231–240 of 567 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why was Solitaire bundled even with the NT (i.e. enterprise/business) versions of Windows? No one ever questioned that, but everybody takes issue with Candy Crush? Weird...
Solitaire is not asking you for money
This blog seems to be down. Yeah I can't deal with the new keyboards myself. Especially the butterfly ones, but even the new redesigned ones are too thin for me. Edit: Lol, the page works again and the keyboard is the one thing he does like :) I can't imagine this but I did notice the new keyboards are highly polarising. Some people love them, some hate them (like me). I really love the keyboards on the thicker think…
I have always been in disbelief of people who have to type for a living and also like Mac keyboards. It's like somebody told the designers "make it as close to a flat sheet of aluminum as you possibly can". I'll give it that it looks clean and elegant, but the actual tactile experience is garbage.
Why the disbelief?
I'm not necessarily a fan of Macs or their keyboards, but generally speaking, I've been able to adapt to almost all types of physical keyboards without issue. They did not affect my speeds on Typeracer, and while I preferred some key types over others, no physical keyboard switches were never deal breakers for me, whether they were mechanical or domes or whatever. I've been typing going back to the 80s, so I've lived through the great IBM and Apple mechanical keyboards of the time.
The only keyboards I could never get used to are the pure touch keyboards like ones on the original Surface covers.
My MBP has 2 USB-C ports. That’s all. Of these ports, the options to expand off of them are slim to nil. I have not encountered a single hub or multi port adapter, including Apple’s that works properly or reliably.
Essentially it is a situation where I cannot use more than two of my USB-C ports at once, which usually means I can only use one, as the other is always reserved for charging.
The hubs are trash. The adapters are trash. Near all of them are from brands I have never heard of.
The whole thing just seems broken. But notebook manufacturers, especially Apple, have now been doubling down on it for years now.
Also while Mac's aren't meant for gaming, when I do game I find the touchbar to be a poor replacement for the F keys. I play WoW and have F1-F5 bound to certain abilities and having zero tactile feedback during something as fast-paced as combat is frustrating.
Additionally, totally agree with the webcam complaint. I don't use it very often, but I was definitely expecting more from it when I first used it. A $2k laptop should have a better camera than my ~$600 laptop from a few years ago.
All that being said, I do also agree with the praise-worthy part of the post. I've really enjoyed how intertwined my iPhone and Mac experience are. Being able to effortlessly take/make calls and texts from my laptop without having to install an app on the phone or waste a bunch of time configuring things is really wonderful.
The speakers are also wonderful and the laptop itself runs surprisingly silently, even under high-load.
But I'm afraid Catalina is the end of the line for its major updates. This was the most expensive computer I've ever bought with my own money, and I've learned the lesson that it pays off to spend money on good hardware. But I can't seem to find to find a great true successor yet.
I understand that Windows can service me just fine, but I really want to avoid paying money/time/attention/dependance into fixing its user privacy hostility. I use Linux on the desktop, but on the desktop I can tolerate its papercuts - coming from a seamless touchpad/software/wifi/battery life/display scaling experience on a Mac is hard sell to spend more time being a sysadmin (I know it's gotten better - but I think it would still require too much of my time). This year's MacBook Air looks actually great, but Apple looks to be replacing it with an ARM laptop next year. I'm actually excited for that change, but I'm not really super enthusiastic about being early adopter or the implications for the support lifecycle of their Intel Macs. In any case, being able to replace the battery or SSD is a big question mark (or just a big 'no') in any Apple hardware now.
When I bought my Macbook in 2012 I never expected 1) to have it last for eight years and 2) that finding a replacement would be such a game of tradeoffs.
> By the way, not including the extension cord is unacceptable. This cord is not only a convenience, but it increases safety, because it's the only way to have earth grounding for the laptop. Without it, rubbing your fingers on the surface of the computer generates this weird vibration due to static. .... THAT'S WHAT THAT IS? I have wondered for _years_ why my laptop sometimes feels that way. Another mystery solved!
As others have said, that's not it. It's the line filter capacitors in the power supply. There's two types: X capacitors which filter differential noise (between line and neutral) and Y capacitors which filter common mode noise (between line and chassis.) Some small AC current (microamps) will pass through the Y capacitor to the chassis. If the chassis is ungrounded, you may be able to feel the current when you touch…
Are there people who can’t feel it? It really is gross and people comment on it as soon as they touch it.
I did switch from 2012 Macbook Air to 2019 Macbook Pro a few weeks ago and I can't agree more with the article. One of the reasons I'm using Mac instead of Linux is that I make music. And the new Macbook sucks for this purpose: the same recording settings I used on my old laptop are not usable on the new one. 90% of time things work fine, but sometimes I get glitches and pops in the middle of the recording. Why? Who…
Never seen this kind of flakey-out-of-the-box bullshit from Apple. I really need a new machine but I'm holding out for a better run than what they have now. And maybe some undoing of their recent price hikes (they used to drop prices, substantially, with some frequency, in the distant past of a few years ago and earlier). Plus all the damn dongles. My '14 has lots of ports and zero USB-C and those ports are great, and I still don't have anything that's USB-C aside from adapters for work laptops, so... why do I want only USB-C again, and no other ports at all? Maybe in another 5-7 years it'll make sense. Give them time to switch all their iDevices to USB-C and for me to replace all those (they last many years, that's why we buy them). Then at least my laptop and iPads and iPhones and such can share peripherals, which is moving toward some kind of benefit to offset the loss of ports.
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I've tried both ways there too; at least a few years ago (may be different now) running windows as a HOST worked way better for me since Linux in a VM was way more well behaved than Windows would be.
Curious what kinds of problems you used to run into here that made you give up on Windows guest/Linux host. I've been running my daily driver that way for the past 3 months and haven't hit any issues aside from 2 nits: - Windows 10 basically requires an SSD to get reasonable responsiveness. You could maybe get away with putting a disk image on an SSD, but for serious use it's best to dedicate a whole disk or partitio…
You can preallocate the disk image for the VM. It's reasonable. YMMV and I don't do anything resembling heavy lifting on the Windows machines.
> By the way, not including the extension cord is unacceptable. This cord is not only a convenience, but it increases safety, because it's the only way to have earth grounding for the laptop. Without it, rubbing your fingers on the surface of the computer generates this weird vibration due to static. .... THAT'S WHAT THAT IS? I have wondered for _years_ why my laptop sometimes feels that way. Another mystery solved!
Does the current MacBook come with 3 prong plug with ground pin? My iPad Air 2 doesn't and it does have this issue when touching the aluminium when charging.