isn’t a macbook the same thing as an ipad pro + mac mini only a lot* cheaper
lmao don’t recruit your wife into remote desktop shenanigans!!
i hope IT never asks me what “sunshine” is
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Mac is kind of a shitty platform these days for anything other than [non-game] software development or audio production, except when you need to do something an iPad can’t, an iPad is a lot pleasanter to use a lot of the time and in some respects can do more, and their Sidecar thing works really well at this point
sure but an arm air is an even better microsoft office machine than the haswell airs were at the time. they’re like fleet vehicles with bottomless gas tanks
just, you know, don’t close the lid
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i get annoyed trying to use an ipad for anything other than reading and garageband but i did run a line6 guitar modeling box, my 88-key midi controller, and stereo monitors on one dongle out of my phone last weekend. that felt illegal
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forcing ipads to run mac os would fix both the mac and the ipad i keep saying it out loud in crowded rooms and no one will make eye contact
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that wouldn’t do cuz apple just enjoys having a complete tight grasp on everything that goes through an ipad so much that they keep desperately trying to do the same thing with mac os, slowly turning that into a giant ipad and making it increasingly harder to install anything not from the app store with every passing mac os version. if anything i find it more likely that we’ll get ipados replacing mac os than the other way around at this point.
I’m not interested in the intersectionality of Mac and i* OS anymore
instead, what if we just stuck an M4 inside an Apple TV
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this isn’t really true if you use the platform for work:
$ brew list
==> Formulae
aom giflib libevent libvpx openssl@3 svt-av1
aribb24 git libidn2 libx11 opus tcl-tk
autoconf glib libmicrohttpd libxau p11-kit temporal
bash gmp libnghttp2 libxcb pandoc tesseract
bash-completion gnutls libogg libxdmcp pango thefuck
brotli go libpng libxext pcre2 theora
ca-certificates graphite2 librist libxrender pixman unbound
cairo harfbuzz libsamplerate little-cms2 pkg-config vale
certifi highway libsndfile lz4 pyenv wakeonlan
cjson icu4c libsodium lzo python-tk@3.12 webp
coreutils imath libsoxr m4 python@3.12 x264
dav1d jpeg-turbo libssh mbedtls rav1e x265
ffmpeg jpeg-xl libtasn1 mpdecimal readline xorgproto
flac lame libtiff mpg123 rubberband xvid
fontconfig leptonica libunibreak nettle sdl2 xz
freetype libarchive libunistring nvm snappy yt-dlp
frei0r libass libvidstab opencore-amr speex zeromq
fribidi libb2 libvmaf openexr sqlite zimg
gettext libbluray libvorbis openjpeg srt zstd
but for non-work, yes, it’s not any fun any more. it seems increasingly like they only see macOS as a professional platform, which is frankly a weird and ahistorical positioning for a personal computer.
I still think that their insistence on using their own (iOS-first) middleware is actually a bigger obstacle to software I like running on macOS than any of the security or package management stuff they do but I know that gatekeeper is perceived as a much larger obstacle to lifelong PC users
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i personally don’t have any issues with installing stuff myself, but i’m talking more from the point of view of regular customers for whom they make a lot of things needlessly obtuse and arcane to the point that i think a lot of people might just give up on trying to run certain things. that’s what i’ve been observing around me though so it’s possibly very anecdotal
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yes — if you take, for example, https://iina.io/, which is like, the best mpv frontend on any platform, and is Mac-only, a great and pleasant piece of software, I recommended it to a friend of my wife’s who is like a VP of something or other at an actual software company the other day and she was like “oh gatekeeper is complaining I think I’d rather install something from the app store” and I was like, oh you really have just surrendered your judgment after being annoyed enough times haven’t you
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I like that Apple is trying to push Mac gaming for the umpteenth time but won’t do the things that would actually establish Mac OS as a non-meme platform
meanwhile they hid the fact the Game Porting Toolkit 2 in the current (park name) beta has AVX emulation, so presumably the M3 and M4 are embarrassingly tuned
of course, I only partake in legitimate native Apple gaming
this is a lie
the best mpv frontend is notepad++
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it’s a lot of cases like this i’ve found. on the one hand if i’m feeling generous i can say that it is in some ways preferrable to the alternative, i.e. people installing whatever random thing and getting viruses in very dumb ways, but i can’t help but think this is an insane overcorrection in the other direction that in the end mostly only financially benefits apple, while on the other hand not necessarily solving actual security issues that their os has
can’t gush enough about iina too, a tangible improvement compared to almost every other alternative
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that reminds me, i need to see if someone fixed the brew formula for graphviz at some point in the past year (it was dependent on a broken formula for svn used to clone one of its dependencies)
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apparently it only works on M4 and not M3 and given that the M4 is currently an iPad only chip this seems sufficiently apple-brained
I think about the only thing they could do to stop the bleeding would be to work with Valve to actually ship Wine/Whisky/Game Porting Toolkit 2 inside of the Mac Steam client so it tries to seamlessly run wrong-arch stuff. before the Steam Deck and Proton I didn’t think people would put up with that on a consumer platform but anything else is just a drop in the bucket at this point. and the tooling is just about good enough to do it, god knows the hardware is
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the svn formula is still broken for me, but maybe my xcode being a minor version or two behind had something to do with it. opened the app store to update xcode and it does this
i recorded a video of clicking the “update” button repeatedly in the apple app store app and the process immediately starting and failing repeatedly with no feedback other than the button being replaced with a progress indicator which immediately turned back into the “update” label with no other feedback. the screen recording opened in a quicktime preview window. the context menu of the screen recording allowed you to save screenshots of it but not the entire video. there was an export button but it only allowed you to export it to other apple apps, which notably did not include “finder”. i selected the “photos” app hoping to be able to export the video to a place i could locate it in the filesystem from there. the quicktime preview window vanished but the photos app did not open. i used spotlight search to open the photos app manually and the recording was there and i was able to drag and drop it into the discourse editor window, however, it only uploaded a still image of the first frame. so i opened finder and dragged the video onto my desktop. i attempted to upload the video to discourse but it was disallowed due to having a .mov extension. i then used homebrew to install ffmpeg, whose dependencies somehow include something called “libmicrohttpd” and something called “libass” as well as zeromq. at this point, a warbling, distorted version of meat loaf’s “i would do anything for love” run through a narrow band pass filter began playing from nts’s “conor thomas - a v/vm reflux mix” on my other computer across the room. configure finished and make started at about the point the tempo kicked up. the track completed and dissolved into screeching broken tape noises as the build failed with the gnomic message ld: missing LC_LOAD_DYLIB (must link with at least libSystem.dylib) in '/private/tmp/glib--gobject-introspection-20240808-51060-ee2s1l/gobject-introspection-1.80.1/build/tests/offs ets/liboffsets-1.0.1.dylib'. i install handbrake as a fallback and the precompiled binaries download and go into place immediately over a glitchy semi-nitecore mix of “it’s hip to be square”. i copy/paste an invocation i got from stackoverflow and it yields the following video file
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oh no
softwareupdate --list, then find the label for Xcode and softwareupdate --install '<xcode label>'. but really you shouldn’t install Xcode unless you’re doing iOS development, the command-line tools are just fine for Homebrew.
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i am only using macos in order to do ios development
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rip in hell, your sacrifice will not be in vain
i respect gatekeeper after being enlisted to remove “flash player” trojans from pcs as a teenager just… too many times, like, ew, guys, come on
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