However, despite being an actual software engineer, I'm no security researcher. I don't understand kernels or privilege elevation or anything deeper than the UNIX shell I work in. So it's nice to have a system that's 99% safe by default, but still allows me to run crons, or programmatically open/modify things, and generally script my machine to look and behave the way I want.

Apple is the perfect middle-ground for people like me. Just because you can't fiddle with a kernel hardly makes this a "hood-welded-shut" machine. There are processes on my Windows machine that I'm not allowed to kill even as an administrator. I can `kill -9` whatever the hell I want on my Mac.

There's a very large group of people who operate like me, and are even less technical than I am, but love things like Keyboard Maestro or Apple scripts which allow them to tweak little things. Windows has no comparison and as far as I've witnessed it's one of the most frustrating operating systems in existence. Most people do not have the time or desire to run Linux. So, you are left with Apple which nails several of selling points that no other ecosystem nails.

That's why people, including "hackers", are enthusiastic about this "hood-welded-shut" system.

Note that the Mac is way more open than the iPhone (or iPad, which is funny considering how some chips are shared between Mac & iPad), specifically to preserve (some) of the kind of control people expect from their Mac.

That's why you can run Asahi Linux on Macs, but not iPads.

So you & GP may be talking past each other, them grousing over the locked-down nature of the iPhone, while you celebrate the control of your Mac.

Windows blocks me from doing things like permanently uninstalling Microsoft Edge.

It’s like the operating system itself is viral in nature.

Last time I was playing with a Mac, even the root account was a problem to try and access. Apple are just way too nannying with their devices, but people like that.

Unless your company has something locked down. If it’s a consumer Mac, it requires nothing more than a login password.

There are some security features that (for good reason) get in the way of e.g. dtrace, but I'm not aware of any of those that you can't turn off.

> I'm also not a fan of how Apple controls devices and the market of software after the device has changed owner.

What's this about?

Such scenarios are trivially recoverable on better-designed machines with removable storage and consumer-friendly software FDE. BitLocker does this reasonably well - yes, there are privacy concerns w.r.t. key backups, but one must strike a balance between convenience and security.

ETA: To be clear, this setup would be entirely tolerable to me, but I (and everyone else in here) is hardly an average consumer when it comes to technology.

Many hackers think that about Apple computers. Many others have no choice because they develop iOS apps.

That being said, I love iOS on my phone and tablet. I used to prefer android, because of how much I could customize it, but it slowly became less reliable and more centered around selling me products and services sponsored by Google or my carrier. I switched to an iPhone and iPad about 7 years ago and am much happier with a reliable set of mobile devices that I know are relatively secure and wont get in the way of what I want to do.

Point being, the OS you want on, and ecosystem you want around your devices absolutely depends entirely on what you want your devices to do (or not do against your will).

Shit. Works.

This is critical. I can focus on my actual task at hand, rather than fiddling with the system.

Some perspective: I've been on Debian for 15 years, and I still hold it in very high regard for servers. I'm also an occasional Alpine & OpenBSD user; and Windows for games. I've tried Ubuntu, couldn't stop it from getting in my way. Before you suggest Fedora, Arch, NixOS, whatever: I'm done distro-hopping. The experience is about equal everywhere. No amount of "choice" beats thoughtful design, accessibility, and vertical integration.

Hmm...

    $ last | grep reboot       
    reboot time                                Sun Feb 16 14:10
    reboot time                                Fri Feb 14 19:40
    reboot time                                Thu Jan 30 09:52
    reboot time                                Fri Dec 13 16:20
    reboot time                                Tue Oct 29 15:32
    reboot time                                Tue Sep 17 12:19
    [...]

> it absolutely refuses to play nice with my KVM (that my desktop has no issues with)

Honestly I'm with you here, but I'm pretty sure KVMs are just pure lottery. I plug the mini via USB-C/DP to a screen that has a simple built-in USB hub (which in turn handles mouse/KB/audio interface); this also works perfectly fine with my Thinkpad T495. However an expensive TB3 dock with a dozen ports doesn't work with either, but it's just fine with a 2017 MBP. TBH I wouldn't blame any of the involved parties; USB-C/TB always came off as a finicky mess to me.

> I'm a software engineer at a company that does all macbooks.

I can't say anything but extend my sympathy. In an ideal world, companies prioritise employee satisfaction and productivity. There's an argument that this is a trade-off vs increased IT support cost/workload, but I guess SWEs don't need much support to begin with?

