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Everyone is quite right there have been systems like this available to the “Pro User” for a long time but what’s different here is it’s being brought to the mai

Everyone is quite right there have been systems like this available to the “Pro User” for a long time but what’s different here is it’s being brought to the main stream. They are taking a niche professional tool and making it available in a “just works” way to literally everyone. A lot of people have a Mac and an iPad, this will be their first experience of this. It’s going to be very popular with people who had no idea it was possible. The other thing to consider is that Apple will be able to integrate at a lower deeper level than third party apps. It’s the drag and drop between devices that is going to be the game changer, that isn’t currently possible with the iPad with a third party app, the APIs don’t exist. So yes, it’s not new but it is new to 99% of people. Just like smart phones, tablets or portable music “jukebox” players weren’t new but apple took them mainstream.

knolan 5y ago
This is exactly what Apple have done again and again and yet people are still surprised when it happens. Touch screens, FaceTime, AirDrop, Handoff, Sidecar. These are generally polished and reliable iterations of existing ideas that don’t require a bunch of other apps and configuration. They are usually marketed and smartly named, unlike Windows where they can’t seem to name anything or features are locked behind different tiers of the OS. Even the PC Master Race brigade who love to shout that they could build a better machine for less than whatever desktop Apple releases miss the point. Macs are appliances. They work reliably and do so for a long time and you know what you’re getting in terms of functionality.
- waffleiron 5y ago
  I’ve never been an real Apple user, however I got a MacBook Pro from my employer. Recently my android broke, and a friend gave me an 2020 iPhone SE as temporary replacement while I look for a replacement. The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard, I’ve always been sending myself messages through Signal or Discord to share my clipboard. Now it’s just automatic. The only thing I would have liked was a better way to discover this, I only did by accident. I’ve used KDE connect in the past, and this feels like the polished version of it. edit: Mac Pro -> MacBook Pro
  - catach 5y ago
    > The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard I wasn't aware this was a thing, and my mind just got blown. Thanks.
    - thenthenthen 5y ago
      Ha I also discovered this by accident, mind blown. Do you know about the long press space bar that turns it in a sorta ‘trackpad’ to move the cursor around in text (ios)?
    - knolan 5y ago
      It’s the kind of thing they’ll talk up and demo at their keynotes and maybe on their webpage when the latest OS drops, so unless you’re actively paying attention to them all of this goes unseen. Sometimes the annoying tips app may pop up and tell you too.
      - catach 5y ago
        Yeah, I'm pretty new to the ecosystem and I frequently have a nagging feeling that I should do a deep dive into documentation and guides just to catch up. Especially when it comes to wrangling Finder.
        vishnugupta 5y ago
        While you are at it take a look at all the trackpad gestures. They are quite useful. I wasn’t aware of two of them for a long time. Four finger close gesture to show all the apps. Two finger swipe from the right edge to open up notifications tray.
        catach 5y ago
        Yeah, the Trackpad section in Settings is absolutely fantastic at teaching these options. Thanks for reminding me about it. My problem has been kinda the opposite: I trigger the notification center by accident too often. So this was enough for me to finally rebind it to a hot corner.
- lloeki 5y ago
  Continuity has been a wonderful feature that I use only from time to time, but when I use it it's been absolutely glorious in removing mental friction for menial tasks. Copying TOTP codes is one thing that just makes 2FA that much less of an annoyance. It's infectious. So much so that I'm constantly annoyed that Music supports neither Continuity nor some form of remote control. It feels like the feature was released and then they suddenly stopped adding more apps to support it.
  - knolan 5y ago
