251–257 of 257 posts
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I doubt I would get the same quality and reliability. Good Android phones are equally expensive and it is very hard to know which are actually good without doing research. As well I had bad experience with some Google Pixel model.
That is always the excuse people bring up to ignore the point. You can spend $1000 on a fancy chefs knife, or you can spend $30 on an Ikea chefs knife. Sure, the $1000 knife is higher quality. Yet, millions of people are still doing just find with the Ikea knife. A cheap car will still get you to/from work over an expensive "higher quality" car. Lots of families don't have money to buy an iPhone for every member of t…
I do SIP and Asterisk. I read the title and was like I know right! Oh smartphones. Setting it up is the tip of an iceberg whereas consumers and society as a whole are pay huge prices in several currencies for phones which are tremendously over engineered for and not fit for, purpose. The entire stack from Von Veumann to 5G has to go.
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That sounds like Linux users complaining about Windows Server or vice versa. iPad is trivial to get running but it is not the same as an Android tablet, and if you try to use your Android experience you will have issues.
Not so trivial that I didn't struggle with it for an hour. I'm not an Android power user. (I think?) I'm not even particularly a fan of Android. It's just the (hot take) least bad option I've tried. More to the point, it seems reasonable to design for onboarding brand new users. That was never a strength of Linux, which most Linux fans would probably acknowledge. What ever happened to "it just works".
If you are comparing apples-to-apples (e.g. setting up pre-installed Linux verses pre-installed Windows, or installing Linux to installing Windows), I would argue that Linux has been in the lead for many years. Setting up a reasonable desktop distribution (Fedora, Ubuntu, etc.) is no more and no less technical. Linux distributions won't encourage you to create online accounts, try to upsell you online services, or bombard you with questions about privacy settings.
From my last experience with macOS: on a technical front, macOS is simpler to reinstall. The online account setup and upselling is far less intrusive (perhaps to the point where you can legitimately consider it as a beneficial setup step for the end user). Perhaps macOS has the lead, but it is a marginal one.
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OK continuing to play Devil's advocate: In my country my mom fell to a sophisticated spear phishing attack and whilst on the phone with the scammer and he leveraged her app's login to make it easier and more convenient to attempt to send her money via Zelle. I wonder if there's really evidence to support that the app's protect you from phishing attacks. I personally think notifications suck and are spam and not neede…
I’m not sure about the formal evidence, but to me it’s quite straightforward. I installed the official banking apps on my parents’ phones and told them to use only those apps for banking. Nothing else. If they use a website, they might mistype the URL or click on a fake link. They don’t really use bookmarks either. Even if they manage to reach the correct site or add it to their home screen, they still have to log in…
Excel on Mac has been closing the gap, but VBA macros from Windows colleagues still break regularly — sometimes silently, sometimes loudly. A workbook that runs perfectly on Windows will open on Mac and just do nothing, with no error. I've ended up keeping a Windows machine running purely because of macro-dependent spreadsheets.
QuickBooks is the more frustrating one. Intuit has historically treated the Mac version as a feature-lagged port — payroll features, industry-specific reports, and bank reconciliation behaviour all differ between platforms. The company essentially wrote the same product twice and kept them deliberately out of sync. Muscle memory from one doesn't transfer to the other.
The only partial escape I've found is pushing financial calculations out to platform-neutral layers entirely — whether that's a shared Google Sheet, a web-based tool, or an API. The moment the logic lives in a .xlsm file, you're platform-dependent again.