Apple has not fixed the macOS audio left/right balance bug for nearly 10 years
twitter.com
twitter.com
I've been trying to raise awareness of Apples horrible audio issues for quite a few years now. Driver re-starts and USB re-connects, for no apparent reason. [0][1]
I have the issue on Mac Mini (2018) Intel, Mac Studio M1, Macbook Pro M2, so it's not device specific.
[0] https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/132423
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163114
[2] https://developer.apple.com/forums/search/?q=Popping+Sound
There is no software remedy, only re-connecting physically works (temporarily)
If they do, then the app in question will pass the audio raw to the external device without the OS or any existing mixers interfering at all.
Of course, no other audio will play - only that from the app with exclusive control. It's not perfect but it can help in these scenarios.
Was fixed with a motherboard swap
By any chance, is that problem related to the new Microsoft Teams and its incoming-call notification sound? Ever since the Sonoma update and the coinciding Teams switch it's glitching horribly.
I absolutely have this issue and would love to know more about any suspected causes.
If the laptop has not been restarted for a while, Firefox tabs will eat up more and more memory over time until it makes the mac kind-of unresponsive (*) and will need to get hard power cycled.
The only signs that this is about to happen are two:
1. Any audio-emitting webapp will start to get very choppy, whether is youtube on FF, Google meet on chrome, or a slack call/huddle. Which is the problem I think you are referring to.
2. Switching workspaces animation will get very very choppy. Usually when this happens it's already almost too late.
(*) this means that while the pointer is still moving smoothily, even from a BT mouse, there is no reaction to any click or keyboard typing.
I thought it was because I pause the entire firefox process when the screen is locked. When it resumes it sometimes acts up (I use the STOP and CONT signals for this). But maybe it's just a FF bug.
I just restart it once every few days, my OS doesn't actually become unstable due to it. But i do have 64 GB of ram (one of the benefits to no longer being tied to apple's ecosystem is that memory upgrades and amazingly cheap)
https://twistedwave.com/AudioGlitches.zip
It contains a program where the only thing I do in the real-time callback is to count the glitches, and I made sure to mlock() the memory used by the glitch counting code. When the memory pressure increases, it glitches.
(You can’t mlock every single code page possibly executed by the thread for instance.)
I believe 96KHz/24bit is the highest quality audio supported natively on the MacBook Pro.
24 bits * 96KHz * 2 channels * 4x safety factor = 2.3 Megabytes per second.
It's not "use" but "ever potentially access", so it's unbounded unless they were careful. (Audio playback to speakers itself is bounded, but mixing isn't, and wireless headphones get complicated.)
> Forgive my ignorance I don't deeply understand OS level memory management but I thought, much like the task scheduler has priority understanding for CPU resource management, the memory manager had an idea of "these pages are important find some other page to evict".
It's difficult to know what the most important pages in memory are, because you'd have to observe every single memory access, and that's not worth the overhead.
Basically there's two ways it uses:
1. a program can tell the OS to keep something in memory (either by hinting it or forcing it, called mlock or wiring).
2. every so often, the OS will disconnect some pages such that accessing them faults (called "moving to the inactive queue"). If there's a fault, it know it's being used and moves it to active again. Eventually, if there aren't any for long enough, it gets to the end of the inactive queue and is paged out.
I do my best to do it on the application side. It would be nice if Apple's CoreAudio did the same.
If you mean that it is difficult to identify the pages used, that is true, but I found a great way to do just that. I keep track of all the pages I mlock(), list all the remaining pages, and mprotect them to crash if I accidentally access memory that was not mlocked. That helped me identify a couple of pages I forgot, such as the one that contains the __stack_chk_guard
And regarding the code pages, for some reason I get a permission denied error if I try to mlock them. Not sure why.
There is no mlockall() on macOS, but if there was one, I could delegate the real-time audio handling code to a separate executable, and call mlockall(). I would be guaranteed all the pages used by the real-time thread would be mlocked.
