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

bepnewt wrote:

I'm using a MacBook Pro 16, the model that was out right before the new neato chip Apple now has. I also have an iPad Pro. I would like to work from our camper sometimes and have 2 monitors. I hear Sidecar will let me use my iPad as a second monitor. Seems like an easy setup here at home on my WiFi, but will it work in the camper?

My Mac will be tethered to my phone and connected via VPN to work. The iPad could be connected to my phone, too, if needed. Anyone have experience with this situation? Should it work?

-BEP

If everything is connected to the phone's hotspot it should work like any other wifi network.

Thanks, folks. I’ll give it a test run at the house.

-BEP

What combination of browsers and ad-blockers are people using on MacOS/iOS?

I recently came back to the Mac after a few years on a Windows laptop, so this is a great time to re-evaluate some of the tools I'm using and try out the latest and greatest. Or the tried and true, for that matter!

Firefox + uBlock Origin on all of my systems (both Windows and Mac). Privacy Badger as well.

misplacedbravado wrote:

What combination of browsers and ad-blockers are people using on MacOS/iOS?

I recently came back to the Mac after a few years on a Windows laptop, so this is a great time to re-evaluate some of the tools I'm using and try out the latest and greatest. Or the tried and true, for that matter!

Safari + 1Blocker on both. Free version works great.

I also sub to AdGuard VPN which blocks ads in apps such as Apple News+ which I shouldn’t have to see ads in.

Chrome plus uBlock.

Safari + AdGuard. I also have Chrome installed (for the occasional site that only works properly with it), but I prefer Safari because of its integration with the Apple ecosystem (e.g. easily transferring open tabs between devices). AdGuard does a better job than any of the other blockers I tried (1Blocker, Ublock, AdBlock+, Ghostery).

I stick with Chrome because of the plugin ecosystem.

I definitely go overboard with browser extensions and add-ons

For personal use, Firefox (with all security/tracking protection set to max, plus enabling Containers on deeply offending services like Fb and Amazon) + uBlock Origin (ad blocking) + Decentraleyes (replaces JS libraries hosted on CDNs with potential tracking with locally-hosted libraries) + ClearURLs (removes unnecessary tracking tokens from URLs, might be redundant with Ff and uBO).

For work I have to use Chrome, but I still use uBlock Origin for adblocking.

Also, I set my DNS to 1.1.1.2 as one more step of tracking and malware protection. I might be a little paranoid/annoyed with trackers, but whatever. If companies want my data they should pay me, or at least respect my preference to opt out.

I use the Brave browser. Built-in adblock, Chrome-based so you get the extensions and rendering. Just has made my life easier across all devices.

Stuck in a boring all-day meeting (again), I absent mindedly browsed the Apple store, and bought a Midnight Macbook Air.

It should get here on August 15th.

Also my roommate has offered to buy my old MacBook Pro for the same price Apple was offering to take it back, so that's some money saved.

The best kind of meetings!

I’d replace my Mac Mini ‘14 but damn thing refuses to break down and I can’t justify it otherwise. It’s been on 24/7 since I bought it…

Mr GT Chris wrote:

The best kind of meetings!

It certainly was an expensive one!

I can't really find a justification for replacing my current MacBook Pro (2015 model), other than:

1. I want a new MacBook Air
2. I can expense it since I'm self employed (and working in IT)

I guess I will use it for game development with the Godot engine, it'll be a good test machine for performance testing and stuff.

Edit: The reviews that came out this morning convinced me to cancel my order for the Midnight color and to go with space grey (because of the fingerprinting), and to go with 512 GB instead of the 256 I originally ordered (because the 256 drive is slower).

First impressions of the new MacBook Air (which arrived two weeks earlier than the Apple online store's estimate):

I love it! It looks really good, the speakers are great, the screen is great, the thing is fast, I like the keyboard, I like the trackpad (much better than the trackpad on my Lenovo or my work laptop, also a Lenovo). Oh, and I've used it a lot last night, left it on sleep through the night, used it some more this morning, and the thing still has 65% battery. My Lenovo's battery would not have lasted through half of that.

I ran into issues when I tried to find how to download the standalone version of 1password I bought years ago, which apparently doesn't really exist anymore (they still have 1password 7 up, but I don't think my license will work with this one), so I am in the process of migrating to Bitwarden on my three computers, my phone, and my iPad. So far so good and not too painful, just tedious.

I'm thinking of replacing my aging 13" Macbook Pro (mid-2014 model) with the new Air myself. So any impressions/observations, good or bad, are certainly welcome from me, since it's a lot of money to be spending right now...

