Comment by timmg
3 months ago
I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.
There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have. (FWIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230 .)
Lately I've gotten so many of these popups on Mac that it both annoys and amuses the hell out of me. "Die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain", I guess.
But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace.
It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!
The best part is the motherboard produced in a way to fail due to moisture in a couple of years, with all the uncoated copper, with 0.1mm pitch debugging ports that short-circuit due to a single hair, and the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years. How would you otherwise be able to change the whole laptop without all the walls around repair manuals and parts? You just absolutely have to love the fact even transplanting chips from other laptops won't help due to all the overlapping hardware DRMs.
I'll go plug the cable into the bottom of my wireless Apple mouse, and remind myself of all the best times I had with Apple's hardware. It really rocks.
> the whole Louis Rossmann's youtube worth of other hardware features meant to remind you to buy a new Apple laptop every couple of years
Apple have a couple of extra mechanisms in place to remind us to buy a new device:
- On iOS the updates are so large it doesn't fit on the device. This is because they purposely put a small hard drive i. It serves a second purpose - people will buy Apple cloud storage because nothing fits locally.
- No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine. Then forcing the app developer ecosystem to target the newer iOS version and not support the older versions. But it's not planned obsolescence when it's Apple, because they're the good guys, right? They did that 1984 ad. Right guys?
> No longer providing updates to the device after just a few years when it's still perfectly fine.
This is a weird one to complain about because Apple leads the industry in supporting older devices with software updates. iOS 26 supports devices back to 2019. And they just released a security update for the iPhone 6S, a model released a full decade ago, last month.
The oldest Samsung flagship you can get Android 16 for is their 2023 model (Galaxy S23), and for Google the oldest is the 2021 model (Pixel 6).
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The part that really gets me is that the price per GB to go from a 256 to a 512 GB iPhone is $2.54 (since the next storage option up costs $200 total). Two and a half dollars!!! A 512 GB micro SD would run you $0.10/GB. They have been charging 25x the market rate for storage on a device with no expandable storage at all for years. Baffling that they aren't called on it more. It should be criminal.
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I recently found my ipad mini 2 (released in 2013) that had been boxed up when I moved a few years ago. After charging up the battery and booting it up, I checked for system updates. The latest system available for it was ios 12.5.7, released in 2023. It loaded fine, and I’ve been using the mini as an ereader ever since – the screen is fine, and wifi works.
A Macbook is the only Apple device I have in my entire array of computers and computer-related stuff, so I've got plenty of points of comparison. While Apple's hardware design isn't perfect, all of what you bring up seems wildly blown out of proportion to me. I can say I've never seen anyone with molten keyboards and displays. I've used the charger cable on my main charging brick for about five years now, and it's still going strong, despite being used for charging everything everywhere. And while Apple has committed many sins in terms of doing their absolute best at preventing anyone from touching their sacred hardware (we just need DRMed cables and enclosures to complete the set), this only affects repair. In terms of planned obsolescence, Macbooks statistically don't seem much less reliable than any other laptops on the market. They make up a majority of the used laptop market where I am.
And of course, just had to bring up the whole mouse charger thing. Back when Apple updated their mouse once and replaced the AA compartment with a battery+port block in the same spot to reuse the old housing, and a decade later people still go on about the evil Apple designers personally spitting in your face for whatever reason sounds the most outrageous.
Apple produced at least three mice that were very different and terrible in different ways. Their laptops are good, but don't waste your time defending their other peripherals.
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There was a third-party battery module[1] for the original AA Magic Mouse that would allow it to charge wirelessly, a feature that Apple somehow still has not managed to steal!
[1] https://techpp.com/2011/04/19/mobee-magic-charger-for-magic-...
> How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line!
???? ctrl+a and ctrl+e? That works on most Linux setups, too. Only Microsoft screws that up. I love how in Mac Office apps, Microsoft also makes ctrl+a and ctrl+e do what they do in windows lol.
