12 ms·

I'm confused. From his success list: I basically went back 5 or 10 years and replaced every "modern" technology solution. I pay now way more than I did with i

I'm confused. From his success list: I basically went back 5 or 10 years and replaced every "modern" technology solution. I pay now way more than I did with iCloud, but I am back in control. I am more productive. - Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality - I can take real photos wiht high quality instead of relying on ever newer iPhone models for thousands of dollars which will always have lesser quality than a mirrorless camera for the same price - I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists - Coding via neovim on a terminal and just being on my keyboard navigating not only tmux and co, but also my OS is way more productive and faster Which of these can I not do on a Mac?

rsync 5y ago
"Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ..." This item is the reason I am leaving the iphone and trying an unlocked/stock android device. My music collection is a directory tree that I have curated and organized since 1996. The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app. Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane. It is a workflow built for people that impulse buy a track here and there ...
- Terretta 5y ago
  > The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app. Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. On the contrary, any number of apps support precisely this. - https://readdle.com/documents https://readdle.com/documents (not just music) - https://www.everappz.com/evermusic https://www.everappz.com/evermusic - https://brushedtype.co/doppler/ https://brushedtype.co/doppler/ - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sony-music-center/id724406878 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sony-music-center/id724406878 (if you use Sony headphones) - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mrmc-touch/id1062986407 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mrmc-touch/id1062986407 There's no point in listing all of them. Having ripped some 20,000 CD tracks a couple decades ago, I use several such apps. As a user of such apps, I'd argue with "correct" though, given Apple Match with iCloud One combo and last year's update supporting high resolution / lossless. Over time, I have come to use those apps less than Apple Match, which mirrors my rips using tracks from Apple's library where they have them, or uploads mine where they don't, giving me more seamless access across all devices, spoken access from Siri on HomePods, etc. Match was a debacle at launch, is now almost never wrong on even the most obscure tracks.
  - brewdad 5y ago
    I've had good luck with flacbox https://www.everappz.com/flacbox https://www.everappz.com/flacbox It supports FLAC obviously but also Opus. For my phone, I've ripped my FLAC files to Opus and can carry my entire music collection wherever I go. I used their import tool to build the same folder structure that I have on my NAS. I have iTunes installed on my Windows machine (no Macs at home) but I try to avoid it if at all possible.
    - sneak 5y ago
      This app uploads your identifiers and activity to the developer without consent. There's a growing trend these days of making every single player app into spyware, and it's sad. I won't use reader apps or player apps that read or play local files that are going to transmit my activity off device for no reason that benefits me.
  - jrm4 5y ago
    From this Linux (formerly Windows from a looong time ago) guy this looks dreadfully silly and annoying. Files and folders, y'all.
    - Terretta 5y ago
      All those players work from files and folders. That was the point.
      - jrm4 5y ago
        Sure, I'd say I was also commenting on the idea that "Files and Folders" as anything other than an extremely obvious default (and even perhaps requires help on a forum) is again, terrible and silly.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  > Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane. This is not completely true. You can store your iTunes collection wherever you like, organized however you like. You don't have to duplicate anything, although it's true that the default is for it to "import" it. You can also create an "all my music" playlist which you can sync with the iDevice. I used to have this setup with my music collection on Google Drive (because it didn't fit on my MBP's internal drive) and synced some of it to my iPhone. It worked well enough. The issue was more that all the music couldn't fit on the phone, so I had to pick and choose anyway. The real gotcha is that iTunes didn't support flac, so I had to convert everything to m4a.
  - rsync 5y ago
    "You can also create an "all my music" playlist which you can sync with the iDevice." Yes, but then how do you deal with that enormous "all my music" playlist once it is in the iDevice ? You can't browse by directory. You can't organize or display based on filename. So I guess I could parse all of the collection and transpose the artist/title/album out of the filename into mp3 metadata and then I would have a ... 30,000 track playlist ? Again, all of this makes perfect sense if you're impulse buying a track here and a track there and if there is some way to move that "collection" to a new device every 2-3 years. It's just not for me.
    - vladvasiliu 5y ago
      Well, I don't know how you organize your music "by directory", so maybe you can't reproduce what you do. In my case, I organize it by artist / album / track number - track title; or by compilations. I then search for the album or the artist. I never have just random single tracks, so a directory is an album, which I have in Apple Music. But I guess that you can't have any kind of organization you want, which is something that folders could give you. > So I guess I could parse all of the collection and transpose the artist/title/album out of the filename into mp3 metadata and then I would have a ... 30,000 track playlist ? Well, in the case of a meticulously managed collection, I'd expect the files to have correct metadata. Again, if this isn't the case, and you rely on file name / location, yeah, you're gonna have a bad time. Just for the record, I've never bought any track off iTunes. All my music is ripped from CDs.
