I HATE APPLE

i think people like the fact that the keyboard doesn't break.

unusably large trackpad, touchbar, heavy, sharp corners, terrible keyboard ("does not break" is a low bar)...

it is a profoundly anti-humanist object!

the 2013 MBA is the best macbook design ever and it's been downhill from there.

ah. yeah that all tracks with current-day Apple :/

at some point someone decided that TLS and passwords was Not Good Enough and now everything is really stupid

i hate when i’m running with my new SE and the screen just turns on and controls become active and my finger accidentally hits back or forward or some shit. i’m not even pressing volume up/down (which ALSO shouldn’t activate the screen)

Might get the new iMac being announced on Monday? Been about 10 years since I last had a desktop

Tracer: have you been getting annoying battery drain with the SE, and it's always some app you used for 15sec nine hours ago which has been chuntering away in the background? Probably an iOS thing rather than a hardware-specific thing, mind. I've had it with Shazam (no, I did not long-press for AutoShazam), a bus times app, a SpeedTest and some other thing I can't remember. But I don't remember this being a thing before a month ago.

I haven’t noticed! I use very few apps these days though.

Maybe try turning off background app refresh for those apps. But I’m sure you’ve thought of that. And it doesn’t help for the next app which decides to start eating up juice.

Yeah, Background App Refresh is off for everything. Supposedly apps have a grace period of 10min or so after you switch away from them to finish doing whatever they're doing (with Refresh off), but this is a case of apps nibbling away at the power for many hours. I was told years ago that it's never really necessary on iOS to swipe up in the switcher to "kill" an app; while you may accumulate a couple of dozen in there, they're not doing anything, they're entirely suspended and not using system resources. Well, looks like I have to start actively killing them, like it's an Android in 2010.

For example, I used The Guardian app around 7:15pm this evening. It has been active in the background, draining battery, ever since. (9-10pm: The Guardian (1hr background) - 44% of battery usage; 10-11pm: The Guardian (1hr background) - 37% of battery usage, etc).

lol or android now

Might get the new iMac being announced on Monday? Been about 10 years since I last had a desktop

― calstars, Saturday, 20 June 2020 7:14 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think if I were in the market for a computer today I’d buy an iMac for home maybe with an iPad for out and about. Most of the time my MacBookpro just sits in its stand on my desk.

I'm on a 2014 MBP and use it for everything. The only thing I really use my phone for is tethering. I've never really gelled with smart phones, though this is in part due to the fact that something usually goes wrong (went missing in airport x ray machine, blew up when plugged into socket, refused to turn on one day, slipped into drain)

i found an old 4S the other day, plugged it in, it works great. it’s not compatible with zing but maybe that’s a feature.

The 4S was (is) great. Tiny and heavy. A little tank.

The last Steve Jobs phone I think.

i still use my 4s and yes it's great (but increasingly incompatible with apps i'd like to use) (not zing ffs)

Had a 4S 2013-15, sat in a drawer for 18 months and then became elder daughter’s first phone in summer before secondary school. She smashed the screen inside a week.

Also have a 2014 MBP. 850+ recharge cycles now so battery getting pretty tired (“service battery” messages come and go). Has a tendency to shut down from anything below 50% when tasked with something hard. Never a problem with it otherwise. I did take a look at a tutorial on battery replacement. It’s the “make your own butter” of tech fixes. You just wouldn’t.

^ same boat, also w/ a ‘14 mbp. Hard to service the battery when I have to use it for work.

I'll be in a position to get a new macbook this fall. this thread gives me pause? my current machine is a 2014 15" mbp that works great; I use it to drive a big 4k monitor in clamshell mode, but (used to?) use its portability also. my life will (maybe?) be considerably more portable in the fall, so I still want a laptop. was thinking of going with the 13" mbp rather than the air, is that a mistake? won't buy until september in any case.

i’m in the minority that has a touchbar macbook and i love it. it’s 13”, maybe those were built better? anyway a version with a better keyboard sounds great (not that i’ve had an problem with mine)

ok good to hear. looking at the 13" for the sake of portability, it seems it'll drive external monitors as well as the larger model. can't just get away with a tablet.

I'll be in a position to get a new macbook this fall. this thread gives me pause? my current machine is a 2014 15" mbp that works great; I use it to drive a big 4k monitor in clamshell mode, but (used to?) use its portability also. my life will (maybe?) be considerably more portable in the fall, so I still want a laptop. was thinking of going with the 13" mbp rather than the air, is that a mistake? won't buy until september in any case.

i'm currently using a 2012 MBP that had its entire HD replaced in early 2017 under AppleCare warranty, and it is really starting to drag...thinking about getting a new computer, and have been using Apple products for personal computing for so long that going back to a PC sounds difficult...but what's a guy to do? should i get an MBA? wait until the fall when the bugs with the new MBPs are figured out?

