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Comment by Vicinity9635 | Hacker News Reader

>Additionally, anyone notice that nothing works worse together than Google and Google. I had Google Wifi, Google phones, Chromebooks, EVERYTHING. And nothing ever worked reliably. Ever.

Apple is the only one even in that market, really. Everybody else is so focused on getting each "segment" of the market they miss the whole picture. Apple wants to slather you in Apple devices so thoroughly you don't need anyone else's electronics, and if you do it all works really well together. Which is why it's so annoying that I still need a Windows box for PC gaming.

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My husband is up to his eyeballs in the Apple ecosystem. Macbooks, iMacs, Apple TV, iPhones, homepods, airpods, ... He has it all.

I feel like the idea that Apple products work seamlessly together is a bit of an exaggeration. He gets frustrated with Apply products plenty of times.

There is definitely a lot of half-baked stuff in Apple's ecosystem, but relative to the alternatives, it works well enough.

One of the great features is that, typically, everything works again after power cycling. And if that does not work, you can go to Apple's tech support website/app and schedule a call where they will walk you through the troubleshooting.

It's a generalization, but the Apple ecosystem is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else.

It's kind of a "suffering from success" thing because it is generally so seamless that any disruption is extra-annoying.

>generally so seamless that any disruption is extra-annoying.

Precisely. If I moving things between my iPhone, iPad and macbook is super easy.

But if I want to talk to/from windows I've been using a one person group chat on Signal, and it's still pretty clunky. I used to use pushbullet but it shut down or something.

In case you're not aware, Signal has a chat called "Notes to Self" that should be more or less the same thing, except without having to create a group.

yeah when it works 99% of the time that 1% is VERY VERY ANNOYING. When you are in the google ecosystem everything works like 5% of the time and so you just pretend it doesn't work together.

It is not that Apple's ecosystem is perfect. Far from it.

It is the others are so bad, so poorly designed and handled is what made Apple felt so good. That is both Microsoft and Google.

> Which is why it's so annoying that I still need a Windows box for PC gaming.

Steam is not helping. Any game that only ships 32-bit x86 binaries should not be listed as having Mac support. Apple not only doesn't sell x86 Macs anymore, they don't even do security updates for Mojave. If you have an Intel Mac around, Bootcamp likely makes for a 10x better gaming experience.

I feel like Apple are really dropping the ball here. There's an amazing catalogue of classic games that could run really well under a hypothetical 32-bit x86 Rosetta. But Apple is doing Apple, and asking you to use their Game Porting Toolkit instead... Basically telling gamedevs, if you're not ready to go full Apple, don't go Apple at all.

>Steam is not helping.

Apple's version of Steam could be called "Sauce".

> There's an amazing catalogue of classic games that could run really well under a hypothetical 32-bit x86 Rosetta

Rosetta 2 is a combination of good AOT/JIT x86-64 translation to ARM, and apple-specific hardware modes to change performance CPU to use the x86-64 memory model.

The x86-32 memory model is much more expensive to support. Doing this in software is why ARM windows has such a terrible reputation for running x86-32 unbearably slow.

Unless Apple suddenly feels the need to make a stronger investment in running an architecture they deprecated before they even switched off Intel, it is unlikely to see any sort of official offering.

Even if they did feel the need to support 32-bit: without a hardware investment (e.g. M4 support), you likely get the same performance you would running under a third party emulator - which you can get reasonably easily via ARM linux or windows running on the hypervisor.

So if there isn't interest in an actual port, your easiest option to run older games is going to be with something like Parallels running a Windows VM.

Sony is the company that I feel somehow misses this the most. Possibly Microsoft. The lack of integration that Playstations and XBoxes have with anything is rather surprising. Could be as simple as volume control on the TV. Or automatically turn on the TV. Nothing fancy. But nothing exists.

Get a Sony TV and you can fully control the Playstation with the remote. It handles TV on/off signals and autoconfigures HDR/Display settings. The whole bit.

Isn’t this just HDMI-CEC? I don’t think it requires Sony hardware but I could be wrong.

I'll have to try a newer device, then. Pleasantly surprised to hear that my view is just outdated. :D

This has been my experience, though some aspects of CEC are hit or miss, especially depending on the TV, AVR and other device(s). I use an NVidia Shield TV with an AVR in my main living space, and a couple others in different rooms. For CEC, some remotes/devices work for everything, others not so much, others still are hit and miss for say volume control, etc.

I had a PS5 and an LG television, it integrated just fine. Including the Playstation Media Remote. Could control volume to my sound system, television controls and playstation interaction just fine.

