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People willingly buy blatantly proprietary systems, then publicly muse why they don’t have freedom to do with them what they want.
It’s easy to get mad at people for not knowing the things we know. It’s incredibly frustrating. But then they know things we don’t. Turns out there’s way too much stuff to know and we can’t all know everything.
Modern life is unbelievably complicated and everyone is failing to manage that complexity to a level that would satisfy all the idealists. In light of all that, I find it hard to blame them for it.
I don’t know how many normies you talk to, the vast majority of Apple product owners I meet wouldn’t even know what a proprietary system is, let alone what makes Apple exceptionally bad for it. If it isn’t for jewelery, many of those people are also just buying Apple machines because there is a perceived and real quality gap between them and other options. They think there’s just two major OS’s to chose from and a Chromebook if you’re poor.
Its true though, it is funny and annoying when people who understand what an Apple product is buys it and then acts surprised that it functions as advertised. I think most of these articles are written by people who are trying to warn average people and make sure the issue is platformed.
It would technical possible for Apple to have dual boot, and you could boot macOS when you connect to an external display. But I guess it would not be good for business
Not even dual boot. The core OS is the same. Just have two UI. One for phone one for desktop.
Apple will never do this because they sell hardware.
That wouldn’t be even needed. Just add back macos features to iOS and iPadOS
It would be quite nice if they added some MacOS features back to MacOS instead of trying desperately to turn it into a mobile phone OS.
That said, Sequoia is so objectively awful it finally gave me the kick I needed to nuke my MacBook Air and install Asahi, and I’m genuinely really impressed. The only shame is having to waste 80gb of disk for a MacOS partition that I’ll never use, but otherwise it’s actually good enough to be a daily driver.
Sequoia? I felt like that was a nice improvement, do you mean Tahoe with its awful liquid ass design?
Actually it was Sequoia that was the last straw for me to get rid of most of my Macs (replaced them with Linux machines in the main - I was just so sick of Apple trying to turn the OS into a phone while not fixing basic known bugs that have been around for years - like forgetting external display layouts one in ten boots, not restarting external drives properly after sleep, and the finder being, well, everything about the finder…) And constantly having to fight with crappy “oh, today all your builds are going to fail because I’ve decided
ld.soisn’t trusted any more” locked down platform nonsense. And creeping “you don’t need to know where your files are stored, they’re In The Cloud, stop asking for a file dialog (and that’s why we’ll never fix the finder btw)” type crap from the ever increasing number of un-uninstallable crapware applications wasting disk space with every update…But yeah, you’re right - the visual horrorshow that is Tahoe was the trigger to finally give Asahi a try on my last remaining Mac.
Shame really; until a couple of years ago I’d had exclusively Macs for desktops & laptops since the late 90s (from the lovely Powerbook G3 Lombard on.)
That’s what they’re doing. They clearly would prefer people to move to iOS, that smells a bit like MacOS, as it’s a damn sight more profitable to both sell you hardware and software 30% cuts.
- Phones are computers.
- Phones are the most popular personal computers in the world.
- Many people only have a phone and no other computers.
It’s me. Outside work, I dumped PCs a decade back and have lived a much better digital life.
I seriously get annoyed at the amount of work it takes to keep a PC running.
I seriously get annoyed at the amount of work it takes to keep a PC running.
???
!!!
…
I mainly just turn mine on. Not a lot of work.
I mean, it’s been a lot of work lately because I’m learning a new OS and mucking about with shuffling some data around on a couple different drives, but for the last 5 years or so, the “work” involved in keeping my desktop running was mainly plugging it in again after moving to a new apartment.
I hate using a phone. It’s small, the screen is tiny, the keyboard sucks (all touchscreen keyboards suck), you can’t have more than one thing in the tiny screen at a time (yes split screen exists and Android has freeform windows, but they suck even more).
A desktop is a breeze to use. It feels liberating to use after being on a phone.
Then get a larger phone or a tablet and a keyboard. You have options that are infinitely more efficient and less annoying than babysitting a PC.
At some point you must face the question: Are you using a PC because it’s how you’ve always done it?
EDIT: I happened to open the Voyager app and saw your comment. I responded within a minute. My keyboard works just fine. I’m sorry yours doesn’t.
So how fast do you type on your phone? Because I can barely get 50 words per minute and even then my accuracy suffers… So that’s a third of the speed of a proper keyboard and way more typos.
