I HATE APPLE

WHAT DID HE EVER DO TO YOU??????????

All too true.

Apple replaced my new iBook's motherboard while I was in Japan. That's hundreds of dollars worth, at no charge to me. Of course, it shouldn't have failed within six months in the first place...

That's why they charge you double upfront!

Because I don't believe in a company making you pay for a warantee that should be offered for free upfront. I was under the impression that a one-year warantee meant that if something goes wrong in the first year, they actually fix the thing, not put you on the phone with several douchebags who are trying to sell you additional warantees.

Shit, when the first warantee doesn't seem to work, why would I want to buy another one?

But it does sound like you have a problem with your serial number, Jay.

tho when i was waiting there, i did see todd oldham.

My tech experience with Apple has been sensational. A friend called me today to tell me that his mini iPod was replaced in less than five business days, and he also got the new generation mini in place of his old one that had died. No charge.

I've dealt with Dell and Gateway and their CSRs are no better than Apple's. HPs can blow me, they've sucked.

the desktop I have at work running XP has been up and alive for 2 years with barely any reboots. It does everything I want it to do, does it quickly, and I can navigate painlessly without ever touching the mouse if I feel like it.

I was raised on Apple and my first job was DTP on a Mac, followed by audio editing on a Mac, more DTP, and so on. OS 7+ had more than its share of problems and stupid quirks but the hardware was rock solid and at least its behavior was predictable.

Since getting my latest-edition powerbook I've put it through little more than I ever tried to do with my old OS

...OS

My old Quadra used to have a TV Tuner in it and be able to do image captures from live cable broadcasts, then I could import them into my cheap, incredibly easy to use paint program and do whatever with them. I believe it cost approximately half of what my laptop did! My laptop lets me chat and surf the internet. And rip CDs.

Well today it decided it wasn't going to wake up again, ever, as I'm being greeted with a totally white screen.

What's funny is that like doing searches on my own to try to figure out wtf this computer is doing right now (I mean not even the sad face x-eye Mac or the question mark Mac! NOTHING AT ALL! WHITE SCREEN! I know how to handle the other things!), everyone who is reporting similar issues to me is like bitching about how they have all this important blah blah blah they were doing with the Mac prior hand. Is it that no one who has this failure who is only using their Mac for chat, porn, and MP3s can be bothered to get in on the discussions, or is it because they don't die if that's all you use it for? Because yeah, it seems like my sleep problem increases tenfold whenever I've been using my iBook more for writing or photo work. If all I've done on the damn thing is use iChat for two weeks, no problems whatsoever with starting it up, back when it, uh, started up.

What does this imply??? Is there like some inherent instability in the majority of the "native" programs that come bundled with OSX or is this just really fucked up coincidence?

Also it seems that this particular issue with the iBook G3 was so bad they threw the whole "your warranty is expired, give us $500" shenanigans out the window, and searching on this same issue with "Powerbook" has not given me the same results--ARE IBOOKS PIECES OF SHIT? wtf?

*with the exception of my ancient PowerMac that I had when I was 14-15-16, which only died because my sister is a dick.

I am pretty close to deciding to become the female Punisher, except murdering computer firms, instead of bad guys.

And then kind of ran away????

That was pretty funny.

well i figured the inexplicably missing clock app would be available via the app store if i was careful what i looked for, and there it was, and is now safely reinstalled.

i couldn't edit the location for one of the copies in the widget view, right panel thing, it just ignored me pressing on it desire being another copy of the one i could change. I'm obviously using it wrong (c) Steve Jobs

desire / despite

Vision Pro reportedly out of production
https://www.macrumors.com/2024/12/31/vision-pro-may-be-out-of-production/

In the music app when I search I hate how it defaults to “Apple Music” instead of my library

they do this sort of thing constantly. sermonize about being user-centric and then self-preferencing or directing to a paid partner even when it’s clearly not what the user wanted.

cf search the app store for, say, “CNN” and you get a paid rival’s listing above them.

