My fear is that Apple will now make the design decision to make these services more unreliable if blocked. Like I experienced, others too have noticed similar behaviour:
> It’s worth noting that Big Sur and its predecessors are built to assume that they can talk to Apple at any time, but when we don’t allow it, a few unwanted side effects pop up. For example, the keyboard sometimes takes longer to wake up from sleep mode. Or, in certain situations, the Mullvad app takes longer to detect that the computer is online.
(Ofcourse, as a developer, I can sympathize with the Apple developers - when you design a product to use the internet, you don't really think hard about all kinds of use cases where internet access is deliberately denied).
> when you design a product to use the internet, you don't really think hard about all kinds of use cases where internet access is deliberately denied
Why wouldn't you, though? That seems like a pretty big oversight. Lazy at best, negligent at worst.
Not everyone in the world has constant internet access, and it seems ridiculous to design an _operating system_ with that assumption.
I like to take an eBook reader to the park, for example. Prior to owning that device, I took a laptop when learning a new programming language. If that laptop had been running BigSur, I'd see all these same issues based on Apple's un-thought-out "design decisions".
It's not like these things fail to work without internet access. Obviously, the vast majority of people using the OS are going to have internet access so assuming actions based on internet access and then failing if you can't connect is accounted for, regardless of the reason (weak connection, no connection, etc). I don't see how anyone can call this behavior an oversight when it works exactly as intended.
> It’s worth noting that Big Sur and its predecessors are built to assume that they can talk to Apple at any time, but when we don’t allow it, a few unwanted side effects pop up. For example, the keyboard sometimes takes longer to wake up from sleep mode. Or, in certain situations, the Mullvad app takes longer to detect that the computer is online.
- https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2020/11/16/big-no-big-sur-mullva...
(Ofcourse, as a developer, I can sympathize with the Apple developers - when you design a product to use the internet, you don't really think hard about all kinds of use cases where internet access is deliberately denied).