Can you be specific about your bad experiences with Apple hardware? I've gone through 5 MacBook Pros since 2008 and my only complaint was the old Intel models always got too hot. Nothing ever broke on them and I guess I kept them relatively clean?
I also have all of the adapters that came with the MBPs too, all perfectly functioning, the oldest still attached and powering my 2013 model with the dead battery (2008 model was sold, still working). The magsafe cable is pretty yellow now, and maybe a little wonky from the constant travelling, but no fraying/fire hazard yet.
Was there a Gateway that did better?
n=4 but my niece spilled a whole cup of milk and a whole cup of matcha on my M2 (twice on 1 device). I just flipped it up, dried it out with a hair dryer (apparently shouldn't do that) and it still works 2 years later.
Can't relate to what you're saying, had 4 MacBooks, and many PCs too.
Also they leak charge onto the case.
Any properly grounded device will do that with specifically incorrect electrical wiring and/or a shoddy charger. Did this happen with a properly wired outlet, and an undamaged Apple charger?
I have doubts that it did, as that would warrant a safety recall.
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Found this out one time when I went to touch my MBA and it was like I stuck my finger in a light socket.
>Oh, that smell of molten keyboard plastic, those yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust, those laser-machined loudspeaker holes next to keyboard, all filled with grime! How I miss that time on a Macbook, with all the chords you have to press whenever you need a Home or End button to edit the line! Not to mention the power button right next to backspace. It's so rewarding when its charger dies in a month, and you feel superior to your colleague, whose vintage 6 months old charging cable with none of that extraneous rubber next to the connector catches fire along with your office. What a time to be alive!
None of the above sound like anybody's actual experience. Which is also they have the biggest resale value retention among PC laptops, and biggest reported user satisfaction.
Now, if you were about the lack of ports (at least for a period) or the crappy "butterfly" keyboard (for a period), you'd have an actual point.
Home/End is just Control-A/E.
Never seen "molten keyboard plastic". I'm sure you can find some person who has that somewhere on the internet. I doubt it's a problem beyond some 0.0001% rare battery failures or something like that.
"yellow spots burned into a display with its own heat exhaust". Not sure what this even means. Especially AS Macs don't even get hot. I haven't heard the fan ever, and I use a M1 MBP of 5+ years with vms and heavy audio/video apps.
"when its charger dies in a month" is just bs.
Staingate?
I had a GPU issue (that was the subject of a recall that matched my symptoms precisely (and I could make the MBP core dump on demand in the Genius Bar) but "recall declined, does not fail diagnostics".
Damaged charging circuit on an MBA. Laptop worked perfectly. Battery health check fine. Just could not charge it. "That will be a $900 repair. Maybe we can look at getting you into a new Mac?" (for one brief moment I thought they were going to exchange mine... no, they wanted me to buy one. And of course, my MBA couldn't be traded in because it was damaged...).
I've also had multiple Magsafe connectors fray to the point of becoming like a paper lantern with all the bare wire visible, despite the cable being attached to a desk with cable connectors so there was near zero cable stress (and often only plugged/unplugged once a week).
While I was in law school, every student who had an Apple laptop had to get their laptop replaced at least once (some multiple times) over the course of our program. The biggest problem was the bulging keyboard, due to the bulging battery, but their were also numerous issues with displays and with chargers not lasting very long. Most chargers lasted at least a semester, but few of the Apple chargers lasted an entire school year. They simply weren't designed with durability in mind. Quite humorously, after one student's laptop keyboard began bulging during torts, the professor began an impromptu lecture on product liability laws.
The only PC laptops that were replaced were the ones that got damaged in accidents (car accidents, dropped off a balcony, used as a shield in self defense during a robbery, etc.). Dell Latitudes of that era were sturdy, and not noticeably heavier than their fragile Apple counterparts.
Yes! I wholeheartedly agree!