Why would I pay for a tablet and a keyboard to get a second super limited device as opposed to having a proper computer that can do anything I want it to?
Pretty damned fast, actually.
The rest of your excuses are pretty sad but I get it. Gotta protect what you support even if it’s based on outdated information.
To respond in kind, I offer this: You could always cut off the anti-virus subscription and sell your home PC to get that cheap tablet and keyboard.
Nice troll m8
Try programming on a tablet, or playing any graphics heavy games, or really anything more than simple text editing or media consumption. It’s a shit experience.
Of course if your idea of PC ownership includes an anti-virus subscription, you should indeed limit yourself to devices that limit what you can do with them, as I have suspicions about your tech literacy.
Something I’ve learned is that PC people are insane about accepting that there are better options out there.
Thanks for the lesson.
Lmao. Buddy if you want to use a phone as a computer, no worries. But fuck all the way off with the idea that using a PC is difficult or less efficient than a phone. Get a grip on reality.
“Babysitting a PC” you sound like you’re tech illiterate.
Buddy, you sound so defensive typing this out on your phone while your PC sits all the way across the room.
I could do a lot of things I do on the daily on my phone. But it would be more finicky and annoying. I have automated pretty much all regular maintenance my PC needs long ago. I just don’t see what I’d get, except for more janck.
You do you, mate.
I program on pc. Programming on phone is pretty terrible, I have spent a decent amount of time doing this and you kinda need to accept that a lot of regular dev programs on termux don’t work. And you also have to accept using the terminal for everything
Being able to program with a mouse is pretty convinient for things like debugging
Fair. But you also conceded that you can do it on a phone, just not as efficiently.
My comment specified “outside work.”
I think a lot of people downvoting and defending their PCs so . . . vociferously are just old and set in their ways. Not everyone is a programmer/coder.
First of all, I couldn’t find where you specified “outside work”, so maybe you imagined it and accidentally believed you did.
Second of all, phones can be efficient at some tasks, but PCs can be for others. Phones aren’t always the most efficient thing ever at every task. Programming for example is much more streamlined on desktop, since you can simply install an IDE, program what you need and test it pretty easily unless you’re really shit at coding. On mobile, it’s different, on iOS you’d be hard pressed to find an IDE at all that isn’t some completely unheard of one with at most 3 stars if people actually used it, or 5 stars from the creator of it. On android it’s a little better, although I genuinely haven’t heard of official or even recommended options for IDEs either.
Thirdly, people aren’t downvoting out of elitism, it’s out of logic, PCs are amazing at most things, maybe apart from endless short form video scrolling. Phones are just portable PCs built to be more energy efficient, do mostly the same tasks, but also lack most of the input methods apart from a digitiser, and a miniaturised display. None are bad, and frankly I’m typing this on an iPad right now, but that’s because I’m away from my desk and just wanna do some simple browsing. On my laptops I can genuinely do what I’d like that isn’t just browsing, I can have a game open that’s not compatible with iPadOS or android, and even within browsing, I can have 30 or more YouTube or other tabs open without the browser grinding to a halt, which I can’t say the same for safari on the iPad or chromium on my android phones.
People aren’t “just old and set in their ways” because they like the tactility, openness and forms of ease of use PCs bring. Sure, your workflow may have never touched PCs at all currently, but other people have different workflows. Other people aren’t stupid for not being you.
Sorry, I skipped all that.
OP: pulls out phone “Ha HA LET ME SHOW YOU MY 30% completed POKéDEX”
Bill: “I can store actual Pokémon here…”
I would, but I can’t fit 3 32 inch screens in my pocket ever since I blew out the crotch on my JNCOs.
Perhaps get some prescription glasses for your eyes so you can see screens better, mate.
I looked it up and you can save your JNCOs with Ceftriaxone or Levofloxacin. Check with your doctor, mon frère.
Ugh sounds like my nightmare. I try to keep the phone away and only use desktops or laptops. I just use the phone for calls, texts, photos when I don’t have a better camera, Lemmy/rss and some light web browsing.
I seriously get annoyed at the amount of work it takes to keep a PC running.
Can you elaborate more on that? In my experience unless you set up a complicated NAS or home server setup maintaining a personal computer doesn’t require much upkeep. I prefer it over a phone because of the physical keyboard and superior window / tab / organization options.
PS: Wrote this comment from my phone anyway 🥲
You see all those things you just listed?
