Well it *did* just get released. Lets give it some time for people to compile binaries and test things out. None of the apps have been yet tested with 2.0
I'm not holding my breath, mind you, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
The big difference is that Apple's updates don't have better than even odds of hosing your computer, unlike Microsoft who manages to brick people's computers on a routine basis.
As far as privacy goes, Apple has said repeatedly on multiple occasions that user privacy is a primary concern. I can't speak to the future obviously, but up till now, an OSX machine sends nothing to apple that the user doesn't allow. People have even tested this, and verified it. Don't want anything going to Apple? Don't sign into iCloud. Don't use Siri. Disable all that stuff and not so much as a single byte gets sent to Apple. At this point I am inclined to take Apple at their word that they will continue doing what they're doing until such time as they demonstrate they've changed their mind.
The pre-configured defaults are just fine for people who don't know what they're doing, but every single one of them is bypassable by anyone with technical skill.
Just to pick out a particular item you mentioned, Gatekeeper (the thing that doesn't allow you to use apps outside the app store) is a fantastic security tool. If a user doesn't know what they're doing, they are basically shepherded to the app store where everything is curated, validated, and reasonably safe from malware. If you want to run apps outside the App Store, it's just a setting away, and still only permits signed applications from official developers. If you download some open source application from sourceforge and you really want to run it? You right-click and choose Open. It gives you a one time warning of "Are you sure?", and after that you can open it freely like any other application.
As a sysadmin, and as someone who has to do tech support for family members who really ARE confused by left and right mouse buttons, this sort of functionality is a godsend because it protects users from themselves, while still allowing those with the knowhow to do what they need to do.
There are other things about OSX that bug me, but privacy isn't one of them. At no point have I ever been concerned that Apple is going to sneak into my machine while I wasn't looking and start siphoning files from my hard drive, as Microsoft has the ability to do.
Now if only their hardware division would pull their thumb out...:\
That's because you're listening to what he says and not what's in his heart! You can't take anything he says seriously, but he tells it like it is and I for one trust....
Isn't that what FCC has been *trying* to do, but has been blocked at every possible avenue, if not by corporations, then by congress, who have stated that FCC is exceeding it's authority?
And hasn't Trump stated that he is uncategorically nixing Net Neutrality?
Based on all the other actions that have occurred in just the last few days, I have serious doubts that what the US consumer gets will be in their best interests.
I am really really hoping that that is the case. That would be the logical thing to do. But after having been burned many times in the past by conjectures and promises (I still remember how pissed I was when Dell reneged on their promise to support a later version of Windows Mobile), that I'm not willing to assume anything beyond what's already marked on the tin.
At any rate, we'll know soon enough. It's going to take few months for "official" BT5 products to hit the market anyway.
While you got modded +5 Funny and rightly so, I have to wonder how many people actually get this joke? Very few people even know what com ports and modems are, anymore.
While that may be true, wouldn't that only occur if you were listening to your music really loud?
I agree with the GP that music over bluetooth is nowhere near as good as it is over wire, but it's for a different reason: Bluetooth itself. Bluetooth wasn't designed for high quality music playback. Hell, it was barely designed for music at all. The stereo audio profile is basically a profile add-on, with audio is sent using a codec (SBC) that doesn't hold a candle to newer ones, in part because it needs to keep the max thoroughput down. That's why Apple-curated devices provide an AAC codec, and for everyone else there's AptX, which are supposed to provide significantly better sound quality. The downside of course, is that you need to *explicitly* search for devices like these, and unless the device expressly says that it supports these codecs, your basically guaranteed that they're using the default SBC that is a mandatory part of the bluetooth standard.
I started looking for bluetooth headphones that didn't suck, and ended up doing a whackton of research to understand what turns out to be a very systemic issue.
