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Comment by Terretta | Hacker News Reader

I'm confused. From his success list:

I basically went back 5 or 10 years and replaced every "modern" technology solution. I pay now way more than I did with iCloud, but I am back in control. I am more productive.

- Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality

- I can take real photos wiht high quality instead of relying on ever newer iPhone models for thousands of dollars which will always have lesser quality than a mirrorless camera for the same price

- I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists

- Coding via neovim on a terminal and just being on my keyboard navigating not only tmux and co, but also my OS is way more productive and faster

Which of these can I not do on a Mac?

View on HN

The measurement of success in this case doesn't seem to be that he's gained new abilities, but rather the poster figured out how to gain them without Apple.

Most of these seem like pyrric victories to me, as the Apple versions rose to success with all of these as competition by providing a better experience. I certainly wouldn't want to carry a mirrorless camera everywhere, nor deal with Bandcamp.

Depends on the mirrorless camera, doesn't it? The smaller ones are hardly bigger than larger smartphone, and they do offer way better picture quality.

Not really (on size), what mirrorless can you fit into your pocket? The smallest ones still are 3-4" thick because of the lens.

Your trousers? No. Your coat? Definitely. Unless you go for full-format ones with bigger lenses. In which case your priorities most likely aren't carrying your camera gear in your pocket.

I’m not wearing a coat all year long, and almost never on vacation. The latter situation is the most important one where I need a less bulky solution.

Fuji X-E4 + 27mm f/2.8 at 2" thick is quite pocketable.

http://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/products/gr-3/

While not opting out of most of the convenience the Apple ecosystem gives me, I did buy a GRIII and carry it along everywhere I go - together with an otherwise capable iPhone. The difference in optics and sensor really does show in print or when cropping.

I have one of these and yes, I can cram it into my pocket with some effort, but it isn't very testicle friendly.

They're still much bigger than an iPhone. Sure, if you walk around with some 13" tablet that doubles as a phone, the point may be moot, but a "regular" iPhone is much smaller than even compact cameras.

I can stick my iPhone 7 in my jeans pocket. My Olympus Pen-F (one of the "smaller" mirrorless cameras) with a small prime lens needs a pretty big pocket only some of my larger coats have. Plus it's heavy enough to pull on said coat and make it uncomfortable.

Yeah, image quality is pretty bad on the iPhone compared to the Olympus. But when I go out and about and don't want to have a bulky thing hanging around my neck / forearm or carry an extra bag, the Olympus' image quality is exactly 0. The iPhone beats that hands down, even at night.

Now don't get me wrong, I love my pen-f, and it's an incredible improvement over the DSLR I used to haul around before. But iPhones are getting pretty good for my needs now.

The best camera is the one you have with you.

Couldn't agree more!

Not really. I have so many shitty Razr and smartphone videos that I wish I had just enjoyed the moment instead of wasting time capturing something that has the quality of a gameboy camera.

Now I am thankful my dad endured the pain and captured a lot of stuff on the JVC shoulder camera. At least the quality is pretty good even for 80's/90's.

We don't capture events like we used to anyway. No one holds there camera up for more than a minute. So we're left with all these short videos. I like watching the really long stuff my dad shot.

Sincere question: Can mirrorless cameras match or do better than the result of the multiple exposure stuff that phones can do? (E.g. Apple’s “Deep Fusion” feature)

Yes, easily. Modern DSLR sensors have a higher native dynamic range, so you can get more out of a photo without using multiple exposures in the first place.

Also, most DSLRs these days have some sort of multi-exposure functionality built-in. Sometimes it's as simple as 'bracketing' (so you get multiple phones you have to merge together in post), but some fancier ones offer HDR functionality in-camera, so nothing to do in post.

> the Apple versions rose to success with all of these as competition by providing a better experience

At one time, Apple clearly was a better experience.

Now, with features removed and new "privacy and security" features added, I'm not sure they are a great experience. For example, my Macbook reminds me of Windows Vista, except for worse, every time there's a system update and I have to reboot to permission the camera for a web conference.