And by the way if you are interested in the report I sent to Apple, you can find all the details with the sample code to reproduce the problem there:
Also I use an old AudioBox USB and it sometimes dies and needs the unplug/replug.
Could this be an electrical issue?
Are you bus powering your interfaces?
$ sudo launchctl kickstart -kp system/com.apple.audio.coreaudiod
Could not kickstart service "com.apple.audio.coreaudiod": 1: Operation not permittedThe fact that there is an Apple-specific L/R audio balance bug, which now seemingly everyone suffers from, is complete news to me. Sometimes I feel like I am living in a different reality…
The flip side is that I get the crackling extremely frequently.
Don’t think it ever happened in DAW though, only when playing audio from OS.
Other people have reported it too, so it's not just a one-off defect. I know electrical engineering is hard, but it's a really annoying problem to exist on a super expensive laptop.
https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/shopping?q=tbn:ANd9GcSyVF...
https://www.apple.com/shop/product/MK122LL/A/power-adapter-e...
Edit: https://a.co/d/6yvKXPW
e. oh grounded short adapters. I wouldn't go for that due to the wall wort issue. I usually swapped out my apple bricks to grounded tails because it was usually easier to work into whateve ad-hoc power I encountered.
Though I can't remember if it was my old Intel Mac, or one if the newer M1s. I haven't used the wired headphones lately.
I'll see if I can find them and report back here.
> .. which now seemingly everyone suffers from ...
Was this claimed somewhere? Either way, it's clearly not true. You're not affected by a bug that lots of others are (myself included!), so consider yourself lucky.
For 1-2 years in the mid-2010s, my audio balance on my work MBP would routinely drift every month or so, and none of my coworkers or Mac-using friends, nor anyone on the tech forums I frequented had experienced such a thing. Just a few random posts on Google with no solution.
Then, it simply stopped happening. Haven't thought about it in years until I read this tweet. Fascinating!
Basically, there are lots of weird race conditions and oddities in how they deal with communicating and syncing volume between the system and the bluetooth device.
This can manifest in your system volume saying one thing and your bluetooth device outputting at a different volume when you first connect, and then you do one volume adjustment and the bluetooth device will "snap" to that volume.
Another way is what the twitter post is about, where when you ramp the volume up or down, with at least some devices this appears to be done per speaker (so per ear), and they can get out of sync. Imagine if the increaseOrDecreaseVolumeBy(speaker: id, amount: int) function was blocking and didn't queue requests. If one speaker takes longer to adjust than another one (wireless communication being what it is), the slower one will drop requests on the ground and get out of sync with the faster one.
I used to produce a lot of music on my MacBook about 7 years ago and remember having the same thing (probably when I used to be just working on headphones straight in). I used to think one of the drivers was blown, only to (eventually, after some frustration) find that the audio was panned hard left (or right?) systemwide from the settings, and could be fixed with a single click. Never knew it was such a widely-known bug…
The problem is that audio devices do not have an explicit concept of "balance". It's set by adjusting the level of each channel. That volume adjusting process is not reliable. It often happens over an unreliable interface where some volume adjustments are just dropped. This hits a second problem: the audio device often has the ability to adjust its levels out of band with the host audio stack. Thus your laptop has to periodically poll the device to find out what the current actual audio levels are. When your laptop sees that the volume per channel is not equal, it doesn't know if this was caused by the device itself adjusting the balance or the volume adjustment message being ignored.
So for example:
1. User tells laptop to increase volume from 50% to 60%
2. Laptop tells device's right channel to go to 60% (success)
3. Laptop tells device's left channel to go to 60% (failure)
4. Laptop checks with audio device, sees 60% on right and 50% on left
5. Laptop changes audio balance to be nudged to the right
There are some ways to mitigate the problem. The audio stack could try to detect when its level commands are being dropped, but that risks the audio stack and device "fighting" over the correct volume. Better closer-to-realtime scheduling can reduce the risk of messages being dropped.
I don't think the "fighting" will be a problem at all - you'd have to to press volume control on device and on Mac at the same time, within milliseconds. And in the worst case, you'll run out of retries, and it will be no worse than situation today.