- pixelgeek 5y ago
  > Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. It is so bad that it makes me wonder who at Apple thought any of it was a good idea. Its not even 'bad from a certain perspective' bad but totally FUBAR. I simply stopped trying to use my phone for playing music and it is the #1 reason why my partner wants to move away from iOS
- nicce 5y ago
  > Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. No, it is not impossible. It is very easy at least as Linux user. There is a project for that, called as iFuse https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse It basically allows you to mount the Media chroot filesystem and the app specific sandboxed filesystems without a jailbreak.
- zimpenfish 5y ago
  > Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. I believe VOX Music Player allows you to upload your music without using iTunes - although it is using their cloud sync instead. Flacbox also seems to let you download and play local files from Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, SMB servers, DLNA servers, ... It doesn't seem "totally impossible"?
- EricE 5y ago
  Using a file system as a metadata storage system is pretty dumb - especially when music files have ID3 tags built into their formats. There are tools that will help you fill out the metadata in the tags based on your file system layout. Once you do that you can use the tags to slice/dice. Smart Playlists are very powerful. Or you can use one of the many other apps others linked to if you really want to stick to the whole filesystem thing. I quickly got away from trying to organize stuff in the file system when I got my Personal Jukebox 100 (PJB100) - literally the first hard drive based MP3 player out there in the mid 90's. It heavily relied on MP3 tags so I developed tag discipline early on - and never looked back. Tags are WAY more flexible than folder structures. I couldn't care less how files are stored in the file system. This conversation always amuses me - we don't complain the computer tracks all the parts of our files in a directory while we have no control over the layout of the files on disk - mainly because that's a level of minutiae better left to automation. For me it's a similar things with my music files. As long as my tag information is accurate (and since it's the first thing I do when I add something to my collection, it is) I can manage my music collection however I want irrespective of where the file is.
- jxdxbx 5y ago
  I think that manually organizing your own files is not really compatible with a large music library (I have around 2 TB of music) and, from my experience, was too much of a barrier for most people anyway. I currently use Swinsian to organize files (and various metadata-fixing tools) and Plex + Plexamp to listen to them. Mac mini server, iPhone. Works great. This is just to say that one person's "correct" is another person's cumbersome and unintuitive.
- handrous 5y ago
  Uh, did something change? As recently as a year ago I just dragged files into iTunes (or Music or whatever they call it now, but this was definitely after the split) then selected which artists I wanted to sync, and I only had to do that step because I didn't want them all on there. I didn't have to do anything with playlists. But then, my metadata's in pretty good shape, so it barely even matters how my music files are stored. One big flat directory, carefully named folders, not that important. To be fair, I guess I did have to convert the Flac to m4a. Drag to converter program, convert a ton in one go, drag those into iTunes. So that's one more step.
- minimaul 5y ago
  The old iTunes Media Library .xml format isn't too complicated - I wrote a few small tools to generate m3u8 playlists, and another to convert .m3u8 playlists into itunes library xml. Then I just import that straight into the music app. Shouldn't take more than an afternoon of a reasonably proficient developer's time. I agree that it's not great that you should need to do this kind of thing, but it's less effort than switching to android ;)
- egypturnash 5y ago
  My music collection is a giant pile of files (~19k tracks, according to iTunes) that I have been curating for a similar length of time, but I let iTunes do all the grind of organizing them on disc for me. My purchasing and listening is pretty much entirely on an album basis. iTunes uploads it to Apple's cloud, since I'm paying for iTunes Match; my iPhone and iPads pull it down. It is very easy to search for a single album on the iOS players; they also make it very easy to find your most recent acquisitions, with an automatically-populated "Recently Added" playlist. ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music looks almost exactly like the directory structure you're probably meticulously maintaining by hand (lots of Artist Name/Album Name/01 Track Name.m4a), but adding new stuff to it is a simple matter of dropping a directory full of properly-tagged files onto iTunes. Then I delete the original files after iTunes has copied it into its directory. It breaks down if 90% of your collection is a bunch of badly-tagged files you downloaded off of KazAa, but if your collection is a mix of stuff you ripped from CDs back in the nineties and made sure were tagged properly, and stuff you've bought that the musician/store tagged properly, it works pretty much seamlessly. Except for this one weird glitch where sometimes iTunes on my Mac decides that I have both the copy of a track I bought off of the Apple store, and one in the cloud, and thus plays every song off an album twice. I've kinda quit buying stuff from Apple because of this; I'll go to Bandcamp first. What is the attraction of meticulously maintaining a directory structure that a computer can very, very easily maintain based on the metadata stored in the files? Why are you so married to explicitly browsing a duplicate of this filesystem on other player devices?
  - f1refly 5y ago
    When you drop all of your stuff into itunes, won't it automatically reencode everything to either aac, possibly leading to perceivable audio errors or to alc, bloating the file sizes to a ridiculous degree?
    - egypturnash 5y ago
      Nope. I've got WAVs and MP3s sitting around my library that I know I have dropped in there as recently as a few months ago.
recvonline 5y ago