You could at least appeal on the basis that the HW you've been provided with is clearly unreliable. Come up with some numbers about lost productivity. Bosses love numbers.

IME, it's also about being able to ensure that everyone has access to the same software. I worked at a company that used macOS-specific software for development (I think it was Sketch?) so I had to have a MacBook around, even though I primarily used a Linux desktop for work. Anecdotally, I don't think this is uncommon.

NixOS in its unofficial "endgame" is more like a container where you can strictly define what files to keep between reboots and everything else gets thrown away. Except unlike a container it covers your entire filesystem (not just a single application) and it's actually usable for things like a laptop since you don't have to reboot between making changes. There's a popular blog post titled "Erase your darlings" that explains it in more detail[1]. And, like with a container image (but different in how it's done), NixOS forces you to write any and all changes to your system's programs or config as code that can be introspected and delivers repeatable results.

This is definitely not to everyone's taste but for me this is now the only way to keep computers "clean" in the long term (sans specialized distros like Talos Linux). I can just look at the source code to know exactly what I'm running and I can delete stuff I no longer want without having to think about leftover files or anything like that. Backups also get a lot simpler when you only have to think about the persistent volume of your system and your config and full restores are just a matter of reinstalling with your config in place.

macOS is gorgeous and I love how everything just works pretty much (except defining global keyboard shortcuts). But I've been so spoiled by NixOS catering to my config management obsession that everything else feels kind of primitive in that regard. My dream would be the macOS userland and kernel on top of Apple hardware but built and assembled with the Nix module system. And then some APFS magic to make an ephemeral root filesystem work.

(Also yes I've tried nix-darwin. Love it and I'm infinitely grateful it exists because I'm also using a MacBook at work but it's not the same kind of "complete" experience that NixOS provides.)

[1] https://grahamc.com/blog/erase-your-darlings/

Not that that makes it objectively better or worse. The config shtick of NixOS can also be really annoying to someone who just wants to install stuff and move on. It comes down to personal preference.

Notably, macOS (a BSD in my book) took the next logical step and completely sealed the base OS, all the way via logical volume management, verified boot chain, SEP (aka TPM), etc.

I agree that NixOS solves configuration management in a much more elegant way, but that elegance carries a heavy cost: it requires domain knowledge to comprehend. Personally I just keep /etc in git, and use judo to propagate changes. <https://github.com/rollcat/judo>

Also - I'm done distro-hopping. The problem is KDE/Gnome- KDE is aping Windows (badly), Gnome is aping macOS (also badly). I'd list all of the problems but it would take an essay.

It's no substitute for backups (I use Borg), and syncing is good (I use Syncthing, I guess iCloud also counts). But snapshots should be ubiquitous at this point, just like having a "trash bin" was mainstream in 1995.

What exactly does not work for you on other systems, that works on a mac?

I think the term 'hackers' has become diluted to the point it just means 'enthusiastic coder' - it hasn't seemed tied to creative thinking or pushing boundaries in some time. That probably stopped around the time the LifeHacks site became popular.

They prefer Apple because most are young and grew up with iPhones and Apple being cool due, all while MS starting continually shooting themselves in the photo with Win 10 and 11. They probably approve of Apple standing up to the FBI also.

But I think they're regressed. I think sj was good at getting apple to interface with the rest of the world, and make course corrections. But now they've forgotten how.

Everything apple does is more apple ecosystem, ignore everyone else.

Sort of like the 7-habits dependent, independent, interdependent. Now they're back to independent.

so... they ignore the rest of the world. their own hardware, their own languages, everything else comes from their store. admittedly macos still allows people to run their own software, but ios doesn't let you run software or even access your own filesystem.

Do I, a highly technical person, want a machine that has been made in to an appliance, where I have very little control over what's going on in the background, where I have to trust one of the largest companies on the planet to Do The Right Thing™?

Well, I know I don't want to run an OS like Windows where the end user is treated with contempt and distain, where the price of the license means nothing because I'm still treated as someone who doesn't know enough to even choose my own browser, where third party programs have more control over my own machine than I do, unless I happen to have a lot of specialized knowledge and plenty of time to circumvent these biases.

But let's compare the Apple appliance to an open source OS running on an Intel CPU. Now I have an OS that gives me more freedom to do what I want and need, that has only documentation and technical issues as roadblocks, not intentional design. Better, yes? But now I'm also required to trust a company that has a literal hardware back door built in to it, that comes from a company that acts like they have no real understanding of security but might just be playing dumb, that has lied to users many times over years, that has knowingly chosen speed and marketing numbers over security time and time again.