I don’t know the macOS audio stack in detail, but I work on state synchronization problems in distributed systems and my intuition for problems like this is that the “why not just” solution almost never solves such a bug completely.
I've made drivers for badly designed hardware, and it's really not not that hard when you control the pieces. I mean, if it was Windows with all that backwards compatibility stuff and drivers written by 3rd party manufacturer than sure, it could be hard.. but Apple controls entire software stack, so they have no such excuse.
And the most important part is that the problem is very error-tolerant. Sure, having random balance change once per day is super annoying. But instead, imagine having one random volume change command per day be ignored.. People would not even notice, it would be a great improvement.
Are you sure? Audio volume is usually not (only) controlled in the device driver. Modern OSes usually have some type of audio mixer, often in user space. I'm pretty sure that this is actually where the problem lies, not in the hardware driver (given that it also persists across reboots).
This means you need IPC, and depending on how your API looks like, that's not that trivial to do right for inherently non-atomic operations.
A proper fix could be e.g. moving to a system where the IPC call is of the form "decrease global audio volume by 10%" and is executed atomically by the OS audio mixer, but that could well require backwards-incompatible changes. And...
> Apple controls entire software stack, so they have no such excuse.
Even Apple can't break backwards compatibility with all existing audio applications.
I recently discovered that interrupting the close-all-apps-before-reboot workflow when applying a macOS upgrade (e.g., "don't terminate my terminal process yet, one sec, okay, I'm good to reboot now") requires a redo of the ENTIRE update process (including redownloading the 13GB update!)
What is it with these huge corps missing the simple stuff?
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/balance-lock/id1019371109?mt=1...
(though why should git fix such a stupid problem it didn't create...)
And I say this as someone who uses Windows and Linux daily alongside macOS. Windows isn’t going to get any better so long as Microsoft’s betting on pushing services on users to make money and while desktop Linux is better than ever it still has a ways to go to make it unquestionably better across the board for more than a small subset of users.
It’s actually quite similar to why people buy MacBooks. Generic PC laptops nearly all involve one or more major tradeoffs in day to day use, with none being as good all-rounders as MacBooks even if individual specs don’t measure up.
As far as I know, iCloud is less well-featured than OneDrive.
As a recent MBA owner, the only thing I think Apple nails is hardware. The battery life and low power use are amazing and there's something to be said for Apple's ability to force-move devs to ARM.
The rest, not really. The OS is aggressively mid, as the kids would say.
...okay. Apple still makes native apps. That counts for something.
On the odd occasion I need tiling (which isn’t often) I use Moom[0] because it’s extremely non-intrusive (no easily accidentally triggered animations like Aero Snap) and lets you specify to leave a gap of a few pixels between windows and screen edges which looks nice.
Its virtual desktops aren’t independent between monitors for example, so when you switch desktops on one monitor it switches on all monitors, which means you can’t mix and match window sets between monitors like is possible on macOS.
Windows’ window-centric nature also gets on my nerves. The only place you’ll see any notion of application-based window grouping is the taskbar, which is desktop-bounded, and so you can’t for example gather all windows for a program from across desktops into one desktop or close all windows across desktops unless the program’s developer has added that functionality themselves. You also can’t move groups of windows between desktops quickly.
Linux doesn’t have the desktop-based issues at least primarily because it’s had virtual desktops for decades, so the feature has been mature there for a long time, but DEs there are still overwhelmingly modeled after a Win9X paradigm and often also lack app-based grouping, even as a toggle.
But with Microsoft turning Windows into a big advertising billboard, I can see it becoming a valid reason.
This also applies to smartphones. No matter the aspect, some specialty Android is 10x as good as your iPhone. However, it'll have bizarre drawbacks. iPhones are popular because they have right default balance for the broad audience out of the box.