    With a HomePod you can transfer music from a phone to the speaker by holding it near it. It’s not AirPlay it just switches over. A similar feature for MacOS would be nice. You can also use an Apple Watch as a remote for music playing on any device in your home. Apple want your money.
  - dwighttk 5y ago
    Also would be nice if it worked for Siri… I’m always hey Siri-ing my watch for timers and my phone is like “there is no timer set”
  - axtonpitt 5y ago
    Yeah agreed, not having continuity support in Music baffles me
    - sigjuice 5y ago
      That’s likely because of the usual music industry bullshit. They are probably asking to be paid for a “continuity license”.
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    How do you se for 2FA?
    - knolan 5y ago
      If you’re on your Mac or iOS device and you get a sms with a 2FA code the OS pops the code up for you for autocomplete. You can have iMessage send and receive sms from macOS.
- Lamad123 5y ago
  The smug face I had while making similar claims with so much confidence and zeal got crushed when started seeing weird shit like the infamous green lines on the screen and the fucking "stage light effect".. I love how even embarrassing failures of this company have fancy names!
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  The polish isn't as shiny as it once was. Let's fix the Music app no? How about passwords? What about the complete failure of a window manager on macOS. Feature bloat has plagued Apple developers to the point nobody knows how to wrangle all the gestures and interactions properly. Even a man as diligent as Steve, I suspect, wouldn't know what to do with the current state of things. He'd probably just burn it all down and start over with the front end, as is the natural order of things.
  - FractalHQ 5y ago
    I use Rectangle for tiling and Bitwarden desktop app for passwords. Highly recommend them!
  - imwillofficial 5y ago
    A massive company with dozens of apps have some that don’t meet your arbitrarily high bar? Shocker. Music works fine. Passwords work fine. The window manager works fine. Revolutionary? No. Needing an update? I think so. A failure? Only in your fevered dreams.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      There are a few core features music is missing on top of their semi-unintuitive interface. For starters, it’s as hard for me to plug my phone in on multiple computers without licensing alerts going nuts/blocking certain songs despite the fact the music was bought through them. That is baffling to me given how synchronized Apple ID usually is.
    - enos_feedler 5y ago
      Feel the same way. There are some uninspiring apps but they can't update all apps all the time. 2 things matter: 1) they are not being decprecated or ignored. Thats for google to do. and 2) when they do finally get a non-incremental update, they usually are much better. Meaning, they batched together a bunch of things that were true problems and fixed them in a smart/clever way.
  - Bud 5y ago
- passivate 5y ago
  >Even the PC Master Race brigade who love to shout that they could build a better machine for less than whatever desktop Apple releases miss the point. Apple locks their ecosystem so nobody else can make a smooth seamless experience. They ensure that only they can deliver such an integrated experience. I respect the effort of their engineers, but there are countless smart UX people and engineers in the world.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
    >Apple locks their ecosystem so nobody else can make a smooth seamless experience KDE Connect and GS Connect do virtually the same things between Linux and Android, and sometimes even more than what Apple can do[1], and is proof that you don't need vendor lock-in and a 3 trillion $ valuation to achieve the same features, just a group of dedicated enthusiasts with a vision and free time on their hands. That's the beauty of FOSS. Unfortunately, the Apple apologetics brigade will shout loudly that vendor lock in is the key to Apple delivering these features and that openness is somehow bad as it will only hurt the ecosystem and get you hacked. Not hating on Apple or Apple users, just stating my POV. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Uwh0hAhW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Uwh0hAhW8
    - jedberg 5y ago
      There is no Android and PC that I can buy where KDE connect is just installed and works. That's the difference. I buy a new iPad and MacBook, log in with my iCloud account, and boom, it works.