Ravanon wrote:

I'm thinking of replacing my aging 13" Macbook Pro (mid-2014 model) with the new Air myself. So any impressions/observations, good or bad, are certainly welcome from me, since it's a lot of money to be spending right now...

The differences between my 2015 13" Macbook Pro and even the M1 Air is like night and day. In comparison, the Air is the better part of a pound lighter, lacks MagSafe, the SDXC slot, and along with the HDMI port, support for a second external display, but it offers better color coverage, max brightness, and true tone on the built-in screen, quadruples the number of physical CPU cores (all of which I suspect are faster than those of the 5th gen Intel CPUs), more than doubles the battery life, and eliminates the fan. A complete lack of fan noise is a big deal to me, plus it means there's no dust getting in and clogging up cooling solutions over time. The M2 model brings back MagSafe, this time as a replaceable USB-C to MagSafe cable, drops a little more weight, and again ups the brightness of the screen. I like a brighter screen, too.

So far, no issues migrating from 1Password to Bitwarden, and I was able to get rid of DropBox in the process (since I was using DropBox to sync my passwords with my iPhone and iPad). The free tier of Bitwarden is good enough for me, but I might subscribe anyway, since their higher tier is pretty cheap and I want to give them some money (plus, as a self-employed person, I can expense it).

My biggest worry was the printer. I'm using an old Brother HL-2040 from the early 00's, shared from my Raspberry Pi, and I haven't been able to find drivers for it for some time on Brother's website. For some reason it was still working fine on my old 2015 MacBook Pro. Yet, it worked without a hitch: the OS found it immediately, and I was able to print with no issue whatsoever. Impressive!*

Otherwise, I'm still on my first battery charge, with 46% left, after almost 24 hours of medium use.

* Fun fact: I'm in the process of rebuilding my Raspberry Pi server, and I had a much harder time adding the printer to both of my Windows 11 machines than I did to my Mac. It wasn't exactly hard, but still annoying.

I thought I might be in the position of needing a new Mac. My '14 Mac Mini seemed to be on its last legs. It would always fail to return from any kind of power saving mode. On rebooting, I would get variations of the following message in the error log: Mac was awakened from but failed to respond after x seconds <- x being the number of seconds I waited before getting impatient and hitting the power button.

I searched online, seemed not that uncommon but no particular root cause. I wondered if, in my case, it was down to a HDD failure. Anyway, I decided to try a clean install. I was running Big Sur, but made a Monterey USB stick then started the reinstall. Failed twice part way through. Oh crap... probably should have updated my backup (I hadn't bothered because everything important is either cloud or on the NAS but inconvenient in this case). Eventually dug up my old backup HDD, apparently High Sierra was the last time I did a backup to that. Rebooted off it at a glacially slow pace, made a USB Big Sur stick. Then restarted, and fresh install of Big Sur successful! Phew... Not only that, but the power saving bug is gone for now. Big cash expenditure delayed! Hooray!

Thinking about it, ideally I'd like the Mac Mini I buy to be M2/M3, 512 SSD, and 16 gig ram. Preferably as the base configuration because Apple's upgrade tax is brutal. Anyway, hopefully I can hold out for a few more years now.

I had a Macbook Retina from 2012 and the battery replacement I did a couple years ago was already starting to fail. I was torn between the Macbook Air M2 and the Macbook Pro 14 with the beefy M1 processor. I ended up getting the pro 14 ($200 off on sale) which put it at only slightly more than the Macbook Air M2 if you put the RAM at 16GB and a 512 GB drive like the Pro 14 has. Mostly all the same features: no touch bar, 1080P camera, etc. with the added benefit of HDMI and an SD card reader like my old Pro had - I really didn't want to lose those things. The 120hz screen is nice too.

Been very happy with it. Felt like the first laptop that covered my old one's features without losing anything. Except the regular USB input. Miss that rectangle boy.

Certis wrote:

Except the regular USB input. Miss that rectangle boy.

I think I'm with you there, especially since I still use a wired keyboard, although I have a USB-C hub with USB 2, USB 3, two sizes of SD cards, and HDMI out (not sure if it does 4K or not, I can't find my HDMI 2.1 cable).

Edit: No idea why my HDMI 2.1 cable was in the same ziploc bag as my Raspberry Pi 2. Anyway, my hub doesn't do 4K at 60Hz. Oh well. I think I can use my monitor as a USB hub though. More things to test this weekend.

Edit 2: I wasn't sure about touch ID, but so far, I really like it!

I won't miss USB-A when it fades into the sunset. Although I will admit it was a major technical achievement when somebody managed to design a connector that has a right and a wrong way around, but somehow only ever goes in correctly on the third try.