Now add the fact that we need to trust binary blobs for wifi chipsets, some ethernet chips, GPUs, et cetera. Not great, if we want to both control our machine and trust it.

So, really, would I want to run an open OS on top of a janky CPU with lowest common denominator hardware, where each part might have issues, possibly security issues, or would I want an appliance?

I wish there were more options... AMD is better than Intel, but not sufficiently. They have less of a history of lying, of manipulation of marketing information, et cetera, but they still have that hardware back door. People are working on open source firmware for wifi chips, et cetera. ARM is nice, but ARM laptops and desktops still come at a premium.

So do I see the appeal of an appliance that has incredible performance, battery life, the best exploitation of the hardware on the planet, excellent quality and security? I do, particularly when all aspects of that appliance are in the hands of a company that makes their insane profits from being "premium". So long as their profits depend on being premium, I will trust them, because my trust needs align with their profit desires. When that stops, my trust stops.

Would it be nice if I could run my own choice of OS on it? It would. But sometimes we need a device that gets things done, and in many instances, an appliance is better than the alternatives.

Can I still run pretty much what I want on this appliance, aside from my OS of choice? Yes, I can. So unless I'm interfacing directly with hardware, these appliances mean less work for me.

That's not to say your case isn't valid, but it's easy to see a case for most people having appliances.

Yes using a VM means taking a performance hit. But with the latest Apple machines, and for what I do in the VMs, I haven't experienced any lack of performance that annoys me.

One example for what I do is to run double Wireguard tunnels. In MacOS it has been nigh impossibly to get working (and esp not reliably). But works easily in a Linux VM. With this I can proxy through the VM to access remote resources from applications in MacOS.

I'm using UTM btw: https://mac.getutm.app/

Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks.

Of course, he’s still at the whim of the Board, and he’s no spring chicken, so there’s no guarantee that his successor would feel the same, but I do believe that he, himself, is legitimately serious about privacy.

At the risk of sounding like Richard Stallman, that exactly is the problem with buying into such walled-prison ecosystem of devices. You're at the mercy of Apple pushing an update that can unilaterally take away your privacy and rights.

They already do that with sending hashes of your photos on your iPhone and implement dark patterns to trick you to upload your data to iCloud. Just 1 CEO change away from having them from being a privacy advocate to a privacy nightmare.

This is mainly a concern if you are a high value target likely to be the first person poisoned. For most of us, that’s not true, and a formerly good actor turning evil would be noticed long before it came our turn.

So there’s the idealist “I can’t be sure my favorite restaurant won’t poison me today, so I’m never eating there again”, and the pragmatic “the benefits I get outweigh the slim chance that today is the day they decide to attack boring people like me” outlook.

I’ll never fault someone for being the idealist; the concerns are unfalsifiable. But to me it looks like a rough way to live. Maybe just because I really am that boring so it’s hard to relate to having any super secret stuff that would put me among the first to be attacked.

If Apple adds a backdoor to their E2EE (by sending their servers the key) via a software update, and they don't do anything with the secrets exposed, they can compromise a large proportion of users over just a few weeks and there is a big chance you'll be among the "first", because the "first" is now a large set.

It's just another principal-agent problem, and I agree that a fully self-sovereign life, with no dependence on trust or agents, is an unrealizable ideal; and, that a decent solution (while not perfect) is reputation stake and aligned incentives, check and check in Apple's case. I too think Cook is sincere, and I trust them as far as I can throw their products, which is to say, a little. (The Apple Tax is so they don't have to rely on a sketchy big-data business model.)

That said, computing and InfoSec have some unique contours, in a way that trusting a mechanic or a lawyer does not. Those can have catastrophic failure modes as well (crashing from a shoddy repair, getting sued based on bad legal advice), but they aren't systemic to society, and have lower switching costs.

And I ultimately think it's a false choice. When it comes to meatspace security, it's possible to have trusted and accountable public institutions, and allow citizens to have some means for self-sovereignty (2A, locked doors). It would be foolish to rely only on one or the other, either as a society or an individual.

So I'm deeply grateful for the Stallman types, pushing forward the capacity for self-sovereignty. Even if it doesn't currently meet my needs from a risk/benefit tradeoff, I still benefit from the ecosystem, and its BATNA, and I look forward to the day I sever my dependence on Apple's ecosystem, whether or not they betray my trust.

