We made the call to go Apple years and years ago when he was always fighting viruses and virus scanners on Windows. His Macbook was still (hardware-wise) perfectly functional, but does not receive security updates anymore, so he went iPad. Indeed there are more problems than expected. I expected even less IT support from me was needed. Instead he now complains about the lack of control (which I am certainly ok with btw, the complaining I mean.)

The current plan is to put Ubuntu on the Macbook, not sure what to do with the iPad but make it less "primary computer" will be one of the policies to implement indeed. Maybe he will be happy with an external disk and f-spot, and his music nicely sorted into files. Then some generic backup solution to a Synology NAS or something...

I suspect what we might actually see in that regard is something similar to Minecraft (the Java based one): people were regularly modding it because it was Java based and easy to decomp and know where to inject a mod.

So the Minecraft crew would regularly release updates and obfuscate the code again - most updates were to fix issues/add features, but some were purely for obfuscation. So if you wanted your mod to work it meant not playing any other version.

I'm guessing we'll start seeing more regular updates from software makers; will the updates be fixing bugs or adding features - sure - but I'm guessing that quite a few updates will be simply to obfuscate the code and change addresses around so that any mods that worked before, won't in the new version. Sure an LLM could just decomp it again, but I figure most people won't want to spend the tokens/time it takes for the LLM to actually do the work on that new decomp effort. And with the fact that most people have "auto-update" defaulted to on, I'm foreseeing that apps will get auto-updated likely daily in the near future to combat this.

Years ago, someone once told me "I hope you live in interesting times" ... I don't think this is what they had in mind.

Apple will also use AI to make it at least as painful and as unexpected as before. It's their business model (I have come to believe).

Edit: But good point of course, but I believe it will remain cat and mouse, no idea how Apple internally sees it, whether they really don't care, or actively break stuff (break your ** face tonight).

Reverse engineering is not a magic wand you can wave on everything and expect something good to come out of it. You need to actually know what you are trying to get out of it.

The issue is rarely to have some working setup at a given time, IMHO the real fight is to keep it working thought the updates and ecosystem changes.

That was the same issue with jailbreaking, it gave a lot of freedom, while also being a PITA to deal with at every security fix and system change. Many jailbreakers came to parent's conclusion and just "give up".

Correct. TrueNAS uses Samba, which has supported this for a while. On TrueNAS it also creates a ZFS snapshot after a successful TimeMachine backup which is really nice for the times MacOS decides to corrupt a TimeMachine volume for no apparent reason.

Apple have dropped support for AFP, so SMB is the only game in town.

What are the alternatives to SMB for time machine?