This sounds like a "your television not following standards" (HDMI-CEC) problem and not a Sony one.

Huh, that is news to me. My TV does a stupid "tv will turn on if I power on a console, but won't automatically switch to that input."

I'll have to dig a little on it. Curious what is off on it.

That said, I should probably reframe my criticism. Most of this is me being surprised at how bad it was neglected back in 20002ish timeframe. Went many years with no TV to really see some advances. I'm getting a large "batteries got good without paying attention to them" vibe. :D

You may need to check which input the device is plugged into on the TV, as well as make sure CEC is enabled on the TV in question. Even then sometimes support (volume control) is hit or miss.

My experience - smart TVs tend to be really bad at CEC during power on, because they are booting while the other device is asking them to execute commands like switching input. I usually set the TV to 'last input on boot' if such a setting exists.

I've noticed the Apple TV will ask the TV to switch input via CEC on pretty much any button press, which is non-ideal but is a decent enough workaround.

I think Microsoft depends on what market you are looking at. As far as creating a "Microsoft" ecosystem they are doing pretty bad and seem to be trying to force it to happen for their benefit instead of it being a thing that actually gives the user something in return, like you tend to get in Apple's ecosystem.

However, if you look at Gaming Microsoft has actually done a pretty good job with this. With their "play anywhere" initiative to buy a game once and it works on Xbox and PC (ignoring that publisher support of it has been hit or miss but thats a different story). Game saves, friend list, etc all being synced between PC and Xbox.

I should have put that my understanding was old. I'm happy to see things have come even farther along than I would have expected. But I honestly don't get why this didn't happen early 2000s. The specific thing that always baffled me was how the PSPs couldn't interact with the Playstation at the time. Heck, after the first PSP, I don't know why the next Playstation couldn't take those disks in to let you play on your TV. Why build up a completely separate ecosystem? I see they are moving away from that now, with the PS5 being able to do PS4 games. That is good to see.

My old Xbox 360 would turn on the TV+receiver and change the input from just pressing the Xbox button on the controller over a decade ago. The Xbox IR receiver worked as a DVD player for the receiver remote as well so I could control the media controls on the Xbox from my receiver's remote.

My playstations and xboxes all turn on my tvs (and switch their inputs) just fine.

Xbox is fun example because they hit some peaks and then actively got worse. The Xbox 360 was somewhat focused on being your living room hub and for many years tried to actually get people to use Windows Media Center, and supported its own and general Media Center remotes. (I used it for streaming some things.) It also had a bunch of support for many TVs that used custom HDMI protocols (pre-HDMI-CEC).

The original Xbox One with bundled Kinect was the peak of their integration attempt before "gamer outrage" crippled and then killed its efforts. It supported HDMI-CEC some but it also truly had "universal remote" capabilities as it could use the Kinect's IR depth sensor as an IR blaster to send commands to almost anything that uses a traditional IR remote. It had a big database of IR commands and also could use the IR depth sensor to watch and try to learn any IR remote you pointed at it. On top of that it also had a port on the back to connect a normal IR blaster if you needed to send signals to hardware that wouldn't catch a blast from the Kinect or just wanted to disconnect the Kinect for a bit but still have TV/sound system/cable box control.

That Xbox One also had an HDMI passthrough and could picture-in-picture with something like a cable box. (It also support picture-in-picture from some apps at the time.)

The original on-device-only voice recognition with the Kinect was great and "Xbox, Volume Up" was something I used all the time on the original Xbox One until Cortana took over the voice recognition and made it far more cumbersome.

The OneGuide was an interesting attempt to show you a mixture of your TV/Cable grids and highlighted content from streaming apps you had installed. It would let you jump to channels on TV or Cable just as easily as launching something like Hulu straight into a show.

Almost all of those features were eventually shutdown or left to slowly break in the drastic post-launch retooling from the "gamer outrage" that the Xbox One was "gamer-focused enough" and their pressure that the Xbox should be "only for games". (The Xbox One and Xbox Series still support rudimentary HDMI-CEC, but in my experience it is hit-and-miss and definitely nowhere near as well supported as the "universal remote" stuff.)

What you’re talking about is CEC & ARC support.

Unfortunately, that too is a buggy mess, hence why universal/programmable remotes still exist.

Indeed, a reason why I am still hoping they release a new airport. I’ve tried quite a few and none of them have ever been particularly great. The most recent being Ruckus and my current AP, an Omada EAP670.

It seems a lot of people make a product but don’t use it themselves enough to tell how to make it better so it always feels like v1.

Or they do but they’re not very observant idk?

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