I think it's a "philosophical standpoint" >I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me. And I wanted to change that.
- Terretta 5y ago
  Many of us probably know senior folks at Apple. While this is purely anecdotal, I've observed a higher proportion of "mission oriented" product and even I.T. leads at Apple than at the other brands he adopted in this divorce. (He's not using Framework laptop yet.)
- shapefrog 5y ago
  Shout out to the unambitous product manager / owner who doesnt want a raise at Fujifilm for making such nice cameras. There is no chance that they tweaked the XT-2 or XT-3 to compete with the also excelent Sony products in order to impress the guys back at HQ. Obviously they are "technology people who share the same passion as me" and are browsing throught HN.
  - arc-in-space 5y ago
    I'm struggling to see your point. Fujifilm does not have the same incentives as Apple.
    - shapefrog 5y ago
      The author agrees with you that they do not have the same incentives and have products not directed by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise and are apparently technology people who share the same passion as them. I just see two companies, that want to sell stuff for more than it costs them to produce, but what would I know.
  - neoromantique 5y ago
    >Obviously they are "technology people who share the same passion as me" and are browsing throught HN. Except they actually are? If you read their dev blogs, it's insane how much love actually goes into building the colour magic that goes into the cameras. Trully decades upon decades of love labour. Instead at Apple camp they deliberately hinder UX for end-users if it means Apple gets to make some more profit this way.
defaultname 5y ago
The post can be distilled down to "I had a Mac and thought it made me special, but now I don't feel special so I use something else and think that makes me special". Which...I guess? Millions (billions) of people use all sorts of stuff. Good for them. The "I'm leaving [some platform]" posts are always extremely low value pablum for a subset.
- foobarian 5y ago
  It reminds me of the early MUDs and some MMO guild bulletin boards where you'd periodically get these super melodramatic "I quit and this is why" posts, which would more often than not be followed by the person returning to the game not long after.
  - BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    The longer and more impassioned the goodbye6ever post, the sooner you know the author will return.
    - ziml77 5y ago
      If it's really long, it means they love the game but burned themselves out and don't want to admit it.
      - shapefrog 5y ago
        A long enought post and they will be back before they get to the end of their goodbye.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    This still happens frequently. Even before the lawsuit against Blizzard, their WoW forums would basically have daily posts from people who felt the need to cry about things they didn't like about the game and tell everyone they're quitting.
- hef19898 5y ago
mholm 5y ago
The measurement of success in this case doesn't seem to be that he's gained new abilities, but rather the poster figured out how to gain them without Apple. Most of these seem like pyrric victories to me, as the Apple versions rose to success with all of these as competition by providing a better experience. I certainly wouldn't want to carry a mirrorless camera everywhere, nor deal with Bandcamp.
- hef19898 5y ago
  Depends on the mirrorless camera, doesn't it? The smaller ones are hardly bigger than larger smartphone, and they do offer way better picture quality.
  - jclardy 5y ago
    Not really (on size), what mirrorless can you fit into your pocket? The smallest ones still are 3-4" thick because of the lens.
    - hef19898 5y ago
      Your trousers? No. Your coat? Definitely. Unless you go for full-format ones with bigger lenses. In which case your priorities most likely aren't carrying your camera gear in your pocket.
      - yunohn 5y ago
        I’m not wearing a coat all year long, and almost never on vacation. The latter situation is the most important one where I need a less bulky solution.
    - The_Colonel 5y ago
      Fuji X-E4 + 27mm f/2.8 at 2" thick is quite pocketable.
    - petepete 5y ago
      http://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/products/gr-3/ http://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/products/gr-3/
onion2k 5y ago
Which of these can I not do on a Mac? You can do all of them when you use a Mac, but Apple will do a lot to try to persuade you not to. That means you'll spend a lot of mental energy fighting with Apple's very effective p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ marketing department, and often you won't win. That's fine. You don't really lose anything, but every so often you'll think to yourself "I listen to the same bands all the time" or "I wish this phone had a bigger camera sensor." and you'll regret putting so much of your life, and money, in Apple's pockets.
- halo37253 5y ago
  Honestly this is by far the biggest problem I currently have with newer versions of MacOSX. I would have hopped by now that integration with dropbox, Sharepoint/Onedrive, Google Drive would have gotten better. But they are mostly barebones. Granted Google Drive is barebones on nearly every platform. I'm a big 365 user, and that is by far the best experience so far in terms of fluid use between devices and apps. Especially on windows, where even sharing a file doesn't require a Web browser popup. But oh man the admin side of 365 is overly complex, and easy to see why people use gsuite. iCloud Sucks and has always sucked. Unless that is you are 100% apple ecosystem. Integration into my onsite server is easy with 365, google, and dropbox. Icloud is super clunky and really thinking about moving the Wife to something other than iCloud.
  - robertoandred 5y ago
    What sorts of integration are Dropbox, Onedrive, etc unable to do?
halo37253 5y ago
Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux. Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise. Hell the window's drivers are bad enough, Apple doesn't really want users doing anything other than OSX. I will say they have no problem booting up a VM, and everything he is doing can be done in a VM with hardware accelerated graphics. So Full screened feels just like the real thing, as long as you are not playing modern games. Boot into windows for that. That being said there are Windows Laptops that will give a Macbook Pro a run for the money, but when it comes to the $1k price range the Macbook Air is hard to beat. I like the ARM chips for basic users, but for a Power user the ARM chips are a step backwards. Unless you want to run ARM based Linux. With my many years of raspberry pi use, ARM has gone a long way on the Linux front. But not sure if i'd want to rock that as my main. At the same time you can do all these things on Windows as well.... Really more of a personal preference. I have limited experience with Linux for Windows Subsystem 2, but it worked damn well when I used it.
- shapefrog 5y ago
  > Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux. Dual booting on any hardware is nuts if you ask me, pick an OS and use VMs. If you really have to have a native OS but hate it so much you wont use it the rest of the time stick it on a different machine.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- hirvi74 5y ago
  I hope things have gotten better with Linux and drivers. I'll admit I've been out of the game for about 5 years now. > Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise. When I was using Linux as my main OS, I was having this problem with all laptops. Desktops usually had many less issues, but were occasionally less than perfect. For example, Lenovo, at the time, was hailed to be great for Linux compatibility. Well, for some reason, regardless of the distro I was using, I was more or less given an ultimatum -- I could have a screen with adjustable brightness or a consistent network card driver, but not both. Editing whatever file I found on various forms to "fix" the backlight issue (was permanently stuck at 100% brightness) would inevitably cause some sort issue with where my Internet connection speed would drop from around 1gbps to mbps eventually to kbps the longer laptop was awake. It was an issue I never found a solution to, and the oddest part was that this was never an issue if I booted the OS of a live USB. Only when the OS was installed would the issue arise. Various laptops I owned / used for work had their own issues with Linux too. I eventually just settled on using Linux in virtual machines / servers and never looked back. So, I definitely agree with your point about VMs. I'd consider going back, but I really cannot/do not want want to sacrifice too much time getting distracted with making the OS bend to my will when I could use that time to be actually getting things done.
nobleach 5y ago
On a mac, with say, 4 workspaces. What key combo can I hit to go to workspace 2? Yes you can hit CTRL + left arrow or right arrow multiple times but... once one gets into a workflow that allows them to hit Super+2, it actually feels like a pain to do something else.
- rootusrootus 5y ago
  Control-2 if you enable it. Or 1, 3, or 4.
webmobdev 5y ago
> I'm confused ... Which of these can I not do on a Mac? You apparently didn't read the article properly. The author's major grouse is how he recognized slowly that Apple is very controlling about the user experience on its devices and how this is a huge limitation to do anything else "outside" of Apple's "thinking" of how a software or hardware should be used. And how Apple's product manager's have lost sight of what really adds value to the user experience, and their software and hardware choices of new Apple devices are now more dictated by their own greed / ambitions. From the very examples you cited, the author's emphasis thus was on: > ... but I am back in control. I am more productive. > Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ... > I can take real photos wiht high quality ... > I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists > ... but also my OS is way more productive and faster So it's not just about what you can or cannot do on a Mac, but how the author has found a better way to do all this outside of Apple's limiting ecosystem, keeping in line with his new beliefs that Apple no longer cares about users like him. And I fully agree with him and share the exact feeling (I feel Apple says a "F*k you" to me everytime I want to maximise a Finder or Safari window because the "Apple way" is that you are only supposed to make them fullscreen or vertically maximise ...)
NoPicklez 5y ago
The third dot point here makes absolutely no sense to me. Apple music and Bandcamp are essentially the same thing, I personally use Spotify and I don't have to listen to "mind numbing" music. You can choose to let the applications play music for you, or you can choose your own music. Spotify 10 years ago was exactly how I discovered old/new bands and artists that were not mainstream. I don't see this persons logic in that regard at all.
- hammyhavoc 5y ago
  The author is stating that not all music sees distribution on Spotify et al, instead it is distributed via Bandcamp or other sources. A lot of older material isn't available through Spotify et al due to licensing issues, or labels that have gone bust.
  - NoPicklez 5y ago
    It's their tone, there is a difference between "a lot of older material isn't available on Spotify" vs saying that Spotify has mind numbing music. Spotify to my knowledge and experience has an enormous amount of older music. Enough to make it the main source of music for my parents. I think this guy needs to realise that they don't need to listen to the curated playlists...
diffeomorphism 5y ago
Sure, you could get a mac and then opt out of/remove all things apple, but then why get a mac in the first place? I don't think that is confusing at all, just a matter of degree between leaving all services of apple or additionally leaving their OS as well.
8fingerlouie 5y ago
> Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality "Hey Siri, shuffle <playlist name>" - no clicks involved. As for wired/wireless headphones. I wasn't aware that running Arch was a requirement for using Wired headphones, but then again, i moved to wireless headphones a decade or so ago, and have changed my habits to allow me to charge them while i sleep, as well as checking the product specifications for any headphones i buy to see if they actually match my expected usage pattern. But then again, i'm weird.

