what else do I get with something like CARROT that the default doesn’t offer

More control over what data is highlighted as the primary metrics at the top of the report (or on widgets).

Where I live the actual temperature and “feels like” temperature are often really far apart. Apps like Carrot can be configured to show “feels like” as the main temperature, but Apple only shows it if you scroll down all the way down past a bunch nearly useless stats like the sunset time (spoiler, it will be the same as yesterday) and how the current temperature compares to the historical average.

Also, I live near the beach and want to know the tides. That’s almost more important than the temperature.

It sounds like it should work to me.

As an example, as a kid I couldn’t play first person video games until game developers worked out they need something in a fixed position taking over a significant portion of the screen (for example, a steering wheel in a car or the gun you’re holding in a shooter).

Turn those fixed overlays off, and after just playing for a few seconds I’ll be sick the rest of the day. If anything I’m even more sensitive now than when I was a kid - but with the right overlays I’m all good.

I’d bet Apple did a lot of research into motion sickness while developing the Vision Pro headset. Good to see some of that coming to other products.

Putting my developer hat on and reading various reports - this smells like Apple had a really bad data loss bug which they quietly fixed by attempting to automatically recover lost photos from some corner of the database that still might have the data. Such as the thumbnail database or a cache.

Backups people. Make sure you have good backups and for your most precious photos not just digital ones - print them. And send a physical copy to your grandparents as a gift - they’ll love it and it will be one more place you can recover that photo of your kid’s birthday if you ever need to

And if you don’t want something in a photo… don’t take the photo.

it’s all CGI

Crushing the industry I work in, and my dad worked in, is CGI? I’m pretty sure that’s very real.

I love listening to digital music on as much as anyone. More than most people. But it will never replace physical instruments for me and I don’t like to see a company celebrating that transition - even if I admit it’s very much real.

I think the world was a better place when all 50 people on a train carriage listened to the one musician who brought a guitar onto the train and called out asking them to sing a favourite song next.

Some of us don’t like watching beloved musical instruments destroyed. We also don’t like how so many people think watching TikTok on an iPad is “music”.

When my father died, my sister didn’t give a shit about the house. She just wanted the guitar - which our father (a drummer) inherited when the lead guitarist in his band died. The guitarist had two dozen guitars but was his favourite.

It’s close to a century old, nobody knows what trade secrets the luthier who created it used to get that sound, and no other instrument sounds the same. It’s been used on stage in countless live performances on every continent in the world and has been used to record over a hundred songs in professional recording studios. It was used to play music at the funeral of both the previous owners and it’s literally impossible to replace.

I get it, not every instrument is that special… but this instrument wasn’t that special either when the first guitarist ever picked it up. Nearly all instruments have the potential to become that special… and Apple created a video dedicated to destroying a bunch of them while also implying that listening to an MP3 is as good as an actual instrument. No way.

Um - Apple’s problems are very public.

It was clear they had supply constraints a few years ago, and when those cleared up there was a huge bubble of sales. Expecting growth this year when so many regular customers just got a new phone would be silly.

And it’s also a distraction - the problems facing Apple are

1. How poorly the company is responding to antitrust complaints.
2. The Vision Pro doesn’t seem to be doing well, and their car project was so much worse they literally killed it.
3. Twelve years ago Apple was leading the industry on digital assistants… Siri was nowhere near good enough but nobody else had a “good enough” product either and Siri showed real promise. Now? WTF is taking so long? It’s pretty clear other companies are very close to achieving what Siri failed and there’s not much to indicate Apple can keep up.

Phones are remarkably durable now

Even if you look after them perfectly the oleophobic coating starts to wear off with normal use after about six months.

iPhone 15 Pro Max is about 5 or 6 on a mohs scale. Beach sand is much harder than that and often very sharp, so if you ever go to the beach (I’m lucky enough to do that almost every day), you’re probably going to have sand in your pocket/bag and that will scratch the screen. My current screen protector is about 12 months old and has tens of thousands of micro scratches (only visible in certain lighting) and five or six deep gouges (visible whenever the screen is off). Time to replace the protector.

They all take away from the display. Even if nothing else, the simple fact you have one more layer is adding a surface for light to bounce off. Glass is not transparent. Something like 16% of light bounces off most glass, depending on the chemical makeup and also how the layer is bonded to the display (there are ways to bond it that reduce the issue and Apple uses those for all the internal layers on the display).

Having said that — I still think screen protectors are worth it, because i use my phone for a long time and am pretty rough with it, so my glass is going to get scratched and the ability to replace the outer layer periodically (and cheaply) is worth the tradeoff to me.

