the machine before any app had had a chance to open.)

5. Aperocky ◴[13 Nov 20 00:02 UTC] No.25077042[source]▶
so you can't even reboot without phoning home.

Or can you still reboot without wifi?