Some of that consistency is also undone when it’s necessary to run Electron or Qt apps. Anki for example is a real pain if you’re using fractional scaling under Wayland, because GNOME’s refusal to implement server side decorations forces Anki to run with an ugly generic titlebar and no shadow. macOS is better here, with all programs getting the system default window treatment unless they request otherwise.
Nowadays I had both but use a Windows PC quite a lot (was destined to be a hackintosh, but couldn't put up with the hassle later one) and the reason I use Windows more is precisely because I have found it to be more stable, less annoying and with less bugs usually.
I have a loaded Intel Mac Mini along and the audio bugs keeps happening on this system, I have particularly nasty crackling that is impossible to debug and particularly annoying for a machine of this price (and I can't swap the mobo like I could if it were a PC).
The Apple reputation is largely underserved nowadays and I find it frustrating because it is one of the reasons they use to justify their absurdly high pricing.
Considering those bugs are still not fixed in Apple Silicon Mac's, I am pretty sure this is a combination of bad software maintenance and poor hardware design, even though they pretend they know better.
Considering the price of their computers, it is unacceptable but to be honest it won't be my problem anymore because I'm not buying anything else from Apple for the foreseeable future.
MacOS is nice and had some cool stuff back in the days, but now Windows can offer an almost 1to1 alternative, at a much better price with much less hardware issues. If you put as much money into a PC than you do in a Mac, the warranty will outlast the Apple support for the equivalent Mac which is kind of funny considering the prices...
For example, window management on macOS is trash, and the shortcuts are command+arrows which is fine if you have both hands on the keyboard. Not so much when you have a separate mouse. The OS is built expecting you are on a laptop or using a trackpad of some kind.
'Just works'!
Filing 100s of extremely detailed bug reports on their 'feedback assistant' will do less to change anything than one trending twitter post or news coverage.
Plus it gives you burnout. Rely on the system logs to have enough detail.
There are plenty of things I can complain about and I kind of think Mac OS is getting worse, but this one hasn't hit me.
When the support person couldn't address it they assigned an engineer who worked with me to identify the issue - the bug was patched in the next x.x.1
That's literally all it takes. I've gone down this route 3 times now in various products of their, so I know it's not some off chance to be assigned an engineer.
It beggars belief that people think complaining to the wind will get the problem resolved, when all they need to do is contact the manufacturer.
I don't see anything there about contacting Apple
Edit: Apple was well aware of this issue (or a similar one), 12 years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20221205223648/https://support.a...
Their response? "deal with it"
But it seems to have gone away in last couple of versions of macOS, have not had the 'fixer' installed since I got an M1 and it hasn't occurred again for me (so... Sonoma and the one before).
If I recall, the original reason for the bug was a stupid keyboard shortcut (helpfully mapped to "f*** up my audio balance") that was easy to trigger by accident, with no visual feedback to know that you'd done it.
I wonder if it's locale-specific, maybe some keyboard layouts or whatever still have it mapped.
Back when installing Windows on a MacBook with Bootcamp was pretty common, it was galling to have Windows support MST perfectly fine on the Apple hardware while MacOS reverted to simple (useless) mirroring.
At least this balance bug disappeared, although it was plagueing me on my previous MacBook.
It really sucks. I'm not using a regular bluetooth headset, these are my hearing aids and my only way to get decent sound in meetings. Switching to mac last year was a mistake.
I can assure you that I didn't have this issue in Linux. :) There were other issues, of course, but they were at least solvable.
It's something specific to these headphones (Sony WH-C700N), as they do something different to get higher audio quality when using the microphone. Apple have helpefully removed Bluetooth Explorer from Xcode and the debug panel from the Bluetooth status bar icon, so I'm yet to figure out what mode it's using that my other headphones (Sony MDR-ZX770BN) don't.
Sounds like a sample rate inconsistency issue, maybe a trip to Audio MIDI Setup.app could give hints.
But you're right, it certainly seems that's the kind of game Cook is playing. Better than Windows, but no better, and keep the extra money.
To be fair to Apple, it does sound like this is a somewhat rare bug (only seen in high-load situations?). It's not as bad, I think, as ads in the OS. So, as you say, Apple just needs to be a little better than MS and that's good enough.
