Oddbean new post about | logout
 He's likely not being stupid; he just has more computers than you, so they don't ALL need to be general purpose. When all you want is an appliance, Apple's not so bad at providing it. Just never expect it to replace a full functioning system that actually welcomes you to use the hardware you own. The number one malware threat Apple protects against is called "User input." 
 Sounds like... Apple is junk. 
 I mostly feel that way, but to play devil's advocate, is the fact that your toaster doesn't ask you to configure voltage, resistance, and manually configure an adapter to the wall a bug or a feature?

Sometimes people just want an appliance to be an appliance, and not have as much of a surface of things that can go wrong, or simply be misconfigured. It boggles my mind that these people exist to a degree that even their primary computer follows these principles, but it's not particularly surprising that for a device that they on use for a specific task, they'd rather it just not be any more complicated than it needs to be.

Where Apple pisses me off though is somewhat the same place Roku TV's piss me off, in that they step in the way even of things I likely want to do in the limited scope of the appliance they've sold me. It's why I'll take an Amazon Firestick or a Google Chromecast over them any day of the week.

But, I won't begrudge the fact that people like my wife exist, who really would rather not navigate through menus to get to what they want, even if it means they can't go streaming anything from fmovies and actually have to PAY for what they watch, AND see the ads that are packaged with it. I will just sit around and worry for their sanity. 
 (In Roku's defense, they do at least support screen casting, from most any device aside from Google Pixel products, which is a Google thing, not a them thing. I'd still prefer being able to install apk's or at LEAST having a web browser built into it though). 
 Makes sense