I teach C++ programming classes as part of my job as a professor. I have a work-issued MacBook Pro, and I make heavy use of Terminal.app. One of the things that annoy me is always having to click on a dialog box whenever I recompile my code and use lldb for debugging. Why should I need to click on a dialog to grant permission to lldb to debug my own program?
It wasn't always like this on the Mac. I had a Core Duo MacBook that ran Tiger (later Leopard and Snow Leopard) that I completed my undergraduate computer science assignments on, including a Unix systems programming course where I wrote a small multi-threaded web server in C. Mac OS X used to respect the user and get out of the way. It was Windows that bothered me with nagging.
Sadly, over the years the Mac has become more annoying. Notarization, notifications to upgrade, the annoying dialog whenever I run a program under lldb....
> Why should I need to click on a dialog to grant permission to lldb to debug my own program?
Because apps and web browser tabs run as your user and otherwise they would be able to run lldb without authorization. So, this is the authorization.
Tried iTerm?
Terminal app is terrible, use iTerm if you possibly can.
*ghostty
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That has nothing to do with developer prompts.
I can't stand the stupid dance required to run a third party app every single time.
Get the fuck out of my way and let me use what is supposedly my computer.
They become more shitware and Microsoft like with every update.
Worst part about this is that these days the error message simply lies to the user. "Whatever.App is damaged and can't be opened. You should move it to the trash."
If you remove the 'quarantine' attribute that gets added to downloaded files it runs great.
This doesn't really address your concern, but I feel obligated to share the Gatekeeper bypasses I know about:
Homebrew has an option which bypasses Gatekeeper when installing apps:
And apparently you can have this on by default:
And I have this alias for everything else:
That's true, but macOS is still further from the current equivalent of Windows than it ever was.
Yes, Windows 11 is horrendous.
Years and years ago, I fought the good fight, full desktop Linux fulltime.
I see and hear from a lot of people it's pretty great these days though, and you can do whatever the new cool fork of WINE is or a VM for games / software compatibility.
Definitely not moving to 11. When 10 gets painful enough I'll probably try Devuan or Arch or something for desktop use.
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The Apple gods know what's best for you. They're just trying to protect you from yourself.
You can disable SIP if you don't like it.
I'm the first to tell people they can disable SIP, but it's not something that everyone should do.
i.e, blanket disabling of SIP will interfere with conveniences like Apple Pay, etc. People want those conveniences. Disabling SIP is a trade-off.
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> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
This makes me extra sad. The HW is very good and very expensive, but the SW is mediocre. I bought an iPhone 16 a few months ago and I swear that is the first and last iPhone I'd purchase. I'd happy sell it at half of the price if someone local wants it.
Edit: Since people asked for points, here is a list of things that I believe iOS does not do well:
- In Android Chrome, I can set YouTube website to desktop mode, and loop the video. I can also turn off the screen without breaking the play. I can't do this in Safari however I tried.
- In Safari, I need to long-press a button to bring up the list of closed tabs. How can anyone figure it out without asking around online?
- In Stock app, a few News pieces are automatically brought up and occupy the lower half of the screen when it starts up. This is very annoying as I don't need it and cannot turn it off.
- (This is really the level of ridiculous) In Clock, I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.
- Again, in Clock, if I want to setup alarm for sleep, I have to turn on...sleep. This is OK-ish as I can just setup a weekly alarm and click every weekday.
So far, I think Mail and Maps are user friendly. Maps actually show more stuffs than Google Map, which is especially useful for pedestrians. Weather is also good and I have little complain about it.
The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.
I dislike the new Safari layout in iOS 26 too. https://support.apple.com/en-nz/guide/iphone/ipha9ffea1a3/io... -- change it from "compact" to "bottom". I assume this choice will disappear in the future, but for now, you can make it more familiar.