My Linux audio bug of the month is that output on all USB interfaces just stopped working. Not sure yet what changed (it wasn't an update, at least not immediately).
On WASAPI last I checked you still couldn't programmatically change the device settings from a user application, which leads to weird issues with sample rates and buffer sizes, which means ASIO is still necessary. Very sad.
I am now convinced it is the best audio stack on desktop.
I've heard the occasional random pop or click audio artifacts from my Mac mini home recording studio setup but never experienced the L/R balance issue. And with the more recent macOS versions (Ventura and Sonoma) I don't think I've heard any audio clicks or pops. I'm using an older Roland OctaCapture audio interface, but have tried the Focusrite Scarletts and some MOTU devices without incident.
Go to device properties and change L/R balance to be unequal.
Turn sound down to 0.
Turn it back up and balance is equal again.
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/79384/audio-balanc...
I have never used a (modern) Mac long enough to listen to audio, so I have no experience with this I just thought it sounded odd.
Now having learned that, I really (really) wonder how such a bug can happen, and how it can stay ignored for so long by the always-ranted-about masters of vertically integrated luxury computers. More the former, though.
It sounds almost as if there already is software somewhere that is doing something to maintain the proper balance (perhaps due to bugs in the hardware), and then that something becomes CPU-starved and/or interrupted when the volume changes, and doesn't resume properly. This is a wild guess straight outta ... Hampton, I have no clue about Mac hardware or macOS internals. Fun to think about, though!
I hope they fix it for real, soon!
My first guess was that "volume up" is actually "increase volume on left channel" and "increase volume on right channel"
And when there's high CPU load, one of those commands gets lost or ignored for some reason.
It sounds like they have inverted the relationship between what is displayed to the users and what is used by the machine.
Now apparently there's a game-breaking bug? For 10 years? And it's a really really big deal?
Hmm.
I know it’s silly but it helped me with imposter syndrome to see such a major OS that prides itself on seamless “it just works” experiences tolerate bugs like this.
That and the fact if you airplay a movie to Apple TV it thinks you want it to cast over the top of it with random advert videos in your web browser, so you can’t watch and browse.
We’re all human I guess ;)
For years now, and across iphone models and iOS versions, my iphone randomizes the artwork of the mp3s in the music app (ie display the wrong album cover). I see people complaining about that in forums but I guess if you are not using Apple Music they don't care.
I don't seem to be able to copy files from my iphone onto a windows desktop. Tried several cables, the transfer fails after a few GB. I guess if you are not syncing your files through iCloud they don't care.
A bug recently corrupted the iphone mail app. It wouldn't sync mails anymore, in fact would display old mails from the wrong account (I have multiple setup). I only fixed it by deleting the accounts and recreating them. That's using ActiveSync. But I guess if you don't use an apple email they don't care.
Another bug on my ipad. The USB-C DAC often fails to be recognised. Tried several DAC. I thought it was a hardware problem (usb port damaged), except that few hardware problems are resolved by rebooting. But if you don't use apple wireless headphones they don't care.
These are basic functionalities, but not using the main path which happens to be the most profitable to Apple. Apple's reputation for quality is inconsistent with my experience of their products.
If anything, profitability of chip makers cheaping out on USB implementations is a bigger problem.
+function() { while (1) { for (var i = 0; i < 1000000000000000; i++) { console.log(i); for (var j = 0; j < 1000000000000000; j++) { console.log(j); } } console.log('herewegoagain'); } }();
"In some cases the audio balance may unexpectedly drift towards the left or right channel. This can happen if you rapidly press the volume up or down keys while the computer's microprocessor is under heavy load."
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20120630125615/https://support.a...
https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/79384/audio-balanc...
>I've had this problem on multiple MacBooks (from my old Powerbook 15 from 2003 to prior to finding this question on my late 2011 MBP 13").
so about 21 years
P.S. I'm specifically talking about certain playlist management features not working. Specifically, the "add next" simply has never worked well.