Those are things you hardly ever worry about or whose existence you completely forget about when you ditch a PC.
Your computer is an annoying child you never parented.
Wanna boot it up? Better wait for a minute or two. Oh! Now it needs an update because something went wrong last night when it was supposed to automatically do it.
Oops! Lost internet connection. Better go pecking around menus.
Shit. It’s acting up still. Your game you’re trying to play is losing frames. Something to do with heat management. Something about a graphics card? Who frigging knows, better ask the internet from a phone.
P.S. Your antivirus is out of date and you need money to renew your subscription. The process will take another few hours of your time because you have to babysit it past all the AI that’s sure to get in the way.
Bah! Humbug!
EDIT: The angry PC people typing aggressive insults using their phones proves the point and is quite funny.
It sounds like you’ve been burned by a poor PC experience. Your problems are legitimate though they should be rare, which is why your sweeping characterization of the PC experience is being downvoted.
I am much more interested in your mobile workflow! What apps do you use? Do you use workarounds for something PC users wouldn’t think about? Do you use accessories like a keyboard/mouse/monitor?
Holy fuck I wish I had read this comment first. You are actually an idiot of the highest order.
Can introduce you to our lord and savior Debian? All your troubles will go away when you accept Linux into your heart.
No. That requires a PC.
Tablets and phones allow keyboards and run 99 percent of the programs or tasks I could ever need.
I guess if all you do is troll people online, a phone is just fine
Preferring a phone over a PC trolling. Got it.
Why do carpenters need all those saws and chisels? I have a perfectly good staircase right here already
“right to root” would prevent so much eWaste.
I would love a variant that is like, if you stop delivering security and minor fixes/backports to a device, you have to give access to root or better even to the bootloader.better yet, open source it when it gets abandoned.
full on, no excuses. all board schematics, source code and documentation.
shit, require it from the start.
The problem is that it allows users to detect when they’re connected to a phony cell tower like the ones police and ICE use to intercept communications, and we Can’t Have That.
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They have been since the beginning.
That’s literally why I got an OG Motorola Droid. I said to myself “I can have a full computer in my pocket!”I went to the Verizon store to buy an iPhone when the droid first launched, the rep said “you don’t want that phone, check this one out” and showed me the droid. So glad I didn’t get roped into that ecosystem.
I still miss CyanogenMod dearly…
Yah. It had customizations nobody has anymore.
I am actually very, very, very seriously looking at post-market OS since it is mainline Linux on a phone.
The whole point of the article is that the new MacBooks are running on iPhone hardware. And that therefore there’s no reason for you not being able to install MacOS on your iPhone. Even your old droid was locked down and you were not able to install a real OS which would have given you the freedom to run what you want without restrictions
I remember one time I had a coworker sit down next to me with her MacBook, iPhone, iPad and iWatch and that was an “aha!” moment for me. She had spent like 5x more than she would have if 1 or 2 devices could do all of those things.
It wasn’t locked down. I rooted it, installed a few OS’s, it even ran Linux.
I understand the point of the article. I’m saying since the very beginning, the only limits on what smartphones can do, have been what software ‘they’ want you to run.
A CPU is a CPU. Some are faster or slower, but they can all do anything.
This. But Marketing has been very good at saying “this: phone, that: computer. not same thing”. So many times I heard “Oh but how do you want to do that on a phone?”. It’s not a phone. It has never been a phone.
The only difference is UI. I operate my phone in my hand with my thumb, not on my lap or on a desk from a keyboard.
And the hardware. Your phone requires much harder power optimization in order to have a usable battery life. Same for size and heat dissipation.
Also politics related to the radio connection. Public cellular is tied to identity. It is structurally hostile to user-controlled, fully open, deeply optimized devices because the radio stack is certification-heavy, operator-governed, and privacy-hostile.
For the first point, that sort of engineering is more necessary for a smaller form factor, but can absolutely be done for other computer hardware. Applying these lessons to laptops yields some amazing laptopsz for example.
As for the second point, that’s just one component in the system. You can attach a cellular modem to a PC. They just don’t tend to be built in directly.
I’m emphasizing breaking free from identity ties to devices enforced by the hardware/radio. Not adding it to all devices.
It also limits open source competition in the phone market.
I think you’re having a different discussion than we were in this thread, then.
I had an Atrix 4G back in the day.
