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Comment by SOLAR_FIELDS

6 hours ago

Apple has historically never been good at multiple users at the same machine. Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it. IMO incentives are not aligned here, they want everyone purchasing their own iPad, so i suspect that their strategy is to not invest too much into profile management as it risks cannibalizing their hardware sales.

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SOLAR_FIELDS

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mikeocool  6 hours ago

Like 20 years ago OS X server had pretty great support for it.

I worked a university lab and had an account on the lab server. I could walk up to any computer in the lab and login and get the exact same desktop experience with all my files and settings. The computing power was all on the local machine, but it basically mounted my user folder from the server.

That was the only time I worked anywhere with that setup on Macs, but it worked so well. Though it was admittedly not your standard office environment — there were frequent compelling reasons for me to be using different machines in different parts of the lab, and not a lot of compelling reasons for me to use that account from a computer on a remote network.

JadeNB  6 hours ago

> Even MacOS is still pretty bad at it.

What problems do you see with multiple users on macOS? I don't use it intensively, but I've never noticed issues.

  • lossyalgo  12 minutes ago

    As soon as I added a 2nd user, my Samba share totally broke and days later I still don't have it working. It was fine for over a year and now I'm close to deleting my 2nd user just so I can access my Mac Mini across the network again.

  • silentOpen  6 hours ago

    As a very simple example, airdrop to macOS with multiple logged in users will frequently pop up the confirmation notification in the user account that is not active.

  • booi  6 hours ago

    Perhaps I don't understand it but the encryption security model for MacOS/iPadOS/iOS currently doesn't allow multiple different encryption keys for each user. So any user can decrypt the whole drive and while it does enforce user permissions, the security model can't support true multiuser.

    I actually don't know if Windows or ChromeOS support this either but this is certainly something Linux can with LUKS et. al.

  • kccqzy  6 hours ago

    Switching users while changing displays often results in an incorrect resolution. That’s such a basic thing: different users have different preferences for their displays and keyboards attached to the displays. Yet this doesn’t work reliably, as if during some moments the login window just doesn’t want to adjust resolutions.