I HATE APPLE

Xps

I didn't even make it to the shop before they tried to upsell me a new phone! It needed a restore; I did it myself.

Safari seems snappier

You can really feel the difference with the 500 MHz Power PC upgrade

I will say this thing is fast as fuck.

Fast at giving me tiny little windows!

my magic trackpad sometimes lags appreciably at random times for no readily apparent reason, so that sucks

That sucks
I have the magic keyboard and mouse and they have been flawless

my 16” MBP bricked itself today, two months after apple replaced essentially everything in my first one. i think the thermal design can’t handle the newer i9 chip, and it just cooks itself during normal use.

last time it took 3 weeks to get thru service. it’s gonna suck to wait for them to turn this around a second time, and i’m worried a replacement will just fail again. it’s fucked that a $3300 machine is this unreliable. all of my macbooks 2003-2015 lasted for years before any logic board issues popped up.

what am i supposed to do now? ask them to downgrade me to an i7? demand an upgrade to a newer model?

If they’ll give you an m1 then take that (it works, it’s faster than the machine you have, and if you need the pro stuff (ports, screen size) trade the m1 in for the m1 pro when they release it later this year

thanks caek. i might try that. how’s backwards compatibility tho? i’m concerned most of my music software (written for intel/x64) will be unusable with the new brand of processors :/

Ah yeah no idea on specific software

yup, looks like i’m stuck with intel for a couple more years probably—translating between instruction sets is gonna hurt performance and in some cases fail altogether. plus it’ll be impossible to run any non-native plugins when a host program (e.g. Ableton Live) ports over to run natively in “apple silicon” (which is actually just ARM).

unfortunate... but it will be cool when the audio software industry catches up and we can start to run audio signal processing on GPUs, which it seems will finally be afforded by apple’s new machine architecture.

nerdy details for audio ppl here:
https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/production-expert-1/2020/6/25/apple-silicon-a-developer-helps-to-unpack-what-we-know

Thanks, that’s helpful.

is there a way to get imessage to run on a Windows PC? idk if this is Apple's fault or Microsoft's fault ... but it is annoying because I have a significant number (more than 1, so it's not just one person doing this) of clients/co-workers who have iphones and mac laptops, and in the happy Appleverse, if someone sends me a long ass text with attachments and links, that can easily be opened and responded to on the computer ... it doesn't occur to some of them that like me, there are lots of people with iPhones who have Windows PCs who do not reside in happy Appleverse.

fwiw I have considered shelling out for a Mac, but considering much of my work involves software that is Windows only ...I'd be running a VM a lot so ...

afaict no, iMessage is Mac/iPhone/iPad only

I think iMessage relies on Apple security hardware.

good to know! Now I don't have to feel even mildly guilty for not scouring the internet for a workaround.

There’s this thing 🤷🏻‍♂️

https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/21/22242143/beeper-universal-chat-app-imessage-whatsapp-signal-telegram-pebble-founder

admits that it’s “using some trickery” in doing so

so it'll stop working any day now

Yeah it’s clearly a violation of TOS

good

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/02/soon-you-may-be-able-to-change-the-default-music-service-in-ios/

great job, apple, now add FLAC support to the iTunes/Music app so i can live my life

FLASH POLL

2014 macbook pro, 15" retina. the battery is at 2000 cycles. if it's not plugged into a power source, it can crash anytime it gets below 50%, and it goes from 100% to 50% in like 20 minutes, depending on what you're doing. Not only that, but the OS itself seems to be telling me that there's a problem. REPLACE BATTERY SOON, it says.

diagnosis: battery failure
prescription: either put it to death, pay apple to replace the battery, or do the battery replacement myself.

if i fix it myself, i'd probably get something like this:

https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Mac/MacBook-Pro-15-Inch-Retina-Late-2013-Mid-2014-Battery/IF117-046?o=5

battery replacement got progressively more complicated on macs of this era, of course. you can take a look at the repair guide here: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Display+Mid+2014+Battery+Replacement/90276

like most things, i would rate myself as a step above beginner. i believe that about 80-90% of the time, i would complete this replacement without a problem. for the times that i failed, i'd guess the cause would be me accidentally breaking something, or possibly losing a tiny screw. but i looked through the guide, and it just looks like a long, intermediate level pain in the ass that i can get through.

but there's a reason no one replaces their own batteries on later macbooks right? it fucking sucks.

anyway, what would you do

livestream the surgery. keep a peanut tin handy for the teeny screws

impossible, my fingernails are reprehensible and disgusting.

... unless i wear gloves (which actually come with that kit)?!

but i don't want to wear those gloves, because my hands will get sweaty. welp, this is a pickle

Buy the gloves of your choice and make it pay per view to cover the whole shot

whatever you do don't get pickle brine in there

could this be the quasi-criminal enterprise i feel like my entire life has been building toward?

it is. might i suggest going on AliExpress and finding the least reputable seller you can turn up, for added danger

FWIW, I just had a similar situation with the battery in my 15" 2017 MBP and bought the MacFixIt kit (Apple wanted $199, a local shop was going to charge $350, so I went for the kit)

It does suck and is time-consuming but the MacFixIt guide was great (the comments on each step were valuable). I did it, it worked out OK, and it's one less thing to worry about until the Apple-processor MBPs finally ship.

battery replacement got progressively more complicated on macs of this era, of course. you can take a look at the repair guide here: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+15-Inch+Retina+Display+Mid+2014+Battery+Replacement/90276🕸

I bought a maxed out m1 MacBook Air btw. Vulgar amount of money when you max everything but my last MacBook Air lasted seven years (and still works fine tbh) so if it lasts anything like that then seems worth it. Cannot wait to post to ilxor even faster.

ok for real... god dam! just looked at the steps, and i would just use it plugged in for the rest of its useful life. I only have a 2012 a friend gave me cuz he was gonna toss it. It had hard disk cable... but that was nothing compared to this.

