prof

muthuk_vanalingam said:

Looking at the top free iPhone apps from 4 to 10, do the people in this forum still believe that "Privacy" is a feature that is being actively used by the majority of the iPhone users? For those users who do value and use the Privacy feature, iPhone is the only option and there is simply no alterative option available to them.

Those who don't value their privacy (and looking at the top app usage, it seems to be a huge percentage of iPhone users fall into this category) - Wouldn't those users be better off financially by buying an Android phone at a much lower cost if they are NOT going to use the most-important differentiating feature from the other OS (except probably the niche users playing high-end games in their iphones)?

Dunno. I also find the Apple supported trend "free with lofty iAP" absolutely horrendous. Not only do I want to know the real price in advance but it makes those Apps also hard to distinguish from the usual "hybrid" Apps which have iAP and pay with private information in combination and of course those that require a friggin subscription. I'll stay with my motto: If it's free -- it ain't for me. 

mpantone said:

If they attempt to ship new M2 Macs on Monterey, there would likely be little new functionality offered by the current macOS Monterey unless they heavily forked macOS which isn't Apple's modus operandii. It's worth pointing out that there are no developer betas of the next generation macOS right now. Zero, zippo, zilch.

You don't seem to know a lot about OS development. The CPU specific code for in an operating system for a specific CPU model is miniscule, typically a few thousand lines of code across kernel and libraries. If Apple wanted (and they have done this quite often in the past) they could release a minor update to macOS which supports the new CPU model and release a new feature blazing major version a lot later; zero forking needed.

Also a lot of the limitations of the OSes on older devices are totally artificial to boost sales of new hardware; that's todays crux of device manufacturers: Almost anything is done and possible in software and the hardware has been powerful enough to do so for a long time but you simply can't make money with free software optimisations...

If they defer M2 Macs, then most certainly not because of macOS.

thanx_al said:

"It was Apple who complicated things by pursuing its silly ‘thin at all costs’ mantra which undermined a generation of Macbooks. Now, with the new MacBook Pro, they are back on track"

There is far from universal consensus on this. I personally liked thin-and-light at all costs. It pushed technologies farther than they would have been if thick-and-fat were the go to standard. Did Apple go too far, maybe? But I remember the old days of thick, fat, and heavy laptops. No thanks. I can fit my 13" MBP into a folio designed for a notepad. That's what I want.  

There pretty much is consensus about that, especially with the Pro models. It's great for you that you have another Mac, for me this would be totally impracticable. There're a lot of different needs amongst pros and Apple has pretty much failed all of them and only catered to the needs of a few photgraphers and musicians. There's a reason why there was a lot of speculation about a completely new design with true Pro genes in a larger form factor.

Making the pros as thin as possible is truly self-inflicted damage and people half rightfully scalded Apple for that; the lack of expendability, the abysmal keyboard, the thermal problems, the lack of escape key, the hard requirement to have a boatload of dongles on you, the unergonomic mirror screen.

Apple is truly lucky that other companies are sucking so much in usability department, that switching is often not a real option: a lot of people are sticking with Apple despite their crappy hardware, not because of it. It makes me sad, that my most usable laptop here is still my 2011 MBP 17"; luckily I still have it here because otherwise the 9d it took to repair the shitty keyboard on my 2017 MBP 15" would have been an even harder hit.

This varies, user to user, and anybody telling you that a machine isn't "Pro" because it has or doesn't have any given feature is selling you self-interested snake oil.

Say what now?!? I can definitely say that the pro in the names of Apple products hasn't been pro for about 7 years now. And I'm neither selling those or products the competition, nor am I going to switch from the Mac; I'm simply an unhappy Apple customer and pro user.

It will make some users very happy, and others will scream bloody digital murder about it -- as they always do.

No, not always. I've been a very happy customer between 1999 and 2012. Somewhere around 2010 Apple stopped listening to their users and genius brains and took a deep dive into corporate shit territory: They stopped working on some hugely successful (but starting to be "niche") devices and focused on less diversity and more mainstreamy ultra portable devices. A few months ago when my trusty 2011 17" MBP was up for yet another mainboard replacement I sadly had to switch to a 2017 MBP with touchbar: damn, so many gimmicks, so little pro value: the keyboard is the horror (sticky keys, keys losing paint, bad typing ergonomics, no f'ing real escape key!), they glarey screen is a sparkling nightmare, the touchbar crashes some applications frequently (looking at you, iTerm2!), the machine freezes and restarts intermittently and then the USB-C dongle chaos and the maintenance fuckup (yeah, when our older laptops have a hickup, we simply remove the harddrive, put it in a spare machine and you were back to work in no time, such a problem now takes an expensive person out for at least half a business day and you're shit out of luck if you don't have a up-to-the-minute backup and a few days of work are lost forever...) all in the name of "ultra-portability".

So what's the problem with the Macally HOME72UC? Does USB-C PD and regular USB-A at less of the size of the single USB-C charger from Apple (though at a slightly lower power rating). The only thing I find a bit annoying is the lack of MagSafe requiring an additional piece on the port to provide proper protection.