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.

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.

Because they can make more money from the walled garden of i/Pad/VisionOS. They can’t take their cut of apps installed on a Mac outside of the App Store, and they hate that.

And you could argue that they were only upgradeable because they hadn’t at that point, figured out how to make it not.

They were, they just weren’t massive enough for it to be as obvious or egregious as it is now.

I mean, I remember buying my first Macbook in 2007 and only speccing it with 1gb of RAM because what they were charging to double it to 2gb was eye-watering compared to what I paid online. Same with storage. They only get away with it now because they solder everything on.

But while I never like to be all “Steve would never…” I do wonder whether they’d have walked a more fine line if he was still around. Some of the shit they’re pulling now feels downright hostile, where his approach was to make Apple the more friendly of the computer companies.

I think they’ve hit a point where they’re doing more for shareholder value than for customers.

They’re so scared of iPad chewing into Mac sales that they’ve hobbled iPadOS, leaving it just useful enough to encourage people to buy both. They’re continuing to offer base 8gb RAM, despite it costing them pennies to increase that to 16gb, because they like the money they make from charging for upgrades.

They’re one of the world’s most valuable companies, and they’ve got there by shortchanging customers as much as possible over the past 15 years.

In many ways, I have no problem with what they charge for their devices. What they make is (generally) very high quality and can last for a long, long time. The likes of Amazon and AliExpress have given us a false sense of how expensive things should be.

But I do have a problem with feeling like I’m not getting the most from my purchase.

Like, I have a 6th gen iPad mini. It’s a great little device. But I can’t help thinking how much more useful it could be if Apple had allowed Stage Manager and external display support on it. But why would they when a 256gb version of it puts it on par with a Mac mini. For the majority of what I do, I could be happy with my iPad hooked up to a display, with the ability to side load apps, a la macOS, and the ability to be portable. But Apple don’t want people buying the cheapest they can work with when they can charge twice for both a Mac and and iPad. So they’ve intentionally hobbled the iPad.

And that’s a problem for me.

Here’s hoping they’ve finally sorted out Files.app, and stopped it crashing when you

checks notes

try to use it at all.

My Mini at work has 8gb that I can’t upgrade, and honestly, the only time it’s ever a real issue is when I’m running a Win11 VM that eats up half the RAM.

However, with the cost of RAM now, speccing 8gb on any £1000+ computers is downright criminal.

And, I think, the keyboard. So if you have a current iPad Pro and want the better quality keyboard and trackpad, you have to upgrade your otherwise still more than capable iPad.

It’s fucking diabolical.

The benefit is that Apple are making the chips and want to use the chips in as many products as they can. It doesn’t matter that the software is nowhere near the hardware, the chips are bought and paid for, so they’ll use them.

macOS is really not optimised for touch though.

People say that a lot, but it’s probably not true.

It’d be even better if they let you work from home.

My wife woke up to this this morning, and has had a shitter of a time resetting everything. My account wasn’t affected, so fuck knows what that was about.

I suppose I’m just wondering why people are so angry even about the principle. Ultimately, Riley wants AltStore to be a success and that’s his prerogative. Delta is his app to distribute how he sees fit, and just as soon as alternative app stores are available outside the EU, you can bet that Delta will disappear from the regular App Store. And that’s fine. He doesn’t owe us anything.

In this example, the principle at stake is such a negligible cost (to the individual user) that it just doesn’t seem worth getting irate over it.

Yes, I understand that. But it’s €1.50. What’s that, half a coffee, and ten minutes spent getting AltStore installed. I genuinely can’t work out why people seem so angry about it.

I really don’t wish to come across as a dick, but why are people so up in arms about a €1.50 annual fee for the PAL store? I mean, sure, there’s a principle and the rest of the world are getting Delta for free, but it’s €1.50. A year.

And that charge is only to cover Apple’s bullshit.

Shortcuts comes from the iOS world

I think this might well be the answer to my question. Shortcuts for Mac feels almost like an afterthought, as if they’ve just adapted the iPad version to run on macOS, but they’ve stripped out automations ability presumably because it wasn’t compatible with the OS. As a result, we’ve got two apps that do more or less the same thing, but one is better suited to the complexity of macOS while the other is content carrying out basic tasks.

It’s been a while since I tried, but can’t you also sync your Music album locally still as well? Exactly the same as with an iPod. I know you still can with iPods, because I still use my iPod and sync it that way. But my phones have synced with Apple Music for as long as AM has existed.