Unfortunately, I don't have any advice for the Clock/Alarm; I don't typically schedule one-off future alarms. That would be a useful feature.
> The YouTube thing is Google's choice, not Apple's, as those are "premium" features. Install Vinegar (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vinegar-tube-cleaner/id1591303...) to get a standard HTML5 player in YouTube, which will let you make it full screen, PiP it, background it, whatever.
But it IS Apple's choice. The problem is they have a mixed up conflict of interest, and it's even worse when Apple themselves is trying to sell you their own services.
IMHO the company making the hardware, the company making the software, and the company selling the cloud services shouldn't be allowed to all be the same company. There's too much conflict of interest.
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With Apple's default apps, i kind of feel like the apps themselves are strategically designed to not be the best place to look for lesser trafficked use cases.
Visual customizations get upstreamed into the system accessibility settings. Extra functions are exposed exclusively in Shortcuts for you to hack together an automation feature yourself. For a fully feature supported app Apple would probably say go pay for an app (and them through fee) on the App Store.
For example with your future alarm.. you could get another app or you could create a 'Time of Day' Shortcut automation which checks everyday to see if the date is the date you want the alarm on; if it is the day create the alarm. Delete the alarm on the next day. A (not so) fun fact about automating Alarms before iOS 17: you could only delete alarms through Siri and not Shortcuts lol...
> I fucking cannot set an one time alarm for a future date (Repeat = Never means just today), so I had to stupidly set up weekly alerts and change it whenever I need a new one-time. I hope I'm too stupid to find the magic option.
I think you're supposed to use the calendar for that.
Which is broken, because I want to be able to say “set an alarm at for next Wednesday at 4:30 AM“ the second I find out I have to give someone a ride to the airport.
If I have to make it a calendar entry, I may not notice it in time.
why do you have to go to calendar to set alarm ?
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I'm with you. I got an iPhone 15 a couple of years ago after only ever using Android. I was expecting great things and it's just.. confused!
I never have any confidence it will notify me of things. Often I just miss stuff. I actually have no idea how all the different "Focus" modes work. Notifications pile up and then seem to disappear without any action, and then reappear a week later.
The keyboard is really awful. I recently pulled an ancient Galaxy phone out of a drawer to test something and was reminded of just how much better the Android keyboard is. It just always guesses the wrong things!
And the settings are equally jumbled. Sometimes they're in the Settings app, sometimes they're in the app I'm using. It's just confusing.
It was honestly eye opening because I'd spent so many years assuming iPhones were better. I moved across because my Android phones kept having hardware issues. I think I'll probably go back to Android after this experiment.
I recently bought an original iPhone SE in hopes of using a smaller device. But I can't use it for anything worthwhile because I can't sign into an Apple ID due to having encrypted backups on my account, which was introduced in iOS 16.2. The SE only supports 15.8.5. So I'd have to disable encrypted backups for all of my other devices in order to sign into my account.
Why am I unable to use Apple Music on my device while I can use it from a web browser or from an android phone that don't have encrypted iCloud backups enabled?
Unfortunately this also prevents me from jailbreaking the device because I have to sign into an Apple account in order to trust a developer certificate on the device required for the jailbreaking tool. It's my device! Let me approve of the certificate without an Apple ID!
Oh, that sounds annoying. I also bought an SE 2016 128GB as "Offline-First" / de-Appled device. I think what I did was just signing in to App Store, not fully adding my Apple ID to the device. It now serves as a time capsule, has all the classic apps like Doodle Jump, Fruit Ninja, MiniMetro etc and some resource-light open source apps like CoMaps, fileexplorer with connection / offline sync to Nextcloud. Jailbroken via Palera1n (Think I didn't have to approve install any certificate)
Where are you located at?
What are your actual complaints? And have you tried the trash fire that is Android?
Do you think they just got a smartphone for the first time a few months ago?
