Apple Operating Systems (macOS, iOS, watchOS, & tvOS) Catch-All

They look pretty good. I am hoping for some independent benchmarks soon. Also a little disappointed they didn’t include at least one regular USB port since there are still a lot of devices that use them and on the MBP we have the number one accessory we use is a Thunderbolt to USB adapter.

It shows what madness the last 6 years of design have been that at this point they’ve literally gone back to the old scissor keyboard, got rid of the Touchbar, restored the function keys, brought back MagSafe charging and brought back most of the old ports.

How can anyone be against using a standard USB C charger rather than a proprietary one?

Are you talking about lightning cables or MBP charging?

*Legion* wrote:

My 13 Pro Max does not arrive until mid/late October. :(

Mid/late October has arrived, and so has my 13 Pro Max!

I switched from Android to iOS by taking advantage of a holiday deal to get an iPhone 12, which downgraded my phone size from the big Androids I've used for years (does anyone say "phablet" anymore?), but knowing it was just a temporary measure until I could trade that 12 in for the 13 Pro Max.

Now I finally have my "big" iPhone, and 120hz display on it to boot. Yessssss.

The 120hz screen on the 13 Pro Max is wonderful.

Just installed iPadOS 15.1 and holy forking shirtballs I didn't think we were getting normal Safari tabs back on the iPad too!!!

We got our daughters (4 and 6) an iPad 10 for Christmas, and I'm having trouble with the parental controls. Basically I want to limit any content that's above G-ratings, and make sure they can't make any payment.

But I do want them to be able to access the iPad itself, we monitor their use the old-fashioned way: with a kitchen timer Right now I have to enter my own PIN, which our eldest now knows by heart after 5 logins (oh how I envy kids' memories) - which would also allow her to pay for stuff.

Is there any way to do this in iOS itself? Or should I look for a 3rd party app for this?

Don’t have a password / pin to log into the iPad, just have it open with a click of the home button. Then have a password they don’t know for the App Store. That way the only apps they have are the ones you give them and they can’t buy in-app DLC.

Then remove / hide all of the regular default apps. We put them all in a folder. For video apps like Netflix and Disney you can set content ratings on their profiles.

I set the content filters in the iPad settings as well, but don't really know if that only applies to Apple apps or services. When preparing the iPads before wrapping them I removed a lot of apps that got installed when copying my iCloud account. Weirdly enough that messed up my own iPhone settings as well.

I'll check for removing the PIN code, and applying a separate code for the App Store.

For the App Store it is just your apple id (at least in the US), so you just have to set it to not login to the app store automatically. That way if they try to buy something it asks for your apple id login.

You CAN setup a 'secondary' type apple id that belongs to the primary id, like a family account type thing. The downside is if you load app store credit into an account balance, each id has its own balance and it can't be shared. On the plus side it does not auto-download apps bought on the other ids, like you found with your phone. Each id has to pay for its own iCloud backup though, if you use that.

Secondary apple account is IIRC what I did for my kid. He has screen time limits that lock it off for bedtime, and if he wants to purchase anything I get a notification to approve/reject it.

I'm not sure how shared app-store purchases go as we haven't tried to do that.

I can't get it to work. On the kids iPads the faceid and pincode options are not there in the settings. On my iPhone I don't want to disable it.

Isn't Apple supposed to be the guys with the intuitive GUI?

Under settings do you have the “Touch ID & Passcode” page? It is in the same section as General. The phone and iPad settings can be set independently.

No not on the iPad, it might be because of restrictions I put on the kids accounts - which are not full AppleID's as they're under 13. I just wish there was a button you could push with a separate PIN code or password to switch between 'full admin rights' and 'kids zone'.

dejanzie, I'm in the same boat. Like qaraq I created a separate account but it's not great. I don't think there's a better solution at the moment.

Thanks.

I got it to work, after removing any restrictions i could disable the pin code and set the app store to force password entry with each install.

It's not elegant, as I can no longer use my finger print to get into Lastpass for example.

I'm still not clear on how the content restrictions work. Plex cannot stream any movie if I limit content by age, even if only Pixar and other kids stuff is on my server.

Plex added a 30s restriction for streaming to mobile apps without being a Plex Pass account or paying an "unlock" fee for the platform. Is that the kind of error message you get?

Sustainability is hard.

No I have a lifetime Plex account, and it started working the moment I turned off age -based content filters.

It is probably not encoded with ratings properly or not passing them to the client and by default it filters unrated stuff.

Has anyone here attempted to install Kodi on their Apple TVs? I'm currently considering replacing my Raspberry Pi with an Apple TV (so that I can access Apple Arcade, Netflix, and others).

I've looked into it, and apparently there are ways to install open source programs (Kodi and Retroarch are the main ones I have in mind) on the Apple TV, as long as you have a Mac, Xcode, and a developer account to sign the code (which I do have). The processes don't look too bad, but I was wondering if anyone has tried them?

I don't know how much you value your time, but you might be better off having a Chromecast with Google TV that you can just install Kodi and RetroArch* onto from the Play Store, in addition to an AppleTV for literally everything else. Or seeing if VLC on the AppleTV can fill the requirement.

* or sideload the plus package some other way.

Trying to install Kodi on an Apple TV is an absolute nightmare, even for someone that deals with Apple code signing from time to time.

I second the recommendation to just get one of the new Chromecasts and stick it on a different HDMI port. That's what I do. It makes a nice fallback option for anything that isn't working/available on Apple TV.

Good to know, I'll give it some thought... Thanks!

EDIT: Plus apparently any project loaded on the Apple TV with a free account needs to be reuploaded every 7 days. That's... more effort than I want to give it. Luckily I think VLC should fit my needs (I can add SMB shares to the iPad version, I assume it's the same on Apple TV)...

I ended up going with Infuse for video playback. Plus a network drive for media. It has a subscription but it's nice not having to worry about different codecs or converting a bunch of VLC incompatible media. Also, it takes care of all the metadata using online dbs and uses iCloud to remember playback position etc across multiple devices.

How are those better than Plex?

Infuse is more light weight, better interface, more codecs. It can interface to plex servers of course.

Giving this project a bit more thought, I've realized that a Chromecast with Google TV will fulfill most of my needs, and it's less than half the price of the Apple TV.

The only outlier is Apple Arcade.

However, I have an iPad Air and a USB-C-to-HDMI port adapter. I've just tested it with Fantasian and Manifold Garden and, aside from the aspect ratio that creates black bars on the side of the TV screen (which I can live with), this seems to work fine. I had no issue connecting my Xbox One controller to the iPad, so all's well that ends well.

Thanks for the input, everyone, and Kurrelgyre for bringing up the Chromecast!

so i just switched to Mac OS and have had a decent experience so far. I'm trying to use my windows SSD as an external SSD for my mac at the moment though and can only see 675 gb or the 1tb available. very strange. i took some screen shots of what i see:

imgur.com/a/jpz7d5Y image isn't embedding for some reason

I thought Apple's NTFS support was read only. But I haven't been dual booting for several years now; things might have changed on that front.