Darren

Back in 2007 when I bought my first MacBook it came with a massive 1Gb RAM, so I asked the lad in the store about upgrading to 2Gb. He pointed me in the direction of a site where I could get it for a damn sight cheaper.

Yeah, Apple have been playing that game for a loooong time.

I posted my comment using that very client 😀

The mobile app is basically a clone

Amazing. Make loads of noise about snagging Christian from Apollo to be a part of the relaunch, then make an app that has nowhere near the charm of Apollo.

my Android phone

Hard to do AirPlay from a Pixel.

Literally the only reason my LG TV is hooked up to the wifi is so I can show my wife stuff from my Android phone. For everything else we have an Apple TV.

I can’t see any good reason to allow a fridge access to the internet.

This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.

And how do you improve your attention span? By not having distractions available to you.

There are dozens of us out here patiently awaiting a bunch of reasonably powerful new Linux machines.

They do not. Yet.

I don’t really use Windows these days. Mostly in a VM to make sure something I’m fiddling with is compatible for the poor folks at work who have to use it. So I can’t say I have any real opinions on 11 one way or the other. I couldn’t really point to one thing that’s vastly different or improved.

I guess, from that point of view, 11 feels mostly like it’s MS adjusting the OS to better suit their revenue stream, rather than improving workflows for the consumer. Which it is, I suppose.

We use a Canon at work, behind a print server called UniPrint, or some shit. I figured out how to use it to print from a USB drive long before I finally caved and mailed the guy who maintains it to ask how to get my KDE Neom machine to successfully send a print job. I figured out how to see it, I could check the toner levels, but I could not send a print.

Works now, because he changed a setting.

Bastard printers.

I genuinely couldn’t tell you what the current gen Xbox is named, though to be fair I don’t really pay that much attention these days.

But yeah, Windows can’t really have much of a default theme update when there are a good four different window styles throughout the various settings panels.

Looking at it from a perspective other than “Windows shit, use Linux”, MS’ biggest issue here is that the vast majority have no compelling reason to upgrade. Currently.

To the average punter, W11 offers nothing that W10 doesn’t already have. There’s no new technologies that they care about, no new tentpole software that they’re dying to try. Nothing. It has copilot running rampant through it, but most people don’t know what that is or don’t give a shit.

Give Apple their due, when they announce an OS update, they focus hard on the ways it improves over the current offering. Ways it can interact with your other devices, for example. Or even just a whole new design.

But MS advertise nothing beyond “This is new, come get it!”, then wonder why no one cares.

I’m a few months down that path already. Went from a 13 mini to a Pixel 9 running Graphene back in March and have been shifting most of my desktop computing over to Linux.

Honestly, Graphene is pretty nice. One hell of a learning curve, but now I’m beginning to figure out what I can do that isn’t possible with iOS, I can’t see that I’ll ever want to go back.

I honestly wouldn’t mind paying for it if it didn’t feel like such a fucking rip-off.

For example, for £19 a month I could sub to Netflix top tier. For that, I and three others could watch their stuff in UHD, all at the same time. And sure, Netflix content might be somewhat average these days, but it’s still reasonably high quality and costs a decent packet to produce.

By contrast, YT Premium for family is £20 a month, with which I can access a bunch of videos that, while enjoyable, do not cost Google anything to make. Yes, hosting costs money, and yes, they (theoretically) pay the video creators. But it doesn’t feel like £20 a month, y’know?

Part of the trouble is that they lump YT Music in to the same subscription. But I don’t want or need that. I have Apple Music with its lossless catalogue, and library that I’ve built up over many years. If YT offered a straight up ad-free plan that I could share with my family that cost a tenner a month, I’d probably go for it. It would mean being able to watch videos on Apple TV without having to fuck about downloading them to my Plex folder first, because they’ve injected SO MANY ADVERTS in now that the YT app is completely unusable.

Until a few months ago I was all-in the Apple ecosystem. iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV. Seeing them launch things like Universal Control was amazing.

Then I jumped out, got a Pixel, put Graphene on it, and started messing with Linux.

… Only to discover that Universal Control is essentially just Input Leap, which can trace its history back to 2001 and the launch of Synergy.

Apple are absolutely a marketing company. Don’t get me wrong, they add some much-needed polish, but they essentially just rejig existing tech and lock it down so it only works on their devices sold in the last few years.

Removed by mod

The thing that really gets to me is how we’ve gone from “Here, let us sell you a computer that you can push to its limits however you see fit” to “We will sell you a device and ensure you use that device within a given sphere of acceptability”.

I own this phone/computer/tablet/console/whatever, so why the fuck do I have to adhere to their rules? Rules they’ve changed since I bought the device, of course.

God, I wish.

They have stated that they’re more than willing to work with any manufacturer who is prepared to make a device that meets their security standards. But as it stands, Pixels are the only unlockable devices that meet that standard.

Someone like Fairphone could do pretty well from a tie-in with Graphene. But it’s up to them.

I went from 15 years of iPhones directly to Graphene, without really messing with Android in between, so my experience has been a STEEP learning curve, followed by a fairly hum-drum experience. But honestly, that’s fine. I want my phone to take more of a back seat and not be something I keep needing to worry about.

My banking app doesn’t work in Graphene, but the website does, so I don’t really mind.

It could that there’s a whole bunch of shit I’m missing, but mostly it’s… fine.