Apple fucking sucks

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photomaster
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Apple fucking sucks

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I got onto the Apple bandwagon with their Intel based "mini" running OS 10.4 Tiger. It was wonderful. I had my Windows XP apps running under emulation, the latest PowerPC apps, the latest 32bit Apple apps, as well as a Linux shell with a few command line apps. It was a lean powerful machine, tossing off Big Brother Microsoft and their business machines in favor of something more "personal."

Then 10.5 arrived... for free! I upgraded. The UI was a bit more clean but my disk drives were acting weird. Apparently the NEW mini's were flattened to look like the AppleTV and came with Firewire800 ports. 10.5 was tailored for Firewire800 while my Firewire400 ports were left somewhat untested.

Other disappointments followed. My Apple modem quit working and their new hardware lacked an optical drive. Apple decided I didn't need them. The Firewire ports were replaced with USB, thunderbolt, USBC... I can't keep track anymore. I've still got Firewire external drive enclosures, which thankfully take USB as well - but, now my system is a tangled mess of USB cables. I'm afraid to touch it for fear of weeks of repairs.

Migration Assistant sucks balls. The fanboys say, "Don't use it." Why not ask Apple to fix it? Here's the secret to getting Migration Assistant working: On your old machine, take note of the usernames and their UID's. Enter them exactly and in order so the new machine has an exact same configuration. If you fail to do this, all your files will vanish after being copied over. WHY doesn't anyone mention this? You heard it here first.

I got stuck on 10.10. Apple promised to break all my 32bit apps if I upgrade to 10.11. Now the future of Intel apps are uncertain as they embrace the M1 which runs Intel apps under emulation. It's an ARM processor. We've come full circle. They started with the Motorola 68k processor family, briefly embraced the mainstream Intel environment, and now they're moving back to their own platform.

Worse, Apple spies on you when you open an app and records your information in database along with your apps. It does this in real time, bypassing the firewalls. They're breaking all my apps. And, I'm finding fewer and fewer ways to do anything on the Apple platform. I quit using my iPhone 7 after discovering it took lousy photographs and lacked a headphone jack. Apple punished me by removing my ability to send and receive texts on my Android phone using the mac mini.

Now, I've finally ditched the mini which was running very slowly. Apple has been caught slowing down devices to encourage people to upgrade. Was this happening on the mini? There was a lot of network traffic whenever I turned my mini on. And, now it's off for good. I google'd for a replacement. Nobody was reviewing the Lenovo mini, which is a drop-in Windows replacement. Reviews complain that the fan was noisy (what fan? I don't hear a fan) and gave it poor marks for not having a mouse, keyboard, or monitor. (?) I want to say, "duh, it's a desktop." Those bundled peripherals are usually crap anyway. I've got my Deck keyboard and gaming mouse. The latest NEC monitor is pretty decent although their quality is lagging behind in the market.

Now the pile of old mini's (three of them) is sitting a pile of old computer shit. I'm still running a Win7 laptop as a backup workstation while using the Lenovo mini with Win10 as my primary workhorse. So... how do I like Win10? lol. I admit, it's a solid operating system but Microsoft has learned a few new tricks.

First, they strongly encourage you to have an outlook / live account to login. ok, fine. I enjoy their free Visual Studio so I'll give up my email address. BUT, they default to a network login THRU microsoft.com and mapped all my folders to the cloud. This allows me to have a standard desktop wherever I log in, even on a guest machine. The files are encrypted to my personal key so if I leave files behind they're safe from prying eyes. BUT, with the 5gig limit I would quickly be paying a monthly fee. I had to wrestle control back away which took nearly an hour.

Then, it tends to download paid software without warning. I clicked on a .7z file and it asked to install an extension. ok, but failed to mention it was a PAID piece of software while 7zip is free and open source AND already installed. Other competitors to Microsoft, like VLAN are not easy to map as default programs.

Drilling into the guts of the operating system, advanced power saving options have been well hidden - USB port power, network card power, hard drive sleep are all deeply hidden requiring a registry hack to get the options back. Even with that, "wake on LAN" has been supplemented with an option to "wake on magic packet." ah, a new term, "magic packet." It seems safe to disable that as well. Other options, like hibernation is hidden but more easily restored as an option and mapped to the power button.

I have a keyboard and mouse which are both backlit. Sleeping the computer puts it into what I refer to as low power mode, not sleep. It kept waking up to perform functions all night. I'd rather it did that during waking hours. Other bugs are minor, like trying a map a network drive to a NAS with different login credentials apparently freaks out explorer.

BUT, I can SSH by dropping into the command prompt and have a Linux shell to run a few apps. I've got a couple of virtual machines running in the background for legacy apps. Overall, it's a way more useful machine. My only gripe is that "Office" is way too expensive.

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