I would not make any decisions until the WWDC next week. There’s an expectation they will announce the timeline for a switch from intel to arm processors. If it’s going to take 6 months then wait. If it’s going to take 3 years maybe just go ahead.

ok caek that would be a big problem! the 13" mbp is just a bit more expensive than the air but has somewhat better specs (and someone else is paying for it). but the air is lighter and will fit even easier in my current awesome backpack.

xp re. kernel panics, not re. arm processors, but yeah, I could afford to wait a bit if that timeline emerges.

If I needed a new machine today I would get a maxed out MacBook Air, no question

Or a pc laptop tbqh

Maybe just one of these https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/

I love my MBP16 for the most part, but I never use it with the lid closed. Seems like a waste of a screen!

yeah I might go for a pinebook if someone else weren't gonna buy me a new box. it's easily sufficient for my needs (though I love the look & feel of mac os still).

it is a waste of a screen but my 4k monitor is super gorgeous and I'd like to get another for the new office I'll have in another town this fall, in addition to my home office. then I can just bring the laptop back & forth without having to bother with syncing.

Definitely getting a pinebook once the manufacturing stuff is figured out (which might be a while with covid) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/pinebook-pro-review-a-200-foss-to-the-hilt-magnesium-chassis-laptop/?amp=1

I spend most of my days switching between a MacBook Air and a cheap HP Elitebook and I would not, repeat not, go for a pc laptop at this point. They're better than they used to be but still only OK, while the MBA is great.

The MacBook Pro my employer gave me stays in its pouch under the desk, because it is a simultaneously over- and under- engineered brick.

I have a 13" touchbar MBP. it's a piece of shit and I hate it

half of the keyboard only works half of the time, and even when it's 'fully functional', it's a chore to type anything beyond a sentence on it. I'm sure the newer ones are better

'how bad can a keyboard really be' I always thought. welp jokes on me

Euler what monitor do you have ?

thanks for input! yeah, i've been waiting for the news on Monday, but i'm assuming that i'll just be waiting til fall or going with an Air a bit sooner.

The best PC laptop I’ve owned was by... Toshiba, strangely. I don’t think they make them anymore.

iirc when I used to meet semi-regularly with Japanese folks as part of my job they all had Toshibas

I have a 2013-ish HP Elitebook for work (finally wiped and upgraded from W7 to W10 late last year) and it's ok but the screen could be from the '90s compared to any MacBook. My switch to eternal WFH happened too quick to sort out peripherals, so I've been borrowing my gf's 24" monitor and grotesquely clunky gaming keyboard (she was furloughed in early April after getting this stuff from her office). As the day goes on and I get drawn into more multiple maddening parallel Slack chats, my fingers hit the edge of the keys more and more frequently. I gotta get something else.

I've never used the Mac for work-work, just fun-work, so I've never been moved to shout at the thing. Except maybe in Numbers.

Gaming keyboards for work ftw

I have a LG 27UD58-B. It was like 300 €.

I have my MBP13 on a stand next to my 27” 4K Screen boosting it up makes it work much better as a companion screen. Magic keyboard and trackpad. TBH it might as well be a desktop now given I don’t take my laptop out any more. I’m pretty sure that there’s not much I do that isn’t covered by what an iPad can do except working on the big screen (and the occasional stuff I do with R).

caek if that MBP is using a spinning-disk hard drive, an SSD is a no-brainer two year life extension, you seriously won't believe the improvement. A pretty easy job too - buy a 2.5 SATA SSD ($50-80), external case ($15 off eBay), Carbon Copy Cloner (free), a couple of hours to do a complete clone, 10-15 minutes of careful disassembly to switch drives, then you have an external backup drive along with a revitalised laptop.

Eh? Someone else?

I have an encrypted external drive with a user set up on it. I can log in as that user but only if i log in as a user on the main drive first and then switch user. I have the drives password in the keychain but it must be the regular drive users keycahin rather than anything in system.

Is there a way around this so I can log in directly as external drive user first? Its not super important and I can live with it, but good to know if there's a simple way around it

I have a user on the *internal* (encrypted) drive in the same situation - have to log in as someone else first. Curious is anyone knows.

xxp sorry caek that was intended for table

Thank you Matthew! really appreciate it— i might just try that.

CURSED IMAGE CURSED IMAGE pic.twitter.com/IbyTglQCjR

— assigned goth at birth (@mycoliza) June 23, 2020