I've learned to dread OSX updates because instead of adding new useful stuff, it seems like we just move things around, change out the icons and add some more intrusive "touch the fingerprint reader" authentications... plus I have to re-permission half of the apps and hardware just to do my job. Then there's the whole reboot, unlock, install, reboot, re-lock cycle. It's seriously worse than Windows Vista. Anyone remember the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials?

I have never needed to reboot because of permissions, basically just had to click “allow” a few times, so this stuff doesn’t really bother me. It’s a very slight inconvenience.

Big Sur performance on older hardware has been a disaster though. Even on a $2500 MBP 15” from 2017. On M1 though it’s excellent.

Every update I need two reboot twice to get the google drive system extension to load, but that’s the only issue I’ve had like that.

However big sur runs alright on my 2015 MacBook!

Having written system extensions (both kext and DriverKit), that seems more like an issue with the extension itself.

That may, but Apple broke a formerly working API. If Google can't figure it out, that's a signal.

I mean... no?

If you're referring to the Kext/DriverKit changeover, this is just false - Kexts still work in Big Sur, they're just trying to slowly shift the ecosystem to DriverKit. Nothing has truly changed there yet.

If you're referring to a broken thing within Kexts/IOKit itself, that would be a pretty severe bug that would get attention within Apple. I feel confident saying this as I've reported bugs like this and they get appropriate priority levels.

Lastly, if you're writing (signed) driver code, you generally have access to resources within Apple to get answers to questions. I'm not even a large company and it was relatively easy to get in touch with those teams - and this stands in contrast to other teams within Apple.

Sounds like something is wrong with your TCC.db file. When did you last check permissions?

Also, in case this helps:

https://cipherlog.blogspot.com/2020/12/macos-microphonecamer...

Thanks, but those instructions did not solve the problem for me at all.

> I've learned to dread OSX updates because instead of adding new useful stuff, it seems like we just move things around

To be fair, that also describes Windows. As best I can tell, every release since 7 has primarily focused on renaming and adding indirection to the ways you get to the same old control panels.

And I haven't ever had to reboot to allow a camera. I have several, ranging from a microscope to an SLR that also is my webcam.

> As best I can tell, every release since 7 has primarily focused on renaming and adding indirection to the ways you get to the same old control panels.

I thought this was the UI museum feature where you can time travel back to Windows NT4 one layer of indirection at a time.

Some things travel back to windows 1.0 - windows 10 UI.

I still don't know how they managed to make the settings control panel replacement so bad in windows 10.

For example, you go to the proxy setup, the pac URL location is a tiny text box no matter how big the window, and if you have restrictions on your system you cant view the full address or copy it.

For Bandcamp maybe regarding playing and library, but not regarding discovery.

I have to travel a ways to specialty shops to buy reasonably good headphones with wires. It makes me mad every time I need to buy some new headphones for my computer.

I carried a google pixel 3 which took excellent pictures.

That said, I now carry a mirrorless camera everywhere. The pictures are WAY higher quality and I have more control over the experience and the final output. Don't get a mirrorless if thats not important to you.

when I want to just take a quick selfie, I still have my phone. The iPhone is great at taking pictures but its never going to be a match for a mirrorless wihch has a enormous sized sensor compared to anything you'll get on a phone.

> nor deal with Bandcamp.

Curious what's wrong with dealing with Bandcamp? They seem just about the best place to buy music online. Majority of the money goes to the actual artist and you have a good choice of formats.

> Majority of the money goes to the actual artist and you have a good choice of formats.

Agreed. Bandcamp does this right by offering V0 compressed MP3s, 320kbps MP3s, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC and I think even Ogg Vorbis.

And, for the past 18 months, they've had a day where they waive all fees so bands that can't play live anymore can stand a chance of making some money.

> I certainly wouldn't want to carry a mirrorless camera everywhere, nor deal with Bandcamp.

Bandcamp recommendations and artist/album similarity ratings are top notch, and there are many clients for the platform.

I personally can't use Spotify or Apple Music after taking advantage of Bandcamp.

