I'm surprised to see an example from Apple Music. That app is an perfect example of design neglect too. The ability to filter your song list for a specific track is now hidden in Apple Music.
To reveal the filter field, you must select the "View" menu, and "Show Filter Field". Worse each time you relaunch Music, this field is again hidden, and you have to select the menu item again.
It's much worse for apple music classical. It's great for classical music, but the way the library works with works and recordings is unintuitive and they decided to remove the ability to download (!?) and the ability to share playlists in the classical app and those as main-app only.
And in the case of the iPad, try to sell you them individually for each family member...
It's 2023, and you still can't have multiple user accounts on any model of iPad, "Pro" or otherwise. This is a feature you can just take for-granted on virtually any other "computer" too.
The feature has existed for years, Apple just won't let you use it because they'd rather sell separate devices to every family member.
For all the talk about environmentalism and their elaborate phone recycling robots, they're not too concerned about the "reduce" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle." Never mind that it's the most important one that you're supposed to do before the others.
EDIT - I'm aware a local users system without a network login system would require a slightly different implementation from schools, but a small 2.8 trillion dollar company like Apple could figure it out if they wanted to
I've heard that the multi user feature for schools is pretty skin deep and that it basically just acts as an auth for apps which store all data remotely. Not at all something you could just drop on regular consumers.
The thing is: I can't even do media consumptions and web browsing on iPad. Browsing the web without uBlock and a few other extensions is a battle I'm not willing to fight. And so many video codecs not supported on iPad makes it unusable for media consumption. And have you tried opening your videos in other apps? Guess what? The file gets copied to the other app, meaning that now you have two versions of the same movie/whatever.
The iPadOS is so broken in basic ways that I can't even.
I really don’t buy these kinds of explanations when it comes to Apple products. They would love to sell you a 2-in-1 device for twice as much.
I just don’t think the UX is good enough for their standards. MacOS is poorly suited for touch interactions, and iPadOS is poorly suited for mouse cursor oriented interactions. 2-in-1s are just terrible UX experiences that Apple doesn’t want to be associated with.
> I just don’t think the UX is good enough for their standards. MacOS is poorly suited for touch interactions, and iPadOS is poorly suited for mouse cursor oriented interactions.
"They've developed utter shite over two decades but only did so because of their impossibly high standards and they care about you, the customer."
Lol no they wouldn't or they'd have done it ten years ago. Apple is after your dollars they care nothing for what's better for you for productivity or any ethics outside of profit really. Their actions over the last 20 years set that in stone.
> Apple is after your dollars they care nothing for what's better for you for productivity or any ethics outside of profit really.
A damning indictment of the personal computing industry is that Apple nonetheless deliver the best of anyone this front, by a mile, for most users. The whole product category of personal computing devices and operating systems is a real shit-show.
different cpu architects - surface book is still just x86 under the hood.
ios is arm, macbooks were x86, now is arm. thats why. it is impressive what rosetta 2 does, but it still impacts a significant performance and battery hiut
Now why they didn't make a touch macbook/detachable screen with osx is another question, and likely because there isnt the demand. i was just addressing why you couldn't just smush ios and osx together/run both on the same device
Anyone that used an iOS simulator back in the x64 days would tell you that it’s entirely possible to run iOS on x64, just Apple chooses not to do it.
(before anyone jumps in to tell me the simulator is not a full OS: I know. But there was a full toolchain to build for x64, if they’d chosen to Apple could have leveraged it)
the os isn't the hard part, its the app ecosystem and navigating how do you ensure they all run properly on x86, and not with a huge performance or battery hit. i would be rosetta2 in reverse, and as great as rosetta2 is it has limitations & does come at a cost.
sharing the cpu arch makes things easy, case in point at launch m1 ran ios apps.
Again, simulator builds in Xcode are exactly that on x64 devices.
> it would be rosetta2 in reverse
It wouldn’t. Rosetta takes programs compiled for one CPU and runs them on another. But in this scenario apps would be built specifically for x64. Xcode previously had the ability to build multiple architectures in one package (32bit and 64bit), they could totally package ARM and x64 together if they wished to.
I think you’re grossly overestimating how many of those apps are actually used regularly. Even if Apple only got 15% of the entire App Store available on x64 it would fulfill the needs of almost all users.
Well if they were really for productivity they would have made all their software offerings over the last 20 years cross platform in order to allow users of other systems to feel such amazing productivity boosts. But they didnt, they walled it off and made mac's about as incompatible and hard to work with for any other device (android,windows,linux) as they possibly could.
Proof in case, I can plug an android phone into a windows or linux os device and have zero problems yeeting files around and doing stuff off the block with zero input from me for drivers or some fancy app to let me get to the data. I cant do this with an iphone. The most simple act of using a phone as a physical storage device to get something from point a to b....near impossible on apple hardware. Meanwhile its been stock standard functionality for about 15+ years on other devices.
> The most simple act of using a phone as a physical storage device to get something from point a to b....near impossible on apple hardware. Meanwhile its been stock standard functionality for about 15+ years on other devices.
It's been a long time since I stopped trying to like Android devices, but quite a few years ago I remember Android phones no longer working as a mass storage device you could drag files onto. That was a widely discussed intentional decision by Google and was one of several things that made me decide that Android's talk about freedom, openness and all that was just marketing. You can plug an Android in and drop stuff on it like a thumb drive again now?
> You can plug an Android in and drop stuff on it like a thumb drive again now?
I don't think that ever changed, though the vendor can probably turn it off, since they have the source.
On Linux, it can (depends on what you told the phone to present) photos or storage or such. It appears in Nautilus like any other external drive. I usually use it it move the photos off my phone onto my computer.