I switched to Android in 2021 after almost a decade using iPhone and I was surprised to find modern Android is actually very good. I remember the early days of Android being a trash fire but since around ~2020 it seems to have gotten a lot better. For various reasons im looking to switch back to the iPhone but I know it'll be a case of giving up some good things on Android in exchange for other things being better on the iPhone.
I updated my reply ^
Fuck man, I worked on the original Mac OS back in '83, when all the work was in assembly. Know what happened? Apple happened. That company is fucked up something supreme. The entire premise behind that original graphical UI was never user experience, it was 'the users are idiots, we have to control them'.
We know each and every person who worked on the Mac because of projects like folklore.org. Which one are you?
Besides the sibling comments, if you read books like "Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing", this point of view is quite detailed there.
Younger readers will find out that modern Apple attitude is quite similar to the early years of the Macintosh being sold to universities.
The be nice and think different phase was only during the time they were about to close doors.
as his user profile indicates: Blake Senftner. I don't see him mentioned on folklore.org, but that doesn't mean he didn't participate in some way.
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> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
They really dodged a bullet there. 2016-2020 Apple laptop hardware definitely didn't rock. It's good they did an about-face on some of those bad ideas.
The fact they were able to turn around their hardware division after all that is the only thing which gives me hope they might be capable of doing an about-face on software.
Are you referring to the butterfly keyboard and TouchBar?
FWIW, I think the Touchbar was close to being a good idea, it was just missing haptics.
They didn't rock but... modern MacBook Pro models are bigger and heavier and have a notch (and yes, I know technically the notch is more screen rather than less, and that one can simply use the space below, but I still don't like it). I also liked how you could charge the older models from either side and still have 3 free Thunderbolt ports.
Debatable since the nub is still around on all their devices. My M3 work laptop definitely feels like a playskool toy.
You can’t get more brain dead that taking away important screen real estate then making the argument that you get more real estate because it’s now all tucked into a corner.
God forbid there be a black strip on the sides of the screen. How did we ever live?!??
I really like my macbook with the notch. The bezels are smaller and you can fit a larger screen in a similar footprint to previous macbooks without the notch.
Except Apple increased the height of the screen by exactly as many pixels as the notch is tall, so yes, your windows actually do get more real estate compared with the pre-notch models. I’m not going to argue that it’s free of problems, but it doesn’t come at the cost of usable desktop space.
Also worth pointing out that this design allows a substantial footprint reduction, which for example puts the 13.6” Macbook Air within striking distance of traditional bezel 12” laptops in terms of physical size. Some people care about that.
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Putting aside the keyboard debacle a lot of the blame for that can be directed at Intel's door. They consistently over promised and underdelivered.
I do not understand this rhetoric of Apple hardware being so amazing. The only moderately impressive thing they've done for years is the M chips. Beyond that, it's just crippled, overpriced, and unrepairable.
They have shiny cases, yay. I'll take my ugly Thinkpad and actually get shit done over a shiny case and glossy screen.
I think it's a bit more than that. I like that I can easily swap the SSD and DRAM in my Thinkpad. But Apple has definitely done some interesting things including:
- good thermals (especially vs. Thinkpad P series), even supporting fanless operation on the MacBook Air
- excellent microphone and speaker array (makes people much more intelligible on both sides during Zoom calls)
- excellent multitouch trackpad with good palm rejection (though for a trackpoint device Thinkpad is your best bet)
- unified GPU and CPU memory with up to 135 GB/s bandwidth (downside: DRAM is not upgradable)
- host-managed flash storage (downside: SSD is not upgradable)
And of course the 10-20 hour battery life is hard to beat. Only downside is I'll forget to plug in at all.