The best ones don’t cover the screen - they cover pretty much the entire front of the device. Unfortunately with some iPhones those are not available (e.g. if the phone has curved edges). And they have an oleophobic coating — because holy shit fingerprints are bad without that. This is another reason to use a screen protector. That coating wears off over time and eventually your factory iPhone screen protector will be covered in smudges (unless you buy a new one regularly).

You also need one with very good installation instructions and maybe also some kind of alignment jig built into the packaging. Wether or not that’s necessary depends on what model phone you have, since some iPhones are more difficult than others.

I’m a big fan of D-Brand screen protectors — they’re well made and the installation instructions are the best. Even if you buy someone else’s protector it’s worth watching the D-Brand instructions for tips. This one doesn’t have an alignment jig, because one isn’t really needed. For some phones or protectors it really is needed. https://youtu.be/OJW89JK3zZk

I guess if you spend all your time working with a laptop on a kitchen counter, this product can with that.

… but WTF are you doing working on a kitchen counter? Get yourself a proper desk. Seriously. And if you’ve got a proper desk two or three large displays will provide better pixel density and a more comfortable work environment for a lot less money.

I can get behind using it for mediation, gaming, watching videos, etc… but no way am I going to spend this kinda money on any of those use cases. I look forward to a future version that is an order of magnitude cheaper.

iTunes didn’t start life as a first party app though. They bought a third party app (SoundJam MP) and hired the entire development team. That team shipped iTunes shortly after and at least one of them still works for Apple today.

While iTunes 1.0 was quite different from SoundJam, it’s likely they were working on a major redesign when Apple bought them and they simply finished it off - I’d guess Apple’s only real contribution was the “glass” user interface elements which eventually became systemwide.

iTunes got progressively less logical/intuitive with every release after the initial purchase.

Here’s SoundJam MP, iTunes 1.0, and iTunes 10.0 which was either the best or worst version (best, because it had the most features, worst, because do you really want a social network and movies/tv shows in your music player?) — from iTunes 11 onwards they finally cut features, but threw out the baby with the bathwater.

Any chance work will issue you with a Mac? This would be so much easier if they would. You’d be able to use the iPad as an external display for the Mac, and could run Mac note taking apps (which save all their data on the Mac) on the iPad screen, with full touchscreen and pencil support for drawing/etc. The iPad basically becomes a Cintiq.

I think the only way Windows can connect to an iPad over USB is with “iTunes File Sharing” which requires installing iTunes on Windows - then it will be able to access some data on the iPad. It used to be pretty widespread for note taking apps to support that, but I’m not sure how common it is these days. Almost everyone uses cloud sync these days.

Lets have a look at the memory speed on your 2012 Mac:

• RAM: 25 GB/s
• HDD: 0.1GB/s
• SSD: if it’s a really good one, 0.7GB/s. If it’s a cheap one, might be closer to the HDD

Now compare that to the latest MacBook Air:

• RAM: 100GB/s
• SSD: 5GB/s

And aside from bandwidth, there are also latency improvements that are even more impressive.

These are the numbers that you are actually going to notice in every day life - they are far more important than CPU speed. They are also far more important than wether or not the software you’re using is native or emulated - because modern emulation usually works quite well (I run intel software all day every day on my M1 MacBook Air, which is a lot slower than the computers you’re considering).

The SSD being an order of magnitude faster than on your old 2012 model also means a lot of things that historically needed to be stored in RAM, no-longer need to be in RAM. That’s particularly true for Photoshop and iMovie which both will use all of the memory you have, and use swap if they need more than that. In practice, you won’t notice when they use swap - because what used to be a three second beachball in Photoshop is now zero seconds.

Another thing to consider is modern versions of MacOS will compress some of your RAM which is incredibly effective. Windows and Linux do that too — it’s an industry standard now and not just to save memory. If you can store 2GB of data in 1GB of RAM, that effectively doubles your memory bandwidth (because compressing and decompressing takes zero time with a good memory controller). Software memory, it turns out, is usually extremely compressible.

Like you, I had 16GB on my 2012 MacBook Pro, and I still have 16GB today on my Apple Silicon Mac. It was all I could afford in 2012 and I wished I could have more. These days I can afford more, but I just don’t see the point in paying. 16GB is enough now*.

(* although if you want to play with generative AI, then you’ll want more RAM)

The primary difference between the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is the GPU, but it doesn’t sound like that will be an issue for you. I recommend the MacBook Air - not just because it’s cheaper, it’s also smaller, lighter, bigger screen, etc.

