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> Read MTP devices > Mount an SSH or NFS drive I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do the

> Read MTP devices > Mount an SSH or NFS drive I know fanboy debates are tiresome, but... I really do struggle to comprehend taking a device that can't do these things seriously as a computer. As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering, which... fair enough. But moving bytes is something any general purpose computing device should be good at. It's almost something you have to actively design out. It's certainly a deliberate, non-budget-constrained choice from Cupertino to be bad at this. Crap like "should Apple be [scanning for CSAM | scanning for copyright | scanning for anti-CCP | whatever I've almost stopped caring ] before uploading to iCloud?" exists primarily because the devices are so bad at moving bytes around without relying on iCloud.

martopix 4y ago
You can use osxfuse to mount ssh filesystems on Mac.
- danmur 4y ago
  > or require adding unsupported 3rd party software Not just unsupported, I think you need a kernel extension?
  - protomyth 4y ago
    No, heck, there are apps like Mountain Duck that do it fine. I should know, that's how we did share drives for offsite staff during Covid. There are plenty of free apps, I just went with a non-free option. Comparing a stock Mac OS to a Linux distribution with packages installed is pretty shady.
freedom2099 4y ago
Actually it is very easy to mount nfs drive on Mac… i don’t see why the post author has problems! I do it daily…
petercooper 4y ago
I'd not heard of MTP before, so looked it up: "MTP is part of the "Windows Media" framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player." I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too. There is at least one thing I can do on macOS though that I can't on Ubuntu: run the latest version of Photoshop in a stable manner.
- nagisa 4y ago
  > I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too. This is almost like saying that devices don't need to support dealing with USB sticks formatted with FAT32 because the file system originates with DOS. MTP today is one of the more prevalent protocols that many devices (including most if not all Android phones made in past decade) use by default. That said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#macOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#macOS claims that this is supported natively…
- jraph 4y ago
  > I'd not heard of MTP before, so looked it up: "MTP is part of the "Windows Media" framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player." This comes from [1] which is an interesting page. It's a de facto standard though. And now specified in the USB standard. Android devices expose themselves using MTP when connected with USB for instance. I think the goal was to allow devices to expose their media data / receive media stuff from the computer while still being able to be used. Exposing as a mass storage device was problematic because conflict could happen when both the device and the computer tried to access the drive, so at the time, most mp3 players just couldn't be used both as a mass storage devices and as an mp3 player at the same time. You can still use your Android phone while it is plugged as an MTP device (fortunately). Though it seems something like Samba, NTP or sshfs could have been possible. I don't know what is the full rationale behind the choice of developing a custom protocol. MTP probably provides some features that makes it easier to manage media stuff. I've not looked into it much. It does extend the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) (used in digital cameras) which is an ISO standard so it's not completely custom neither. Apple went with their custom iTunes-related protocol with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, because why not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
NFS mounts are supported in macOS natively SSH mounts are done with osxfuse MTP support is also available: https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp This article feels a bit like the author didn’t look very hard for solutions to a lot of their problems, but instead skipped straight to writing an article to complain about things they didn’t understand.
- native_samples 4y ago
  For MTP he says: "On a Mac I need to install some shonky 3rd party software which rarely works." This seems like a reasonable complaint.
- djrockstar1 4y ago
  Oversights like these always make me wonder if the author is cunning and Cunningham's Law is at play. Why look very hard for solutions when you can just claim there are no solutions and wait for someone to disprove you?
  - BoxOfRain 4y ago
    I wonder how much Cunningham's Law contributes to flakey search results? I can totally see people using it to game places like Stack Overflow which are far too trigger happy about removing duplicates.
  - snapcaster 4y ago
    Have you personally used OSXfuse/sshfs? it really sucks to get working properly and set up. I had it all working on my x86 laptop finally then upgraded to m1 now it's back to being broken again.
- GlassKingdom 4y ago
  osxfuse is not a reasonable answer. The author says “without unsupported 3rd party tools”. I have severe problems with osxfuse on M1: janky behaviour and system crashes. This stuff should be native.
bfgoodrich 4y ago
ROFL. Yes, "as a toy". Things that 99.9% of Hacker News (and 99.999999% of the general public) has literally never had a need to do, their absence surely just invalidates it. Hot takes like yours are what make HN a hilarious joke to the rest of the world. Embarrassing.
smarmgoblin 4y ago
> As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrigerator — both of those are computers in a sense but function only in a specific narrow capacity. You can warm a potato (if it’s in one location and the door is closed), but you can’t move arbitrary bytes around regardless of the capacity of the underlying hardware. On your Mac you have a way to watch movies, play music, even browse the web. General purpose computing I think is just not the overall goal of these devices.
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  I'm willing to accept your argument that a Mac is not a general purpose computer. It then begs the question of why these devices are so popular for software development...?
  - marlowe221 4y ago
    According to the Stackoverflow 2021 survey, it's not as popular as we might be led to believe. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-most-popular-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo... MacOS comes in at 25.19%. Even Linux is higher at 25.32%. Meanwhile, Windows is 45.33% (over 48% if you include WSL, which was counted separately). 82,719 responses on the operating system question too...
  - scubbo 4y ago
    Software Development is also a specific purpose. One that has a much broader range of requirements than (e.g.) a microwave, but still. It is entirely possible that Macbooks fulfill those requirements while lacking some other properties required of a general purpose computer. (I'm not claiming that that's true - simply that your implication that "it is necessary to have a general purpose computer in order to develop software" is untrue)
    - mikro2nd 4y ago
      Yep. My notion isn't so much that you need a general purpose computer to do software development, but more that people who are interested in doing development are more likely than most to be interested in general-purpose computers.
skepticalwaves 4y ago
What's a computer? https://youtu.be/3S5BLs51yDQ https://youtu.be/3S5BLs51yDQ
msh 4y ago
Why are specific protocol support needed to be a general purpose computer and not a toy/specialized tool? Nothing prevents people from writing programs to support this on the Mac, so it's a general purpose computer. Its like saying linux is bad because it does not build in X that I personally use on a daily basis.
ubermonkey 4y ago
This reads like "my use case defines what a computer is," which is absolutely as tiresome an argument as any fanboy debate. I imagine iOS can't do those things, either, and yet an iPad is the computing platform of choice for an awful lot of people because it meets their computing needs. Examine your biases here.
- nine_k 4y ago
  (1) Good hardware with good software support goes a long way. I'd say that iOS is much more of a polished OS than macOS. No wonder, considering that it's the iOS devices that fuel Apple's profits, not Macbooks. (2) For a lot of people, an iPad is more of a consumption device, or a device to run 2-3 specialized apps (e.g. for drawing or music). Maybe they would be glad if iOS offered wider universal computing capabilities, but their choice of a powerful and mobile device is pretty limited.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    (1) It depends, as ever, on one's needs. iOS is limited by design in order to deliver the things it's intended to do more smoothly. There's a lesson there. (2) Many people really only use any computer as a consumption device, but the general ding of iOS as "read only" has always rung hollow to me. A large number of people work primarily with text -- emails, posts, documents, spreadsheets, presentations. An iPad with a keyboard is a GREAT tool for them, and that's not a "read only" use case. As an aside, when I last updated my camera kit I added an iPad Pro to use for photo processing and culling when traveling instead of a laptop. It's actually GREAT for that, too, but this level of power is relatively new to the platform.
  - Damogran6 4y ago
    Your #1 is not a valid statement. OS, be it Mac, iOS, WatchOS, TVOS has a huge shared codebase. It's all OS, tweaked to the particular need of the hardware.
yokoprime 4y ago
I daily drive a mac, it earns me my living doing everything from development to writing specs. There's a bunch of compromises, weird decisions etc, but none of them are holding me back from doing my job. I vastly prefer this setup over windows and wsl. I do find it interesting how strong the Apple anti-fanboy sentiment is though. Rarely do I hear people rabidly defending Apple around me. It's a tool, like a DeWalt drill or Milwaukee saw. It gets the job done, and of the tools I have to choose amongs I prefer this particular one.
xtracto 4y ago
Use 'nc' provided by OSX and linux. Fully compatible. There, you can easily move bytes between computers

