Tim rarely reads the emails. There's an executive team that reads them and handles them.
I got nowhere with Apple Support and emailed "Tim" and had a very helpful executive team member reach out and arrange to get things fixed and see it through to resolution.
Indeed, everyone's free to do what they want, that's the beauty of open source.
I have zero issues with people vibe coding alternative Homebrew frontends, it's good for the ecosystem for there to be more experimentation.
What I take objection to is when one or more of these happen:
- incorrect compatibility claims are made (e.g. if you're not running Ruby, no post-install blocks in formulae are gonna work)
- synthetic benchmarks are used to demonstrate speed (e.g. running `brew reinstall openssl` in a loop is not a terribly representative case, instead a e.g. cold `brew upgrade` of >10 packages would be). to be clear, I'm sure most of these projects are faster than Homebrew in fair benchmarks too!
- incorrect claims about why Homebrew is slow are made (e.g. "we do concurrent downloads and Homebrew doesn't": true a year ago, not true since 5.0.0 in November 2025)
- it's pitched as a "replacement for Homebrew" rather than "an alternative frontend for Homebrew" when it's entirely reliant on our infrastructure, maintainers, update process, API, etc.
Even on the above: of course people are free to do whatever they want! It's just at least some of the above hinders rather than helps the ecosystem and makes it harder rather than easier for us as a wider open source ecosystem to solve the problem "Homebrew is slow" (which, to be clear, it is in many cases).
Thank you for the answer now it made more clearer, at least for me, on what you meant.
And to be fair, when I was at 4.x version, 90% of the time I was in the happy path, my "being slow" issue was when download speeds got really bad, sometimes caused by my ISP, so my end.
As others mentioned, homebrew is a great piece of software, thank you, not only you but everyone who maintains it.
Thanks for all the hard work. I think brew is what makes the Mac the best “unix” machine choice as far as being stable and not having to take up maintaining my OS as a multi-hour per week hobby. I have been using it daily for three years and have never had any problems.
While I have some vague recollection of homebrew feeling slow in the past I don't know when - I want to say well before Nov 2025. And recently absolutely no such feeling, and great features like auto update handling, etc just working. It's really good stuff.
Python has powered Linux package management to reasonable result for a long time, Python itself is ironic for having tricky platform constraints that ended up being best solved with uv's excellent rust solver. For homebrew I would personally not stress over a Rust frontend - but if it keeps some of the FUD out then maybe it's worth it!
> People are free and probably do this because it is slow. Alternatives often are not a bad thing.
Alternatives are always good but IMO brew is just not something I interact with all that much and to me it's "good enough". It works and does what I expect, although to be fair maybe I'm on the happy path <shrug>.
Good to know! I was doing this with a hacky one-liner but wasn't aware of this flag. I think the sequential build/install process is the agonizing bit though.
I don't see where he said it's a bad thing, or even implied it. As I see it, he did imply that superlatives like THE FASTEST PACKAGE MANAGER aren't worth much in this environment.
Yeah, tbh homebrew is slow as fuck. It literally took 30 minutes to install aws cli on my 2020 mbp. I will happily flock to every new version that's faster.
One point that wasn't mentioned is that we've been through this cycle many times before with Microsoft, and we will again.
It wasn't too long ago that Microsoft went "all in" on Windows for developers and power users. WSL was drastically improved, developer tools were revamped and open sourced. The press adored the "new" Microsoft. Many developers moved over to Windows because they "got the best of both worlds".
And then, they just went back to the same old shit. The thing is, the shit phase of this cycle lasts longer than the non-shit phases.
This next phase is just words, so far. But, mind you, even if Microsoft does produce releases to back up those words, they'll be back to their same old shit within a year or two, once again.
And the whole process will repeat.
PS: And regardless of this supposed change of direction, if you listen to recent statements from Satya and other senior leadership, they are still spewing the same platitudes about agentic computing and software. So what's really going to change long-term?
I remember being excited about Edge, I even started using it because it was fast and had a couple of built-in features I liked. It was a big improvement over the old IE, it felt like Microsoft was going the right direction, but then they kept using dark patterns to change my default search engine to Bing.
Now you have "rounded edges" in Edge that add a content area limiting margins to all sides. Also, they took an open source browser and do not provide the source for Edge. So much for love of open source.
Unfortunately that’s not unique to Microsoft. It’s a fundamental tug of war between the pushback from consumers and the worst ideas and misaligned incentives in an organization
MacOS has had the same ping-pong between good and bad releases, with the latest being particularly poor. Same with video games: one patch brings great fixes, the next introduces absurd cosmetics or a P2W mechanic.
For consumers, it's neither been quality nor trash. They just don't think about it.
I think this tension arises from the commercialization of a consumer product. If consumers and product managers aren't pushing the product in all these different directions, there aren't issues. "Pro" software doesn't face these issues either - Resolve, Photoshop, SolidWorks, Excel; but consumer-oriented spinoffs do. Apple's attempt to consumerize FinalCut was poorly received at launch.
That wasn't an up cycle, was it? Wasn't Microsoft was doing that at the same time as adding ads and stuff to the os. Silicon Valley people were just wowed by the open source initiatives and money. Everyone worshipped the ceo for it while windows for users swirled down the toilet, while new analytics couldn't be disabled, etc etc etc
The only thing I'd add is that not only did he tweet the infamous tweet that caused the backlash, Pavan ridiculed those in the backlash (since deleted). Also, Satya still spews the same "agentic OS" narrative as recent as last week.
So, I hope for the best, but I don't plan on taking them at their word.
I played with OpenClaw and see the value of it and the glimpse it provides of the future, but the major thing it showed me is that I'm just not that connected in life. Not to the point where it provides usefulness to me.
I do frequently use ChatGPT Voice Mode, so I can see a future where a more frictionless version, where I give corporations access to all my life's most intimate data, becomes useful.
I’m standing in a line on my iPhone, waiting to get into a basketball game. So apologies for being sloppy.
Ok, so you’re talking about technologies that already exist and practically everyone has them.
First, you don’t need a new HTTP protocol, you’d use regular HTTPS with certificate authentication.
The glove you speak of is a biometric device with a Secure Enclave (SE) (eg Apple Watch) or secure access to a device with an SE.
This SE stores the private key of a key pair in a manner inaccessible without biometrics. This is also how PassKeys work.
A key challenge here is that everyone has a variety of devices from a variety of OEMs that are all simultaneously talking to multiple services synchronously. More often than not, a web request actually isn’t initiated by a human.
So, you’ll need to get everyone to agree on a standard. You’ll need to address the privacy concerns of privacy-minded people, because if you can attest that a person is actually there, doing something that is going to set off warning bells for private people. It’s also going to set off dinner bells for advertisers and governments.
Again sorry, I’m on mobile and in a line. These exact scenarios (and their drawbacks) are routinely discussed in technical and privacy circles.
Read up on technologies like PKI, certificate-based Auth, PassKeys, Secure Enclave, and biometric devices. The Apple Platform Security Guide is a good first step on what a commercial product is already doing.
Yeah. Obviously we can't know officially for decades but there's still some signals. One is the HAP flag (1, solid) to turn off IME, which has had at least one pubic vuln. Are they merely reducing their attack surface? Why can only they buy CPUs without IME (2, rumor)? Etc.
When enough reports are received for a particular entity, Apple blocks or retroactively moves or deletes the message.
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/report-spam-and-block...
reply