My mate Gary who puts them on his enormous Plex server. He’s a good lad.

Non-American here.

I don’t dislike America. I was a teenager in the ‘90s, when the culture was peaking in influence here in the UK, so I have great nostalgia for American things (which really helps when playing the daily NYT games). I’ve visited a few times, and always enjoyed my time there.

But I am real fucking tired of the American influence on the internet, on politics, and on attitudes around the world.

I’m tired of the American view being the default on social media, because the majority of social media sites are American, populated by Americans.

I’m tired of saying something that would completely uncontroversial outside the US that attracts a rash of people bitching at you because it’s not normal over there. Like letting our cats outside. I once said something on Reddit about my cat getting killed by a car, and got a bunch of replies from people telling me how irresponsible I am for letting her go outside.

I don’t use TikTok, but my wife does, and part of her kinda wants the US ban to go ahead, so that her feed is a bit more balanced towards Europe. And I get that.

:edit: I accept that this isn’t the fault of individual Americans, and hold no ill-will towards them. It’s down to the vast majority of global tech wealth being held in the US, giving the illusion that the whole internet is an American thing.

I also accept that this is rank hypocrisy coming from a Brit. If we’d had the internet 250 years ago, the whole world would be speaking English now, as opposed to most of it.

Folks ITT

This here. The One True GIF.

If Brent Rambo approves, we do.

Landlords are vermin, AI is peddled by vermin, and spambots are vermin.

I dunno, but whenever I’ve seen this brought up on /r/Apple the comments are usually stuffed with Android users, or former Android users talking about how much they love T9 dialling.

I won’t lie, as a man of a certain age I’d love to try texting with T9 again, but it’s not hugely important to me.

Not if you’re an Android user, to whom this feature is apparently vital.

What I’d love is a MacBook Pro with a detachable screen that becomes an iPad. There’s no reason they couldn’t do it with the Airs as well.

But I feel like it’s a ridiculously obvious solution that Apple have tried out in testing and decided against for whatever reason.

As a guy in his 40s who’s been to more than his fair share of punk and metal gigs, was a welder until a couple of years ago, and as a youth thought that ear plugs were annoying: sorry, I didn’t hear the question.

Because they can make more money from the walled garden of i/Pad/VisionOS. They can’t take their cut of apps installed on a Mac outside of the App Store, and they hate that.

And you could argue that they were only upgradeable because they hadn’t at that point, figured out how to make it not.

They were, they just weren’t massive enough for it to be as obvious or egregious as it is now.

I mean, I remember buying my first Macbook in 2007 and only speccing it with 1gb of RAM because what they were charging to double it to 2gb was eye-watering compared to what I paid online. Same with storage. They only get away with it now because they solder everything on.

But while I never like to be all “Steve would never…” I do wonder whether they’d have walked a more fine line if he was still around. Some of the shit they’re pulling now feels downright hostile, where his approach was to make Apple the more friendly of the computer companies.

I think they’ve hit a point where they’re doing more for shareholder value than for customers.

They’re so scared of iPad chewing into Mac sales that they’ve hobbled iPadOS, leaving it just useful enough to encourage people to buy both. They’re continuing to offer base 8gb RAM, despite it costing them pennies to increase that to 16gb, because they like the money they make from charging for upgrades.

They’re one of the world’s most valuable companies, and they’ve got there by shortchanging customers as much as possible over the past 15 years.

In many ways, I have no problem with what they charge for their devices. What they make is (generally) very high quality and can last for a long, long time. The likes of Amazon and AliExpress have given us a false sense of how expensive things should be.

But I do have a problem with feeling like I’m not getting the most from my purchase.

Like, I have a 6th gen iPad mini. It’s a great little device. But I can’t help thinking how much more useful it could be if Apple had allowed Stage Manager and external display support on it. But why would they when a 256gb version of it puts it on par with a Mac mini. For the majority of what I do, I could be happy with my iPad hooked up to a display, with the ability to side load apps, a la macOS, and the ability to be portable. But Apple don’t want people buying the cheapest they can work with when they can charge twice for both a Mac and and iPad. So they’ve intentionally hobbled the iPad.

And that’s a problem for me.

Here’s hoping they’ve finally sorted out Files.app, and stopped it crashing when you

checks notes

try to use it at all.

My Mini at work has 8gb that I can’t upgrade, and honestly, the only time it’s ever a real issue is when I’m running a Win11 VM that eats up half the RAM.

However, with the cost of RAM now, speccing 8gb on any £1000+ computers is downright criminal.

And, I think, the keyboard. So if you have a current iPad Pro and want the better quality keyboard and trackpad, you have to upgrade your otherwise still more than capable iPad.

It’s fucking diabolical.

The benefit is that Apple are making the chips and want to use the chips in as many products as they can. It doesn’t matter that the software is nowhere near the hardware, the chips are bought and paid for, so they’ll use them.

macOS is really not optimised for touch though.

People say that a lot, but it’s probably not true.

I was ok with the Angry Birds franchise right up until the shitty kart racing game they pumped out. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more wretched collection of bare-faced advertising and micro transactions as that fucking piece of shit.

The game was crammed full of new pop songs, and when one would play the game would display a link to buy it from iTunes. I couldn’t let my kid play it, it was just too egregious.

Haven’t touched any of those games since. Which is a shame, because I really enjoyed the original.

I remember buying Bioshock on my iPhone way back in the mists of time, before decent controller support existed for iOS. The on screen controls weren’t great, so I didn’t spend much time playing it, always planning to come back at some point.

Then it got removed from the App Store so completely that it disappeared from my purchased list, and that was that.