Bandcamp also only takes a 10% - 15% fee for digital purchases, and 10% of purchases for physical items, which is an incredible deal for artists compared to what they make from streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify.

Bandcamp is great, and there is something really wrong with Apple music in Firefox on windows. Its very slow and its seems to do authentication _after_ loading the rest of the page and often fails.

Glad it wasn't just me. How is it that slow with gigabit connection?

In fact, I really like their catalog and match algorithm but I always thought apple music being outside of its own fence feels gross.

The android app is good, though I can't compare it to the iOS version. On windows, itunes works okay-ish albeit slow. On Linux, the web app is the only option and it sucks way bad.

"Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ..."

This item is the reason I am leaving the iphone and trying an unlocked/stock android device.

My music collection is a directory tree that I have curated and organized since 1996.

The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app.

Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane.

It is a workflow built for people that impulse buy a track here and there ...

> The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app. Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

On the contrary, any number of apps support precisely this.

- https://readdle.com/documents (not just music)

- https://www.everappz.com/evermusic

- https://brushedtype.co/doppler/

- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sony-music-center/id724406878 (if you use Sony headphones)

- http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html

- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mrmc-touch/id1062986407

There's no point in listing all of them.

Having ripped some 20,000 CD tracks a couple decades ago, I use several such apps.

As a user of such apps, I'd argue with "correct" though, given Apple Match with iCloud One combo and last year's update supporting high resolution / lossless.

Over time, I have come to use those apps less than Apple Match, which mirrors my rips using tracks from Apple's library where they have them, or uploads mine where they don't, giving me more seamless access across all devices, spoken access from Siri on HomePods, etc. Match was a debacle at launch, is now almost never wrong on even the most obscure tracks.

I've had good luck with flacbox https://www.everappz.com/flacbox

It supports FLAC obviously but also Opus. For my phone, I've ripped my FLAC files to Opus and can carry my entire music collection wherever I go. I used their import tool to build the same folder structure that I have on my NAS. I have iTunes installed on my Windows machine (no Macs at home) but I try to avoid it if at all possible.

This app uploads your identifiers and activity to the developer without consent.

There's a growing trend these days of making every single player app into spyware, and it's sad. I won't use reader apps or player apps that read or play local files that are going to transmit my activity off device for no reason that benefits me.

From this Linux (formerly Windows from a looong time ago) guy this looks dreadfully silly and annoying. Files and folders, y'all.

All those players work from files and folders. That was the point.

Sure, I'd say I was also commenting on the idea that "Files and Folders" as anything other than an extremely obvious default (and even perhaps requires help on a forum) is again, terrible and silly.

> Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane.

This is not completely true. You can store your iTunes collection wherever you like, organized however you like. You don't have to duplicate anything, although it's true that the default is for it to "import" it.

You can also create an "all my music" playlist which you can sync with the iDevice.

I used to have this setup with my music collection on Google Drive (because it didn't fit on my MBP's internal drive) and synced some of it to my iPhone. It worked well enough. The issue was more that all the music couldn't fit on the phone, so I had to pick and choose anyway.

The real gotcha is that iTunes didn't support flac, so I had to convert everything to m4a.

"You can also create an "all my music" playlist which you can sync with the iDevice."

Yes, but then how do you deal with that enormous "all my music" playlist once it is in the iDevice ?

You can't browse by directory. You can't organize or display based on filename. So I guess I could parse all of the collection and transpose the artist/title/album out of the filename into mp3 metadata and then I would have a ... 30,000 track playlist ?

Again, all of this makes perfect sense if you're impulse buying a track here and a track there and if there is some way to move that "collection" to a new device every 2-3 years.

It's just not for me.

Well, I don't know how you organize your music "by directory", so maybe you can't reproduce what you do.

In my case, I organize it by artist / album / track number - track title; or by compilations. I then search for the album or the artist. I never have just random single tracks, so a directory is an album, which I have in Apple Music.

But I guess that you can't have any kind of organization you want, which is something that folders could give you.