*a bad hard disk cable

if it looks like a probable PITA to do it yourself, then i'd pay for the replacement service (assuming the cost isn't astronomical).

it's probably worth saving that laptop if u don't need a faster machine right this second. for one thing, i've had pretty terrible luck with my 2019 Intel MBP: my second replacement arrived from apple's repair center just this morning. the hardware failures in my last two were apropos of nothing, and both times they required new logic boards (as well as various other HW replacements). the thermal design seems to be a problem on the new crop, although it's unclear whether it's a software issue.

then there are the new apple-made cores now in production to consider. IDK what yr software needs might be, but the industry has a long way to go before it ports everything over to accommodate the new line. even the big boys with lots of resources are gonna need time: things like Adobe Suite are frequently crashing on the new M1 chips. so, depending on what non-native apps you're using a lot, it might be good to hang on to the Intel machine for another couple of years and wait for the industry to catch up.

xps
sweet m1 macbook air purchase! apart from a few hiccups, i have been really pumped about my m1 mac mini purchase. two thumbs up. ideally i would have waited until next year's model for a macbook pro, but given the shape of my current laptop (not just the battery, also the display and just being beat-up), it was a convenient time to upgrade to a desktop model

Holding out for a 12”…fuck 13”

it's probably worth saving that laptop if u don't need a faster machine right this second.

i think that's the thing...i just got this new mac mini, and i'm only planning on using this mbp for another 2-3 years before getting a new one.

but I’ve done MacBook surgery tons of times and that would be the trickiest I’ve ever done

i have only done it a handful of times, but i still aspire to be good at that kind of stuff some day, so i guess it makes me more willing to take a small risk on it, because the tradeoff is feeling good about reaching a new PR for mac-craftiness

MacBook Pro = Honda Accord

KM, no chance you can ride this out until you can buy a new M1 machine?

already got one! i'm using a mac mini as my main computer these days. the 2014 MBP is more of a recovery operation, but it really would be handy to have a functional laptop. i've had a lot of power-related incidents recently, and really, other than that it's still chugging along, so i'm thinking replacing the battery would get me the rest of the way until i get a newer one a few years down the road?

ah, gotcha. so if this explodes you're still OK

I had my own come to Jesus moment with a battery replacement for my 2015 MacBook pro some months back. It ended up that because of things I'd changed in the machine, neither Apple nor any of the other local repair shops would do the battery replacement for me. So it was either I do it or it doesn't get done. I opted to postpone the surgery myself, because it seemed like a huge pain in the ass, but I imagine at some point between now and battery failure I may reconsider.

I remember the brief window of glasnost from Apple around the early Intel MacBooks when they went to more standard connectors and fasteners and easier disassembly, then the skies started to cloud over when they went to unibody construction. By the time of the retina models it was back to "fuck you buddy" to those of us who wanted to do any fixes or upgrades.

2014 macbook pro, 15" retina. the battery is at 2000 cycles. if it's not plugged into a power source, it can crash anytime it gets below 50%, and it goes from 100% to 50% in like 20 minutes, depending on what you're doing. Not only that, but the OS itself seems to be telling me that there's a problem. REPLACE BATTERY SOON, it says.

Exactly the same model as you, and same issues (except I'm "only" at 985 cycles). I can't import into Lightroom on <70% battery any more (it's the convert-to-DNG step that kills it), launching Chrome can also trigger a shutdown if the battery's <40%. It's perfectly happy to pootle along for 1.5-2 hours on battery without these kind of spikes. I'm sure rendering video in DaVinci Resolve or iMovie would kill it too, but I don't go near video editing without AC power. The only time it's left the house in the last year is when my daughter borrows it for video/graphics school work, and she takes the power cables, so no great hardship being mainly AC.

Resigned to a paying for a professional battery replacement some time in the next six months. Whenever I do the first couple of repair steps on the Apple site, it shows me a handful of still-trading affiliates within a few miles, so once we're out of lockdown I'll book it in. I read Josh's tale of "we gotta swap out the things *you put in there* too, a thousand dollars please" in horror, but I think mine is as supplied.

Um, where does it show the cycle count?

System info - About This Mac, then System Report, choose Power from the list of categories

I too have the same model with the same battery woes. I'm waiting for the second iteration of M1s. (M2s?)

pretty incredible though that after 6 years the machine is still usable for a 1-2 hour stretch doing basic things. You'd never see that on a PC laptop.

My wife is currently using a 2013 MacBook Pro (with SSD) to do design work with the latest versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Safari all running at once. I'm not going to say she hasn't met a spinning beach ball but she seems to be not complaining too much. I keep asking if she wants us to buy a new one but she hasn't bitten so far.

Sorry, wrong thread.