rsync 5y ago

"Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ..." This item is the reason I am leaving the iphone and trying an unlocked/stock android device. My music collection is a directory tree that I have curated and organized since 1996. The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app. Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane. It is a workflow built for people that impulse buy a track here and there ...

Terretta 5y ago
> The correct way to deal with this is to move this directory tree onto my phone (either via network transfer or attaching a USB filesystem) and then browse those files with a music player app. Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. On the contrary, any number of apps support precisely this. - https://readdle.com/documents https://readdle.com/documents (not just music) - https://www.everappz.com/evermusic https://www.everappz.com/evermusic - https://brushedtype.co/doppler/ https://brushedtype.co/doppler/ - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sony-music-center/id724406878 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sony-music-center/id724406878 (if you use Sony headphones) - http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-ios.html - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mrmc-touch/id1062986407 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mrmc-touch/id1062986407 There's no point in listing all of them. Having ripped some 20,000 CD tracks a couple decades ago, I use several such apps. As a user of such apps, I'd argue with "correct" though, given Apple Match with iCloud One combo and last year's update supporting high resolution / lossless. Over time, I have come to use those apps less than Apple Match, which mirrors my rips using tracks from Apple's library where they have them, or uploads mine where they don't, giving me more seamless access across all devices, spoken access from Siri on HomePods, etc. Match was a debacle at launch, is now almost never wrong on even the most obscure tracks.
- brewdad 5y ago
  I've had good luck with flacbox https://www.everappz.com/flacbox https://www.everappz.com/flacbox It supports FLAC obviously but also Opus. For my phone, I've ripped my FLAC files to Opus and can carry my entire music collection wherever I go. I used their import tool to build the same folder structure that I have on my NAS. I have iTunes installed on my Windows machine (no Macs at home) but I try to avoid it if at all possible.
  - sneak 5y ago
    This app uploads your identifiers and activity to the developer without consent. There's a growing trend these days of making every single player app into spyware, and it's sad. I won't use reader apps or player apps that read or play local files that are going to transmit my activity off device for no reason that benefits me.
- jrm4 5y ago
  From this Linux (formerly Windows from a looong time ago) guy this looks dreadfully silly and annoying. Files and folders, y'all.
  - Terretta 5y ago
    All those players work from files and folders. That was the point.
    - jrm4 5y ago
      Sure, I'd say I was also commenting on the idea that "Files and Folders" as anything other than an extremely obvious default (and even perhaps requires help on a forum) is again, terrible and silly.
vladvasiliu 5y ago
> Instead, you have to manually build playlists inside of itunes while "importing" your music (and storing two copies of it) and then transfer those playlists (one by one) to the idevice and ... it's just insane. This is not completely true. You can store your iTunes collection wherever you like, organized however you like. You don't have to duplicate anything, although it's true that the default is for it to "import" it. You can also create an "all my music" playlist which you can sync with the iDevice. I used to have this setup with my music collection on Google Drive (because it didn't fit on my MBP's internal drive) and synced some of it to my iPhone. It worked well enough. The issue was more that all the music couldn't fit on the phone, so I had to pick and choose anyway. The real gotcha is that iTunes didn't support flac, so I had to convert everything to m4a.
- rsync 5y ago
  "You can also create an "all my music" playlist which you can sync with the iDevice." Yes, but then how do you deal with that enormous "all my music" playlist once it is in the iDevice ? You can't browse by directory. You can't organize or display based on filename. So I guess I could parse all of the collection and transpose the artist/title/album out of the filename into mp3 metadata and then I would have a ... 30,000 track playlist ? Again, all of this makes perfect sense if you're impulse buying a track here and a track there and if there is some way to move that "collection" to a new device every 2-3 years. It's just not for me.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    Well, I don't know how you organize your music "by directory", so maybe you can't reproduce what you do. In my case, I organize it by artist / album / track number - track title; or by compilations. I then search for the album or the artist. I never have just random single tracks, so a directory is an album, which I have in Apple Music. But I guess that you can't have any kind of organization you want, which is something that folders could give you. > So I guess I could parse all of the collection and transpose the artist/title/album out of the filename into mp3 metadata and then I would have a ... 30,000 track playlist ? Well, in the case of a meticulously managed collection, I'd expect the files to have correct metadata. Again, if this isn't the case, and you rely on file name / location, yeah, you're gonna have a bad time. Just for the record, I've never bought any track off iTunes. All my music is ripped from CDs.
pixelgeek 5y ago
> Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. It is so bad that it makes me wonder who at Apple thought any of it was a good idea. Its not even 'bad from a certain perspective' bad but totally FUBAR. I simply stopped trying to use my phone for playing music and it is the #1 reason why my partner wants to move away from iOS