For now I'm waiting on any further bluetooth purchases until I see how Bluetooth 5 pans out.(And since Apple went their own way with a custom bluetooth chip, it's anyone's guess whether they will support BT5 anytime soon.) I'm hoping that it will solve not just the quality issues (thanks to greater bandwidth), but the connectivity issues as well. Bluetooth is borderline useless in a big city where there's lots of surrounding EF interference.
Pfft, this is just leftist nonsense. I prefer the Alternative Fact that everything is just peachy and IBM is hiring locally just as Trump told them to.
If this article hadn't been posted to inform people, would anyone even have noticed? Even if you were using VR, would it be noticable?
It feels like ever since Apple put out their "Retina Display" marketing, everyone has been climbing over themselves to see who can jump farthest past the shark.
Question... With all the various contortions that the metadata takes, how well do they handle spam? I guess all the checks are done prior to storing the email on their servers?
All I see is another piece of useful technology that would never survive in North America, because we can't have nice things.
If this was made available in the US, I would give it a month before people started using USB killers, or suing the city for a million dollars and claiming it somehow 'broke' their phone.
O_o Unless I've looked at the scraping-of-the-barrel-bottom end of devices, I haven't come across anything in last few years that doesn't have an HDMI port.... but regardless.
Yes, I agree that it makes perfect sense to sit down at your desk, plug in one cable, and boom, there you go. And being able to do that without relying on one of the bajillion proprietary connectors that dell, lenovo, etc, have, is wonderful. So I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing at all.
My primary beef is that Apple *already* has a line of slimline laptops. In fact, they have *two*. Macbook, and Macbook Air. They are fine, high quality machines that suit the majority of people's needs.
Macbook Pro meanwhile has been a hard core machine for people who need extra capabilities/flexibility. And yet Apple insists on turning that into a clone of two product lines that they already have. People for whom wifi isn't good enough. Who's photo collections measure in gigabytes per shoot. Who routinely need a high-powered mobile workhorse. These kind of people need the kind of flexibility that previous generation MBPs delivered. Flexibility has been (within reason) the name of the game since day 1. But in the last few years it's been getting locked down more and more to the point where it's basically a toaster with a pretty screen.
I'm still using my 2011 MBP because: -It has an ethernet port -I was able to upgrade the ram myself to 16GB -I was able to replace the HD with a 1TB SSD.
Yes, having to have a bunch of video dongles was annoying, but the overall package was so good that the dongles were only a minor ding.
There's no way I could have afforded a MBP with these specs at the time I bought it. If I spec'ed out the current gen MBP to what I believe would satisfy my needs for the next several years, I'm looking at a *minimum* of $4000, and even then it still isn't good enough cause, like you pointed out, it maxes out at 16GB. That's just flat out, unadulterated bullshit.
And this is why I'm pissed off to hell, and why I feel (if I were being completely honest) betrayed. I've been using Apple for over a decade now, and now Apple is so clearly and unequivocally taking the piss out of their customers that I now being forced to reconsider my computing needs. Do I want to go into debt just to buy a new computer that won't even fulfill my needs now, let alone 3 years from now, or do I want to go back to Microsoft and let them forcibly take away all control of my machine to the point where I may not even have a working computer from one day to the next cause they f__ked up yet another update.
I would move to Linux, but the linux software ecosystem is just not fit for desktop use and it looks like it never will be. LibreOffice, despite it's recent improvements, still has some shocking gaps. Linux doesn't have one single email client that has the polish of even an average-level Windows or Mac client. (Even Evolution, which is supposedly the best there is, is basically a clusterf__k unless you connect it to exchange.)
Apparently Microsoft uses the word "Trust" in the same way Apple uses the word "Courage". I still haven't figured out what either one means... only that neither correspond to what's in the dictionary.
Oh, don't be so hyperbolic. Of course a laptop doesn't need all those ports. But it isn't even slightly unreasonable that a laptop would be equipped with standard ports that will outlive the life of the laptop itself. And your point isn't even well made, because we arn't even talking about edge cases. Apple is forcing you to buy dongles for ALL cases. Doesn't matter what you do, or if 99.9999% of the world needs to do a particular thing... you HAVE to buy a dongle. I mean, FFS, You can't even connect a brand new iPhone 7 to the latest MBP, without a dongle.