My shit ain’t on Apple Music

I can't stop thinking about the new pro headphones making a marketing point out of acting like a low-level hearing aid.

1. Hearing aids are SO EXPENSIVE, like $4000 or 10,000 and don't necessarily last all that long.

2. Insurance doesn't cover or covers them poorly, so people who can't pay are already going without a whole sense (and there's research aiui linking hearing loss to dementia, and it definitely makes a person less able to participate in society and be close to other people)

3. Apple "steps up" and makes a product that performs for 1/10th of the price -- hallelujah! Great, an enormously wealth tech company solving a health problem for profit, what could possibly go wrong....

4. The hearing function only works for a certain range of mild to moderate hearing loss, it's not a medical-grade solution for all situations. Now it splits the hearing-disabled into camps who can benefit from this accessible device and those who can't...the more "profoundly" deaf, I guess? But now there's even less urgency to find a health care option that works for them because a big chunk of the people who need hearing assistance are paying Apple for their solution.

Blah.

I've been boring people at parties for at least 3ish years about realizing one day that my bluetooth ear pods were the same technology (or at least related) as my elderly neighbor's hearing aid, but I got mine for $200 on the internet in like a week and his were $$$ and he had to wait months for an appointment to help him adjust them. Mostly I was struck by the stigma of using an assistive device. My ear buds came in wild colors for the discerning consumer and his were intended to be "invisible" so no one would know he was using them...how much of the cost was a function of making them smaller, less visible, less stigmatizing?

And now here we are, they are the same solution...kind of. Does this remove the stigma of being disabled? Does it just mask it?

I think you're on to it with the removal of stigma, or the normalization of assistive devices, being a boon

I think it's maybe a gateway to admitting you have hearing loss? There are a number of people who might not want to admit their hearing is going, but would do a little at home test and leave their earbuds in if it's normalized. I think half the problem with many assistive things, for seeing, hearing, walking, aren't used because people are in denial. I have the right AirPods Pro to do the test and will when I get a quiet moment and my sinuses aren't acting up and fouling the test a little. The other interesting bit to me is that you can use them as earplugs, but they do more screening than muffling. You still feel it in your body, but the volume's leveled out.

I just keep thinking about this former coworker who was overall a friendly, competent guy but had so many little quirks that irritated the shit out of me. One was that he needed reading glasses, but would always misplace them or not have them on him when he was at your desk so he'd be complaining about it or whatever. I suspect he really just needed to wear glasses but he was so wrapped up in projecting his competence that he didn't realize he'd seem much more so if he just used the tools at his disposal. I could see him making his lack of hearing others their problem in the future.

tl;dr I view them like reading glasses, you can get them many places and they work for people but it's not a universal solution nor does it work if you leave them elsewhere

good post in orbit.

I think apple deserves a lot of credit (or at least a lot more than any other big business I can think of) for making their products more accessible, but the unanticipated consequences of expensive general purpose devices being assistive tech for very common disabilities are going to be wide.

fwiw, I enjoyed using my iPods in noise reducing mode when my dreadful children made me take them to a monster truck rally at Barclays Center.

i dont know if its any more complicated than apple thinking it’ll help them sell more air pods. i imagine it was very easy for them to do, the airpods have like seven microphones built in or something like that. see also the apple watch and the lawsuit with massimo over pulseox… and of course the holy grail, glucose monitoring

technically easy to do but not obviously a good idea from a liability vs financial reward pov. see also AirTags.

well nobody ever listens to the lawyers (i speak from experience)

you should come and work at amazon we can't do anything

my dreadful children made me take them to a monster truck rally at Barclays Center

lololol

caek, you are truly an american now

hell yeah monster trucks

caek, I should try this one failure condition at work again. an automatic upgrade on a a managed service didn’t work correctly and the aws solution appeared to be “spin up more ec2s and see if it resolves”

I figured out what it was choking on, but it added 17 over my lunch hour when I walked away and decided to see if it’d resolve itself

amazing fall through condition

https://i.postimg.cc/W4Zdvk69/IMG-3929.png

got this ig ad literally an hour after reading about caeks monster truck lark

ok well not an hour as evidenced by the timestamp… but still

it's the loudest thing I've ever heard. toddlers crying their eyes out. it was great.

