Apple Thread - The most overrated technology brand?

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What killed Steve Jobs?

  • Pancreatic Cancer

    Votes: 65 12.2%

  • AIDS from having gay sex with Tim Cook

    Votes: 468 87.8%
  • Total voters
    533
Almighty Space Duck said:
No, not at all. There is the iCloud Plus you can sign up for but there is no nag for it if you’re not subscribed. Apps like Music and Apple TV etc will prompt you to sign up if you aren’t already but besides the Music app you would only open those if you had a subscription anyway.
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Or a free trial.
 
FMW13 said:
M4 user here I agree one of the best laptops I've ever owned. Very expensive but the seamless transfer of things between my iPhone and iPad with it makes it all worth it. And having both airpdods Pro and Max's make the experience so much less of a head ache compared to windows.
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One of my favorite tricks is using my iPad as a second display. It’s so convenient when I work remotely.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
So getting a new computer with macOS is still an OK idea? At least if it's not a laptop with an unable-to-remove battery?
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It's the least worst of the three consumer operating systems. The Mac mini is a brilliant little box, I can't speak to the iMac as I've not owned one. There is also the usual caveat of being the worst platform for gaming.
What Mac/macOS device are you looking at? And what do you want it to do?

Samuel Fuller said:
One of my favorite tricks is using my iPad as a second display. It’s so convenient when I work remotely.
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I found sidecar to be kind of meh. Maybe it would be better on a 13" iPad rather than my 11" iPad Pro.
 
Almighty Space Duck said:
What Mac/macOS device are you looking at? And what do you want it to do?
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Dunno if I wanna get a new computer now. But if I did I'd want something that I could easily swap out the drive if it goes bad and use it for general purpose or basic stuff.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Dunno if I wanna get a new computer now. But if I did I'd want something that I could easily swap out the drive if it goes bad and use it for general purpose or basic stuff.
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So, you can upgrade the SSD on the Mac mini M4, however it's not just a case of buying whatever is available from your website of choice. You'd need to get something from a place like this - https://expandmacmini.com/shop/# - no doubt there are other places you can get compatible drives and I'm sure you could roll the dice on aliexpress too. Installation is easy enough - https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/How+to+Replace+the+SSD+in+your+Mac+mini+(2024)/180199 .
The default 16GB RAM is plenty, but it is not upgradable so if you're really bothered you'd need to get the 24GB/32GB version.
If you're on the fence, pick up a second hand Mac mini with 16GB (this is critical as the 8GB models are not able to run the Apple Intelligence stuff) and an M series chip and see what you make of it. You'll very quickly decide if macOS is something you can get on with, and total cost of the experience won't be that much if you sell that second hand one straight on.
 
Almighty Space Duck said:
It's the least worst of the three consumer operating systems. The Mac mini is a brilliant little box, I can't speak to the iMac as I've not owned one. There is also the usual caveat of being the worst platform for gaming.
What Mac/macOS device are you looking at? And what do you want it to do?


I found sidecar to be kind of meh. Maybe it would be better on a 13" iPad rather than my 11" iPad Pro.
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Definitely. I have the 13-inch 2TB iPad Pro, used to have the 2019 10-inch iPad 32GB, and it was only useful on that as an input device.

That said, turning your iPad into a giant trackpad with styuls capability is pretty killer too.

As far as gaming goes, there may not be the selection Windows has, but what we do get tends to run very well. I get 30FPS solid in Borderlands 3 with all the effects on on my MBP.
 
Samuel Fuller said:
Definitely. I have the 13-inch 2TB iPad Pro, used to have the 2019 10-inch iPad 32GB, and it was only useful on that as an input device.
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It makes sense, but I could never see the rationale behind the 13" iPads. I'd rather have a MacBook Air at that point and not be dealing with iPadOS.
Samuel Fuller said:
That said, turning your iPad into a giant trackpad with styuls capability is pretty killer too.
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That sounds quite fun, I do have an Apple Pencil.
Samuel Fuller said:
As far as gaming goes, there may not be the selection Windows has, but what we do get tends to run very well. I get 30FPS solid in Borderlands 3 with all the effects on on my MBP.
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Don't get me wrong, native stuff runs ok. But it's always a limited selection. Running stuff in a Parallels VM can be hit and miss and Crossover/Wine is a pain at the best of times. Also with Rosetta2 being deprecated in a couple of years the x86 translation isn't something to bank on. My MBP is an M1 Max (biggest GPU version) with 64GB Memory and I find I'll always be CPU limited when playing anything demanding. TWWH3 being the poster child for that. My beloved Cracktorio works just fine though.
 