HDMI is the new VGA. You go into *any* meeting room, and they will almost guaranteed have an HDMI connection available to the projector/tv/whatever. SD cards are still very heavily used by professional photographers, as others have stated, and they won't be going away anytime soon. Ethernet? I will be surprised if Ethernet disappears any less than 3 decades from now. USB? There are literally ZERO external mice or keyboards that use USB-C. There are metric fucktons of perfectly good USB3 devices that are still being actively used. They are still being actively developed and manufactured.
And with the exception of ethernet, *all* of these ports could be included while still obsessing over unnecessary thinness.
The most frustrating part of all this is that there is absolutely NO reason why this had to become and either/or scenario. I love the TB3 ports just fine, but Apple could have included the TB3 ports and still included those other ports, and this whole debate would never have happened. But they didn't, and people like me that rely on our laptops to be mobile workhorses are feeling justifiably betrayed.
The single most important point here, and this is one that seems to be inexplicably glossed over by literally everyone defending Apple's moves, is that this is a PROFESSIONAL level laptop. Professional users have much more demanding needs and requirements than the average sitting-in-starbucks-reading-facebook person. I had no issue with the fact that The Macbook Air and Macbook were designed the way they were. They are perfect for that market segment. But don't pull this horseshit on a laptop labeled "Pro", and then expect people to be happy.
Slashdot Mirror
So.... people were turned into pandas?
O_o So what ARE you supposed to say?
Right, because context isn't important at all...
Well it *did* just get released. Lets give it some time for people to compile binaries and test things out. None of the apps have been yet tested with 2.0
I'm not holding my breath, mind you, but I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
This is news to me. Do you have a link?
The big difference is that Apple's updates don't have better than even odds of hosing your computer, unlike Microsoft who manages to brick people's computers on a routine basis.
As far as privacy goes, Apple has said repeatedly on multiple occasions that user privacy is a primary concern. I can't speak to the future obviously, but up till now, an OSX machine sends nothing to apple that the user doesn't allow. People have even tested this, and verified it. Don't want anything going to Apple? Don't sign into iCloud. Don't use Siri. Disable all that stuff and not so much as a single byte gets sent to Apple. At this point I am inclined to take Apple at their word that they will continue doing what they're doing until such time as they demonstrate they've changed their mind.
The pre-configured defaults are just fine for people who don't know what they're doing, but every single one of them is bypassable by anyone with technical skill.
Just to pick out a particular item you mentioned, Gatekeeper (the thing that doesn't allow you to use apps outside the app store) is a fantastic security tool. If a user doesn't know what they're doing, they are basically shepherded to the app store where everything is curated, validated, and reasonably safe from malware. If you want to run apps outside the App Store, it's just a setting away, and still only permits signed applications from official developers. If you download some open source application from sourceforge and you really want to run it? You right-click and choose Open. It gives you a one time warning of "Are you sure?", and after that you can open it freely like any other application.
As a sysadmin, and as someone who has to do tech support for family members who really ARE confused by left and right mouse buttons, this sort of functionality is a godsend because it protects users from themselves, while still allowing those with the knowhow to do what they need to do.
There are other things about OSX that bug me, but privacy isn't one of them. At no point have I ever been concerned that Apple is going to sneak into my machine while I wasn't looking and start siphoning files from my hard drive, as Microsoft has the ability to do.
Now if only their hardware division would pull their thumb out... :\
That's because you're listening to what he says and not what's in his heart! You can't take anything he says seriously, but he tells it like it is and I for one trust....
ugh. I can't even finish the sentence.
So sad...
Why hello there Mr. President! So nice to see you!
I expect a sudden surge in sales to Trekkies. I know I'm suddenly more interested now.
