I HATE APPLE

I'll be in a position to get a new macbook this fall. this thread gives me pause? my current machine is a 2014 15" mbp that works great; I use it to drive a big 4k monitor in clamshell mode, but (used to?) use its portability also. my life will (maybe?) be considerably more portable in the fall, so I still want a laptop. was thinking of going with the 13" mbp rather than the air, is that a mistake? won't buy until september in any case.

i'm currently using a 2012 MBP that had its entire HD replaced in early 2017 under AppleCare warranty, and it is really starting to drag...thinking about getting a new computer, and have been using Apple products for personal computing for so long that going back to a PC sounds difficult...but what's a guy to do? should i get an MBA? wait until the fall when the bugs with the new MBPs are figured out?

I would not make any decisions until the WWDC next week. There’s an expectation they will announce the timeline for a switch from intel to arm processors. If it’s going to take 6 months then wait. If it’s going to take 3 years maybe just go ahead.

ok caek that would be a big problem! the 13" mbp is just a bit more expensive than the air but has somewhat better specs (and someone else is paying for it). but the air is lighter and will fit even easier in my current awesome backpack.

xp re. kernel panics, not re. arm processors, but yeah, I could afford to wait a bit if that timeline emerges.

If I needed a new machine today I would get a maxed out MacBook Air, no question

Or a pc laptop tbqh

Maybe just one of these https://www.pine64.org/pinebook-pro/

I love my MBP16 for the most part, but I never use it with the lid closed. Seems like a waste of a screen!

yeah I might go for a pinebook if someone else weren't gonna buy me a new box. it's easily sufficient for my needs (though I love the look & feel of mac os still).

it is a waste of a screen but my 4k monitor is super gorgeous and I'd like to get another for the new office I'll have in another town this fall, in addition to my home office. then I can just bring the laptop back & forth without having to bother with syncing.

Definitely getting a pinebook once the manufacturing stuff is figured out (which might be a while with covid) https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/06/pinebook-pro-review-a-200-foss-to-the-hilt-magnesium-chassis-laptop/?amp=1

I spend most of my days switching between a MacBook Air and a cheap HP Elitebook and I would not, repeat not, go for a pc laptop at this point. They're better than they used to be but still only OK, while the MBA is great.

The MacBook Pro my employer gave me stays in its pouch under the desk, because it is a simultaneously over- and under- engineered brick.

I have a 13" touchbar MBP. it's a piece of shit and I hate it

half of the keyboard only works half of the time, and even when it's 'fully functional', it's a chore to type anything beyond a sentence on it. I'm sure the newer ones are better

'how bad can a keyboard really be' I always thought. welp jokes on me

Euler what monitor do you have ?

thanks for input! yeah, i've been waiting for the news on Monday, but i'm assuming that i'll just be waiting til fall or going with an Air a bit sooner.

The best PC laptop I’ve owned was by... Toshiba, strangely. I don’t think they make them anymore.

iirc when I used to meet semi-regularly with Japanese folks as part of my job they all had Toshibas

I have a 2013-ish HP Elitebook for work (finally wiped and upgraded from W7 to W10 late last year) and it's ok but the screen could be from the '90s compared to any MacBook. My switch to eternal WFH happened too quick to sort out peripherals, so I've been borrowing my gf's 24" monitor and grotesquely clunky gaming keyboard (she was furloughed in early April after getting this stuff from her office). As the day goes on and I get drawn into more multiple maddening parallel Slack chats, my fingers hit the edge of the keys more and more frequently. I gotta get something else.

I've never used the Mac for work-work, just fun-work, so I've never been moved to shout at the thing. Except maybe in Numbers.

Gaming keyboards for work ftw

I have a LG 27UD58-B. It was like 300 €.

I have my MBP13 on a stand next to my 27” 4K Screen boosting it up makes it work much better as a companion screen. Magic keyboard and trackpad. TBH it might as well be a desktop now given I don’t take my laptop out any more. I’m pretty sure that there’s not much I do that isn’t covered by what an iPad can do except working on the big screen (and the occasional stuff I do with R).

caek if that MBP is using a spinning-disk hard drive, an SSD is a no-brainer two year life extension, you seriously won't believe the improvement. A pretty easy job too - buy a 2.5 SATA SSD ($50-80), external case ($15 off eBay), Carbon Copy Cloner (free), a couple of hours to do a complete clone, 10-15 minutes of careful disassembly to switch drives, then you have an external backup drive along with a revitalised laptop.