That's the kind of noise you feel in your chest more than hear. Literally in your bones. I went to similar as a kid...once. The exhaust in the indoor stadium made the air so foul we all got sick and had to leave early lol. HVAC systems were not ready in the 80s.

the one I went to as a kid featured the American Gladiators monster truck, and one of the American Gladiators guys was there to sign autographs. it turned out that he was the nephew of a neighbor from up the street and was very friendly when we mentioned that

I don't remember which dude it was, but it's made me wary of watching the recent documentary about the show because it'd be extra depressing if his experience was especially dire

i haven't taken many pictures in the past couple months, so i'm just noticing this now: they took away double tap to zoom in ios 18 photos! now it just fits to screen in whichever dimension it wasn't already, which who cares. if i'm thumbing through a hundred photos and want to check out some little detail, i'd prefer not to have to pinch to zoom. it also defaults to a smaller, white-bordered view with icons. when i look at photos on a phone screen i want them to take as much space as possible and editing and looking at metadata aren't usually important. maybe there's some grand theory to the changes, but mostly they messed with how i like to interact with the app without any benefits!

Current iOS (and iPadOS?) performs AI image analysis of landmarks in your photos, without your consent, unless you switch off something like "Enhanced Location" at the bottom of the Prefs list for Photos.

Yep, iPadOS too, and it's Prefs > Apps > Photos > Enhanced Visual Search at the bottom of the list. Not that they're tucking it away out of sight.

Do you think there’s something nefarious about that?

Apple finally has disabled the AI news summaries that resulted in totally wrong headlines appearing on lockscreens next to the logos of eg NYT and BBC

Siri stopped responding to “Hey Siri” after I declined Apple Intelligence, I had to root around in there to turn it back on.

If I make it to 65 I’m going back to binge drinking, smoking and I’m going to flatly refuse to use any post-smartphone technology.

Did you try saying “hey dumbass”

Do you think there’s something nefarious about that?

Is there any way to opt out of this Primary/Promotions/Updates/Transactions malarkey in Apple Mail??

I appreciate what they’re trying to do but I’d rather have my own categories (or turn it off; I’ve already developed a labyrinthine series of rules and folders for this shit)

hit the three dots in the far upper right corner while viewing your inbox and hit “List View”?

Ahhh duh thank you :)

Could have just used an “All” lozenge tbh

Primary, VIP… it’s all a bit messy

if you swipe from right to left on the lozenges there is an All lozenge

goddammit

I LOVE APPLE

It doesn't mention the swiping bit but here you go, buddy: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-categories-iphfe4a36baf/ios

it does! It’s the Pro Tip at the end

I am still trying to recover an account that I got locked out of about five years ago. They never did send me a link to change my password or reset the account. I had music and films on that account that I'd bought. All gone. Every six months or so I remember it and get annoyed all over again and restart the recovery process again. Still no luck.

Also, today I had a small charge applied to my Apple Wallet for TuneIn radio, which I don't remember ever having to pay for in the past and don't currently have installed on any devices. So now I find out what's going on with that. It's possible that my dad's phone has it installed in my name or something?

Sad about the demise of the last smooth sided and Touch ID phone. Face ID sucks and the huge hard edged phones are uncomfortable

I hate Face ID so much I just turn it off and my phone is just open lol. Just money apps and purchasing require it now. Passcode if it goes 4 hours without use. Works well for me.

Good idea

https://i.postimg.cc/g0NG1LPh/IMG-1554.jpg

No I don’t want to search your shitty streaming service. I want to search my own library by default you fucks

2814, good album

Well, yeah

And if you don't have apple music you get ads for it constantly, a la Apple News.