As a Mac user who enjoys trying to get games working, I’ve played Talos Principle II recently, and am able to play Fallout 4 (to some degree) when I get a chance.
On the one hand there are graphical glitches and things aren’t perfect. But on the other, I’m playing games that have had literally no optimisation for macOS, on a fanless M2 Air.
If nothing else, it’s a useful example of the direction things could take if devs had the impetus to do so.
Download the Alexa app and have at it.
That’s good, because it’s dog shit.
I don’t know what to tell you, Preview is an image viewer that is the default way to view PDFs on a Mac, and does so in a way that I’ve not seen bettered. It opens them without any formatting errors, allows for text selection and copying, and allows for rotation and cropping, as well as combining multiple documents and splitting them up. You just drag pages out and into the Finder to create a new document, or drag a second document into the thumbnail bar to combine.
The rotation ability is the reason I started using my old Mac mini at work. The crappy Dell PCs we’re normally given only have the free version of Acrobat installed, and I got sick of being sent landscape scanned document PDFs in portrait, so used my own MacBook to rotate them.
I can only speak for Preview, but yeah, of course. It’s really useful.
and you open it directly or through files like PDFs
As a Mac user, for whom PDFs open in Preview - because they’re effectively an image format - I find it wild that, to this day, Windows defaults to opening them in a browser. Windows has an image viewer right there.
I have Win11 in a VM so I can make certain company documents play nice for the Windows users at work, and find it genuinely entertaining how fucky MS have made it. I found the other day that if you link to a document in Excel, but put the link in wrong, it’ll open Edge to warn you about it. Until that point I hadn’t opened Edge at all in that VM. I installed Firefox from an .exe I downloaded in macOS then immediately set it as default.
It’s always nice to shut that VM down and go back to using an OS that doesn’t nag me all the fucking time.
Oh, and to add something that’s just occurred to me…
If you had a problem and couldn’t find a solution while the support was on Reddit, you could easily start a new thread that might bring you the help you needed. Now, with Discord, you have to hope that someone who knows how to help just happens to be browsing the feed at that moment, otherwise your post is getting lost in the ether, because who the fuck is searching for problems in order to offer assistance?
To be fair, they have a similar problem with iPad, but they can flog those at a price point where many people are happy to grab one to see how they can make it fit.
The overarching opinion of iPads is that they’re just big iPhones, and because they can share apps, it took a long time to get to where we are now, where most iPad apps are actually developed for it. But ultimately, they’re still iPhone apps, just rejigged to take advantage of the bigger screen. As someone with an iPad and a MacBook, who’s had a really good go at making an iPad my main computer, the platform just isn’t there. So if I do use it, it’s always in the knowledge that what I’m doing is probably easier on my Mac.
VisionPro feels the same to me. Sure, I could surround myself with work, but pinching and tapping nothing in the air has zero tactility and is far less satisfying than clicking a mouse and typing on a keyboard. And comes with having to wear a headset. So in the end, most people will just do the work on their Mac.
Like many others who no longer use Twitter or Facebook, one of the biggest impacts to me is suddenly not having a reasonably proactive way to contact companies for support. It’s amazing how many companies have offloaded their support staff to half a dozen overworked social media operators. Try phoning and you’ll get “busier than usual” phone lines, and if you can even find an email address it’ll auto-reply to say that it’s no longer monitored.
It’s a shit show.
I use Opencore Legacy Patcher to run unsupported macOS on my older Macs. They used to have an excellent Reddit group that was easily searchable and rammed full of really good advice on how to fix common issues.
A couple of years ago they shuttered the group and moved everything over to Discord, and it’s been hell ever since trying to figure out how to fix something if it goes wrong.
You search for your issue, find someone talking about it, then have to pick through the dozens of replies either side to try and figure out if there’s anything useful. There are dedicated support threads now, but hardly anyone uses them, so they’re not helpful.
I really, really hate Discord as a support medium, and can’t for the life of me work out why the OCLP mods chose it over Reddit.
From up here you can see the alcoves in the Koningin Astridpark. You use this word, alcoves?
And what housing there is was bought up by investment firms during 2020/21 when people were losing their jobs, or having hours cut, and now more people than ever are paying well over the odds to rent a home because they can’t get a mortgage that would likely cost 2/3 what they’re paying in rent.
But no right leaning/conservative government is going to do a fucking thing about that because too many of them are either landlords, or have funds in those investment firms. So their tame papers run stories about an immigrant family being given a seven bedroom house in a fancy part of town.
2008, the global financial crash, the subsequent shift of trillions of all the currencies towards the already-rich, then Covid hammering the final nail in the coffin of proving that governments care about the people only inasmuch as they provide value.
We’ve had sixteen years of people getting poorer and poorer, shit getting more expensive, and the news outlets they read pointing towards immigrants/gays/leftists as the problem.
The right take those messages and amplify them. They tell people that only they can speak truth to power, when the reality is far more nuanced than that. But people don’t want nuance, they just want to be able to pay their bills. The people aren’t stupid though, they know that the windbags can’t really change anything, but the status quo hasn’t done shit to help them, so fuck it, we’ll vote for the other guy.
“They’re all the same anyway”
What I’d love is a MacBook Pro with a detachable screen that becomes an iPad. There’s no reason they couldn’t do it with the Airs as well.
But I feel like it’s a ridiculously obvious solution that Apple have tried out in testing and decided against for whatever reason.
As a guy in his 40s who’s been to more than his fair share of punk and metal gigs, was a welder until a couple of years ago, and as a youth thought that ear plugs were annoying: sorry, I didn’t hear the question.
It feels to me like the Tories (and their wealthy mates) have now got to the point where they don’t feel they can rinse the taxpayer for much more without everyone seeing them for the craven vampires they are, so they’re happily stepping back for one or two terms.
In that time Labour will struggle like fuck to get the country back to where it was 14 years ago when the Tories walked back into Number 10, the papers will blame Labour for everything being shit, and the door will be open for the Tories to come back in and carry on the pillaging with coffers that are worth the effort.
Isn’t that where Big Head lived in Silicon Valley?
And you could argue that they were only upgradeable because they hadn’t at that point, figured out how to make it not.
I’m not gonna stand up and declare that 8gb is absolutely fine, because in very short order it won’t be. But yeah, currently for an average use case, it is.
My work Mac mini has 8gb. It’s a 2014 so can’t be upgraded, but for the tasks I ask of it it’s ok. Sure, it gets sluggish if I’m using the Win11 VM I sometimes need, but generally I don’t really have any issues doing regular office tasks.
That said, I sometimes gets a bee in my bonnet about it, so open Activity Monitor to see what’s it’s doing, and am shocked by how much RAM some websites consume in open tabs in Safari.
8gb is generally ok on low end gear, but devs are working very hard to ensure that it’s not.