djdarren

I’m not an expert on non-Apple hardware by any means, but the Apple stuff I’ve had over the past 20 years has all be incredibly well built. The lone exception was the white plastic MacBook I got in 2007 which was broadly good, but designed in such a way that the palm rest would always chip where the little standoffs at the top of the screen pushed against it when it was closed. But other than that, iPods, iPhones, Macs, iPads, Apple TV, all of them have been very, very well put together.

Whether the components inside were good value for what I paid is a different matter, but the build quality was always exceptional. I never had a MacBook released between 2016 and 2019 though. We don’t talk of those.

But yeah, the software - even with all the current shortcomings - has always been good. Moving from iOS to Graphene was one hell of a learning curve in working out that it was always easy to do stuff on my phone because Apple had put the work into making software that did what their customers needed it to. And for whatever reason, most folks who make apps for iOS/iPadOS put a lot of effort into making their apps really nice to use. The same isn’t always true of Android.

Yeah, there’s an enormous gulf between using a thoughtfully put together app, and cobbling together a solution using command line tools on a phone screen.

I’m currently addicted to The Planet Crafter, where you start with about 30 seconds of air before you have to duck back in to your landing pod to refill your tanks.

But before long you’re exploring the surprisingly large map, gathering items you need to terraform the planet and build increasingly huge bases. I’m about to hit mammal-era, where I’ll be able to craft mad looking alien animals using a DNA manipulator. But most importantly, you can craft a screen that displays your stats, and when you’re in a groove, number go BRRRRR.

It’s basically No Man’s Sky + Minecraft, and it’s great.

There’s a thing that happens on Mastodon throughout June: #AudioMo. Basically, people taking part record and upload a bit of audio every day. Pretty simple.

I used to do it when I used iPhones. Record and edit in Ferrite, add a thumbnail image that I’d edited in Pixelmator, then export from Ferrite as an mp4 static video, ready to upload. It was a piece of piss.

These past two Junes I’ve had a Pixel on Graphene, and I’ve yet to figure out a similar workflow for it. I’ve tried a bunch of different apps, but none of them really match the quality I got used to on iOS, and I didn’t fancy spending loads of money trying different apps, only to find they were lacking in some way.

Yeah, my only wish for my M2 is that Asahi is up to 100% by the time Apple pull the support for it. It’s close. Damn close. But still far enough away that it feels like a compromise.

Are those videos around the 2016-2019 MacBooks? Because yeah, Apple massively dropped a bollock with those things.

But I’m at a point where I’m genuinely pondering whether a fully-specced 2015 MacBook Pro running Linux might be a great replacement for the M2 MacBook Air I currently use, once it dies on me, or Apple drop support (whichever comes first (which will be the dropped support, guaranteed)). I said in another comment on here that I still have a 2011 MacBook Pro at home, running Debian, still trucking along as well as the day I bought it. My home server is a 2014 Mac mini (also running Debian) that’s my Jellyfin/Navidrome/Grimmory/Lidarr/QBittorrent server, all with just 8gb of soldered RAM, drawing very little power while doing it.

Apple have many, many problems, but the build quality of their hardware ain’t one.

I can answer this from the perspective of someone who, until 18 months ago, was all-in on Apple stuff.

The short answer is: As long as all of your devices are reasonably new and running the latest software, they’re all really good at talking to each other. Got a Mac and an iPad? Great, you can use Universal Control to operate the iPad using your Mac’s keyboard and mouse/trackpad. And that is a genuinely useful technology. Got something on your phone that you want to share with your partner on the TV? AirPlay it across to Apple TV. And so, and so forth.

Thing is, once you’re in that situation, you’re kinda stuck. If your Mac ages out of OS feature support, the only option is to replace the Mac if you want it to match the interconnectivity features of your new iPhone. So the answer in that situation is to buy a new Mac, one that supports the new features available in the newest OS. At that point, your options are to either shell out £1000+ on a new Mac, or completely change your workflow to one that can be achieved using open source or paid alternatives. The vast majority of people have neither the time nor the inclination to set up things like that, so they factor in the cost of a new computer, phone, or iPad every few years.

But Apple’s real secret sauce is that - and judging by the attitude you’re swinging around in your post, OP, you’re not going to like this - they make REALLY good hardware.

My primary computer is still a 15" M2 MacBook Air. That thing is super thin, super light, completely silent to use and has never given me a moment’s trouble in three years that I didn’t somehow inflict on myself. Using Crossover, I can play Windows games on it just as easily as using Steam/Proton on my Linux PC. I can play RDR2 on my fanless ARM laptop and get a perfectly fine 30fps when I’m not at home. The battery is three years old but still gives me a full day of use. Sure, it only has two ports, but both of them are Thunderbolt 4, and it has a dedicated Magsafe charging port.