As a person that always had, and still has, PCs, and also now has MacBooks, I'm suspecting that I use my devices in a significantly different way than you do.
> made all their software offerings over the last 20
What Apple software would people want outside of the Apple ecosystem? Do you have an example? Most of the "niceness" is system wide/cross device integration related, many of which don't have an equivalent in the other OSs to share. For example, try to wirelessly transfer a file, quickly, between any combination of linux and Windows without an active WiFi connection.
The only "substantial" software I can think of, from Apple, is iMovie. My only frequent use is Preview and Keynote. Everything else is either Microsoft (including Office), or third party.
> they walled it off and made mac's about as incompatible and hard to work with for any other device (android,windows,linux) as they possibly could.
Is this also about wired connections? Do you have an example? For me, NFS, VNC, and lots of third party stuff to take care of the rest, the same that I use for PC to PC/linux. I'm not aware of walls for macOS. There's no restrictions for software. I even have third party kernel extensions installed right now.
> plug an android phone into a windows or linux os device
That is obviously intentional, and probably annoying. Although, I can't say I've used wired transfer with a phone in over a decade, including on my Android phone. I have a far less $/Gb USB3 drive to go from computer to computer.
I might be breaking HN guidelines with this comment.
> What Apple software would people want outside of the Apple ecosystem? Do you have an example?
How about starting with iMessage?
Keynote etc. for Linux would be rather nice.
At one point, I joined a local MUG (Mac Users Group), hoping we could find common cause and support each other in a Windows world. Sadly, that was naive of me.
What is this in reference to? I have an iPad and a MacBook. I don't pay a subscription. I usually use Microsoft OneDrive, so I can sync between/to my non apple devices, though I usually just use airdrop.
Are you referring to extra cloud storage?
edit: A response would be appreciated, so I can understand what's going on with this comment. This is a genuine question. What subscription am I missing out on here?
I don't understand. There's no iCloud subscription to enable all the cross-device interoperability.
The cloud subscription just gets you more than the 5Gb of free storage. I use Microsoft OneDrive for extra cloud storage. Handoff, shared clipboard, airdrop, sidecar, and all the other nice stuff works without extra cloud storage. You do need to have an iCloud account.
Surface tablets exist (they can run Linux but I'd stick with Windows on them). 2-in-1 laptop/tablet hybrids have also existed for a while, sold with Windows and ChromeOS but many of them work fine with standard Linux.
Some models can even become relatively competent Hackintosh, though macOS lacks proper pen drivers of course.
Samsung has Dex, which is a desktop interface for Android tablets (and phones hooked up to a dock). For a while they experimented with offering a full Ubuntu desktop, but I believe they've stopped that experiment.
Honestly, Apple seems to be the only tablet manufacturer that still tries its hardest to push professional users back to laptops. With the virtualisation support in Android 13+, I wonder how long it'll take before someone brings out the first macOS-on-Samsung-Galaxy app; various people have already run Windows 11 as a proof of concept on Pixel devices so who knows how long it'll take.
I don't get why this is still impossible in 2023, with M1 in both macbooks and ipads.
I'm sure at some point someone at apple has built a prototype and did extensive testing, I'd love to know why was that shut down. And whether it was a business related issue, or a tech/UX related issue.
My guess is that Apple wants companies to reinvent their programs to work well on a touchscreen, which has largely been happening. If you could just drop macos on the ipad, we wouldn't have things like Procreate. You'd just get told to install desktop photoshop and connect a mouse and keyboard.
I hope they never do this. Bolting touch into a desktop OS is too much of a compromise for me. It didn't work well in Windows 8 and I don't think it would in macOS.
This is a silly thing to say. macOS is specifically designed for use with a mouse and keyboard. iOS is specifically designed for use with a touch screen.
Adapting either one to work with the other would only make it worse.
MacOS allows me to run any software I want. It has a terminal, and allows me to run scripts. It has a shared file system and offers true multi-tasking.
You can already run some iOS apps in MacOS. I'd like a single computer where I can switch between mobile / pencil usage and desktop keyboard / mouse usage.
That's exactly what I have with a convertible Chromebook. Super Snappy ChromeOS for web browsing. It can run Android apps, or stream them from my phone. Flip it around and it's a BIG tablet. 15.6" 4k screen. Going back into computer mode I can run full blown Linux, very quickly via Crouton or virtualized slightly less quick with official Crostini. Can also do a lot of the terminal stuff directly in the ChromeOS shell. In either Linux environment I can emulate Windows via QEMU/KVM. It's as fast as native in Crouton, again a bit slower in Crostini. Lightweight,long battery life, charges over USB-C will fast charge my phone and interfaces seamlessly with the phone for tethering that doesn't use hotspot data and doing messages notifications, etc.
No... I use an iPad with Magic Keyboard case daily.
It works pretty well for things designed for keyboard and pointing device -- one of my main uses is to remote in to a Windows machine.
The main problems with this setup aren't inherent... while the track pad is quite good, the keyboard is passable at best (needs function keys and for the frequently used keys to stop semi-dying).
Pretty quickly you start to naturally switch between touching the screen, typing on the keyboard or using the trackpad, depending on what you're doing and what software you're using.
Now my wife laughs at me when I'm using a regular MacBook and try to swipe or tap the screen.
I love BBEdit and use it daily as my main text editor, and have since classic MacOS days! I'm hoping they add a couple of features:
- Ability to auto-format using Prettier.
- AI Large Language Model auto-complete for code. The field is moving fast, but I'd love to be able to use open models here. I don't want to send all my code to GitHub co-pilot.
BBedit has an excellent built in text-filter functionality and I've written scripts to send selected text as a prompt to various LLMs, but built-in would be ideal!
