hecifato

You make a good point. Windows 10 course corrected fairly heavily from Windows 8. The tablet mode was there but you could ignore it pretty easily.

However, I still feel like Apple is in their Microsoft era where they're making some of the same mistakes Microsoft have made in the past 20 years.

Aero -> Liquid Glass

Ads in the OS -> Ads in core applications

Fullscreen ads for Microsoft services in the OS -> banner ads for Apple services in the OS

Dark patterns for Windows 11 upgrades -> Dark patterns for macOS 26 upgrades

Windows Mixed Reality -> Vision Pro

I could also say Surface Duo -> iPhone Duo but at this time it's too early to tell. I also think that a touchscreen Mac is a mistake. Not because it's something Microsoft already did but because the reason a MacBook does not need a touchscreen is because Apple has best-in-class trackpads.

You’d think a network drive would be included. Apple used to also provide instructions for connecting a network drive but they stopped with macOS 15 or 26. Now a drive that is physically connected to a Mac is the only method of using Time Machine that Apple officially recognizes.

edit: to be clear you can still use a network drive, but how well that works is the big question. It will probably depend on the user and the setup. The Macs in my house backup to a share on a Pi 4. They can still restore files from it just fine.

> The AI industrial complex does not do consent. You will use it.

I posted a thread on thr MacRumors forum making a similar point. I tried to couch it in the language of Apple being inconsistent with Apple Intelligence. You can’t turn it off anymore globally but Apple provides the user the ability to block, not turn off, some parts of it. Even then you can’t block everything, like the Apple Intelligence parts of the Photos app. Even if you turn off Siri that stuff sticks around. But iOS 27 does not require Apple Intelligence to function or anything like that because my 4th gen iPad Air can’t run Apple Intelligence but can run iPadOS 27 just fine.

I used an iPad + Apple Plencil for my last 2 years of University. I love the idea of digital notebooks, but for me writing 99% of the time in cursive zero friction between Pencil and glass was not a good combo. I find, at least for me, cursive needs that friction.

I tried some big name matte screen protector, I can’t remember now what it was called, and it was pretty good. It was like 70% of the way to feeling like paper. The Pencil tips would wear away but they still lasted much longer than the sticks for a mechanical pencil would. But the way the matte finish would diffuse light hurt the sharpness of the iPad display so I’ve been using these Pencil tip covers instead. It took some getting used to, and I still prefer actual pencil to actual paper but this at least saves me from buying and storing tens or hundreds of notebooks.

I used to get Sandisk cards but recently I stopped using SD cards altogether. When it came time to update from Debian 12 to 13 for my Pi4 I migrated to an NVME USB enclosure for my boot drive. Just yesterday I set up another Pi4 for a project with an M.2 SATA enclosure and in both cases they work just fine.

Something that I ended up loving about iOS was the relative simplicity it had compared to Android at the time I started using the iPhone in 2017. iOS 10 and 11 were great. People complained about things like all apps needing to be on the homescreen or not being able to place apps arbitrarily, but at the same time that "lack" of function is part of what made iOS easy to use and understand.

I find nowadays iOS is as complex as the Android I remember. I can navigate it just fine because I'm used to it but even my parents who've been using iPhones longer than me have found themselves getting lost in the OS with iOS 26 in particular.

I knew Blizzard was abandoning macOS when Overwatch didn't ship for it. I assume there must be a decent amount of Mac users playing WoW seeing as it still works on macOS and transitioned to ARM. Diablo 3 only ever got an ARM build because, apparently, Blizzard they replaced the 2010(?) Mac Pro that they were using to test Mac builds of the game with a Studio.

I hear what you're saying, but keep in mind that Bethesda shipped Skyrim as 32-bit in 2011. It wasn't until the Special Edition release in 2016 that it was updated to 64. Now, obviously, we could chalk that up to it just being Bethesda.

I ordered the X4 this past Christmas and received it sometime in January. I have it running Crosspoint. I like it a lot but I do wish it was a bit larger, like a 7-8" display so more text could fit on the screen. The thing I love about the X4 is that I can flash different firmware on it and it's dead simple. It's not an Android tablet with an e-ink screen, it doesn't download ads from Amazon servers, it's just an e-reader.

It being a Switch emulator certainly didn't help. However, the primary reason Nintendo went after Yuzu was that Yuzu devs were openly accepting payment for special updates to run Tears of the Kingdom. TOTK was, at the time, only available because of a leak and had not officially released.

Oracle cut their Always Free ARM offering in half CPU & memory-wise, Hetzner is increasing prices by up to 300%. I think that this is going to push even more people to pick up a mini PC and forward ports to it on their LAN.

I meant more that those systems at the time would have likely been paired with lower resolution displays.

This drives me crazy. Even looking at these old screenshots you just know that these systems we outputting a display resolution lower than 1024x768.

When I was checking out the MacBook Neo a while back I was disappointed that the resolution is not natively x2 scaled. It uses fractional scaling when macOS handles fractional scaling quite poorly. I've set the resolution on my M1 MBP to 1280x800 so it was x2 scaled and clarity improved significantly. But I also sacrificed usable space because apps don't adjust, everything is just made larger.

> Operating systems of that era were designed based on UX research to help people use the unfamiliar operating system.

I have a lot of thoughts on things like PC usability today. You're right that UX research would have heavily contributed to the design on these older systems. As computers moved from the warehouse to the living room they had to be easier to use and understand for people without CS degrees. I think it is fair to assume *some* things about what people these days are familiar with when it comes to the desktop GUI, but usability should receive more focus now even if it slightly hinders aesthetic. A friend of mine has been teaching a college program for video editing and she has students who needed her to explain what files and folders are. This is not the first time I've heard of things like this.

Smartphones and tablets have obfuscated so many basic functions and features that it is actively harming people's understanding of how to use a computer. Things like window sizing, executables, how apps know where things are, and how programs are installed. Android does allow users to peek behind the curtain more than iOS but Google has been going down the path of locking down Android. I haven't been in an elementary school classroom for like 17 years but I remember having computer lab time where we would learn how to use Windows 95/98. I think what has benefited my friends and others my age (~30) is that we grew up when computers were in the home and were usable enough for us to log in and intuit our way around but there was enough friction that made it so we would have to figure things out on our own.

Whenever I see a Starlabs release I think about picking it up then I look at the price. When you're getting to the point where a MacBook is a better deal it's a tough sell, especially when your lower end CPU options are so weak.