> 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
Mainly because I feel exactly the opposite. I don’t find Windows, Linux or x86 technologically exiting anymore.Apple makes (IMO of course) the most technologically exciting CPUs, their GPUs are a breath of fresh air, I love their approach to UI, APIs and OS security.
Nobody said Apple's security is perfect. People's views are simply biased because when Apple's much tighter security is breached, of course it will make headlines everywhere. Windows and Android have far more malware, but you won't see headlines about it every single day.
Either way, unless you're a journalist, politician or some other high-value target, you're pretty unlikely to be targeted by exploits like the NSO one. But if you don't care about jailbreaking, you can still update your device to give yourself peace of mind.
That has changed massively recently, my sense is rough parity currently (on a clean android phone).
Payouts are still a lot higher per point marketshare for iOS though, so maybe still harder to develop.
Android is about $30K per point market share and iOS is around $130K per point market share (4x more).
For example, it's not that Exchange / Outlook are HARDER to get an RCE on that makes the payout so high for those, it's because they have a LOT more usage than something like postfix etc.
Instead some things that have every day practical relevance for me:
- read-only mounted system volume that prevents me from doing stupid mistakes and accidentally sudo rm important files - application certificates - all executables being code-signed to prevent tampering - built in zero-knowledge password manager with automatic synchronization across all my devices - full hardware insulation for DMA devices on Apple Silicon
What are you talking about? You have nothing to hide? You are so addicted to Apples "solution" that as a tech savvy professional you cannot "countermeasure" against.
Practical? What is practical in knowing that your trusted computing device is easy target? Did you not understand that "power of association" with high-profile target by false positive will ruin your life forever? And this "automated" processes will be "included" in all commercially viable OS's.
IDK but sticking with FOSS and practical knowledge looks like better solution than trusting "whatever magical <Big Corporation> tech. But who am I to question the Apple fetishists of current day. After all in the past I was in this camp. So be happy with whatever "rationalization" you come up with. Everything is fine and dandy, the Big Apple is taking care of you.
Because of availability of control surface, absent in Windows and macOS and most importantly the Kernel access. Yep, there are security problems in any os, but to compare custom build Gentoo with your beloved Apple toy, please grow up:) Your argument is funny and nonfactual.
To trust that a company witch publicly cooperates with oppressive governments and creates on device scanning software , breaching all "privacy" promises, helping with your security is absurd.
I have used exclusively Apple computers since early 2000s, and can pinpoint the moment in which all that I loved ended.
The moment when the iPhone was born.
Since then fighting with Apple telemetry was "business as usual", the existence of Little Snitch is all the proof that you need.
I hate how closed-off a lot of their ecosystem can be, and the obvious "I prefer open source" that every engineer says, but I do honestly (and sadly) think that macOS is the least-bad *desktop OS out there right now.
I'm not a graphics programmer, but whenever I've gotten the itch, I've always gotten huge headaches trying to get Vulkan to work, and had basically no issues at all using Metal.
But any time you are emulating one complex low level API with another, there are likely performance penalties. Not to mention you are raising the complexity of the software stack and adding more surface area for bugs.
It would be better if there was an open source low level graphics API that every OS could support in addition to their own proprietary APIs focused on ease of use.
Funny enough, that would be Vulkan, right?
Note that WebGPU has been heavily inspired by Metal (AFAIK), and it uses translation layers on top of a number of APIs (whatever is available on the system). And it's not limited to browsers, despite what its name might suggest.
So it seems like your best bet to try something Metal-like that works across platforms.
- TBDR with user-programmable persistent GPU caches allow you to do some really cool things smartly, drastically cutting down the amount of work and memory fetched - GPUs are trivially exposed as what they are: machines with very wide SIMD ALUs - resource binding graphs with full support for pointers and indirection; resource bindings that can be created and populated on the GPU - sparse resources that actually work and are performant (nobody uses them on mainstream GPUs because they are apparently slow as f** there) - etc.
Pretty sure it was before the millennium when computers became cheap while the value of repair skills increased, it was no longer cost effective then to have the old malfunctioning computer of any make repaired. I expect you mean that you want to repair it yourself, but if you are skilled enough to do that, your time is valuable, so it hasn't been worth your time for at least two decades to spend even 10 hours a year repairing a machine more than about 3 years old. And AppleCare is worth the cost of extended warranty, so you don't have to repair it.
> Apple Music can't even play FLAC files
That's just that software. VLC runs on Apple Silicon, so you don't need to use Apple Music, but if you did and want to play FLAC files, you'd need to transcode them to ALAC, Apple Lossless (or mp3 or aac for lossy). You could build and script ffmpeg to transcode all your FLAC files to ALAC in one CLI command, because lossless is lossless. I'm kind of curious just how fast Apple Silicon will do that... seconds I bet, because it takes only a couple minutes for my Core2Duo to transcode a full-length album of FLAC to ALAC.
The median hourly income in the United States is $20/hr. Buying a new computer every three years is certainly going to cost you more than $200 a year, unless you buy extremely cheaply. And that's leaving out the massive environmental externalities of not repairing older equipment rather than throwing it away. Also leaves out the fact that most people have free time that they can not trivially trade for more working hours.
Furthermore, 10 hours a year seems ludicrous. Apple bricked my MBP with the Big Sur update (along with many other people's laptops, it was a bit of a scandal). I repaired the rather infamously not-repair-friendly Apple device in about half an hour with a part I bought on Ebay for less than $10.
> I expect you mean that you want to repair it yourself, but if you are skilled enough to do that, your time is valuable, so it hasn't been worth your time for at least two decades to spend even 10 hours a year repairing a machine more than about 3 years old.
So your claim about the cost of onsite repair is completely irrelevant. We're talking about the cost of repairing something yourself, which you very frequently can do, even when you're working with something as unrepairable as a Macbook.
I replaced the battery in my X1 Carbon using a screwdriver in about 15 minutes. No significant downtime or hassle.
> You could build and script ffmpeg to transcode all your FLAC files to ALAC
Hardly "Just Works" though is it? I might as well stay on Linux...
If you run linux, sooner or later you're going to want compile software from sources. Building software on linux is hardly if any different than building software on any other *NIX platform. Developers and package managers have made the process easy. So whatever your pleasure, please indulge.
Which would suggest that Apple's glued-in batteries are a bad idea? Whatever one chooses to call the process of changing a battery, this is unnecessarily difficult with Apple hardware.
In fact, I feel like my freedom is more practically restricted on Linux, with its' general hostility agains distributing compiled code.
If this tread is showing reality of the level of critical thinking by the tech educated people, we are living in 1984 in full swing.
Attacking the author for sharing personal decisions which have factual data, disregarding arguments with personal "ease of use" points. Just totally out of touch and reality.
And when I think that most of these people are producing the software solutions of today - OMG.
[0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/22/ios-15-how-to-move-safari-ad...
I already cannot fathom how we dealt with the URL bar at the top of these big phones for so long. It's been a long time since a major UI change in some popular software actually made me happy, let alone this ecstatic. I'm usually one to complain about unnecessary change (like Firefox's recent UI refresh)
It's not at the bottom, but within the content viewport. Browsers need a dedicated "safe space" for notifications and symbols like a lock for HTTPS. A floating address bar over the content of the website could easily be faked using HTML/CSS/JS and abused for phishing.
Sure, put it at the bottom, but not as a floating pill over the content.