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.
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?
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.
However big sur runs alright on my 2015 MacBook!
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.
Also, in case this helps:
https://cipherlog.blogspot.com/2020/12/macos-microphonecamer...
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.
I thought this was the UI museum feature where you can time travel back to Windows NT4 one layer of indirection at a time.
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.
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.
Agreed. Bandcamp does this right by offering V0 compressed MP3s, 320kbps MP3s, AIFF, FLAC, ALAC and I think even Ogg Vorbis.
In fact, I really like their catalog and match algorithm but I always thought apple music being outside of its own fence feels gross.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.