My wife wants to paint our bedroom drawers, so got some testers and painted a small section on each drawer. She called me in and asked which I preferred.
I gave my answer.
“No, it’s none of them,” she replied, “None of them are any good”
I’m glad she asked my opinion.
What, like Asus did back in 2007?
Of all the PC manufacturers, Apple are the ones who are most likely to sweep away legacy standards.
Remember when they ditched DVD drives altogether, and the tech world threw a shit fit. When was the last time you saw a new laptop with a disc drive?
They did the same with the 30 pin connector. USB-A as well.
Of course, they can get away with it because they can also dictate which machines get which OS updates, so can entirely block devices that don’t have hardware they no longer want to support.
Thing is, from Apple’s perspective they don’t really need users to plug anything in to a MacBook - particularly where this one is concerned.
MacBook Neo exists as an entry-level device to hook new computer users into their services. You don’t need an external hard drive, because for just £5 a month you can access iCloud Storage. You don’t need to connect a music player, because for just £15 a month you can have Apple Music. You don’t need to sync a Kobo, because you can read Apple Books on your iPad or iPhone. And so on.
They made the same argument with the 2015 MacBook. It only had one USB-C as a nod to the fact that it needed to be charged somehow.
Personally I don’t like that view, but I’m not the target for this laptop.
For a teenager whose primary use case is to complete their school work on this, that’s entirely valid. And for the employee who’s issued a low-cost computer so they can work from home.
If the user needs more/better IO, then they can spend more to get more. But why equip an entry-level computer with four Thunderbolt 5 ports that will never be used? And why go to the trouble and expense of retrofitting an A18 SOC to provide those TB ports?
It’s like you don’t care about stonks and shareholder value.
I have a script that takes a YT URL on my clipboard and uses yt-dlp to download it to my Jellyfin folder so I can watch on my Apple TV on The Big Telly.
Fuck adverts.
My work PC and gaming PC are Kubuntu, my media server is Debian, and my Home Assistant server is macOS, because it’s an M1 mini. So yeah, kinda. I thought about putting the server on Kubuntu, but in the end figured I’d go for as stable as possible.
I’ve been on Graphene for a year and have never had trouble with Android Auto.
I actually have no idea how it all works. It just does.
Asahi is incredible for general use computing on M1/2 machines, and perhaps even in use as a general purpose home server. But it’s still very much a fun exercise in what might be possible rather than a solid option, in my opinion.
I have an 8GB M1 mini in service as my Home Assistant server. 4GB to UTM to run HAOS, the rest for macOS and Ollama running a small LLM for speech to text. I’m genuinely amazed that it hasn’t fallen over. Tried the same thing in Asahi but without macOS’ memory management and access to GPU acceleration, it just wasn’t feasible.
I last tried out the beta version of it on Graphene a couple of months back and it was rough. In fairness though, I was mostly using it to figure out how to use it to install a full fat Linux distro, which is probably a niche use.
My phone’s just updated, so I’ll give it another spin when I get home tonight and report back.
The performance with regards to Home Assistant is spot on.
I have an M1 mini with 8Gb of RAM that I use as my Home Assistant server. I’ve given 4Gb to HAOS running in UTM, and let Ollama use the rest to run a modest LLM for speech to text. It’s flawless.
I’m not suggesting that 8Gb is the gold standard or anything, but for some applications it’s still perfectly usable.
I have an M2 Air with 16Gb, and for what I need it to do, I couldn’t have any less, but the target market for a bargain basement entry level MacBook almost certainly won’t ever notice. It’ll literally just be a portal to access iCloud and whatever browser they use to get on their socials. And if they do find they need more, then Apple will happily sell them a new laptop.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Apple’s approach to RAM pricing has been criminal for years, and as a company they’re really figuring out how to plumb the depths of scumminess, but on this I don’t really see the issue.
With that said, the cost of an extra 8Gb to them is literally pennies, so withholding it is shitty. But it won’t really make that much difference to the average performance of the computer.
The only trouble with the website (my bank’s website at least) is that you have to input a passcode, then a secret password, THEN it’ll send a 2FA SMS for me to put in a third code. Yay for security, but I’d love to be able to login with my thumbprint.
Banking and finance is the one area where Graphene falls over for me in the UK, on a Pixel 9.
In short, my bank’s app - Lloyds - doesn’t work on Graphene. At all. I have Play Services sandboxed, and I’ve tried all the tricks, but nope. No dice. The website works in the browser just fine, but is kind of a pain in the arse to have to manually log in to whenever I want to use it.
And, as with all Graphene phones regardless of bank, Wallet does not allow registration of any payment cards. Neither my credit nor debit cards work. Store reward cards do though, so that’s something.
Workarounds for me are currently:
I’m led to believe that the Curve app can be used for contactless payments, however, I somehow failed the ID check when I tried to register with them, and their customer service is APPALLING. It’s been five months, and I’m still no closer to actually getting hold of anyone who might be able to help. Also, Curve was recently bought by Lloyds, so it seems likely that that option will be closed in the foreseeable future.
Ultimately though, it’s fine, and the benefits outweigh those few drawbacks.
British here, and yeah, pedestrians absolutely have priority over cars at zebra crossings. In my 45 years I can count on one hand the number of times motorists have zipped past without stopping to let me cross.
For what it’s worth, I was planning on reinstalling my home server because I put Mint on it a year ago and I kinda feel like I’ve outgrown it. So it’s now running Debian.
It obviously feels a lot more useful than Mint, but feels basically the same as my Kubuntu machine, largely because they’re both running Plasma.
Yep, works fine for me too, on the south coast of England.
Has anyone checked the author’s wifi connection?
Don’t use Ubuntu. It’s just a suckier version of Debian. It used to be user-friendly Debian, but now Debian is more user-friendly than it.
As a reasonably new Linux user, who’s merrily used Kubuntu for the past year, what makes Ubuntu sucky? Aside from dabbling in Asahi and a little bit of Arch, just to see why everyone loves it (I don’t think my use-case is advanced enough to really tell the difference), my only real experience with Linux has been Mint and Kubuntu, both of which have been fine for me.
This isn’t a bad-faith query, btw, I’m genuinely interested in what the actual differences are between Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora.
Eh, I gather the Linux based ones were actually pretty cool. But 99% of netbooks ended up being underpowered mini laptops running XP, so were doomed to failure.