I agree with this part, but relying Apple is quite far from self-sovereignty compared to many other practical alternatives: not relying on external clouds, GrapheneOS, Linux. By relying on Apple, you not only pay a tax to essentially bribe them to not attack you (perhaps a viable strategy, not too different from taxes to governments), but more importantly you give up the ability to resist without serious compromises (can't have E2EE backups on your own cloud if they said so). This is akin to trying to be paying taxes to the government to get better police coverage, and they decide to ban locks, security cameras, and leaving the walled garden.

The problem with the current computing security paradigm is that it puts too much trust in entities that do not deserve it, because the entities are simply too powerful and do not suffer consequences when they break that trust.

There are a couple meaningful points of divergence in the ecosystem: Mac vs iOS (the former has some self-sovereignty, even if there are risks of backdoors/etc); and, cloud vs not (I mostly avoid cloud usage, iCloud or otherwise, and when I do use it, I treat all content as public).

I agree about the trust problem. Varoufakis might make some valid points re: "Technofeudalism", but then Bruce Schneier was making a similar analogy over a decade ago. I've heard cogent arguments, that early feudalism evolved from rational self-interest, that serfs were willing to trade some degree of autonomy for safety, and it does feel that many "normie" users (especially with iOS) are making a similar rational trade, even if it sets up an asymmetric power dynamic, and risk (inevitability?) of future betrayal.

I'm curious if you have any examples in mind for Apple, re: "do not suffer consequences when they break that trust". IMO, they've done okay at putting actions and costly signaling behind their privacy rhetoric, and I think they'd take some kind of market hit if they were to blatantly break that trust. But I'm curious if you think there are past instances in which that already happened, which maybe I've forgotten or am neglecting, or if it's a threat model of the future.

Their image scanning proposal? The recent UK E2EE backup thing?

For the first, although they eventually backtracked, proposing it alone should be ruinous they are actually a privacy-oriented company.

Although the second situation is forced by a government, it is still a self-inflicted problem where iCloud is the only way you can back up your stuff. Not being able to have encrypted backups is a serious QoL issue.

> I mostly avoid cloud usage, iCloud or otherwise, and when I do use it, I treat all content as public

This is also my attitude toward "the cloud" in general.

He's one end of the spectrum, and NSO is at the other end. The best place is somewhere in the middle.

Most times, this doesn’t mean anything, but there’s very few demographics that understand the need for privacy and data protection, better than gay folks.

I used to think this, too. His recent ring-kissing antics have changed my mind. He, too, can be bought for a price.

You don't write a check for a million dollars to a person who is actively trying to decimate the gay community and still get to wear the rainbow flag.

Collective action, even in corporate America, is required to beat these people. The failure here is that like-minded execs didn’t preemptively gather to prevent this outcome in the first place. If you want to be unhappy with Tim Cook, be unhappy that he was too politically naive for too long.

If a few more of us would have stood up at the time, the world could look very differently today.

He's a leader. He should lead.

Jobs also said a lot of things that still resonate with me. Recently Apple introduced a "classic Mac" screensaver that shows how carefully designed the original Mac GUI was. I'm sure nobody misses the days when app bugs could crash the OS, but I wish Apple were as obsessive now about detail now as they were back then.

(the article is good but giving you the hn for comments too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2131299)

The biography is really awful though. It constantly misquotes people - Bill Gates is directly quoted as saying something so technically inaccurate he can't possibly have said it.

I also remember that every time his son is quoted it's because he was telling a dick joke. At one point the book claims this is why Apple Park is a circle. Why the author did this is not clear to me.

(Btw, I have an unreported Jobs story about this myself. Actually two. I'm not going to tell them, so feel free to just imagine.)

I feel like the official Isaacson biography was trying to tell a story, and would twist facts and reality to fit that story. This certainly makes for entertaining reading, but is not a great way to study history.

Meanwhile "Becoming Steve Jobs" gives the reader glimpses into Jobs's life, often very contradictory glimpses, ones that don't really tell you what to think. It shows you how complex of a person he really was.

It was my first Isaacson biography, and didn’t leave me excited for another one.

It definitely was, but at least parts of that must have been warranted given Jobs refused to read it, saying something along the lines of "I know I wouldn’t like what it says"

> Very well then I contradict myself,

> (I am large, I contain multitudes.)

When you speak ill of Jobs you are speaking on his moral character. When others (incl. myself) speak positively on Jobs, they are speaking on his design, business, and life philosophies, which are quite profound. [0]

How you want to weigh the two is up to you, but it is not a contradiction to say someone contains both good and bad.