Regarding the Mac Mini, no I don’t think 8GB isn’t enough. Keep in mind the core operating system itself uses about 4GB of your RAM… so an 8GB Mac will have 4GB for the software you run, and a 16GB Mac will have 12GB available for your software. Personally I’ve configured Docker on my Mac to use 8GB on it’s own… but it obviously depends what containers (and how many) you are running.

8GB probably would be just enough, your docker containers sound smaller than mine, but my feeling is it’s a little too close for comfort and you would likely regret it in a couple years time, when you run something that needs 16GB.

The last one isn’t warning you that your trial is running out. It’s warning you that if you don’t start your 90 day trial soon, you will “miss out” and only be able to sign up for a shorter free trial period.

And yes, I’m aware you can disable them. My point though was that Apple definitely does do ads. Oh and by the way if a third party developer were to use notifications like those three? They’d risk having their developer account banned. It’s a blatant violation of Apple’s developer agreement.

That doesn’t disable ads, it just means the ads won’t be “personalized”.

For example you’ll see general interest news ads, instead of ads targeted at the things you are interested in.

Cloud storage fills quickly

Apple provides up to six terabytes of cloud storage (for a monthly fee, obviously). And if you have a family account, individual members of the family can pay for even more storage (by default though, the entire family has a shared pool of storage).

But yeah — I’m pretty sure Apple ProRes RAW video can be hundreds of gigabytes per minute of footage. If you’re choosing that then yeah, you’re going to have to find another cloud provider. And it’s going to be very expensive. Most people don’t shoot video in ProRes RAW though.

On my iPhone it’s more like:

• 5GB downloaded podcasts
• 4GB offline maps
• 2GB photos
• 2GB music
• 1GB health data
• 1GB messages
• The core operating system uses about 10GB
• About 10GB of or so of other stuff.

In total, I’m using a bit over 30GB.

I had to delete so much stuff.

The thing is, an iPhone does that for you.

My full photo library is huge — terabytes, and i have a bunch of large apps (especially games) on my phone that I never play - it automatically removes them but leaves the icon in the launcher. It’ll simply re-download them if you do tap the game. And if the game is well designed, it won’t be a single download - it’ll be a minimal download for the game then within the game each level or area of the game will be downloaded separately as you play.

I have a 64GB phone, and the storage management makes sure I have 20GB or more of free plenty space for large video recordings, software updates, etc etc. If I had a 2TB iPhone, I’d probably have the same 20GB or so of free space since my photo library is that big.

I guess it would be nice to be able to look at a photo I took six years ago and not have to wait a tenth of a second for it to download. But I’m not willing to pay for that. Even if more storage cost 10 bucks, I wouldn’t be willing to pay.

I think the Apple silicon devices are going to have a pretty locked boot loader

Couldn’t be further from the truth. The OS is heavily locked down to prevent malware from modifying the kernel / boot process, however bypassing it is as simple as holding down the power button until you see an options screen (equivalent to BIOS on a PC) and one of the options is a tool to adjust boot security including the option to boot into an arbitrary third party kernel. As long as it’s compiled for ARM64 (which is a decades old industry standard CPU architecture) it will boot.

The only real headaches are around drivers. For example Mac laptop trackpads don’t have any buttons at all. Instead the trackpad is pressure sensitive and the software should detect pressure that looks like a press action, treat that as a click, and send haptic feedback (vibrating the trackpad). None of that is standard stuff and if you want a Mac laptop to work at all… you need to figure it out yourself.

Apple’s official policy is you can’t access that money as cash “except as required by law”.

In other words, if UK law says you are entitled to the money, then Apple would know that, and you simply need to contact Apple and ask them to give the money to you, as cash (or a bank transfer).

They don’t like doing it, they want you to spend the money with them, but in many countries they are required to by law. Because it legally is your money - Apple classifies it as being spent when you use it to buy something, not when you add to your balance.

Depending how the money was deposited in your account, you might not get all of it back. For example target often sells $100 Gift Vouchers for $80. Try to get them to give you $100 cash in that situation, and there’s a good chance Apple will only give you $80 (Target didn’t make a loss of $20 on that gift card, and neither will Apple). But it doesn’t sound like that will affect you.

PS: Transmit is awesome. Been a user for decades. The Mac App Store version is more expensive (subscription pricing with a lot of the money going to Apple) and has less features (some important features are not allowed in App Store apps) - so yeah, don’t buy it from the App Store.

There are some awesome games I grew up playing that I can’t run anymore. Like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK5PTq7vXA4