Almighty Space Duck said:
It makes sense, but I could never see the rationale behind the 13" iPads. I'd rather have a MacBook Air at that point and not be dealing with iPadOS.

That sounds quite fun, I do have an Apple Pencil.

Don't get me wrong, native stuff runs ok. But it's always a limited selection. Running stuff in a Parallels VM can be hit and miss and Crossover/Wine is a pain at the best of times. Also with Rosetta2 being deprecated in a couple of years the x86 translation isn't something to bank on. My MBP is an M1 Max (biggest GPU version) with 64GB Memory and I find I'll always be CPU limited when playing anything demanding. TWWH3 being the poster child for that. My beloved Cracktorio works just fine though.
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The iPad Pro definitely has its place for me. If I’m onsite and need to be able to quickly update notes or respond to emails it is a lot more convenient than my laptop.

I tested one day to see just how much of my job I can do using just the iPad.

Turns out, I can do 90% of my job on it, 95 if I pair a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Literally the only thing I can’t do on it is use my company’s PRTG monitoring, because we aren’t on the newest version, so only the Windows application works properly.
 
hey @Almighty Space Duck

So Mac OS still does not spy on users with AI, unlike what Windows 11 is doing? Also, does Mac OS still have that "time machine" backup thing, and if so, can it be disabled?
 
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ToroidalBoat said:
So Mac OS still does not spy on users with AI, unlike what Windows 11 is doing?
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That is what Apple promise. Any Apple Intelligence feature that you cannot run locally is handed off to Apples Private Cloud Compute. The details of, and how it all works can be found here - https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
ToroidalBoat said:
Also, does Mac OS still have that "time machine" backup thing, and if so, can it be disabled?
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Time Machine is disabled by default. For it to work you connect to either an external usb or designate a network share on your home server for Time Machine use (which is what I do). After connecting you have to enable and set up Time Machine yourself.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
That's good. Are there any other write-intensive features in that OS that accelerate wearing out the SSD?
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No, nothing of any real consequence. In the last 24H the most disk intensive thing my MBP has done in the way of background tasks is 20GB written by Spotlight doing whatever housekeeping it does after a macOS update. Which I’d take to be some amount of reindexing. And that is on a 4TB drive with 3TB used.
 
ToroidalBoat said:
Can Spotlight be disabled without crippling being able to search for files? In Lion you need Spotlight to do file search, which is BS.
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I would expect that to still be the case.
I’ll have a look again at disk usage for Spotlight tomorrow morning and see if it has climbed anymore. Yesterday morning I updated to 26.1 and expect that the majority of that disk usage was post update stuff. It’s also worth noting that my MBP has my entire photo archive on there and could well be skewing the amount of work that Spotlight has to do compared to a clean/more normal use case.
As for disabling Spotlight, it’s not something I’ve ever looked at doing since I’ve always been happy with how much better it is compared the the shit of the Windows 11 search on the start menu.
 
Almighty Space Duck said:
I would expect that to still be the case.
I’ll have a look again at disk usage for Spotlight tomorrow morning and see if it has climbed anymore. Yesterday morning I updated to 26.1 and expect that the majority of that disk usage was post update stuff. It’s also worth noting that my MBP has my entire photo archive on there and could well be skewing the amount of work that Spotlight has to do compared to a clean/more normal use case.
As for disabling Spotlight, it’s not something I’ve ever looked at doing since I’ve always been happy with how much better it is compared the the shit of the Windows 11 search on the start menu.
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Disabling Spotlight doesn't do much to improve performance, and it removes the ability to search for files, which is not really a smart thing to do.
 
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