I still have my 2011 MacBook Pro at home. It’s currently running Debian and is still rock solid. Looking a little rough around the edges these days, but still a perfectly usable computer - that’s 15 years old.

Apple has inherently worse hardware

This just isn’t true. At all. The build quality of their hardware is the best in the business.

Sure, they effectively paywall things like 120hz screens to the higher end Pro models, but they have enough market research telling them that people who buy a mid range iPhone don’t care about refresh rates, or even know what they are. Why spend money on a QoL upgrade that the user will never notice?

But yeah, their cost for memory and storage is downright criminal, and always has been. The only thing that’s changed in recent(ish) years is that now everything is soldered or proprietary, they’ve made it effectively impossible to upgrade it yourself at a far, far lower cost. And that’s incredibly shitty.

These days I’m primarily a Linux user. My work PC is Kubuntu, my home server Debian, my gaming PC CachyOS. None of those machines are as easy to use as my Macbook running macOS 15. They can (theoretically) achieve more, but in the 2 years I’ve been using Linux I’ve had to teach myself how to use a command line; something I very, very rarely needed to when I just used macOS alone.

But I reached a point where I got sick of Apple’s bullshit, their performative stance on progressive politics that didn’t match the image of Tim Apple licking Trump’s ring. So I traded in my iPhone 13 mini for a Pixel 9 onto which I immediately installed GrapheneOS. That one act completely broke the spell of the interconnected nature of Apple products for me. I still have an iPad mini, but 90% of its use is as a peripheral for my MacBook, where it does still have genuine utility.

So yeah, Apple don’t do anything particularly groundbreaking, they just make good hardware running software that’s mostly good and useful. People, it may shock you to learn, generally prefer to use devices that don’t need much tinkering to keep them running.

I use Navidrome, and have set up Lidarr to feed it if I’m feeling a little hook-handed, if you get my meaning. Lidarr was a bit of a bollocks to set up, but once it’s running it’s pretty neat. I access it via Tailscale so can add stuff to the library wherever I am.

As for accessing it: again, I use Tailscale to run it through a reverse proxy on my website, so I connect to it using a subdomain. But as long as I’ve got Tailscale active on my phone, I could always access it that way. As others have suggested, I use Symfonium on my phone, and I use Feishin on everything else.

It all works pretty well, to the point that I don’t really use Apple Music anymore.

It helps when you get that their goals and ours are not really the same. They want to earn more money, and don’t need to provide a perfect service to achieve that. They just need to be (slightly) less shitty than Xbox.

I’ve heard a bunch of people talking about this game over the years, but have never played it. So, inspired by the comments in here I just took to Steam and bought the whole lot for a whopping £3.70.

Fair play though, it is pretty funny that they let DBrand spend all that money first.

It might not be “absolute cinema” and had maybe 5% of the budget of Chernobyl, but given that people have suggested Ted Lasso, I’ll go one step further into the realm of fuzzy feel-good TV and drop a mention for my favourite TV show of all time.

The Detectorists

There isn’t a single moment in that programme where any of the characters are mean to each other (save for the when dealing with a rival club). It’s just 20 beautiful episodes of people looking for gold, living their lives, and doing their best to be supportive.

And it’s incredibly funny.

As someone who hates football, Ted Lasso was wonderful because at no point was it ever really about football.

sorry

I also trust @Nemo@slrpnk.net’s spouse’s opinion.

Funny enough, the other day when the Steam Machine pricing was announced, I noted that where Valve are charging £90 per 500gb for storage when upgrading from 500gb to 2tb, Apple were charging £267 per 500gb for the same upgrade in an iPad Pro.

That has now changed.

Apple are now charging £300 per 500gb when upgrading from a 500gb ipad to a 2tb iPad.

Three. Hundred. Pounds.

For me, I think it’s the Megadrive/Genesis.

I was a Nintendo kid, originally. We had a NES and a Gameboy in our house, and I loved them. But during a visit to the US in the summer of 1993, I got to spend pretty much the whole of the 4th of July at a family friend’s house in Massachusetts, playing Genesis games with a bunch of American kids. That cemented it in a special place in my mind.

Ok, fair enough. That accounts for the difference in upgrade pricing between an iPad and a Mac.

But what accounts for the other £110 between the same upgrade on a Steam Machine and a Mac?

Oh, I know. It was true when I bought my first MacBook in '07. It’s just rough to see it in such stark numbers like that.

Looking at the upgrading pricing on a Mac Studio - which is the closest analogue to the Steam Machine - the pricing is only slightly better at £200/500gb. Still criminal though.

Just compared the storage price jump to the current iPad Pro.

512gb to 2tb Steam Machine + £270 (£90 per 512gb) 512gb to 2tb iPad Pro + £800 (£267 per 512gb)

That’s straight up robbery from Apple.