> So I guess I could parse all of the collection and transpose the artist/title/album out of the filename into mp3 metadata and then I would have a ... 30,000 track playlist ?

Well, in the case of a meticulously managed collection, I'd expect the files to have correct metadata. Again, if this isn't the case, and you rely on file name / location, yeah, you're gonna have a bad time.

Just for the record, I've never bought any track off iTunes. All my music is ripped from CDs.

"Well, in the case of a meticulously managed collection, I'd expect the files to have correct metadata."

WAV files don't have metadata like mp3 files (typically) do.

I'm not saying I copy the uncompressed wav collection to my phone (~700 GB) but I am saying that my original metadata schema has all of the metadata in the filename:

Last, First - AlbumName - 01 - SongName - 3m25s.mp3

... and yes I could parse and reencode all of these populating their mp3 tags with these fields but, man ... what a load of work just because iTunes can sort by 50 different attributes just not filename:

https://www.tech-recipes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/itun...

... just look at all of those fine grained, fancy ways to sort by ... but the most basic attribute of all the filename is missing.

> ... just look at all of those fine grained, fancy ways to sort by ... but the most basic attribute of all the filename is missing.

That’s a screenshot from a decade-old iTunes. And it includes the option to sort by name.

I’ve just checked with the most recent version of Apple Music, and the wav filename appears in the title field and you can sort by it.

> WAV files don't have metadata like mp3 files (typically) do.

I feel it's my civic duty here to repeat: they do, in fact they even support ID3 tags, but it's up to the software developer as to whether they support them or not.

WAV tagging has grown in support in the past few years, but yeah, iTunes certainly doesn't support them.

Did you try any third party music apps?

Browse by artist, album, etc?

> Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

It is so bad that it makes me wonder who at Apple thought any of it was a good idea. Its not even 'bad from a certain perspective' bad but totally FUBAR.

I simply stopped trying to use my phone for playing music and it is the #1 reason why my partner wants to move away from iOS

> Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

No, it is not impossible. It is very easy at least as Linux user.

There is a project for that, called as iFuse https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse

It basically allows you to mount the Media chroot filesystem and the app specific sandboxed filesystems without a jailbreak.

> Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible.

I believe VOX Music Player allows you to upload your music without using iTunes - although it is using their cloud sync instead. Flacbox also seems to let you download and play local files from Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, SMB servers, DLNA servers, ...

It doesn't seem "totally impossible"?

Using a file system as a metadata storage system is pretty dumb - especially when music files have ID3 tags built into their formats. There are tools that will help you fill out the metadata in the tags based on your file system layout. Once you do that you can use the tags to slice/dice. Smart Playlists are very powerful.

Or you can use one of the many other apps others linked to if you really want to stick to the whole filesystem thing.

I quickly got away from trying to organize stuff in the file system when I got my Personal Jukebox 100 (PJB100) - literally the first hard drive based MP3 player out there in the mid 90's. It heavily relied on MP3 tags so I developed tag discipline early on - and never looked back. Tags are WAY more flexible than folder structures. I couldn't care less how files are stored in the file system.

This conversation always amuses me - we don't complain the computer tracks all the parts of our files in a directory while we have no control over the layout of the files on disk - mainly because that's a level of minutiae better left to automation. For me it's a similar things with my music files. As long as my tag information is accurate (and since it's the first thing I do when I add something to my collection, it is) I can manage my music collection however I want irrespective of where the file is.

I think that manually organizing your own files is not really compatible with a large music library (I have around 2 TB of music) and, from my experience, was too much of a barrier for most people anyway. I currently use Swinsian to organize files (and various metadata-fixing tools) and Plex + Plexamp to listen to them. Mac mini server, iPhone. Works great. This is just to say that one person's "correct" is another person's cumbersome and unintuitive.

Uh, did something change? As recently as a year ago I just dragged files into iTunes (or Music or whatever they call it now, but this was definitely after the split) then selected which artists I wanted to sync, and I only had to do that step because I didn't want them all on there. I didn't have to do anything with playlists.

But then, my metadata's in pretty good shape, so it barely even matters how my music files are stored. One big flat directory, carefully named folders, not that important.