[0]: https://youtu.be/cHuqhQmc4ok

Worst of all is the false good person / bad person dichotomy that leads to great offense at any slight praise for someone the reader has decided is a bad person, or any slight criticism of someone the reader has decided is a good person.

I can’t think of anything less fruitful than arguing over whether a public figure’s personal plus professional life makes them a 100% good person or 100% bad person. It’s strange the conversation ever happens, and yet it’s so incredibly common.

I personally view that as more of a failing in the system itself (why are there multiple lines to begin with when organ transport is a solved problem?), but it's not unreasonable to look at somebody exploiting that broken system and question their character.

For some other actions on some sort of badness scale, we have:

- Murdering people for your spare organs. Parts of China do this (somebody survived and escaped recently, so it's stirred things up a bit). Most people think this is very bad.

- Paying for somebody's organs (similar to prostitution at some level, though banned much more frequently than sex work -- if society is structurally so unequal that sacrificing part of your life for a pittance is actually attractive, that reflects poorly on that society, and we try to ban.the rich and powerful from using that power to create scenarios more like my first point).

- What Jobs did. It's technically legal, but he necessarily got an organ before somebody else for no other reason than that he had money. Did that somebody else survive? Who knows. If you factor in that it was actually many people who were displaced, did all of them survive? Unlikely. Organ donations are already fraught with ethical issues and strongly held convictions, and I'm not at all surprised that a number of people would be upset at this.

You didn’t pose the question to me. And yet.

Very many people don’t. We know there are constructs that would enable us to pay less, yet we choose to not pursue them. We are part of a society that enables us to be what we are, why should we strive to give as little as possible in return?

(And yes, we also don’t send extra money. This is not a contradiction.)

Only because you don't want to put the effort in to pursuing it. If I told you you could reduce your tax bill by 20% by spinning round in your chair one time I doubt you (or anyone else) would decline.

Every entity generally seeks to take as much as they can and give back as little as they can. Individuals are generally a little less extreme, in my experience, with corporations being the worst.

My taxes are not a burden on me. While on the other hand, the local politicians have sought tax cut after tax cut, causing the library to limit services, the schools to cut down on teaching staff, infrastructure maintenance delays, less funding for local social services and city events, and more.

My paying an extra 20% wouldn't fix things, as adding to the general budget would end up simply reducing taxes further, instead of everyone sharing the load.

I hate that I've starting getting involved with local politics. I would rather code.

Or, following your self-centric analysis, I would put the effort into raising my taxes by 20% since the collective benefits give me much more than what I can do individually.

While he could have funded a new hospital and not even change his tax bracket.

I was at a talk with Martine Rothblatt several years back, who created a startup for 3D printed organs. They ended up also building electric helicopters to transport those organs, because the transportation bottleneck was a huge issue.

I try not to judges peoples character when they’re looking death in the face. No one really knows what they’ll do in that scenario. Most people who can save their own life will. This was the premise of the movie SAW… how far are you willing to go to save your own life? How strong is your survival instinct? Most people are never tested, and it’s easy to sit back and judge, but would you just sit back and die? How do we even know there was someone else in line behind Jobs? It could be that he got an organ that would have otherwise been wasted.

Though SJ "He was diagnosed with insulinoma, which unlike other pancreatic cancers, is curable and can be treated with surgery."

see: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-16157142#:~:text=He%20wa...

And the outcome was a computing company that was waaaay less mediocre than 99% of these other memetic, mediocre gradient-descent chasing privacy-abusing, ad-supported companies.

Apple has raised the bar so high. And the DNA of what is manifesting is Steve’s insistence and vision followed by Tim’s clarity of execution.

Look at the Apple Architecture moves. They got Intel’s hot, slow CPUs out of the device. And replaced them with excellent, quiet, fast, efficient CPUs, with UMA and great features.

It’s hard to nail every detail when you have the surface area of Apple 2025. A huge huge company with billions of users and dozens of device families and services. But the bar is high for most of what they do.

Because we miss new instances of the great products they created to earn all that money.

He became a billionaire because Disney bought Pixar.

When I see the sincere sentiment sometimes expressed towards Jobs, I wonder if something similar is being tapped into when people - often tech people - use and experience LLMs.

To put it a bit bluntly, it almost feels like there's a mystical or religious element to it. As if we desperately want there to be miracles, and oracles, and god-like, caring men who can provide us with beautiful products, and rituals, and a future where everything is sleek and bountiful and timeless. As if some spiritual "hole" were being filled.

I don't mean to disparage anyone who feels fondly towards Jobs or LLMs, I'm merely sharing an observation of mine.