I think it's only on PC, but they do something to make your playlists unusable, if they're large. I think shuffle doesn't work at all for my uses (perhaps for tiny playlists where shuffle barely matters)
Weirdly, most of this seems by design, although it's not hard to see why. Apple doesn't want shuffle to compete with their algorithm, but WTF did we end up with? Streaming services riddled with user hostile design.
My own projects have a few so I am guilty.
Maybe they give the project “character.”
This has been the behavior for every version of MacOS at least going back to 10.2 Jaguar (2003).
I have an LG monitor and a list of bugs I am experiencing in the macOS:
- No sound volume control
- No brightness control
- Nightshift doesn't work on it
- Audio is unusable most of the time. When I try to play audio on the monitor, it is playing it at like 10x speed with a stuttering sound and if you try to watch a 20-minute video it finishes in like 2 minutes.
Keyboard -> Input Sources [edit] -> Automatically switch to a document's input source.
Checking it maintains different "active input source memory" per app.
Unchecking it keeps a global "active input source".
With this setting, I never have to "switch back to the default language", it only switches when I explicitly do so with a "next input source" keyboard shortcut.
Regardless if the "next app has a text input in focus" or not, the language I have set (english or my local one), sticks when I change apps.
So,if I'm in an app "with alternative input language X" it means at some point before I excplitly set X as the active input language (and that gets enforced system-wide). Then if I change to Spotlight, it still uses the same X language.
I understood that to be what you also want, but perhaps you want the opposite (which I haven't tried and don't really want - to have apps remember their own input language each. Then the same toggle looks to be able to cover that, but perhaps not well, as you say).
That's an issue - some apps get it right, others don't, not sure what the pattern is (e.g. if it's apps using the same GUI framework).
I think that issue is orthogonal to the dichotomy I talked before though:
(a) one system-wide input language active at any given time, only explicitly changed by the user.
(b) each app "remembers" its own input language, and focusing that app switches to it
From what you describe, you want (b), and macOS disrespect it for some apps, despite the toggle to do just that.
For the shortcuts thougj, the OS should handle it for all apps/GUI frameworks though, and make shortcut assignments work the same respective of language chosen. I mean "Cmd-<letter X on keyboard>" should work, whether <letter X> is mapped to one character in an input source or another character in some other input source: just based on which physical key was pressed.
It's pretty rare, I've only seen it a few times, but yeah. Pretty obnoxious
The only Apple I used never had this problem. But then again, the first thing I did with it was replace the OS with Linux. :-P
It evens it out fine. Will replace at 99%.
Might an ill fitted case or something, but those phones had different cases.
Anyone know if this is some bug or am I being dumb?
I'll use the occasion to crap on macOS because yes, I experienced this, not to mention random devices disconnecting in conditions of higher memory pressure (i.e. starting a k8s cluster and doing tests, then tearing it down, then starting another etc.) -- one time even my keyboard disconnected which was annoying to say the least.
To this day my $300 dock sometimes doesn't at all get detected after I wake up my iMac Pro. A $8000 machine and an OS developed by trillion+ $ dollar company cannot properly wake up all devices after sleep. Yep. :|
I appreciate macOS as a system for users where SIP et. al. prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot -- Apple has mostly solved the problem of careless users clicking on stuff they really shouldn't. (Excluding phishing.)
But as a programmer, I am now on a course to gradually and eventually move back to Linux. Why?
- Everything is just faster. A Manjaro XFCE with the latest kernel (6.7 as of 2024-FEB-14) just makes everything fly on my AMD 5500U laptop. Telegram starts in 0.5s while my iMac Pro needs at least 5 seconds. Firefox with all its addons boots up in about 1.5s. I know all of the lag and delays are related to security scanning but it does get tiring after several years. As a programmer I want to say "everything in these directories is trusted, I'll suffer if I am wrong, now leave me alone" which of course I can't do.