To be fair, I guess I did have to convert the Flac to m4a. Drag to converter program, convert a ton in one go, drag those into iTunes. So that's one more step.

The old iTunes Media Library .xml format isn't too complicated - I wrote a few small tools to generate m3u8 playlists, and another to convert .m3u8 playlists into itunes library xml. Then I just import that straight into the music app.

Shouldn't take more than an afternoon of a reasonably proficient developer's time. I agree that it's not great that you should need to do this kind of thing, but it's less effort than switching to android ;)

My music collection is a giant pile of files (~19k tracks, according to iTunes) that I have been curating for a similar length of time, but I let iTunes do all the grind of organizing them on disc for me. My purchasing and listening is pretty much entirely on an album basis.

iTunes uploads it to Apple's cloud, since I'm paying for iTunes Match; my iPhone and iPads pull it down. It is very easy to search for a single album on the iOS players; they also make it very easy to find your most recent acquisitions, with an automatically-populated "Recently Added" playlist.

~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music looks almost exactly like the directory structure you're probably meticulously maintaining by hand (lots of Artist Name/Album Name/01 Track Name.m4a), but adding new stuff to it is a simple matter of dropping a directory full of properly-tagged files onto iTunes. Then I delete the original files after iTunes has copied it into its directory.

It breaks down if 90% of your collection is a bunch of badly-tagged files you downloaded off of KazAa, but if your collection is a mix of stuff you ripped from CDs back in the nineties and made sure were tagged properly, and stuff you've bought that the musician/store tagged properly, it works pretty much seamlessly. Except for this one weird glitch where sometimes iTunes on my Mac decides that I have both the copy of a track I bought off of the Apple store, and one in the cloud, and thus plays every song off an album twice. I've kinda quit buying stuff from Apple because of this; I'll go to Bandcamp first.

What is the attraction of meticulously maintaining a directory structure that a computer can very, very easily maintain based on the metadata stored in the files? Why are you so married to explicitly browsing a duplicate of this filesystem on other player devices?

When you drop all of your stuff into itunes, won't it automatically reencode everything to either aac, possibly leading to perceivable audio errors or to alc, bloating the file sizes to a ridiculous degree?

Nope. I've got WAVs and MP3s sitting around my library that I know I have dropped in there as recently as a few months ago.

Most interesting, I should take note of that. thank you.

Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux. Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise. Hell the window's drivers are bad enough, Apple doesn't really want users doing anything other than OSX.

I will say they have no problem booting up a VM, and everything he is doing can be done in a VM with hardware accelerated graphics. So Full screened feels just like the real thing, as long as you are not playing modern games. Boot into windows for that.

That being said there are Windows Laptops that will give a Macbook Pro a run for the money, but when it comes to the $1k price range the Macbook Air is hard to beat. I like the ARM chips for basic users, but for a Power user the ARM chips are a step backwards. Unless you want to run ARM based Linux. With my many years of raspberry pi use, ARM has gone a long way on the Linux front. But not sure if i'd want to rock that as my main.

At the same time you can do all these things on Windows as well.... Really more of a personal preference. I have limited experience with Linux for Windows Subsystem 2, but it worked damn well when I used it.

> Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux.

Dual booting on any hardware is nuts if you ask me, pick an OS and use VMs. If you really have to have a native OS but hate it so much you wont use it the rest of the time stick it on a different machine.

I hope things have gotten better with Linux and drivers. I'll admit I've been out of the game for about 5 years now.

> Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise.

When I was using Linux as my main OS, I was having this problem with all laptops. Desktops usually had many less issues, but were occasionally less than perfect.

For example, Lenovo, at the time, was hailed to be great for Linux compatibility. Well, for some reason, regardless of the distro I was using, I was more or less given an ultimatum -- I could have a screen with adjustable brightness or a consistent network card driver, but not both. Editing whatever file I found on various forms to "fix" the backlight issue (was permanently stuck at 100% brightness) would inevitably cause some sort issue with where my Internet connection speed would drop from around 1gbps to mbps eventually to kbps the longer laptop was awake.