nicce 5y ago
> Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. No, it is not impossible. It is very easy at least as Linux user. There is a project for that, called as iFuse https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse https://github.com/libimobiledevice/ifuse It basically allows you to mount the Media chroot filesystem and the app specific sandboxed filesystems without a jailbreak.
zimpenfish 5y ago
> Anyone familiar with iDevices knows that every piece of the simple, standard workflow I just described is totally impossible. I believe VOX Music Player allows you to upload your music without using iTunes - although it is using their cloud sync instead. Flacbox also seems to let you download and play local files from Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, SMB servers, DLNA servers, ... It doesn't seem "totally impossible"?
EricE 5y ago
Using a file system as a metadata storage system is pretty dumb - especially when music files have ID3 tags built into their formats. There are tools that will help you fill out the metadata in the tags based on your file system layout. Once you do that you can use the tags to slice/dice. Smart Playlists are very powerful. Or you can use one of the many other apps others linked to if you really want to stick to the whole filesystem thing. I quickly got away from trying to organize stuff in the file system when I got my Personal Jukebox 100 (PJB100) - literally the first hard drive based MP3 player out there in the mid 90's. It heavily relied on MP3 tags so I developed tag discipline early on - and never looked back. Tags are WAY more flexible than folder structures. I couldn't care less how files are stored in the file system. This conversation always amuses me - we don't complain the computer tracks all the parts of our files in a directory while we have no control over the layout of the files on disk - mainly because that's a level of minutiae better left to automation. For me it's a similar things with my music files. As long as my tag information is accurate (and since it's the first thing I do when I add something to my collection, it is) I can manage my music collection however I want irrespective of where the file is.
jxdxbx 5y ago
I think that manually organizing your own files is not really compatible with a large music library (I have around 2 TB of music) and, from my experience, was too much of a barrier for most people anyway. I currently use Swinsian to organize files (and various metadata-fixing tools) and Plex + Plexamp to listen to them. Mac mini server, iPhone. Works great. This is just to say that one person's "correct" is another person's cumbersome and unintuitive.
handrous 5y ago
Uh, did something change? As recently as a year ago I just dragged files into iTunes (or Music or whatever they call it now, but this was definitely after the split) then selected which artists I wanted to sync, and I only had to do that step because I didn't want them all on there. I didn't have to do anything with playlists. But then, my metadata's in pretty good shape, so it barely even matters how my music files are stored. One big flat directory, carefully named folders, not that important. To be fair, I guess I did have to convert the Flac to m4a. Drag to converter program, convert a ton in one go, drag those into iTunes. So that's one more step.
minimaul 5y ago
The old iTunes Media Library .xml format isn't too complicated - I wrote a few small tools to generate m3u8 playlists, and another to convert .m3u8 playlists into itunes library xml. Then I just import that straight into the music app. Shouldn't take more than an afternoon of a reasonably proficient developer's time. I agree that it's not great that you should need to do this kind of thing, but it's less effort than switching to android ;)
egypturnash 5y ago
My music collection is a giant pile of files (~19k tracks, according to iTunes) that I have been curating for a similar length of time, but I let iTunes do all the grind of organizing them on disc for me. My purchasing and listening is pretty much entirely on an album basis. iTunes uploads it to Apple's cloud, since I'm paying for iTunes Match; my iPhone and iPads pull it down. It is very easy to search for a single album on the iOS players; they also make it very easy to find your most recent acquisitions, with an automatically-populated "Recently Added" playlist. ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media/Music looks almost exactly like the directory structure you're probably meticulously maintaining by hand (lots of Artist Name/Album Name/01 Track Name.m4a), but adding new stuff to it is a simple matter of dropping a directory full of properly-tagged files onto iTunes. Then I delete the original files after iTunes has copied it into its directory. It breaks down if 90% of your collection is a bunch of badly-tagged files you downloaded off of KazAa, but if your collection is a mix of stuff you ripped from CDs back in the nineties and made sure were tagged properly, and stuff you've bought that the musician/store tagged properly, it works pretty much seamlessly. Except for this one weird glitch where sometimes iTunes on my Mac decides that I have both the copy of a track I bought off of the Apple store, and one in the cloud, and thus plays every song off an album twice. I've kinda quit buying stuff from Apple because of this; I'll go to Bandcamp first. What is the attraction of meticulously maintaining a directory structure that a computer can very, very easily maintain based on the metadata stored in the files? Why are you so married to explicitly browsing a duplicate of this filesystem on other player devices?
- f1refly 5y ago
  When you drop all of your stuff into itunes, won't it automatically reencode everything to either aac, possibly leading to perceivable audio errors or to alc, bloating the file sizes to a ridiculous degree?
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Nope. I've got WAVs and MP3s sitting around my library that I know I have dropped in there as recently as a few months ago.