Isn't that what FCC has been *trying* to do, but has been blocked at every possible avenue, if not by corporations, then by congress, who have stated that FCC is exceeding it's authority?
And hasn't Trump stated that he is uncategorically nixing Net Neutrality?
Based on all the other actions that have occurred in just the last few days, I have serious doubts that what the US consumer gets will be in their best interests.
I am really really hoping that that is the case. That would be the logical thing to do. But after having been burned many times in the past by conjectures and promises (I still remember how pissed I was when Dell reneged on their promise to support a later version of Windows Mobile), that I'm not willing to assume anything beyond what's already marked on the tin.
At any rate, we'll know soon enough. It's going to take few months for "official" BT5 products to hit the market anyway.
And your sarcasm detector is clearly on the blink.
While you got modded +5 Funny and rightly so, I have to wonder how many people actually get this joke? Very few people even know what com ports and modems are, anymore.
While that may be true, wouldn't that only occur if you were listening to your music really loud?
I agree with the GP that music over bluetooth is nowhere near as good as it is over wire, but it's for a different reason: Bluetooth itself. Bluetooth wasn't designed for high quality music playback. Hell, it was barely designed for music at all. The stereo audio profile is basically a profile add-on, with audio is sent using a codec (SBC) that doesn't hold a candle to newer ones, in part because it needs to keep the max thoroughput down. That's why Apple-curated devices provide an AAC codec, and for everyone else there's AptX, which are supposed to provide significantly better sound quality. The downside of course, is that you need to *explicitly* search for devices like these, and unless the device expressly says that it supports these codecs, your basically guaranteed that they're using the default SBC that is a mandatory part of the bluetooth standard.
I started looking for bluetooth headphones that didn't suck, and ended up doing a whackton of research to understand what turns out to be a very systemic issue.
For now I'm waiting on any further bluetooth purchases until I see how Bluetooth 5 pans out.(And since Apple went their own way with a custom bluetooth chip, it's anyone's guess whether they will support BT5 anytime soon.) I'm hoping that it will solve not just the quality issues (thanks to greater bandwidth), but the connectivity issues as well. Bluetooth is borderline useless in a big city where there's lots of surrounding EF interference.
FYI, here's an ok article that summarizes bluetooth 5, in particular WRT audio: http://www.avhub.com.au/news/s...
TL;DR: Bluetooth audio is crap compared to most other transmission methods, and BT5 may or may not help.
Pfft, this is just leftist nonsense. I prefer the Alternative Fact that everything is just peachy and IBM is hiring locally just as Trump told them to.
If this article hadn't been posted to inform people, would anyone even have noticed? Even if you were using VR, would it be noticable?
It feels like ever since Apple put out their "Retina Display" marketing, everyone has been climbing over themselves to see who can jump farthest past the shark.
Question... With all the various contortions that the metadata takes, how well do they handle spam? I guess all the checks are done prior to storing the email on their servers?
All I see is another piece of useful technology that would never survive in North America, because we can't have nice things.
If this was made available in the US, I would give it a month before people started using USB killers, or suing the city for a million dollars and claiming it somehow 'broke' their phone.
O_o Unless I've looked at the scraping-of-the-barrel-bottom end of devices, I haven't come across anything in last few years that doesn't have an HDMI port.... but regardless.
Yes, I agree that it makes perfect sense to sit down at your desk, plug in one cable, and boom, there you go. And being able to do that without relying on one of the bajillion proprietary connectors that dell, lenovo, etc, have, is wonderful. So I'm not sure we're actually disagreeing at all.
My primary beef is that Apple *already* has a line of slimline laptops. In fact, they have *two*. Macbook, and Macbook Air. They are fine, high quality machines that suit the majority of people's needs.
Macbook Pro meanwhile has been a hard core machine for people who need extra capabilities/flexibility. And yet Apple insists on turning that into a clone of two product lines that they already have. People for whom wifi isn't good enough. Who's photo collections measure in gigabytes per shoot. Who routinely need a high-powered mobile workhorse. These kind of people need the kind of flexibility that previous generation MBPs delivered. Flexibility has been (within reason) the name of the game since day 1. But in the last few years it's been getting locked down more and more to the point where it's basically a toaster with a pretty screen.