It was an issue I never found a solution to, and the oddest part was that this was never an issue if I booted the OS of a live USB. Only when the OS was installed would the issue arise.

Various laptops I owned / used for work had their own issues with Linux too. I eventually just settled on using Linux in virtual machines / servers and never looked back. So, I definitely agree with your point about VMs.

I'd consider going back, but I really cannot/do not want want to sacrifice too much time getting distracted with making the OS bend to my will when I could use that time to be actually getting things done.

I think it's a "philosophical standpoint"

>I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me. And I wanted to change that.

Many of us probably know senior folks at Apple.

While this is purely anecdotal, I've observed a higher proportion of "mission oriented" product and even I.T. leads at Apple than at the other brands he adopted in this divorce. (He's not using Framework laptop yet.)

Shout out to the unambitous product manager / owner who doesnt want a raise at Fujifilm for making such nice cameras. There is no chance that they tweaked the XT-2 or XT-3 to compete with the also excelent Sony products in order to impress the guys back at HQ.

Obviously they are "technology people who share the same passion as me" and are browsing throught HN.

I'm struggling to see your point. Fujifilm does not have the same incentives as Apple.

The author agrees with you that they do not have the same incentives and have products not directed by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise and are apparently technology people who share the same passion as them.

I just see two companies, that want to sell stuff for more than it costs them to produce, but what would I know.

>Obviously they are "technology people who share the same passion as me" and are browsing throught HN.

Except they actually are? If you read their dev blogs, it's insane how much love actually goes into building the colour magic that goes into the cameras. Trully decades upon decades of love labour.

Instead at Apple camp they deliberately hinder UX for end-users if it means Apple gets to make some more profit this way.

Which of these can I not do on a Mac?

You can do all of them when you use a Mac, but Apple will do a lot to try to persuade you not to. That means you'll spend a lot of mental energy fighting with Apple's very effective p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ marketing department, and often you won't win. That's fine. You don't really lose anything, but every so often you'll think to yourself "I listen to the same bands all the time" or "I wish this phone had a bigger camera sensor." and you'll regret putting so much of your life, and money, in Apple's pockets.

Honestly this is by far the biggest problem I currently have with newer versions of MacOSX.

I would have hopped by now that integration with dropbox, Sharepoint/Onedrive, Google Drive would have gotten better. But they are mostly barebones.

Granted Google Drive is barebones on nearly every platform.

I'm a big 365 user, and that is by far the best experience so far in terms of fluid use between devices and apps. Especially on windows, where even sharing a file doesn't require a Web browser popup. But oh man the admin side of 365 is overly complex, and easy to see why people use gsuite.

iCloud Sucks and has always sucked. Unless that is you are 100% apple ecosystem. Integration into my onsite server is easy with 365, google, and dropbox. Icloud is super clunky and really thinking about moving the Wife to something other than iCloud.

What sorts of integration are Dropbox, Onedrive, etc unable to do?

The third dot point here makes absolutely no sense to me.

Apple music and Bandcamp are essentially the same thing, I personally use Spotify and I don't have to listen to "mind numbing" music. You can choose to let the applications play music for you, or you can choose your own music.

Spotify 10 years ago was exactly how I discovered old/new bands and artists that were not mainstream.

I don't see this persons logic in that regard at all.

The author is stating that not all music sees distribution on Spotify et al, instead it is distributed via Bandcamp or other sources. A lot of older material isn't available through Spotify et al due to licensing issues, or labels that have gone bust.

It's their tone, there is a difference between "a lot of older material isn't available on Spotify" vs saying that Spotify has mind numbing music.

Spotify to my knowledge and experience has an enormous amount of older music. Enough to make it the main source of music for my parents. I think this guy needs to realise that they don't need to listen to the curated playlists...

> Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality

"Hey Siri, shuffle <playlist name>" - no clicks involved.