- Related to the above: Intel Macs are likely unofficially now second-class citizens and frak all of us who invested in them, right? The iMac Pro costed me $8000 and I'll use it until it blows up in my face, that's non-negotiable for a $8000 machine. So I'd think whatever performance gains or optimizations are being done for macOS, the Intel architecture is probably a persona non grata already.
- Just lately Erlang's team fixed an absurd issue where due to JIT using memory mapping macOS literally shows me a popup while I am coding! Save an Elixir file in my NeoVim (which invokes the LS) and whoops, there, you have a micro popup that disappears after ~0.2s. And it can be a problem if you cancel it (has an X button inside which I assume is focused by default) but seriously, just working in your editor leads to micro popups that disappear fractions of a second later... WTF. And their fix? They moved to use another memory mapping API. Which is a workaround in fact, not a fix. I feel for them so hard.
- A lot of goodies are hidden behind paid software which is 100% fine by me (obviously we all want to be paid for our work) but it does send a signal that Apple doesn't care much -- iStat Menus is a good example and SoundSource is probably the best example (and strongly related to the original article); why do we need SoundSource at all? Why is this not handled by the OS? And again on the money issue, as much as I want to support other programmers, it starts feeling like you are being nickel-and-dimed as time passes by.
Honestly, after using macOS full time for about 4.5 years, I am not impressed. I like the displays a lot and I know I would miss them dearly and my eyes will be unhappy which is basically my main reason for sticking with macOS for a workstation (well that plus the $8000 investment I made 4.5 years ago which let's be honest, has paid for itself already, many times over).
Another thing I do like is the menu bar and I'll duplicate that functionality on my XFCE laptop soon enough, so not much of a loss.
I believe at one point I'll just start ssh-ing into my AMD 5500U laptop so I can reap the benefits of the amazing iMac Pro display while still having Linux's benefits on my side. And I didn't even mention how much I can tinker with it e.g. I wanted to experiment with various ZFS and bcachefs setups and of course I couldn't do that without a VM... did I mention I never found a truly good VM manager for macOS?
But that tinker-ability is just the tip of the iceberg and this comment became huge enough already.
If you have gotten this far -- any ideas how to properly secure an XFCE environment? I'll need to install Chrome and Zoom at one point but I don't trust their creators to not pwn my system the moment I run the installer and as we know X11 is not at all secure; likely both softwares will record each of my keystrokes and upload them somewhere. So, anybody knows how to properly isolate a desktop program on XFCE? And if that's not possible on XFCE I am open to migrate to whatever other DE allows it.
Thanks for reading.
The additional power and heat is incredibly small in the long run, and without spinning rust it likely even extends the life as it doesn’t have cool/heat cycles.
Though I probably wouldn't feel it because no matter what I tried I couldn't make it not wake up for 30s each 5 minutes anyway...
I think people sticking with macOS are doing it for convenience and because it is hard to switch to something else when you have done things a particular way all your life. But considering the price of Macs, currently it is an unbelievably bad deal but as long as there are fools to pay the price nothing will change I guess.
But yeah, beyond that the deal gets worse and worse with time. Apple are dropping the ball, it's been visible.
As mentioned upthread, I'm very likely to start using my Mac as a thin client in the next years: get all the benefits of Linux (ultra speed included) with none of the drawbacks (insecure desktop environments; the X11 protocol literally allows you to capture all key presses once you connect), and all happening through the best displays there is.
So it's not about being a fool. There are objective benefits to using Macs. But, these benefits are dwindling with time, so the equation gets less and less in favor of Apple.
I am actually rather mad they stopped making them because it was clearly the best value in the whole Apple lineup, but also lowkey one of the best computers you could buy for the price (unless you needed something exotic or massive amounts of power).
And to be clear, I'm not saying all Apple customers are fools but I am saying that Apple are taking all its customers for fools, including the ones who supported them in their hard times in the PPC days and it feels rather greedy and nasty to me. But some of them try to justify every penny-pinching decision Apple makes and those ones I do think are complete fools and they do not help the case...
