My mate Gary who puts them on his enormous Plex server. He’s a good lad.

Until last week it was running Sonoma. Then I put Mint on it, which somehow buggered up the macOS partition.

Long story short, it’s not run High Sierra for a couple of years now, not since I discovered OCLP.

Speaking personally, I don’t think they’re dumbed down. They’re pretty straightforward to use, sure, but they do what I need them to.

In terms of the hardware; I have a 2011 MacBook Pro at home that’s still just about as solid as the day I bought it. The battery’s dead, but that’s to be expected for its age. I’m typing this on a 2014 Mac mini that’s running the latest macOS perfectly through OCLP. My main computer is a 15" M2 MacBook Air that is a genuinely impressive machine. If anything, Apple have kinda shot themselves in the foot, making devices that last far longer than their software support allows.

I quite believe this.

Was looking on /r/Apple last week and was shocked by the number of people who are apparently full on free market champions or Apple shareholders or both. That place has always had it’s fair share of them, but they seem to have been ramped up to the max now.

I’ve been a user of Apple devices since I got my first MacBook in 2007. I now have an iPhone, iPad, a selection of Macs of various ages, and a couple of Apple TVs. As much as I’d like to switch to Linux, I don’t really see it happening because I like Apple’s hardware too much.

With all that in mind, I think the EU are doing sterling work. Shame my country voted to leave it…

Landlords are vermin, AI is peddled by vermin, and spambots are vermin.

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.

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?

I dunno, but whenever I’ve seen this brought up on /r/Apple the comments are usually stuffed with Android users, or former Android users talking about how much they love T9 dialling.

I won’t lie, as a man of a certain age I’d love to try texting with T9 again, but it’s not hugely important to me.

Not if you’re an Android user, to whom this feature is apparently vital.

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?

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”

Fair play to you OP, for having the ability to give me a headache from far away.

Who among us has never committed a tiny bit of light treason though…

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.

He thiccccc