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        >There is no Android and PC that I can buy where KDE connect is just installed and works. That's the difference. Sure, but now we're moving the goal posts and arguing about semantics. The original comment I replied to, said Apple features are only achievable due to their ecosystem and I disproved him, that's it. The fact that the Linux community doesn't have billions of $ for marketing and commercialization of their products is a separate issue that's been the thorn of Linux adoption on the desktop since forever. >I buy a new iPad and MacBook, log in with my iCloud account, and boom, it works. Unfortunately, some people in the world that don't earn western wages can't afford to own several Apple products worth multiple times their salaries to enjoy the ecosystem, so it's great that FOSS alternatives exist that do the same things so those less fortunate can enjoy them at a fraction of the cost.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  They are usually marketed and smartly named People really underestimate the contagiousness of Apple brand names. Earlier this week I was listening to several non-technical people in the real world talking about their "AirTags." Eventually one of them took hers out, and it turned out they were talking about their Tile trackers. Nobody says "Tile," but everyone says "AirTags" now. And in my company, everyone says "FaceTime," but nobody means FaceTime because it's a Windows-only organization. They mean Teams, or Zoom, or even BlueJeans, but they never actually mean FaceTime.
  - knolan 5y ago
    It goes all the way down to the naming of system utilities. Disk Utility has a distinct name and icon (and questionable functionality). You can easily find it in Spotlight and launch it with a few key strokes. The familiar icon appears and you’ve found what you want. In Windows you search for Disk Management and you not only have to type the entire name but the result you get is not the program you’re looking for but some long winded description that makes you stop and have to decipher it. It adds friction and confusion. At least since Windows 10 Start-X opens a useful list of utilities.
    - Forgeties79 5y ago
      >questionable functionality Legitimately asking this: how so? I don’t really have any issues with it and I’m formatting drives all the time off of it. Are there some other features that are janky?
- ignu 5y ago
  When Apple does this, it's really hard to undersell the "reliable" aspect of it. The responsiveness and web experience of the first iPhone was just, a generational leap. Same thing with Universal Control. I've used Synergy, ShareMouse and basically every clone, and I've never seen close to this same precision as Universal Control which Just Works out of the box. I'm actually upgrading to a new Mac right now, and Universal Control is an absolute game changer for that workflow.
tarsinge 5y ago
For me the "just works" that does it is the seamless copy and paste between my Macbook and iPhone, I never set it up and honestly I don't even looked how it works, it's just here when I need it.
adonese 5y ago
I enjoyed the drag and drop between windows and Samsung Galaxy device. It's certainly not as great as the highlighted apple's one, but it was really super nice!
calmouk 5y ago
This insight seems to be key -- thanks for sharing. Pity that MG Siegler did not realise the opportunity to report more than what goes beyond an off-puttingly biased and superficial analysis. I recall his TechCrunch times more favourably; this article in contrast seems to not only have been written in haste, but written poorly at that.
passivate 5y ago
Apple also locks down their ecosystem so nobody except them can actually make a "just works" product. How many smart UX people and engineers do we have on HN itself? "But Apple has to lock it down, otherwise it would be a shitty ecosystem, just look at Windows lol" is a lame defense (IMO). There are countless ways to design open APIs, open data standards, etc while still having sane defaults for the non-pro users.
- crooked-v 5y ago
  And yet... how often does that actually happen?
  - passivate 5y ago
    That is a very fair point. I think it starts at the leadership level which prioritizes things like UX, quality of materials used in construction, etc, etc. You need people at the top that are not just bean counters.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