recvonline 5y ago

I think it's a "philosophical standpoint" >I realised that my life while using Apple products is controlled by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise, rather than by technology people who share the same passion as me. And I wanted to change that.

Terretta 5y ago
Many of us probably know senior folks at Apple. While this is purely anecdotal, I've observed a higher proportion of "mission oriented" product and even I.T. leads at Apple than at the other brands he adopted in this divorce. (He's not using Framework laptop yet.)
shapefrog 5y ago
Shout out to the unambitous product manager / owner who doesnt want a raise at Fujifilm for making such nice cameras. There is no chance that they tweaked the XT-2 or XT-3 to compete with the also excelent Sony products in order to impress the guys back at HQ. Obviously they are "technology people who share the same passion as me" and are browsing throught HN.
- arc-in-space 5y ago
  I'm struggling to see your point. Fujifilm does not have the same incentives as Apple.
  - shapefrog 5y ago
    The author agrees with you that they do not have the same incentives and have products not directed by Product Managers/Owners who want to get a raise and are apparently technology people who share the same passion as them. I just see two companies, that want to sell stuff for more than it costs them to produce, but what would I know.
- neoromantique 5y ago
  >Obviously they are "technology people who share the same passion as me" and are browsing throught HN. Except they actually are? If you read their dev blogs, it's insane how much love actually goes into building the colour magic that goes into the cameras. Trully decades upon decades of love labour. Instead at Apple camp they deliberately hinder UX for end-users if it means Apple gets to make some more profit this way.

defaultname 5y ago

The post can be distilled down to "I had a Mac and thought it made me special, but now I don't feel special so I use something else and think that makes me special". Which...I guess? Millions (billions) of people use all sorts of stuff. Good for them. The "I'm leaving [some platform]" posts are always extremely low value pablum for a subset.

foobarian 5y ago
It reminds me of the early MUDs and some MMO guild bulletin boards where you'd periodically get these super melodramatic "I quit and this is why" posts, which would more often than not be followed by the person returning to the game not long after.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  The longer and more impassioned the goodbye6ever post, the sooner you know the author will return.
  - ziml77 5y ago
    If it's really long, it means they love the game but burned themselves out and don't want to admit it.
    - shapefrog 5y ago
      A long enought post and they will be back before they get to the end of their goodbye.
- ziml77 5y ago
  This still happens frequently. Even before the lawsuit against Blizzard, their WoW forums would basically have daily posts from people who felt the need to cry about things they didn't like about the game and tell everyone they're quitting.
hef19898 5y ago

mholm 5y ago

The measurement of success in this case doesn't seem to be that he's gained new abilities, but rather the poster figured out how to gain them without Apple. Most of these seem like pyrric victories to me, as the Apple versions rose to success with all of these as competition by providing a better experience. I certainly wouldn't want to carry a mirrorless camera everywhere, nor deal with Bandcamp.

hef19898 5y ago
Depends on the mirrorless camera, doesn't it? The smaller ones are hardly bigger than larger smartphone, and they do offer way better picture quality.
- jclardy 5y ago
  Not really (on size), what mirrorless can you fit into your pocket? The smallest ones still are 3-4" thick because of the lens.
  - hef19898 5y ago
    Your trousers? No. Your coat? Definitely. Unless you go for full-format ones with bigger lenses. In which case your priorities most likely aren't carrying your camera gear in your pocket.
    - yunohn 5y ago
      I’m not wearing a coat all year long, and almost never on vacation. The latter situation is the most important one where I need a less bulky solution.
  - The_Colonel 5y ago
    Fuji X-E4 + 27mm f/2.8 at 2" thick is quite pocketable.
  - petepete 5y ago
    http://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/products/gr-3/ http://www.ricoh-imaging.co.jp/english/products/gr-3/

onion2k 5y ago

Which of these can I not do on a Mac? You can do all of them when you use a Mac, but Apple will do a lot to try to persuade you not to. That means you'll spend a lot of mental energy fighting with Apple's very effective p̶s̶y̶c̶h̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶ marketing department, and often you won't win. That's fine. You don't really lose anything, but every so often you'll think to yourself "I listen to the same bands all the time" or "I wish this phone had a bigger camera sensor." and you'll regret putting so much of your life, and money, in Apple's pockets.

halo37253 5y ago
Honestly this is by far the biggest problem I currently have with newer versions of MacOSX. I would have hopped by now that integration with dropbox, Sharepoint/Onedrive, Google Drive would have gotten better. But they are mostly barebones. Granted Google Drive is barebones on nearly every platform. I'm a big 365 user, and that is by far the best experience so far in terms of fluid use between devices and apps. Especially on windows, where even sharing a file doesn't require a Web browser popup. But oh man the admin side of 365 is overly complex, and easy to see why people use gsuite. iCloud Sucks and has always sucked. Unless that is you are 100% apple ecosystem. Integration into my onsite server is easy with 365, google, and dropbox. Icloud is super clunky and really thinking about moving the Wife to something other than iCloud.
- robertoandred 5y ago
  What sorts of integration are Dropbox, Onedrive, etc unable to do?

halo37253 5y ago

Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux. Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise. Hell the window's drivers are bad enough, Apple doesn't really want users doing anything other than OSX. I will say they have no problem booting up a VM, and everything he is doing can be done in a VM with hardware accelerated graphics. So Full screened feels just like the real thing, as long as you are not playing modern games. Boot into windows for that. That being said there are Windows Laptops that will give a Macbook Pro a run for the money, but when it comes to the $1k price range the Macbook Air is hard to beat. I like the ARM chips for basic users, but for a Power user the ARM chips are a step backwards. Unless you want to run ARM based Linux. With my many years of raspberry pi use, ARM has gone a long way on the Linux front. But not sure if i'd want to rock that as my main. At the same time you can do all these things on Windows as well.... Really more of a personal preference. I have limited experience with Linux for Windows Subsystem 2, but it worked damn well when I used it.

