Great. I recently invested $3800 in an excellent, new iMac. Now I'm starting to wonder if I should have spent a couple thousand less for a barebones PC and installed my favorite Linux distro. It would have done 75% of what I needed, and the other 25% (music and video work)... well, that's the tradeoff.

If anyone in my circle of family, friends, and social network asks my advice, the formerly easy answer "Get a Mac, get an iPhone; you won't regret it!" is probably going to be replaced with something more nuanced ("Buy Apple, but know what you're getting into; here's a few articles on privacy....").

The CSAM detection technical summary [1] only mentions iOS and iPadOS.

If it does come to macOS it will be part of Photos.app, as that's the only way to interact with iCloud Photos. I would recommend you to avoid that app and cloud in general if you care about privacy.

[1] https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

That's not what I read in multiple sources. They including mac os as part of it. And why wouldn't they the software will be easy to compile into the apple photos app. https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-child-abuse-material-sca...

If it stays like that then it's manageable i guess.

Looks like CSAM detection is iOS/iPadOS only (for now?). From Apple:

- Communication safety in Messages

[…] This feature is coming in an update later this year to accounts set up as families in iCloud for iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS Monterey.*

- CSAM detection

[…] To help address this, new technology in iOS and iPadOS will allow Apple to detect known CSAM images stored in iCloud Photos.

- Expanding guidance in Siri and Search

[…] These updates to Siri and Search are coming later this year in an update to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, watchOS 8, and macOS Monterey.

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/