As for wired/wireless headphones. I wasn't aware that running Arch was a requirement for using Wired headphones, but then again, i moved to wireless headphones a decade or so ago, and have changed my habits to allow me to charge them while i sleep, as well as checking the product specifications for any headphones i buy to see if they actually match my expected usage pattern. But then again, i'm weird.

Sure, you could get a mac and then opt out of/remove all things apple, but then why get a mac in the first place?

I don't think that is confusing at all, just a matter of degree between leaving all services of apple or additionally leaving their OS as well.

The post can be distilled down to "I had a Mac and thought it made me special, but now I don't feel special so I use something else and think that makes me special".

Which...I guess? Millions (billions) of people use all sorts of stuff. Good for them.

The "I'm leaving [some platform]" posts are always extremely low value pablum for a subset.

It reminds me of the early MUDs and some MMO guild bulletin boards where you'd periodically get these super melodramatic "I quit and this is why" posts, which would more often than not be followed by the person returning to the game not long after.

The longer and more impassioned the goodbye6ever post, the sooner you know the author will return.

If it's really long, it means they love the game but burned themselves out and don't want to admit it.

A long enought post and they will be back before they get to the end of their goodbye.

This still happens frequently. Even before the lawsuit against Blizzard, their WoW forums would basically have daily posts from people who felt the need to cry about things they didn't like about the game and tell everyone they're quitting.

As somoeone who did the same thing recently, just to MS and Google (I still have a hard time abandoning YoutUbe and Youtube Music along with my years-long build playlist and preferences), I can relate. Because what the OP described is basically the recognition that

- dedicated hardware does a better job than general purpose one (cameras vs. smartphones)

- the smartphone ecosystem (regardless of brand) is becoming more closed, and monitored, every year

- there are enough alternatives out there, even if those mean to give up some "conveniences" we thought we won over the last years (IMHO, most of the perceived "inconveniences" that come from these alternatives are more due to lock-in and dark-patterns from FANG/MS and phone OEMs)

> dedicated hardware does a better job than general purpose one (cameras vs. smartphones)

Hardly headline news - a $1,700 camera with >$1,000 lenses is better than a $1,000 phone with a camera attached. If anything the gap is closer than it has ever been. Irrespective, there is litterally nothing stopping someone from having an iPhone and a dedicated camera, or if there is, then I (and practically everyone I know) are breaking some sort of rule somewhere dictated by the overlords at Apple HQ that thy shall not use a camera.

Also, as any photographer knows, the best camera is the one you have on you.

>a $1,700 camera with >$1,000 lenses is better than a $1,000 phone with a camera attached.

The original assertion was same price, so a $1,000 kit body + lens is better than a $1,000 phone and camera.

Which doesn't change anything about how inane a point it is.

There are many reasons why someone might choose some hardware or platforms over other hardware or platforms. The paradox, though, is that if someone believes it's all or nothing -- that they have to tie their ego with a platform -- their judgment is likely suspect to begin with. When people do the "I'm leaving 𝑥" type declarations, it almost always comes from an unhealthy place.

Somehow I've managed to own an SLR alongside every system I've used for the past decade+ (though it sits unused to a much greater degree given how vastly improved modern smartphones are...). I have a Lenovo Windows laptop, a Windows 10 gaming PC, an Intel MBP, an M1 Mac Mini, an iPhone, an iPad, though I've owned a number of Android tablets and smartphones (including every Nexus device) before. Every server system I've deployed in the past decade has been to Linux.

No Apple stormtroopers ever busted down my doors and demanded compliance. Never did I feel the need to wave a flag or commit to a tribe, because why would I? The notion is self-sabotaging.

> why would I?

In a word "integration".

Can you use an ipad as a second screen/wacom cintiq? On mac it is built in. On windows you need extra software and then it is still ducttaped on.

Linux desktop and android phone? Then you can reply to sms, share the clipboard, automute music when receiving a call,... (kdeconnect. MS and Apple have some decent copies). What if you have an iphone instead? Well, bad luck.

All these things might be "minor" or "only by default", but they matter very much to many people.

