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It Just Works

danielandrews.com

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Re: It Just Works

#131

Post by Jerry2 »

geophile wrote: post #14

Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating. - iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to th…

>If current trends continue, my beautiful Mac hardware will be nothing but a boot loader for VMWare and Linux.

Your whole post is a pretty good troll but I'll bite anyway. Tell me, what do you plan on replacing iTunes and Photos with under Linux? From what I've seen, there's nothing there that even comes close to functionality of iTunes or Photos.

And why even run Linux in a VM? Why not boot it? Why not sell MBP and just buy a Lenovo?

Anyway, your whole post is silly.

Re: It Just Works

#132

Post by blackbeard »

ericabiz wrote: post #129
plug wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Very disappointing for a machine which isn't 3 years old". This really resonates with me, sitting at a similarly aged iMac that frequently displays bafflingly poor performance, displaying what I like to call the "psychedelic jelly-tot of death". Sort of off-topic, but another thing that really frustrates me with Apple products is when something goes wrong with the hardware. I have a 3+ year old Macbook Air. The 't'…

The 2012 Macbook Air you are referring to does have a replaceable keyboard. I co-own a repair shop and we just did one. However, it is a daunting task. We charged $200 for the replacement ($30 for the part + $170 in labor) and it took our most experienced tech nearly 2 hours to complete. The problem is (for anyone who's never opened a MBA) that if you look between each key on the keyboard, Apple decided for some craz…

That sort of design scares me. I've got a circa 2010 lenovo X201 and a keyboard replacement on that is a 5 minute job max and costs $20 and it's all a small philips driver (I use a swiss army knife). I'm on my third keyboard.

Re: It Just Works

#133

Post by msluyter »

gshubert17 wrote: post #35
msluyter wrote: post #17

Yes, I've also noticed an increasing number of software bugs on my Macs. FWIW, I wanted to try out the Dell XPS "Developer Edition," which appears to be about as close as you can get to a Macbook level build quality in a linux box (without having to jump though the hoops of installing linux on a macbook itself), and you simply can't order it from Dell's website. A chat with a rep suggested that it's out of stock. So,…

Any knowledge or experience of System 76 laptop computers as Linux machines?

I read some pretty bad reviews of the Galago. A full third of the Amazon reviews are one star:

http://www.amazon.com/System76-Galago-UltraPro-Ubuntu-Laptop...

Re: It Just Works

#134

Post by afandian »

x0x0 wrote: post #127
afandian wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you avoid updates? Just never quit?

phone: set manual updates only and never approve them; laptop: archive the entire directory structure and replace it =P all devices: wonder why the fuck I have to do this and why spotify can't get their shit together

It's SAAS. It's the future. Get with the program.

(Thanks hadn't thought of going to those lengths)

Re: It Just Works

#135

Post by guscost »

> People lose their minds when Google services go down because it happens once a year. When Apple services go down, people just shrug or write a blog post like this.

Well hang on a minute, I thought people lose their minds when Google services go down because Google is a software company and their core products are online services. When Apple services go down, it isn't as noteworthy since Apple is a hardware (dare I say fashion?) company. But when Apple sells a cellphone that can get faraday-caged by your hand, that's when people freak out.

Now is that any excuse for Apple services to be broken as often as they are? Not at all, it projects a shoddy brand image. And when it's a service that is required to make the hardware function, users won't care which part of the "experience" is breaking.

Anyway, good writeup.

Re: It Just Works

#136

Post by Jerry2 »

tracker1 wrote: post #105
geophile wrote: post #14

Major Apple applications have become inscrutable and frustrating. - iTunes, Music and the iTunes store are a mess. I understood the old iTunes organization. Navigation within my music collection has become highly non-intuitive. It seems that there are multiple paradigms (long list of tracks, and another sectioned off by album), and it isn't always clear why one or the other is used. I keep forgetting how to get to th…

I really don't use any Apple software on my rMBP except for the OS... and even there improper handling of Bluetooth and WiFi are unacceptable. I went with another macbook because I love the touchpad, and like an all-metal case. That said, I paid through the nose for something with an OS update that's simply unreliable. It will be the last Apple product I buy for a long time, and TBH, if Ubuntu comes out with a good e…

Just sell it and buy some laptop that you can use Linux on. Why "suffer"?

Re: It Just Works

#137

Post by waz0wski »

bane wrote: post #37

I dunno, I just don't use Apple produced software on my Mac for the most part and the experience is mostly fine. I use Windows at home and Mac for work, so I probably spend a bit more time on my work Mac. I loath finder with a passion that would reduce stars to quarks, but that's just because its poorly designed, not particularly buggy. And outside of the OS, that's pretty much all the Apple software I tend to use on…

> My only real gripe is that I wish the screen animation and updating was more "snappy" like in windows. It always feels like it's just making the little graphics hamsters work a little extra hard to do things like scrolling quickly.

on 10.8/9/10 You can change the mission-control animations speed with this tweak:

defaults write com.apple.dock expose-animation-duration -float 0.1

It's still kind of crap, doesn't perform well on 3+ displays, but faster.

The 10.11 beta noticeably improves animation speed / "feel" of animations around the whole OS, even on 3+ display systems with many windows open.

Re: It Just Works

#138

Post by rzzzt »

ino wrote: post #29
planetjones wrote: post #6

It's really frustrating for me just how many bugs Apple software has. Let's look at a simple one - the icons on iOS safari for frequently visited websites. They "randomly" assign the wrong favicon e.g. I click the Facebook icon and it loads Hacker News. This has been present since iOS 8. Yesterday I pulled down the notification screen and it occupies only 50% of my screen. Cue another reboot of the iPhone. My iMac. U…

> My Macbook Air. It's better, but the power button no longer does anything when I press it. Press and hold. It's this way to prevent accidental logouts which were frequent in my case when it was just a press.

Depending on the duration of the key press, you can send the machine to sleep, get the traditional shut down window, or invoke the forced power-off incantation, according to this support article [1].

The short tap-for-sleep method doesn't seem to work on the machine I'm using, either.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201150

Re: It Just Works

#139

Post by [deleted] »

Sir_Cmpwn wrote: post #83

I don't understand why the hacker scene these days is full of proud OSX users. What happened to the proud Linux hackers we've always had? They told me to use OSX at the job I recently started, and I only lasted a week before I told them I wanted to install Linux.

[deleted]

Re: It Just Works

#140

Post by extra88 »

jacquesm wrote: post #103
DonnyV wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your entire music library doesn't have to live on your device. Just stream it right from GM or cache the albums you want to listen too.

What really gets me is that some scrappy start-up tried to launch a service like that in the 00's and got totally burned by the labels because it was not 'fair use' but now google does it it is ok.

I think you're thinking of my.mp3.com. They bought a bunch of CDs, ripped them, customers used a desktop application to "fingerprint" a CD they had that would grant them access to the mp3s the company created. They lost in the court because by ripping the CDs they bought, they were offering a service based on copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holders. While the opportunities for abuse with the "fingerprinting" scheme are obvious, that's not what got them in trouble.

There were then and are now music "locker" systems where every track you can play is from a file you created and uploaded and only your account can access. That's what Google Music is doing (for music you add, not the subscription service or tracks you buy in their store). In so doing you may have violated some copyrights but the operators of the locker system played not part in it. And if they act upon DMCA takedown notices (assuming they operate in the U.S.), they're protected from prosecution under the Safe Harbor provisions of the law.

It's inefficient for such locker systems to have X copies of the same song, one for each person who uploaded it, but I assume more modern storage systems can use lower level deduplication to reduced the space needed while still presenting each user with their "own" copy.

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