Summary

Apple is tightening controls around Full Disk Access on macOS in response to agentic AI apps like Meta Muse, Grok, and Claude accessing users' private data — including iMessages — without users truly understanding what they were authorizing. Gruber acknowledges the legitimate concern: most of the ~150 million Mac users are not technically sophisticated and falsely assume Apple protects them from truly dangerous permissions, as iOS does. The core tension is that macOS is a genuinely powerful Unix workstation, but it now has a massive user base that treats it like a big iPhone. Gruber worries the fix will hamper power users who depend on Full Disk Access, while hoping Apple leaves an expert override path. He ultimately sides with Apple's right to act, conceding the scale of unsophisticated users makes this a real support and safety problem.

Key Insight

The mass-market expansion of Mac ownership has created a user base that mentally models macOS as a giant iPhone, making the absence of iOS-style hard permission ceilings a genuine safety crisis that Apple is now forced to address at the cost of power-user freedom.

Spicy Quotes (click to share)

• 7

  This is why we can't have nice things.

• 5

  There are tens of millions of people who need to use a Mac to do things that cannot be done on an iPad, but who have zero understanding of what it means, say, to grant Muse permission for Full Disk Access.

• 3

  A lot of non-technical Mac users do not understand this and cannot be expected to understand this.

• 6

  They just think, wrongly, that Apple protects them from allowing anything truly dangerous, because that's how their iPhone (and/or iPad) works.

• 8

  Some of us need dangerously powerful tools. Most Mac users, however, do not — and don't realize they're using a dangerously powerful Unix workstation with a very friendly face.

• 3

  As AI agents become increasingly capable and autonomous, the risks associated with this level of access will grow substantially.

• 4

  What alleviates my worst fears is the knowledge that every technical user at Apple itself needs to use their Mac as the powerful Unix workstation OS that it is.

Tone

concerned, measured, empathetic to both sides