> "dedicated hardware does a better job than general purpose one (cameras vs. smartphones)"

I think that depends on what you mean by "better job." For example, I have both a Nikon D-800 and an iPhone. The Nikon takes amazing pictures and the iPhone fits in my pocket. Most of the time, the "better job" I want is a camera that fits in my pocket. On occasion, the "better job" I want is a camera that takes amazing pictures.

I would never abandon either my camera or my phone because my "better job" frequently changes.

Some people don't care about their computers making them feeling special and instead just have a set of goals and choose the computer hardware and software which best accomplishes those goals.

But those people I'd say wouldn't then go and write an article about it.

Can you imagine how many, very boring articles, there would be if everyone did write that article.

'I needed windows for some work stuff, so I went onto dell and bought the thing in the middle of the price range.'

Yeah, this is just the nerd equivalent of being a hipster. It's not even as though any of the changes are any better, they're just different. Which of course means you can then write a blog post in a cool monospace font with your cool domain name proclaiming your nerd coolness to the masses.

Not only that, but then you'd also write it in a way that low-key suggests other people probably also want to do the same thing to be just as cool.

Problem is that there are so many different people, and so many of them don't even know how to operate a device that isn't completely pre-prepped for the lowest bar to entry that they can never be as cool. /s

I guess this is the kind of data point that people might use in reinforcing their bias for a choice they are about to make. If you take two brands, platforms, systems etc. and just search for switchers between those you'll find the exact result you'll like.

Going from Debian to Arch? Amazing! Debian sucks for reasons X and Y and Arch is much cooler. But switching from Arch to Debian? Hah, those Arch losers are missing out on A, B and C so they are so uncool! Heck, you can make this even smaller. Using OpenSans as your Font? Boo! Use Fira Code, that makes your code so much better! Pick any microcosmos and you can find migrations in all directions.

This. This 100%. I don’t think my nerd cred is in any danger. I regularly write kernel code, bare metal code, assembly, etc. I know how to computer.

But the older I get, the more I find I’m just happier in the Apple ecosystem. I don’t want to fiddle with X11 settings or tons of dot files. I just want to open my computer and hack on the shit that interests me. There’s things about Apple that annoy me, but the same can be said for Android, Windows, any of the free *nixes, etc.

Every platform and ecosystem has trade offs and it’s fine to just use what you want to use. Personally I’ve got Apple laptop, phone and tablet, a Windows desktop for games, several RPis running various Linux distros, and a Proxmox server running VMs for infrastructure and tinkering. None of that makes my farts smell better than anyone else.

… except for those nasty Emacs users of course :P

I read this article and was immediately reminded of “that kid” in school who was a super fan of some obscure punk band, until some other kid at school claimed they liked them too. Then “that kid” would tell everybody how the now not obscure enough band “sucked”.

On a mac, with say, 4 workspaces. What key combo can I hit to go to workspace 2?

Yes you can hit CTRL + left arrow or right arrow multiple times but... once one gets into a workflow that allows them to hit Super+2, it actually feels like a pain to do something else.

Control-2 if you enable it. Or 1, 3, or 4.

> I'm confused ... Which of these can I not do on a Mac?

You apparently didn't read the article properly. The author's major grouse is how he recognized slowly that Apple is very controlling about the user experience on its devices and how this is a huge limitation to do anything else "outside" of Apple's "thinking" of how a software or hardware should be used. And how Apple's product manager's have lost sight of what really adds value to the user experience, and their software and hardware choices of new Apple devices are now more dictated by their own greed / ambitions.

From the very examples you cited, the author's emphasis thus was on:

> ... but I am back in control. I am more productive.

> Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ...

> I can take real photos wiht high quality ...

> I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists

> ... but also my OS is way more productive and faster

So it's not just about what you can or cannot do on a Mac, but how the author has found a better way to do all this outside of Apple's limiting ecosystem, keeping in line with his new beliefs that Apple no longer cares about users like him. And I fully agree with him and share the exact feeling (I feel Apple says a "F*k you" to me everytime I want to maximise a Finder or Safari window because the "Apple way" is that you are only supposed to make them fullscreen or vertically maximise ...)

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