TBH I was thinking of getting a 5K iMac to do something similar but T2 Macs are kind of a pain in the ass so it doesn't feel ideal, especially since the 5K LGs are less expensive second-hand than the iMacs.
My fear is that it's going to take quite a while after they go downhill to go back to something acceptable, the way I see it, Tim Cook is dilapidating the brand to make a quick buck but ah well...
these are just the bugs i can think of off the top of my head which have existed for literal years:
- on iphone, the haptic and sound feedback from tapping letters on the keyboard has a noticeable lag to it half the time.
- on iphone, the volume of all system sounds shoots up to 100% without warning, even if you're wearing headphones. this bug also reverses the volume level, so you have to turn the volume up to make it go down.
- on iphone, browser tabs just get stuck displaying one page (or sometimes nothing at all) no matter how many times to try to navigate or refresh, and you have to either kill safari and restart it or close the tab and open a new one.
- on mac laptops, the battery drains while sleeping at a rate of about 20% per day. i've been a mac user since 2015 but only since i got an m1 max macbook pro, nearly every time i open the lid, it's dead.
- on mac, sometimes external storage just doesnt show up at all, restarting doesn't work, waiting doesn't work, you literally just have to try again tomorrow and hope for the best.
- on apple music (any platform), music will just stop and it will tell you that another device is trying to play music when it isn't. sometimes this doesnt happen for weeks, sometimes it happens 4 times in a single song and goes on for hours so you have to just stop trying to listen to music.
- on any platform with siri, it will just reset to the default voice/accent regularly, making all the other options useless.
- on any platform with siri, you ask it to remind you about something in x minutes or at x time, siri confirms that it will, then 1/10 times it just... doesn't.
- on apple tv, you randomly lose the ability to navigate left inside whatever app you're in, so you have to kill it and restart it.
- on apple tv, the picture just freezes but the audio continues. you have to just turn it off and on again. happens every 2-3 days.
- on apple tv, about half the time, the native voice search forces you to repeat your search 3 times. you tell it what to search for, it shows up for a split second, then clears. you have to do it three times. this one alone is worth ditching apple over. if i ever find out who introduced this bug and cross paths with them, i will physically attack them on sight.
i actually can even think of more bugs, but i'm bored of typing.
for me personally, the final straw was after i had to replace a broken motherboard, windows wouldn't activate. i contacted microsoft and they told me it was a new computer so i had to buy windows again. i ordered a mac that day and gave my pc to a friend. each to their own but personally i'm never letting that dogshit touch any of my personal computers ever again. if i ever want to build a gaming pc again, steamOS is plenty good enough now for my purposes.
That same macbook also had serious audio "crackle" issues where doing anything that seemingly caused more context switching in the cpu would introduce loud pops to the audio. Rebooting would fix the issue until it would eventually come back.
I had nothing special or interesting installed. These things would happen from using a modern IDE and firefox.
Apple Music is in general much buggier than iTunes but that's the real dealbreaker for me.
I mostly just use MPD instead, but even that program occasionally has issues, there are a handful of music files that basically cause a fault in the headphones and they dont work right unless I switch to a different song. Still no idea whose fault that is though (OS X? the headphones? MPD?)
I also have issues with the sluggish interface. Some of my third-party email apps takes several seconds to just load the list of messages. They take milliseconds to load on a Pixel.
My lock screen can sometimes take a bit more than a second to unlock.
The browser dropdown will occasionally load the wrong page when I touch the URL.
The keyboard is more wrong than right, most of the time. Out of all the bugs and problems that make the iPhone almost unusable, it would be the terrible, auto-incorrect keyboard.
The analogy that comes to mind is when the auto industry consolidated to just three large players. Quality was never great to begin with, but it steeply declined after that. It took foreign companies to add real competition to the market.
Apple has been in decline for years now, especially since their only other competitors are Samsung and Google.
I fixed it: I switched to Spotify.
I support your decision to switch to some other manufacturers; I'm doing just that as well. Apple is making way too much money to care and it will get much worse before it gets better, at current prices it is just not acceptable.