The Justice Department has announced a sweeping antitrust lawsuit against Apple, accusing the tech giant of engineering an illegal monopoly in smartphones that boxes out competitors and stifles innovation
You need an Apple ID for the Mac’s App Store, but the Mac’s App Store is very much the second banana on MacOS. You can open up Chrome or Firefox and download an installer for any ‘ol app, or another app marketplace entirely.
That said, if a developer hasn’t registered as a “Trusted developer” with Apple, installing an app will ask the user if they’re sure that they want to install the program. All of the settings around trusting known developers are at the OS account level. They require a local admin login, not an Apple ID. Its somewhat similar to what Google does with Android.
Yeah, I was mostly referring to the “install apps” part of your comment. You can just download installers from websites. Very few Mac developers rely on the AppStore as their only means to distribute apps.
As for the OS updates, the stuff around major point releases keeps changing. They were forcing people to download installers for major point releases in the AppStore for certain versions of MacOS. I don’t know if that’s still the case with Sonoma. The update experience got refactored about a year and a half ago.
The latest OS for that particular MacBook was Big Sur. Not sure if that’s before or after Sonoma. It was previously on 10.10 or something, whatever that is.
Mac is what I was referring to
You need an Apple ID for the Mac’s App Store, but the Mac’s App Store is very much the second banana on MacOS. You can open up Chrome or Firefox and download an installer for any ‘ol app, or another app marketplace entirely.
That said, if a developer hasn’t registered as a “Trusted developer” with Apple, installing an app will ask the user if they’re sure that they want to install the program. All of the settings around trusting known developers are at the OS account level. They require a local admin login, not an Apple ID. Its somewhat similar to what Google does with Android.
Listen, I know nothing about this, but I had to update a Mac recently, and as far as I can tell, the only way to do that is through the App Store.
Yeah, I was mostly referring to the “install apps” part of your comment. You can just download installers from websites. Very few Mac developers rely on the AppStore as their only means to distribute apps.
As for the OS updates, the stuff around major point releases keeps changing. They were forcing people to download installers for major point releases in the AppStore for certain versions of MacOS. I don’t know if that’s still the case with Sonoma. The update experience got refactored about a year and a half ago.
The latest OS for that particular MacBook was Big Sur. Not sure if that’s before or after Sonoma. It was previously on 10.10 or something, whatever that is.