shapefrog 5y ago
> Bootcamp on a MAC is real hit or miss when it comes to Linux. Dual booting on any hardware is nuts if you ask me, pick an OS and use VMs. If you really have to have a native OS but hate it so much you wont use it the rest of the time stick it on a different machine.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
hirvi74 5y ago
I hope things have gotten better with Linux and drivers. I'll admit I've been out of the game for about 5 years now. > Honestly never seen a modern Macbook Pro run linux natively without major compromise. When I was using Linux as my main OS, I was having this problem with all laptops. Desktops usually had many less issues, but were occasionally less than perfect. For example, Lenovo, at the time, was hailed to be great for Linux compatibility. Well, for some reason, regardless of the distro I was using, I was more or less given an ultimatum -- I could have a screen with adjustable brightness or a consistent network card driver, but not both. Editing whatever file I found on various forms to "fix" the backlight issue (was permanently stuck at 100% brightness) would inevitably cause some sort issue with where my Internet connection speed would drop from around 1gbps to mbps eventually to kbps the longer laptop was awake. It was an issue I never found a solution to, and the oddest part was that this was never an issue if I booted the OS of a live USB. Only when the OS was installed would the issue arise. Various laptops I owned / used for work had their own issues with Linux too. I eventually just settled on using Linux in virtual machines / servers and never looked back. So, I definitely agree with your point about VMs. I'd consider going back, but I really cannot/do not want want to sacrifice too much time getting distracted with making the OS bend to my will when I could use that time to be actually getting things done.

nobleach 5y ago

On a mac, with say, 4 workspaces. What key combo can I hit to go to workspace 2? Yes you can hit CTRL + left arrow or right arrow multiple times but... once one gets into a workflow that allows them to hit Super+2, it actually feels like a pain to do something else.

rootusrootus 5y ago
Control-2 if you enable it. Or 1, 3, or 4.

webmobdev 5y ago

> I'm confused ... Which of these can I not do on a Mac? You apparently didn't read the article properly. The author's major grouse is how he recognized slowly that Apple is very controlling about the user experience on its devices and how this is a huge limitation to do anything else "outside" of Apple's "thinking" of how a software or hardware should be used. And how Apple's product manager's have lost sight of what really adds value to the user experience, and their software and hardware choices of new Apple devices are now more dictated by their own greed / ambitions. From the very examples you cited, the author's emphasis thus was on: > ... but I am back in control. I am more productive. > Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality ... > I can take real photos wiht high quality ... > I have fun again discovering bands and artists on Bandcamp instead of mind numbing listening to Apple Music playlists > ... but also my OS is way more productive and faster So it's not just about what you can or cannot do on a Mac, but how the author has found a better way to do all this outside of Apple's limiting ecosystem, keeping in line with his new beliefs that Apple no longer cares about users like him. And I fully agree with him and share the exact feeling (I feel Apple says a "F*k you" to me everytime I want to maximise a Finder or Safari window because the "Apple way" is that you are only supposed to make them fullscreen or vertically maximise ...)

NoPicklez 5y ago

The third dot point here makes absolutely no sense to me. Apple music and Bandcamp are essentially the same thing, I personally use Spotify and I don't have to listen to "mind numbing" music. You can choose to let the applications play music for you, or you can choose your own music. Spotify 10 years ago was exactly how I discovered old/new bands and artists that were not mainstream. I don't see this persons logic in that regard at all.

hammyhavoc 5y ago
The author is stating that not all music sees distribution on Spotify et al, instead it is distributed via Bandcamp or other sources. A lot of older material isn't available through Spotify et al due to licensing issues, or labels that have gone bust.
- NoPicklez 5y ago
  It's their tone, there is a difference between "a lot of older material isn't available on Spotify" vs saying that Spotify has mind numbing music. Spotify to my knowledge and experience has an enormous amount of older music. Enough to make it the main source of music for my parents. I think this guy needs to realise that they don't need to listen to the curated playlists...

diffeomorphism 5y ago

Sure, you could get a mac and then opt out of/remove all things apple, but then why get a mac in the first place? I don't think that is confusing at all, just a matter of degree between leaving all services of apple or additionally leaving their OS as well.

8fingerlouie 5y ago

> Listening to Music takes 3 clicks and just a few seconds Wired headphones never run out of battery and have superior audio quality "Hey Siri, shuffle <playlist name>" - no clicks involved. As for wired/wireless headphones. I wasn't aware that running Arch was a requirement for using Wired headphones, but then again, i moved to wireless headphones a decade or so ago, and have changed my habits to allow me to charge them while i sleep, as well as checking the product specifications for any headphones i buy to see if they actually match my expected usage pattern. But then again, i'm weird.