Eh? Someone else?

I have an encrypted external drive with a user set up on it. I can log in as that user but only if i log in as a user on the main drive first and then switch user. I have the drives password in the keychain but it must be the regular drive users keycahin rather than anything in system.

Is there a way around this so I can log in directly as external drive user first? Its not super important and I can live with it, but good to know if there's a simple way around it

I have a user on the *internal* (encrypted) drive in the same situation - have to log in as someone else first. Curious is anyone knows.

xxp sorry caek that was intended for table

Thank you Matthew! really appreciate it— i might just try that.

CURSED IMAGE CURSED IMAGE pic.twitter.com/IbyTglQCjR

— assigned goth at birth (@mycoliza) June 23, 2020

waaaiiiit so i’ll be able to use Opera as default now??

So is it a good idea to wait for an arm laptop, or should I continue as planned to buy an intel one in September ?

I’m waiting at least until I know whether they’re doing the pro stuff first or last.

I guess the new iMac is gonna be the arm iMac?

Seems like it would be crazy to use this new architecture for their Pro-series hardware, since there is a huge lift needed on the part of all the pro app-makers.

But I just recently got a MBP so this could be the upgrade malaise talking.

I have an encrypted external drive with a user set up on it. I can log in as that user but only if i log in as a user on the main drive first and then switch user. I have the drives password in the keychain but it must be the regular drive users keycahin rather than anything in system.

Is there a way around this so I can log in directly as external drive user first? Its not super important and I can live with it, but good to know if there's a simple way around it

is the user account FileVault enabled?

ahhhh thanks beard papa that ("some users can't unlock this disk") solved my problem

So I can sync my phone wirelessly using the Finder, great. Love it. Weird, but okay.

But I can only import photos into Photos by plugging in a wire? Do I have that right?

All my photos synch wirelessly via iCloud I think?

i don’t use icloud for photos. it takes up too much room on my phone. hence the need to pour them into my computer!

or is icloud for photos better now at conserving space, only downloading them to your phone as and when you want?

i use dropbox's camera upload feature to get photos from my phone to my computers but that's because icloud gives me the fear. afaict icloud photos is actually very good and will solve your problems tracer.

man it always used to just eat up room. i fear icloud too. it’s not like the wire’s a hassle, it’s just.... why?

I'm pointlessly old school and manual about photos; I don't enable iCloud because I figure it's going to immediately wipe out my free storage allowance and I'm going to start paying (even if it's only 79p/mo) for storing a load of crap, and what if I need something a week later and can't get online? Instead, every few months I connect the phone to the Mac + external HDD, open Lightroom and let it import everything it doesn't already have in its catalog. I then filter by device (i.e. if the metadata says it was something wifi'd off a proper camera, I can get rid, as it's elsewhere anyway), and wipe all the non-iPhone stuff. I then clear out the camera roll up to about three weeks back, great swathes at a time.

I figure anything I really want to access is in the online storage I already pay for (Lightroom CC, Flickr) and maybe quicker to find too. I feel a bit weird about absolute junk (Funny screenshots! "Which of these brands of chickpeas did you mean?" My gas meter reading! etc) sitting on some permanently-on server farm in Virginia, hastening our species' demise. Better to just...stick that in a drawer.

I do what caek does for my phone but what MJ does for my camera.

Me too

Dropbox camera upload is just a way to get phone photos onto my computer so I can treat them like camera photos (and to back them up while they’re not yet on my computer)

There’s probably even a way to have Lightroom watch that folder and Hoover up photos as they appear.

Very n00b question maybe but...if I wait for one of these new ARM laptops, I'm concerned that some apps that I run won't be supported. Knowing Apple, I'm wondering if y'all have any sense of whether open source tools (basic shit like the OpenOffice suite) will be okay?

Sorry for possibly stupid question, thanks!

it looks like it's going to be pretty much OK — the boxes run intel software at reasonable speed, and Apple is working with some open source projects to help them move across. OpenOffice isn't on that list, I don't think (but you do get Pages etc for free with a new Mac now too)

i'd be surprised if there weren't working ARM ports of those open source projects within six months. but yeah, you do get Pages/Numbers/etc. for free with a new Mac