knolan 5y ago

This is exactly what Apple have done again and again and yet people are still surprised when it happens. Touch screens, FaceTime, AirDrop, Handoff, Sidecar. These are generally polished and reliable iterations of existing ideas that don’t require a bunch of other apps and configuration. They are usually marketed and smartly named, unlike Windows where they can’t seem to name anything or features are locked behind different tiers of the OS. Even the PC Master Race brigade who love to shout that they could build a better machine for less than whatever desktop Apple releases miss the point. Macs are appliances. They work reliably and do so for a long time and you know what you’re getting in terms of functionality.

waffleiron 5y ago
I’ve never been an real Apple user, however I got a MacBook Pro from my employer. Recently my android broke, and a friend gave me an 2020 iPhone SE as temporary replacement while I look for a replacement. The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard, I’ve always been sending myself messages through Signal or Discord to share my clipboard. Now it’s just automatic. The only thing I would have liked was a better way to discover this, I only did by accident. I’ve used KDE connect in the past, and this feels like the polished version of it. edit: Mac Pro -> MacBook Pro
- catach 5y ago
  > The thing that really blew my mind was the shared clipboard I wasn't aware this was a thing, and my mind just got blown. Thanks.
  - thenthenthen 5y ago
    Ha I also discovered this by accident, mind blown. Do you know about the long press space bar that turns it in a sorta ‘trackpad’ to move the cursor around in text (ios)?
  - knolan 5y ago
    It’s the kind of thing they’ll talk up and demo at their keynotes and maybe on their webpage when the latest OS drops, so unless you’re actively paying attention to them all of this goes unseen. Sometimes the annoying tips app may pop up and tell you too.
    - catach 5y ago
      Yeah, I'm pretty new to the ecosystem and I frequently have a nagging feeling that I should do a deep dive into documentation and guides just to catch up. Especially when it comes to wrangling Finder.
      - vishnugupta 5y ago
        While you are at it take a look at all the trackpad gestures. They are quite useful. I wasn’t aware of two of them for a long time. Four finger close gesture to show all the apps. Two finger swipe from the right edge to open up notifications tray.
        catach 5y ago
        Yeah, the Trackpad section in Settings is absolutely fantastic at teaching these options. Thanks for reminding me about it. My problem has been kinda the opposite: I trigger the notification center by accident too often. So this was enough for me to finally rebind it to a hot corner.
lloeki 5y ago
Continuity has been a wonderful feature that I use only from time to time, but when I use it it's been absolutely glorious in removing mental friction for menial tasks. Copying TOTP codes is one thing that just makes 2FA that much less of an annoyance. It's infectious. So much so that I'm constantly annoyed that Music supports neither Continuity nor some form of remote control. It feels like the feature was released and then they suddenly stopped adding more apps to support it.
- knolan 5y ago
  With a HomePod you can transfer music from a phone to the speaker by holding it near it. It’s not AirPlay it just switches over. A similar feature for MacOS would be nice. You can also use an Apple Watch as a remote for music playing on any device in your home. Apple want your money.
- dwighttk 5y ago
  Also would be nice if it worked for Siri… I’m always hey Siri-ing my watch for timers and my phone is like “there is no timer set”
- axtonpitt 5y ago
  Yeah agreed, not having continuity support in Music baffles me
  - sigjuice 5y ago
    That’s likely because of the usual music industry bullshit. They are probably asking to be paid for a “continuity license”.
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  How do you se for 2FA?
  - knolan 5y ago
    If you’re on your Mac or iOS device and you get a sms with a 2FA code the OS pops the code up for you for autocomplete. You can have iMessage send and receive sms from macOS.
Lamad123 5y ago
The smug face I had while making similar claims with so much confidence and zeal got crushed when started seeing weird shit like the infamous green lines on the screen and the fucking "stage light effect".. I love how even embarrassing failures of this company have fancy names!
nixpulvis 5y ago
The polish isn't as shiny as it once was. Let's fix the Music app no? How about passwords? What about the complete failure of a window manager on macOS. Feature bloat has plagued Apple developers to the point nobody knows how to wrangle all the gestures and interactions properly. Even a man as diligent as Steve, I suspect, wouldn't know what to do with the current state of things. He'd probably just burn it all down and start over with the front end, as is the natural order of things.
- FractalHQ 5y ago
  I use Rectangle for tiling and Bitwarden desktop app for passwords. Highly recommend them!
- imwillofficial 5y ago
  A massive company with dozens of apps have some that don’t meet your arbitrarily high bar? Shocker. Music works fine. Passwords work fine. The window manager works fine. Revolutionary? No. Needing an update? I think so. A failure? Only in your fevered dreams.
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    There are a few core features music is missing on top of their semi-unintuitive interface. For starters, it’s as hard for me to plug my phone in on multiple computers without licensing alerts going nuts/blocking certain songs despite the fact the music was bought through them. That is baffling to me given how synchronized Apple ID usually is.
  - enos_feedler 5y ago
    Feel the same way. There are some uninspiring apps but they can't update all apps all the time. 2 things matter: 1) they are not being decprecated or ignored. Thats for google to do. and 2) when they do finally get a non-incremental update, they usually are much better. Meaning, they batched together a bunch of things that were true problems and fixed them in a smart/clever way.