Historically, Apple has innovated quite a bit in the laptop space, including: moving the keyboard back for the modern palm rest design (PowerBook, 1991); active-matrix color display (PowerBook 180c, 1993); integrated wi-fi and handle antenna (iBook, 1999); Unix-based OS that could still run MS Office and Photoshop (Mac OS X, 2000 onward); full-featured thin metal laptop with gigabit ethernet (PowerBook G4 Titanium, 2001); pre-ultrabook thin laptop that fits in a manila envelope (MacBook Air, 2008); high-resolution display and all-flash storage in an ever-thinner design ("Retina" MacBook Pro, 2012); going all-in on USB-C/Thunderbolt and 5K external "retina" display (MacBook Pro, 2016); unprecedented performance, and a tandem OLED display with <10ms touch-to-pixel latency, in an absurdly thin iPad, which can also be used as a "laptop" (iPad M4 + magic keyboard, 2024); etc. Some of the innovations also failed, such as the touchbar, dual-controller trackpad, and "butterfly" keyboard which plagued the 2016 models.
I mean, having 2 hours of active use vs 10 hours is quite a bit of difference, quite a bit more meaningful than "shiny case".
I recently installed Ubuntu on my gaming machine. It was a bit of a learning curve, but I am still able to game, and I can play around with software without being treated like a criminal. It's great.
I still use Mac for dev, but only because I don't really feel like messing around with Linux on a work computer.
Not far from my philosophy. If I'm being paid, I'll use whatever I'm getting paid to use. But on my own, I'll choose to learn tools that will be around for a long time, and won't get taken away by some rent-seeking company (i.e. open-source).
Ubuntu is great once you remove the motd advertisements.
Maybe I'm just too used to advertising blatantly in my windows env that I'm not noticing ads on Ubuntu. Which MOTD ads are you talking about?
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Mac is great hardware to be sure. I have to say though, I much prefer an S25 Ultra with Samsung's version of "nanotexture" — even with iPhone 17's improved (?) anti-reflective screen.
I've been very patient with iOS 26. I tell myself - so long as its foundation is right, they'll iron out these details. But it is properly bad often and at times extremely frustrating.
The funny thing is the annoying popups on Windows look like advertising copy from the web post Microsoft getting grid and flexbox into HTML to support HTML-based applications. They at least try to be visually enticing.
Annoying popups on MacOS look like the 1999 remake of the modal dialogs from the 1984 Mac, I guess with some concessions to liquid glass.
Funny that a lot of people seem to have different Liquid Glass experiences, are we being feature flagged? I don't see the massive disruption to icons that the author seems but it does seem to me that certain icons have been drained of all their contrast and just look bleh now, particularly the settings icon on my iPhone. I don't see a bold design based on transparency, I just see the edges of things look like they've been anti-antialiased now. It's like somebody just did some random vandalization of the UI without any rhyme or reason. It's not catastrophic but it's no improvement.
It is catastrophic if you have older devices.
All this wank to waste the power of faster and faster chips.
I am pretty sure that the whole pitch was that it would make people upgrade because they aren't selling enough iPhones anymore. Realistically the vast majority of people can use an iPhone made after 2020 and not care about "upgrading" almost forever. The incremental upgrades are largely irrelevant for most people, it's just good enough and it's just a phone.
So, they have to make the older phones feel bad to use to give a reason for upgrading because otherwise most won't care to do it.
It's not the first time Apple has done that and it has been their strategy for a while now. The "free" updates are the most bullshit marketing success I have ever seen.
I have flipped every imaginable switch and even set up a work profile, and I have not yet been able to turn off desktop notifications on my new work Mac. Every time I log in there's a persistent notification about... something stuck in the corner. The notification does not explain itself, clicking it just drops me into a system menu. Usually there's three or four such notifications queued up.
So it just lives there permanently on the desktop and I avoid using the thing as much as possible. I do all of my work functions through SSH and leave the Mac in a corner of my desk with the screen closed.
I swear, MacOS actively tries to be as annoying and intrusive as possible. Every time I touch the damn thing some new behavior reveals itself. Like there are two sets of hotkeys for copy/paste and which one you need to use appears to be entirely random per-window.
