This is the first time in my career that a Mac is the preferred machine for an organization. I've been using Windows for 30 years. This is a big change for me but I want to learn some useful tips and tricks on Mac os.

This could be "what are some changes you made on the Mac settings to make your Mac experience feel more comfortable?" Or "what tool on Mac can you not live without?"

There aren't any rules really, I want this to be a fun conversation, thanks everyone!

Can be viewed here

Is this just the usual pointless Apple fanfare?

I'm not very techy so I'm just wondering why this is a big deal. It seems to me it's just a different theme of sorts? But in this video MKBHD is making it out to be a really big deal. Is it like technologically super impressive? What's the big deal?

I would like to upgrade my aged 8 years old laptop and I'm completely undecided about which laptop to buy right now.

I considered Apple Intel laptops terrible, bad thermals, overpriced, unreliable, touch bar (uggg), I hated every second working on it, when the company I work for upgraded me with a M1, it was such a huge improvement from any laptop I have ever tried, absolutely no noise, incredibly performant and the longest battery life of any laptop by a lot.

I still don't like the Apple ecosystem, and I would prefer to use Linux as my main OS, but I can't find anything that comes even closer for the price of a Mac Air, If I go with Framework I'll get a less performant machine with a way worse battery, I honestly don't think the premium on repairability is worth for me when I don't have any issues repairing more challenging laptops, at the end repairability will be how easy is to get new parts.

ThinkPads have good reputation and repairability, but for what I see, the quality has gone down the drain in their latest models, and if I go with their premium models I get similar performance to Apple with worse battery, Dell has similar issues.

Gaming laptops are not an option, I don't do any PC gaming and the size and aesthetics are a dealbreaker for me.

The main issue seems to be that until ARM processors become better competitors to Apple, the battery life will be always the bottleneck, and I don't know how good the new Snapdragon X Elite compares right now.

Besides web development, photography edition and video editing (4k), I don't do many demanding tasks, I'm more than fine with the performance of a M1 as the baseline.

As an alternative, I'm thinking about getting a powerful desktop for the demanding tasks and a less powerful laptop with a good battery and screen, but ideally I would prefer a single machine.

Haven't seen anyone mention that project in a few years, but now I'm in the unique position to talk about it. I live somewhere where I can't get any proper internet service - mobile broadband is slow, DSL or fibre lines are not brought out to where I live, and the only other option is cable internet access, which I've 1. had bad experiences with in the past and 2. where I live is operated by a company with laughably bad reviews at exorbitant prices for what they offer. We are talking about 60 USD (eq) a month for 100 megabit service.

So I shopped around to see what other options there are, and Starlink made me an offer. Free equipment, which is usually 400 bucks, delivered to my house, and then an unlimited data plan at whatever speeds I can get where I live for 50 a month, with a one month free trial. I said yes, paid with Apple Pay (seriously, did not have to fill out a single form or sign anything) and the dish arrived the next day.

Now, I know, Starlink is run by Musk, who is somewhere around the top 10 of my nightmare blunt rotation and also pretty likely to be an actual neo-Nazi, but I say whatever. It's not like the alternatives are much better, and at least SpaceX has some actual value for humanity, if you ask me. I might put a "I bought this before Elon went crazy" on my router, though.

I got the dish delivered and set it up on my roof. The app - which is excellent - tells you to orient it north if you're on the northern hemisphere, and to roughly point it up. I built my own mounting solution - a wooden board with mounting holes that snaps in place on my roof - and set everything up, not expecting much.

I was absolutely blown away. The app, once more, is stellar and incredibly easy to use, and a joy to play around with. I got a satellite connection in minutes, and did a speed test. I got 200 down and 50 up in the Starlink app, but independent speed tests as well as my own experience routinely hit 400 down and around 80 up. Genuinely impressive. Ping around 30, by the way. Consistent as well.

The next few days were a similar experience, although I did notice a drop in speeds if there was heavy rain. The speeds dropped however to around 150 over 30, which is still more than usable, and latency was not impacted at all as far as I can tell.

Honestly, it's a super compelling package. Setup was so simple my grandma could have done it, the hardware is beautifully made and very robust, and the designers really did think of a lot here. The cables are just weatherproofed Ethernet and you can bring your own (although they don't recommend it), the router is Wifi 6 and looks damn snazzy, the dish can even heat itself up to melt snow in winter.

If you're looking for reliable internet service, I really can't recommend Starlink enough. If where you're planning on running it is within the service area and you're fine with the 50 dollar a month price point (no speed or data caps, by the way) I'd say go for it.

Now, there are people who will say that it's a good option for remote places, but not that great for densely populated areas in buildings that could get for example cable service, and you shouldn't rely on it. But, well, I haven't been completely honest here:

The real sting in the tale is that I live in one a large European city with plenty of access to other internet methods (just unlucky in terms of my specific building, which is getting fibre next year), and mounted the dish on top of my townhouse in one of the most dense districts in town. It works flawlessly, and it's been the fastest internet service I've ever had, period.

Course, it can't compete with a fibre line, sure, but many people don't have those - and then, service or hardware might still add large costs on top of that. And with Starlink, I can just take it with me whenever I move, and don't need to ever worry about ISPs again.

I don't have many sufficiently nerdy friends to talk about this with, so if you're curious or have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them. If you have Starlink too and feel like I missed something, feel free to contribute to the conversation.

The other day, I happened to stumble on a YouTube video where the creator explored the problem of “discoverability” of video games on platforms like app stores, Steam, and Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo’s shops. That’s something that has been bothering me for a long time about the Apple App Store.