- Bud 5y ago
passivate 5y ago
>Even the PC Master Race brigade who love to shout that they could build a better machine for less than whatever desktop Apple releases miss the point. Apple locks their ecosystem so nobody else can make a smooth seamless experience. They ensure that only they can deliver such an integrated experience. I respect the effort of their engineers, but there are countless smart UX people and engineers in the world.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >Apple locks their ecosystem so nobody else can make a smooth seamless experience KDE Connect and GS Connect do virtually the same things between Linux and Android, and sometimes even more than what Apple can do[1], and is proof that you don't need vendor lock-in and a 3 trillion $ valuation to achieve the same features, just a group of dedicated enthusiasts with a vision and free time on their hands. That's the beauty of FOSS. Unfortunately, the Apple apologetics brigade will shout loudly that vendor lock in is the key to Apple delivering these features and that openness is somehow bad as it will only hurt the ecosystem and get you hacked. Not hating on Apple or Apple users, just stating my POV. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Uwh0hAhW8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8Uwh0hAhW8
  - jedberg 5y ago
    There is no Android and PC that I can buy where KDE connect is just installed and works. That's the difference. I buy a new iPad and MacBook, log in with my iCloud account, and boom, it works.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >There is no Android and PC that I can buy where KDE connect is just installed and works. That's the difference. Sure, but now we're moving the goal posts and arguing about semantics. The original comment I replied to, said Apple features are only achievable due to their ecosystem and I disproved him, that's it. The fact that the Linux community doesn't have billions of $ for marketing and commercialization of their products is a separate issue that's been the thorn of Linux adoption on the desktop since forever. >I buy a new iPad and MacBook, log in with my iCloud account, and boom, it works. Unfortunately, some people in the world that don't earn western wages can't afford to own several Apple products worth multiple times their salaries to enjoy the ecosystem, so it's great that FOSS alternatives exist that do the same things so those less fortunate can enjoy them at a fraction of the cost.
reaperducer 5y ago
They are usually marketed and smartly named People really underestimate the contagiousness of Apple brand names. Earlier this week I was listening to several non-technical people in the real world talking about their "AirTags." Eventually one of them took hers out, and it turned out they were talking about their Tile trackers. Nobody says "Tile," but everyone says "AirTags" now. And in my company, everyone says "FaceTime," but nobody means FaceTime because it's a Windows-only organization. They mean Teams, or Zoom, or even BlueJeans, but they never actually mean FaceTime.
- knolan 5y ago
  It goes all the way down to the naming of system utilities. Disk Utility has a distinct name and icon (and questionable functionality). You can easily find it in Spotlight and launch it with a few key strokes. The familiar icon appears and you’ve found what you want. In Windows you search for Disk Management and you not only have to type the entire name but the result you get is not the program you’re looking for but some long winded description that makes you stop and have to decipher it. It adds friction and confusion. At least since Windows 10 Start-X opens a useful list of utilities.
  - Forgeties79 5y ago
    >questionable functionality Legitimately asking this: how so? I don’t really have any issues with it and I’m formatting drives all the time off of it. Are there some other features that are janky?
ignu 5y ago
When Apple does this, it's really hard to undersell the "reliable" aspect of it. The responsiveness and web experience of the first iPhone was just, a generational leap. Same thing with Universal Control. I've used Synergy, ShareMouse and basically every clone, and I've never seen close to this same precision as Universal Control which Just Works out of the box. I'm actually upgrading to a new Mac right now, and Universal Control is an absolute game changer for that workflow.

tarsinge 5y ago

For me the "just works" that does it is the seamless copy and paste between my Macbook and iPhone, I never set it up and honestly I don't even looked how it works, it's just here when I need it.

adonese 5y ago

I enjoyed the drag and drop between windows and Samsung Galaxy device. It's certainly not as great as the highlighted apple's one, but it was really super nice!

calmouk 5y ago

This insight seems to be key -- thanks for sharing. Pity that MG Siegler did not realise the opportunity to report more than what goes beyond an off-puttingly biased and superficial analysis. I recall his TechCrunch times more favourably; this article in contrast seems to not only have been written in haste, but written poorly at that.

passivate 5y ago

Apple also locks down their ecosystem so nobody except them can actually make a "just works" product. How many smart UX people and engineers do we have on HN itself? "But Apple has to lock it down, otherwise it would be a shitty ecosystem, just look at Windows lol" is a lame defense (IMO). There are countless ways to design open APIs, open data standards, etc while still having sane defaults for the non-pro users.

crooked-v 5y ago
And yet... how often does that actually happen?
- passivate 5y ago
  That is a very fair point. I think it starts at the leadership level which prioritizes things like UX, quality of materials used in construction, etc, etc. You need people at the top that are not just bean counters.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]