Thankfully work lets me use linux on my main machine and I almost never have to deal with goddamn MacOS. I would rather daily drive Windows 11 with copilot and cortana and piles of bossware than plain MacOS.
I am, better, I am old enough to have seen Apple in the good and bad times, and tell that Apple's major attention to detail, and catering to developers, was a side effect from being really close to shutdown the whole business.
Now they have plenty of money, the attitude during early Apple years is back.
Unsurprising that they'd end up there, at the time Mac was allowed to get away with fewer security pop-ups by (relative) obscurity. Fortunately Windows still manages to run ahead as the even worse villain, as I wouldn't even let a Windows 11 PC in my house these days.
I often get third party popups from software vendors which asks me for my MacOS password. I have checked several times and these are "legit" (as in, the popup comes from a who it says it does and it's a reputable company). It's wild to me that Apple have painted themselves into a world where it's expected that users give their OS password to third party apps.
MacOS and iOS both seem to have an insatiable hunger for passwords. The most aggravating scenario for me by far is when the App Store on iOS, with no consistent pattern I have been able to identify, makes me reenter my entire massive Apple ID password instead of the usual Face ID prompt to download ... a free app.
I can’t get it to use my password manager on that screen either, and navigating to another app closes the modal so you have to copy your password and then start over.
Wait, that's actually never legit. If the password popup comes from the OS on behalf of the vendor, that's OK; the third-party party never has access to your password, just a time-limited auth token to allow it to do something privileged.
Ok? I don't know if it's the OS on behalf of the app or not. It's a password prompt that doesn't even have an affordance for biometrics, unlike other MacOS admin prompts. It's commonplace in MacOS applications.
This is an example of what I'm talking about https://www.reddit.com/r/Slack/comments/1geva4f/how_do_i_sto...
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You're not sure if anyone on HN is more than 14 years old? I mean, I feel you, but the odds are...
I watched the whole video and laughed so hard! Thanks for sharing this!
> But, man, Apple hardware still rocks. Can't deny that.
Ah yes, the Johnny Ive era of "no ports on Macbooks except USB-C, and hope you like touchbars!" was fantastic. Not to mention how heavy the damn things are. Oh and the sharp edges of the case where my palms rest. And the chiclet keyboards with .0001 mm of key travel. I'll take a carbon fiber Thinkpad with an OLED display any day of the week, thank you. Macbooks feel like user hostile devices and are the epitome of form over function.
I don't mind that the Macbooks only have USB-C ports. Unlike many PCs, where the USB-C ports can't be used for charging, or can't be used for high-speed data transfer, or can't be used for external displays, or can't be used by certain software that only speaks USB 2.0, etc., the Macbooks let any USB-C port do anything. It's a forward-thinking decision, even if it was primarily made for aesthetic reasons.
What I do mind is that there's only 3 of them.
The transition era was certainly annoying, but now that it's over I think the Mac experience is objectively worse. My PC laptop has 2 USB-C ports that can be used for charging, display, 40 Gbps transfer, etc., just like my Macbook Air. The difference is that the PC also has 2 USB-A ports and an HDMI port. This means that I'm able to plug in a flash drive or connect an external display without having to remember to bring a dongle with me.
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Didn't they have some issues when you tried charging from the left side ports? Eg overheating and throttling etc.
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USB-C connectors are much less reliable than their predecessors due to their design though. I have several connectors that failed, either they no longer grip the cable securely or they just lose contact randomly.
I'm sure it's handy for mobile devices where size and versatility trumps everything, but on laptop/desktop machines where longer-term usage is expected I would prefer something more reliable.
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I forgot where I read it, but there's apparently a Jobs policy of "one standard and two proprietary ports" or something, so to allow data to be ingested easily and freely shared inside Apple ecosystem, but not exported back out to the outside world with same ease.
Which is like, a great way to subsidize junk USB hubs...? But for sure they love following through with policies.