By pure coincidence though, this morning, as I was browsing through the “You Might Also Like” section at the bottom of a game that I am interested in, I began to go down a rabbit hole where I ended up finding a good handful of games I had played on Steam that I wasn’t aware were available on iOS/iPadOS as well. It’s quite sad, because these are games that I really enjoyed, and I paid for them on Steam, a platform that Valve (understandingly) neglects on macOS, whereas I could have played them optimized for iOS/iPadOS.

The creator in the YouTube video didn’t really have a solution for this problem, and it seems to me that as the industry grows, and more and more “slop” begins to flood these platforms, it will only become harder and harder to discover the good indie games buried underneath it all.

I feel this intense urge inside me to start some kind of blog or website to provide short reviews so that at least some people will discover these games. We definitely need more human curation.

I’m also appalled that so many of these games on the Apple App Store have little to no ratings. No one makes an effort to leave behind a few words so that other people can get an idea of whether it’s worth to invest their money in a game.

I guess that there isn’t really anything that can be done about the issue of discoverability. As an indie developer and publisher, you just have to do the that best you can to market your game, and hope to redirect potential customers to your website or socials, where you should clearly list all the platforms that your game is available on (surprisingly, a lot of developers don’t do this). But that’s about all that you can do. The rest is luck.

Ever since I was a kid, I thought planetary rings were cool, and whenever I scribbled a non-specific alien planet I would give it rings. Lately I have been worldbuilding for a story, and naturally I gave the world rings. But since I made that decision, I've paid more attention to rings in other sci-fi I watch.

There's a lot of sci-fi planets out there with their own Saturn-esque rings. Very often it's just there for the vibes. In the opening to Rogue One, for instance, Galen Erso's farm is on a planet with rings, but this doesn't really come up or affect the plot in any way. I forgot this until I recently rewatched the movie. Similarly in the Foundation series on Apple TV+, even though the protagonist is from an ocean planet with rings (that are beautifully rendered), the rings never really come up. The endless ocean ends up driving both plot points in the show and the superstitious culture of the people who live there, but the ring does not. Maybe this is discussed more in the Foundation books but I'm not familiar with those.

Sometimes rings end up being plot relevant, like in Alien Romulus, where instead of being set dressing, the rings are an obstacle that can cause the space station to crash. Still, the rings don't directly impact the planet or the people who live there. The thing that more directly affects the colonists' lives is the atmosphere blocking the sunlight instead.

What really got me thinking was when I saw this Sci-Show video a few months ago about research that Earth possibly had rings about 450 million years ago. The rings lowered the overall global temperature and caused more extreme summers and winters due to light reflecting off of them. This made me realize rings can add quite a lot to the actual worldbuilding, since besides from the obvious cultural impact on any humanoid life, it can cause big environmental changes as well. This is pretty obvious when you consider how The Moon can do many things that affect life on Earth such as the tides.

Of course there's nothing wrong with stories hand waving away these types of questions, but it's interesting when stories like Three Body Problem take these tropes like living in a multi-star system and consider how that would mess with the people living there.

Astronomy nerds and sci-fi fans of Tildes, are there any other interesting ways rings would affect life on a planet?

Was rifling through a drawer looking for a printer cord and came across my old school calculator. This Sharp Elsimate 201 was my pride and joy. I think I got it in junior high so about 1975. And for a 50 yr old calculator it still does exactly what it should.

Then I realized how much old tech I have that I have an emotional attachment to. I still have a Mac Plus and a Mac SE as well as an Imagewriter dot matrix printer and about a hundred 3.5" floppies sitting in a closet. I loved the first time I tried a Mac after the frustration of using DOS on a 286 PC. It just seemed like light years of improvement to actually use a mouse and playing with MacPaint was magical. I sometimes got chided for being a Mac evangelist at university and many people thought Apple would be crushed by Microsoft - looks like they're doing just fine.

My Marantz stereo is about the same vintage, mid 70s, and the Yamaha speakers still sound as good as the first day I fired them up. That stereo was built back when 22 watts per side was actual output and its loud enough to shake the walls. None of this "300 watts" fakery that came along when boom boxes became a thing. Plenty of distortion and zero fidelity is easy, quality sound takes quality engineering.

What have you got laying around that you just dont want to get rid of?

They all released videos at almost the exact same time, so even though I don’t care, I was made to care. Therefore, I’m inflicting that same pain on you. You’re welcome.

Mrwhosetheboss made a good point saying that the target audience for this thing are rich people who want phones that look flashy and can pay for them, but don’t care that they have worse specs than the less flashy ones at a similar price.

MKBHD called it the “S25 Ultra Lite”, which I thought was funny. He also brought up the issue of cooling. He additionally said that no one is asking for thin phones, although it seems that Apple has also bought into the idea that people want this, since it’s rumored that they want to release a thin iPhone this year.

Dave2D said that he tested the heat dissipation capacity of the phone and that it can handle itself well. Apparently it still somehow has a vapor chamber inside of it, as well as a wireless charger. Apparently it also has the smallest battery in the lineup, even though it doesn’t have the silicon carbon tech that is all the rage now. He made a good point though, namely that this could just be Samsung starting the trend so that the technology matures in a few years’ time.

All three of them mentioned that everyone uses cases these days, which immediately kills the whole purpose of buying a thin phone and losing out on better specs.

If you somehow have not gotten enough of tech YouTubers acting confused over Samsung launching a product that no one asked for, there’s also Techaltar and Tech Spurt. I recommend the latter for dirty British humor.

Tildes is a very serious site, where we discuss very serious matters like blackouts, misconceptions and epic games v apple. Tags culled from the highest voted topics from the last seven days, if anyone was hawk-eyed.

But one of my favourite tags happens to be offbeat! Taking its original inspiration from Sir Nils Olav III, this thread is looking for any far-fetched offbeat stories lurking in the newspapers. It may not deserve its own post, but it deserves a wider audience!