For me, it was around 2013 an iPad nano, thinking how awesome having an iPhone with unlimited internet would be, because I could listen anything on demand on the go Then I got my 4s as first self bought iPhone.
I realised, how macOS like it is, as I had jailbroken it.
Im surely not the only one who thinks this article is ai generated? it spams the exact same structure and has the typical smells
I will risk dying of laughter if THIS is what finally pisses off the Apple cult.
There are “pissed off, not the same, Jobs wouldn’ta dunit” sentiments for almost every new product by Apple.
So I don’t think anything will change much.
Anyway, this is a return to roots. They were, you know, a mainstream consumer oriented company at some point. With an implicit but almost explicit claim that “we don’t do the crap others do”.
I’m optimistic. It’s quality attacking quantity. We’ve had a personal computer market with quantity winning over quality every damn year since about 2003, and it has been getting worse and worse. If the pendulum is starting to move in the opposite direction, it’s very cool.
And yes, megabytes of RAM are quantity.
But admittedly I’m a couple weeks’ old convert.
We have been complaining about this shit for YEARS.
And yet… you still… never mind. Not worth it.
I’m annoyed at the state of Apple’s app ecosystem. MacOS is worse this year than it’s been in a long time and I’m not updating on Macs that I control.
But have you used a windows pc recently? It’s like banging rocks together. Somehow, they keep finding ways to make it worse every year. Or month. So yeah, I’m using a Mac because it’s the less terrible option.
(And good luck getting your IT people at work letting you put Linux on your laptop.)
So I’ve recently started using a Mac mini, and it’s very good. But I’ll agree that I don’t like Liquid Glass. I’m using, eh, a 1280x1024 dinosaur display over an hdmi-2-vga adapter, so can’t confirm nausea from it, but sore eyes are a thing.
(And good luck getting your IT people at work letting you put Linux on your laptop.)
What am I gonna do? Stop myself?
yeah, it’s useless… we just need to sit by the river at that point.
very much so, with that attitude.
This is the result of two decades of deliberate, calculated effort by the largest technology companies on earth to turn users into consumers, instruments into appliances, and technical literacy into a niche hobby for weirdos.
Has there ever been a time when computer geeks weren’t consider a weird group of outsiders?
BTW, I was raised on MS-DOS and it didn’t help my computer literacy one bit (heheh). I still can barely navigate my computer in the CLI, much less build anything or do anything cool from some internalized “mental model” of how a computer works. Meanwhile, there are a bunch of toddlers running around with Arduinos and doing all manners of mind blowing shit.
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You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
I mean, a .tar would have made sense as example here;
unzipis also a tool (“app”). And not merely for convenience, the format is not simple. Unlike tar, which you could dd to “unpack”.The quote is funny for me, I can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated application, I don’t speak the language of
moisture vaporatorsdeflate, and certainly not fast enough.
I’ll care about climate change the day they do.
But every time I need to throw away perfectly good electronics makes me resentful of the idea that climate change is our fault any further than the fact these fucking people breathe air in Minecraft.
That’s like saying ‘my partner and I smoke, in the house, and we should both stop because it’s killing us and our family members who don’t smoke. Even though I have the ability to stop, or otherwise drastically reduce my smoking, which would be beneficial to everyone, I’m just going to continue because they won’t stop.’
Zero logic here.
Makes me think of either the Fairphone or the Nothing Phone that originally advertised that it could be used as a desktop computer thanks to USB-C ports and I thought that was a brilliant notion. I really don’t see why Apple couldn’t just do the same. I mean, I can see why (DAT MONAY!) but it would be awesome for folks to have such flexibility with their devices.
Been doing that with a Librem 5 for many years.
Librem! That’s the phone I was thinking of, not the others
I think the fairphone is also a Linux phone, so that would work the same. Nothing however is yet another android-but-private-this-tiime
So are SIM cards.
This model is absolutely short-circuiting the brains of the Apple haters. It upends everything they’ve been complaining about for a decade; all the same arguments that had merit 10 years ago but were mostly resolved 5 years ago (meanwhile, little said about the things Apple currently is terrible about.)
This laptop is:
- inexpensive, but not ‘cheap’
- repairable
- runs a full os; no os compromises
It is not:
- upgradable, but what laptop is these days?
Seriously, it address three of the biggest complaints against Apple historically, and we’re supposed to be mad the phone doesn’t runs a desktop OS? Who was under the impression the phone didn’t run a full OS because of technical limitations?
