Apple: The tao of removing features

Posted on November 6, 2007 by Ian Betteridge

Dave Winer: I’m not happy with Leopard (Scripting News).

The user interface is quirky. The new networking interface is a big step backward. The firewall moved and lost features! That’s simply never done, you don’t charge customers to remove features, esp security features.

I’m not actually sure what features Apple has removed from the firewall (other than it simply not being on by default), but it has certainly removed features from products before. It’s certainly following an interesting product strategy.

For the record, I like Leopard, and the only bug that I’ve come across is the weird one in Mail which shows multiple instances of the "On your Mac" hierarchy.

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  • Richard

    I haven’t seen your mail issue, although I have lost graphics in Mail and I’m trying to figure out why. My experience with OS X 10.5 has been mostly positive. I am concerned about the new firewall as the old one worked just fine, thank you very much. It’s hard to believe Apple would create a new ineffective firewall to replace one that was already rock solid, so maybe there’s something at work here we don’t know.

    I hope.

  • http://profile.typekey.com/ianbetteridge/ Ian Betteridge

    I think that part of the problem with the firewall is that it’s a black box – no one knows what’s going on inside it. From a security perspective, that is a drawback as it means that security researches have no idea how effective it really is – which means, in turn, that any problems may be found by hackers before Apple hears about them.