macOS unable to open any non-Apple application

Unbelievable. When I read the tweet (tried to post here as well), I suddenly realized why my Mac was unresponsive an hour ago.

Here is another tweet that describes the problem in more detail:

https://mobile.twitter.com/llanga/status/1326989724704268289

> I am currently unable to work because macOS sends hashes of every opened executable to some server of theirs and when `trustd` and `syspolicyd` are unable to do so, the entire operating system grinds to a halt.

EDIT:

As others pointed out, I put this to my `/etc/hosts` file and refreshed it like so:

    sudo emacs /etc/hosts # add `0.0.0.0 ocsp.apple.com` 
    sudo dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder # refresh hosts

So yesterday I wrote about the blurring lines of ownership, and people came back with some fairly disparate responses. It's fair to say that I was mostly dismissed. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25058952

And this is why I won't be moving to Apple silicon. Apple already has the ability to restrict whats apps I can run (they can simply toggle a switch for all users to "no unsigned binaries"), and congrats! Apple is the sole decider of what we get to use on our computers.

Of course Apple's Craig Federighi assures us that the people making such assertions are "tools" (https://youtu.be/Hg9F1Qjv3iU?t=3177 , timestamp 53:33) and they have no intention whatsoever of taking away our ability to do general compute on the machines we buy and own.

Except...

Apple can already decide what binaries you can execute. Should they choose to.

Apple is now restricting what other OSes you can boot into. As they've chosen to.

Apple can now make their machine reject a new, third-party repair part like a bad transplant. Should they choose to.

It's clear where they're going. And I'm jumping ship. It's painful to do so, given how invested I am in the ecosystem, but we're already beyond the threshold that many of us would have left earlier in the decade.

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edit - It's also really hard as a designer + developer + would-be researcher in the making to find a good computer. Most non-Apple laptops don't have very good color accuracy. They also don't have good trackpads, and their keyboard + trackpad alignment is wonky (it's off-center in a lot of cases! How weird is that???)

I'm trying to find a laptop with good build quality, long battery life, a good display that I can design on, a good trackpad so that I don't have to carry around a mouse, good speakers would be a plus, and light enough that I don't feel like I'm lifting weights while working on my laptop. And this package should ideally come with 512GB of SSD storage and, at least, 16GB to 32GB of RAM.

Oh and it shouldn't be more expensive than a Mac as many of these laptops are!

Any suggestions?

Yeah so basically in the windows world, a lot of the good laptops are under the "business class" of the various manufacturers:

Dell Precision, HP Elite Book, MSI Prestige

In the consumer world the Dell XPS, Asus Zenbook, Asus Pro Art are the way to go for a designer.

Dell Precision is probably the overall best laptop. MSI Prestige is targetted right at you though, with color accuracy and a good display. The only brand I can personally vouch for is Dell. I and my partner use XPS's, and a good friend of mine has a super nice Precision that I am jealous of (specifically the ports! I'm so over USB-C)

> In the consumer world the Dell XPS [...] are the way to go for a designer

I have to use a Dell XPS 9560 and had two issues with it, most people never realize:

1. The Intel Thermal management driver is buggy so the device shuts off on very high-load tasks. You have to find the old driver on the internet and install it, and prevent windows from reverting to a new driver.

2. Only after two years of hanging connections and dropped UDP-packets I ran a speedtest and realized that this is not my home-internet being weird, but a systemic problem of the Wifi-card, which others have reported on the internet as well. Switched cards - getting windows to recognize the new one was difficult - and now I have normal Wifi.

Both of these issues are terrible for customers, and I still wish I wouldn't have ignored/overlooked the Wifi-issue for so long, as it interrupted work for a very long time.