The Apple that Apple haters think exists (not wholly without reason) would’ve launched a $599 laptop that ran iPadOS, but they didn’t and yet there’s still complaints.
It is not:
- upgradable, but what laptop is these days?
I got a used Framework for under 600€, upgraded the keyboard, speakers and motherboard. The old motherboard is now one of my home servers in a dedicated case.
A older version of a product whose biggest selling point is repairability is hardly indicative of where the industry is currently. And being used, the price you paid doesn’t mean anything either.
upgradable, but what laptop is these days?
Oh, you sweet fanboy child…
Fair enough, enthusiast laptops do. I can’t think of a sub $1,000 mainstream consumer laptop that is.
Pretty much every machine I’ve had open has upgradable ram. Unless the machine is the absolute thinnest of ultrabooks, the ram has been easily removed, replaced and upgraded.
It doesn’t matter really what laptops you’ve owned, what matters is the landscape of new models.
Pretty much every car I’ve owned is gas powered, but we agree the future of most cars is electric.
Bro thinks macbook neo repairable
It’s not my opinion.
Being more repairable than other macs is not really a big achievement.
https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years
The laptop is built on an A18 Pro, a mobile chip first seen in the iPhone 16 Pro, which limits the machine to 8 GB of RAM. Storage comes in 256 or 512 GB, and whichever one you buy is the one you keep.
https://www.canadacomputers.com/en/search?s=sodimm&filter[memoryType_uFilter]=DDR5%2CDDR4&order=product.price.asc
They could have easily made the RAM and Storage user serviceable/upgradeable, and from what I can find, they don’t provide a way for the enduser to expand storage with a secondary SSD/HDD either, so you’re either forced to carry around an external hard drive for a product that is meant to be portable, or use cloud storage where you might not always have reliable access to the internet/data caps.Anecdotal, but the only component that has ever failed on me is a hard drive, if that happened to me on the new mac book, it would be e-waste.
They could have easily made the RAM and Storage user serviceable/upgradeable
Nope, they couldn’t have, since the A18 pro chipset doesn’t support modular memory at all, of expanding it past 8gb. It’s a phone chip after all. There’s also the fact that Apple has equipped all their devices with unified memory, which, if they even managed to make it upgradable, all chips would need to support massive memory bus widths to have the same or similar bandwidth (requiring more modules), would need proprietary modules or at least rare modules like SOCAMM, and would reduce the space inside the chassis for anything else, like battery, modular ports, etc.
Sure, I hate Apple’s antics in terms of lack of right to repair, but frankly they produce arm based computers, where have you ever seen an arm based laptop or mini pc with modular RAM? I’m sure some exist but they’re likely too obscure for me to have heard of (although I have heard of System76’s Thelio Astra, although again they are a bit obscure outside Linux circles.)
Edit: forgot to add, but yeah soldered storage is really inexcusable.
It was more so a comment that they could have used a connector for the ram to make it user serviceable, instead of soldered on, and I combined it with a sentence that the storage should be user serviceable and upgradable instead of making my earlier comment overly explicit/wordy. The quote I took from ifixit right above even says that the mobile chip is why it was limited to 8 GB of RAM.
Some changes would have to the layout be made to accommodate fitting a physical stick instead of just the soldered modules, but there’s CAD software that plots traces, so that really shouldn’t be an issue.
Not allowing a 1TB option certainly is a choice, and one that can be criticized. But I don’t think it’s fair to say they could have “easily” made the RAM upgrade (certainly not user upgradable) at that price point. It uses the A series because they make billions of them, and ram has not been upgradable in them.
All it takes is putting a SODIMM socket into the device instead of soldering in the RAM, making it possible to salvage the device if the RAM begins to fail. It’s a basic laptop, meant for browsing/writing documents, I can’t really see anyone swapping in 16 gb of ram to a device like this, and seeing any performance uplift.
All it takes…
That is perhaps the silliest thing I can think of regarding these chips. Can you name even a single phone whose RAM is not soldered? Heck, most laptops these days don’t have upgradable RAM.
Yeah, even the effing expensive MacBook pro is no longer upgradable (since the switch to Apple Silicon). You want RAM? Better sell a kidney and buy a new Apple, kid!
Was sometime before that. It’s been close to, if not fully, a decade since the switch to what they euphemistically call “unified” memory.
No duh.