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Without trying to be pedantic, not all USB-C ports on Apple computers support Thunderbolt.
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Wuh?
On all but the top tier MBPs, USB C ports on Macs have different specs for data transfer (often the ones on the right of the machine will have half the transfer speed).
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I only have 2 USB-C ports, and most of the time I have nothing plugged in (but power). Sometimes ethernet USB-C when moving large files.
> Unlike many PCs, where the USB-C ports can't be used for charging, or can't be used for high-speed data transfer
I call bullshit on this. Ever since I am alive, I could always use the USB ports on my motherboard and PC case for charging and data transfer.
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I find the keyboards terrible, even the modern ones. I much preferred the 2006-2007 MacBook Pro keyboards.
Those are all legit criticisms but also be fair. They eventually did get rid of the touchbar. USB-C-only was merely ahead of its time. They improved the keyboards.
And even at their worst they were still much better than any Windows laptops, if only for the touchpad. I have yet to use a Windows laptop with a touchpad even close to the trackpad's that Apple had 15 years ago. And the build quality and styling is still unbeaten. Do Windows laptop makers still put shitty stickers all over them?
USB-C only is still a nuisance to this very day and remains the thing I hate most about my Macbook. Without fail there is never an adapter to be found when I need it.
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I owned multiple Macbooks that built a positive static charge when they were on, instilling a Pavlovian fear of being shocked into anyone that used it. Those were fun.
If you use the 3-prong version of the power adapter to connect to a grounded outlet, this problem goes away. Of course, Apple doesn't actually sell a 3-prong plug for their charger in Europe... so us lucky folks in the EU have to get a 3rd party one off the internet
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That’s nothing to do with static electricity, it’s capacitive coupling through the safety capacitors in the power supply. The chassis sits at 90vac or so as a result, it’s not a safety issue it’s FCC compliance for emitted noise.
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They still do. My m1, m1max and m4max Macbook Pros all build a positive static charge. It isn't even something that renders it "returnable" because I observed it on every single Macbook in the last 4-5 years so I just assume that's just how Macbook Pros are now.
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That era sucked for sure, but since (I think) 2021, macbook pros have magsafe, 3x USB-C, an HDMI port, and an SD card. I had a 2014 MBP I was waiting to upgrade once they came up with a sensible redesign, and I'd say they did!
I still have my 2014, along with a 2021 MBP for work, and still love them as machines for my usage profile - writing software/firmware, and occasional PCB design. The battery life is good, M-series performance is great, screen is decent-to-good, trackpad is still best in class, and macos is _okay_ in my book. The keyboard isn't amazing as I prefer mechanical for sure, but I still type faster on a macbook keyboard than anything else. That being said, I designed a mechanical keyboard that sits on top of the macbook keyboard so I can enjoy that better typing experience.
Pretty dang happy with my setup.
Most of what you're talking about is from MacBooks of 5+ years ago on a completely different processor architecture.
I miss the Powerbook G3 series. That was some fantastically modular design.
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> I wonder if anyone else here is old enough to remember the "I'm a Mac", "And I'm a PC" ads.
Those ads ran from 2006 to 2009. That’s between 16 and 19 years ago. How young do you imagine the typical HN commenter is?
> There was one that was about all the annoying security pop-ups Windows (used to?) have.
Those have been relentlessly mocked on the Mac for years. I remember a point where several articles were written making that exact comparison. People have been calling it “macOS Vista” since before Apple Silicon was a thing.
> WIW, it starts here: https://youtu.be/qfv6Ah_MVJU?t=230
A bit better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuqZ8AqmLPY
> Those ads ran from 2006 to 2009. That’s between 16 and 19 years ago. How young do you imagine the typical HN commenter is?
Part of getting old is accepting that 20 years was a long time ago and not everyone is going to remember the same commercials we saw two decades ago, including people who were children during the ad campaign.