RIP

Source: people who were at Apple during that time period.

Example: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/government-officials-want...

I think people underestimate how traumatic it was culturally to Apple and how Apple generally experiences comparatively little turnover vs their other major tech peers, so the responses to those traumas linger. Same with the brouhaha over the CSAM tech that they attempted to bundle into the iPhone that ostensibly was trying to preserve your privacy and they instantly got smacked down over it.

I have two thoughts about this.

One, if you tell yourself a story strongly enough, it becomes real. Especially when you can structure the company to force it to become real.

Two, "marketing" is usually used disparagingly to mean something like "advertising that brainwashes customers into wanting something", but it's more like "knowing what people are going to want by the time it's ready to ship". It doesn't necessarily even include advertising. So in this case people do want privacy.

Isn't that Product rather than Marketing?

IIRC the advertising people are called Marcom or "marketing communications".

The iPhone had to add an app store because there were some apps that users couldn't build on the web at the time. They since allowed apps, but those apps are restricted to a proper subset of the APIs that first party apps get.

https://folklore.org/Diagnostic_Port.html

> Expandability, or the lack thereof, was far and away the most controversial aspect of the original Macintosh hardware design. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was a strong believer in hardware expandability, and he endowed the Apple II with luxurious expandability in the form of seven built-in slots for peripheral cards ... >This flexibility allowed the Apple II to be adapted to a wider range of applications, and quickly spawned a thriving third-party hardware industry.

...

> Apple's other co-founder, Steve Jobs, didn't agree with Jef about many things, but they both felt the same way about hardware expandability: it was a bug instead of a feature. Steve was reportedly against having slots in the Apple II back in the days of yore, and felt even stronger about slots for the Mac. He decreed that the Macintosh would remain perpetually bereft of slots, enclosed in a tightly sealed case, with only the limited expandability of the two serial ports.

> Mac hardware designer Burrell Smith and his assistant Brian Howard understood Steve's rationale, but they felt differently about the proper course of action. Burrell had already watched the Macintosh's hopelessly optimistic schedule start to slip indefinitely, and he was unable to predict when the Mac's pioneering software would be finished, if ever. He was afraid that Moore's Law would make his delayed hardware obsolete before it ever came to market. He thought it was prudent to build in as much flexibility as possible, as long as it didn't cost too much.

> Burrell decided to add a single, simple slot to his Macintosh design, which made the processor's bus accessible to peripherals, that wouldn't cost very much, especially if it wasn't used. He worked out the details and proposed it at the weekly staff meeting, but Steve immediately nixed his proposal, stating that there was no way that the Mac would even have a single slot.

> But Burrell was not that easily thwarted. He realized that the Mac was never going to have something called a slot, but perhaps the same functionality could be called something else. After talking it over with Brian, they decided to start calling it the "diagnostic port" instead of a slot, arguing that it would save money during manufacturing if testing devices could access the processor bus to diagnose manufacturing errors. They didn't mention that the same port would also provide the functionality of a slot.

>This was received positively at first, but after a couple weeks, engineering manager Rod Holt caught on to what was happening, probably aided by occasional giggles when the diagnostic port was mentioned. "That things really a slot, right? You're trying to sneak in a slot!", Rod finally accused us at the next engineering meeting. "Well, that's not going to happen!"

> Even though the diagnostic port was scuttled, it wasn't the last attempt at surreptitious hardware expandability. When the Mac digital board was redesigned for the last time in August 1982, the next generation of RAM chips was already on the horizon. The Mac used 16 64Kbit RAM chips, giving it 128K of memory. The next generation chip was 256Kbits, giving us 512K bytes instead, which made a huge difference.

> Burrell was afraid the 128Kbyte Mac would seem inadequate soon after launch, and there were no slots for the user to add RAM. He realized that he could support 256Kbit RAM chips simply by routing a few extra lines on the PC board, allowing adventurous people who knew how to wield a soldering gun to replace their RAM chips with the newer generation. The extra lines would only cost pennies to add.

> But once again, Steve Jobs objected, because he didn't like the idea of customers mucking with the innards of their computer. He would also rather have them buy a new 512K Mac instead of them buying more RAM from a third-party. But this time Burrell prevailed, because the change was so minimal. He just left it in there and no one bothered to mention it to Steve, much to the eventual benefit of customers, who didn't have to buy a whole new Mac to expand their memory.

But at the same time he was also very proud of the PowerMac G3/G4 case which could be opened at any time (even when it was on) with the side being hinged with a prominent, friendly finger loop.