I'm still using my 2011 MBP because:
-It has an ethernet port
-I was able to upgrade the ram myself to 16GB
-I was able to replace the HD with a 1TB SSD.
Yes, having to have a bunch of video dongles was annoying, but the overall package was so good that the dongles were only a minor ding.
There's no way I could have afforded a MBP with these specs at the time I bought it. If I spec'ed out the current gen MBP to what I believe would satisfy my needs for the next several years, I'm looking at a *minimum* of $4000, and even then it still isn't good enough cause, like you pointed out, it maxes out at 16GB. That's just flat out, unadulterated bullshit.
And this is why I'm pissed off to hell, and why I feel (if I were being completely honest) betrayed. I've been using Apple for over a decade now, and now Apple is so clearly and unequivocally taking the piss out of their customers that I now being forced to reconsider my computing needs. Do I want to go into debt just to buy a new computer that won't even fulfill my needs now, let alone 3 years from now, or do I want to go back to Microsoft and let them forcibly take away all control of my machine to the point where I may not even have a working computer from one day to the next cause they f__ked up yet another update.
I would move to Linux, but the linux software ecosystem is just not fit for desktop use and it looks like it never will be. LibreOffice, despite it's recent improvements, still has some shocking gaps. Linux doesn't have one single email client that has the polish of even an average-level Windows or Mac client. (Even Evolution, which is supposedly the best there is, is basically a clusterf__k unless you connect it to exchange.)
I wish I could mod on the same article I post to. This so deserves a +1.
Apparently Microsoft uses the word "Trust" in the same way Apple uses the word "Courage". I still haven't figured out what either one means... only that neither correspond to what's in the dictionary.
O_o What do you think a DVD drive is?
Oh, don't be so hyperbolic. Of course a laptop doesn't need all those ports. But it isn't even slightly unreasonable that a laptop would be equipped with standard ports that will outlive the life of the laptop itself. And your point isn't even well made, because we arn't even talking about edge cases. Apple is forcing you to buy dongles for ALL cases. Doesn't matter what you do, or if 99.9999% of the world needs to do a particular thing... you HAVE to buy a dongle. I mean, FFS, You can't even connect a brand new iPhone 7 to the latest MBP, without a dongle.
HDMI is the new VGA. You go into *any* meeting room, and they will almost guaranteed have an HDMI connection available to the projector/tv/whatever.
SD cards are still very heavily used by professional photographers, as others have stated, and they won't be going away anytime soon.
Ethernet? I will be surprised if Ethernet disappears any less than 3 decades from now.
USB? There are literally ZERO external mice or keyboards that use USB-C. There are metric fucktons of perfectly good USB3 devices that are still being actively used. They are still being actively developed and manufactured.
And with the exception of ethernet, *all* of these ports could be included while still obsessing over unnecessary thinness.
The most frustrating part of all this is that there is absolutely NO reason why this had to become and either/or scenario. I love the TB3 ports just fine, but Apple could have included the TB3 ports and still included those other ports, and this whole debate would never have happened. But they didn't, and people like me that rely on our laptops to be mobile workhorses are feeling justifiably betrayed.
The single most important point here, and this is one that seems to be inexplicably glossed over by literally everyone defending Apple's moves, is that this is a PROFESSIONAL level laptop. Professional users have much more demanding needs and requirements than the average sitting-in-starbucks-reading-facebook person. I had no issue with the fact that The Macbook Air and Macbook were designed the way they were. They are perfect for that market segment. But don't pull this horseshit on a laptop labeled "Pro", and then expect people to be happy.
Didn't you know? Macbook Pros demand *sacrifices*. Your battery life is backed by the precious life-blood of your slain foes.
Windows 10 is webscale. It sends all your data to dev null.