Ask HN: What software did you purchase that positively impacted your family life

I went all in on apple ecosystem this year after literally 13 years of using android.

Wife and I got iPhone 14 Pro, Apple Watch 8 and AirPods Pro. Got HomePod mini and Apple TV for home. We got bunch of home kit compatible tech at home (baby monitor, smart plugs, bulbs etc). We also subscribe to apple one family. The results are fantastic.

Everything works with everything else, which is impossible to explain without experiencing it. For example, none of the Apple ads/promotions will tell you that if you connect your phone with carplay and ask for directions, your watch will also be automatically a part of it and show you next turns. The watch will also gently vibrate when you are approaching a turn. This requires no configuration. It just works as is. We can ask my homepod to switch off the tv. We can use either of our phones or watches as remote to the TV. The video from baby monitor can be seen on our phones or TV (as pip), or on our watches if needed.

Usually every evening, we put the baby to sleep, switch on the TV, put on our AirPods, put the baby monitor video pip on top right corner of the TV and play a TV shows directly to our AirPods which can connect simultaneously to the TV. Again no config needed, it just works as it is. All we have to do is to login with our accounts (Even this is easy since you do it through phone)

I download shows/tv to my Mac, drag and drop to Apple TV app, they show up on the main TV over wifi. No casting etc. They just look and play as if they are streaming from Apple TV. I can put my phone on a stand, FaceTime with my family on the TV directly using my phone's camera and mic. It looks and works stunning - https://images.macrumors.com/t/0gxYFSdAW32RTme9jwsKnVnYidA=/.... iMessage and FaceTime are much much more reliable than WhatsApp and much higher quality. All my files are synced up between all my devices without any pain. I can copy text on my phone, and just paste it in my laptop and vice versa. I can right click on my Mac to insert image from iPhone Camera. You can use your iPhone camera on your laptop for teams/zoom calls. When we both leave the home, everything (lights, fans, AC etc) switches off and the entrance lights switch on when we come back automatically. we can control all apple home devices from any of our phones, watch, Siri on AirPods, home pod, MacBooks, etc. and every one of the device with microphone responds to "Hey Siri" keyword.

I don't know about Apple hardware as standalone devices, but the who ecosystem is just bloody brilliant. I just cannot go back to the old way of sitting and configuring each device and bluetooth pairing etc. Since we made this switch in March my productivity has gone through the roof.

I don’t understand the downvotes. Looks pretty cool!

Adobe CC. This enables our family tradition to produce photo books for our important events and vacations of our life. In the past we used softwares provided by photo book companies but all of them either phased out their software or being acquired. (They might be rebranded softwares by someone else, seems to be written in Java.)

Since then after I finished doing photo retouching with Lightroom Classic, my wife would use Photoshop and InDesign to design the photo book.

Other Adobe CC apps are at times very useful such as Premiere for Video editing videos we took during a vacation.

Investing into a system like this can be very expensive, not in the $ sense but more like time invested and vendor lock in. Once you invested the time to train in this tools it is very costly to migrate away from it as you become more busy with life. But then it is also very hard to find an alternative that does everything I need from Adobe. Adobe is an ecosystem and is an easy path to start.

This is an interesting thread as a lot of the comments mention services as opposed to software straight out. That said i bought the lifetime membership of jetbrains IDE. I think it was worth the money personally.

Services based i would have to say Spotify. It's been a game changer for me over the years with an unhealthy habit of hoarding music.

Why not syncthing for photo copy?