IMAGE(https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/612/425/0d8.jpg)

Kurrelgyre wrote:
Ravanon wrote:

I'm thinking of replacing my aging 13" Macbook Pro (mid-2014 model) with the new Air myself. So any impressions/observations, good or bad, are certainly welcome from me, since it's a lot of money to be spending right now...

The differences between my 2015 13" Macbook Pro and even the M1 Air is like night and day. In comparison, the Air is the better part of a pound lighter, lacks MagSafe, the SDXC slot, and along with the HDMI port, support for a second external display, but it offers better color coverage, max brightness, and true tone on the built-in screen, quadruples the number of physical CPU cores (all of which I suspect are faster than those of the 5th gen Intel CPUs), more than doubles the battery life, and eliminates the fan. A complete lack of fan noise is a big deal to me, plus it means there's no dust getting in and clogging up cooling solutions over time. The M2 model brings back MagSafe, this time as a replaceable USB-C to MagSafe cable, drops a little more weight, and again ups the brightness of the screen. I like a brighter screen, too.

It’s really hard to overstate how large of an upgrade it is. I purchased an M1 MacBook Air last fall to replace my 2015 MacBook Pro and it’s easily the most powerful Mac laptop I’ve ever used. Whisper quiet, doesn’t overheat and handles every development task I throw at it. It’s really amazing. I was testing it for its fitness for our developers and it passed every test with flying colors, thanks in part to the Rosetta translation layer.

For my actual work machine I still use a MacBook Pro, but I’m currently lobbying to get a MacBook Air from my company, so when I travel and need to take my work laptop I no longer have to lug that beast around.

The M1/M2 laptops are are stupidly good at just being fast computers while apparently never using any power, at least at short time scales.

I have forgotten to plug in my 16 inch MBP and had it only run down to something like 25% battery after 8-10 hours of standard idle time/web browsing/other standard usage.

They also do compute-intensive stuff a lot faster than even the fastest of the Apple Intel machines. And they never get hot. It's astounding.

Thanks for the impressions. I'm definitely hearing a lot of good noises regarding the M1/2 Airs. I'll probably buy one...soonish. I'm mainly prevaricating because the expense makes me feel slightly woozy, but I know my current Macbook won't last forever—the battery is significantly diminished, the connectors and wifi can be a little erratic, and the model is no longer supported by the latest versions of MacOS. I'm starting to have my doubts it'll even make it to the next significant refresh of the Air/13" models before something fails, so now would be the time to buy, I guess.

One possiblity is to go for the cheaper M1 model, since my compute requirements really aren't all that high. It's a good £250 difference in the UK, and I don't love MagSafe that much. But I'm sure I'd end up looking across at the M2 in envy...

Any recommendations for spam text blocking software?
I get about 10 a day and the Apple way is quite the tedious for how to block a caller

Now that I have a toddler who likes to watch stuff on the PBSKids app, I've been getting a lot of mileage out of the Guided Access function. Basically it locks the iPad into the one app until someone triple-clicks the button and enters the correct numeric code.

Earlier today I ran into a bug where the unlock screen wasn't displaying the numeric keypad properly, and was instead showing me the upper-right corner of the QWERTY keyboard. Plan A was to let the battery run down. I left the videos playing, hoping that would drain the battery faster. By the way, when Guided Access is engaged the volume buttons don't work.

After a few hours I started to get particularly annoyed, did a little more digging, and found the answer. I was able to open the "Find My" app on my MacBook Pro and put the iPad into "lost" mode. Once I unlocked the iPad from that it was out of Guided Access mode and everything was back to normal.

Confession: I did not expect the new M2 MacBook Air to be able to run Tomb Raider (2013) as well as it does. I'm not even sure if it's running through Rosetta or if Feral Interactive actually recompiled it for Apple Silicon. My guess would be Rosetta.

My previous 2015 MacBook Pro could not even run Tomb Raider Anniversary (which I believe came out in 2007) well! And here's that smaller computer, which is in no way supposed to be a gaming powerhouse, capable of running this more recent game!

Granted, I got the model with 10 GPU cores, not the 8 GPU core version, but still, I'm positively impressed!

Otherwise, after a bit more than 2 weeks with the M2 Air: I love this thing!

Edit: The app file is marked as 'Intel', so this is running through Rosetta. I think this makes it even more impressive.

Yeah, the M1 and M2 unified memory system makes them quite hard to compare to older systems. But they will happily run stuff that used to tank my old Mac.

I just a got a "new" M1 Mini and figured I'd check out the Ventura beta. As a newish Mac user who came to the ecosystem only because of iPad/iPhone, I really like the new System Settings. It's far and away better than the old System Preferences in my opinion.

All the olds who are bellyaching like Marco Arment and Quinn Nelson can go spit.