martopix 4y ago

You can use osxfuse to mount ssh filesystems on Mac.

danmur 4y ago
> or require adding unsupported 3rd party software Not just unsupported, I think you need a kernel extension?
- protomyth 4y ago
  No, heck, there are apps like Mountain Duck that do it fine. I should know, that's how we did share drives for offsite staff during Covid. There are plenty of free apps, I just went with a non-free option. Comparing a stock Mac OS to a Linux distribution with packages installed is pretty shady.

freedom2099 4y ago

Actually it is very easy to mount nfs drive on Mac… i don’t see why the post author has problems! I do it daily…

petercooper 4y ago

I'd not heard of MTP before, so looked it up: "MTP is part of the "Windows Media" framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player." I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too. There is at least one thing I can do on macOS though that I can't on Ubuntu: run the latest version of Photoshop in a stable manner.

nagisa 4y ago
> I wonder, can Windows natively work with APFS volumes..? I know with extra software it can, but then with extra software macOS can do all the things in the blog post too. This is almost like saying that devices don't need to support dealing with USB sticks formatted with FAT32 because the file system originates with DOS. MTP today is one of the more prevalent protocols that many devices (including most if not all Android phones made in past decade) use by default. That said https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#macOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol#macOS claims that this is supported natively…
jraph 4y ago
> I'd not heard of MTP before, so looked it up: "MTP is part of the "Windows Media" framework and thus closely related to Windows Media Player." This comes from [1] which is an interesting page. It's a de facto standard though. And now specified in the USB standard. Android devices expose themselves using MTP when connected with USB for instance. I think the goal was to allow devices to expose their media data / receive media stuff from the computer while still being able to be used. Exposing as a mass storage device was problematic because conflict could happen when both the device and the computer tried to access the drive, so at the time, most mp3 players just couldn't be used both as a mass storage devices and as an mp3 player at the same time. You can still use your Android phone while it is plugged as an MTP device (fortunately). Though it seems something like Samba, NTP or sshfs could have been possible. I don't know what is the full rationale behind the choice of developing a custom protocol. MTP probably provides some features that makes it easier to manage media stuff. I've not looked into it much. It does extend the Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) (used in digital cameras) which is an ISO standard so it's not completely custom neither. Apple went with their custom iTunes-related protocol with the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, because why not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

NFS mounts are supported in macOS natively SSH mounts are done with osxfuse MTP support is also available: https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp https://github.com/ganeshrvel/openmtp This article feels a bit like the author didn’t look very hard for solutions to a lot of their problems, but instead skipped straight to writing an article to complain about things they didn’t understand.

native_samples 4y ago
For MTP he says: "On a Mac I need to install some shonky 3rd party software which rarely works." This seems like a reasonable complaint.
djrockstar1 4y ago
Oversights like these always make me wonder if the author is cunning and Cunningham's Law is at play. Why look very hard for solutions when you can just claim there are no solutions and wait for someone to disprove you?
- BoxOfRain 4y ago
  I wonder how much Cunningham's Law contributes to flakey search results? I can totally see people using it to game places like Stack Overflow which are far too trigger happy about removing duplicates.
- snapcaster 4y ago
  Have you personally used OSXfuse/sshfs? it really sucks to get working properly and set up. I had it all working on my x86 laptop finally then upgraded to m1 now it's back to being broken again.
GlassKingdom 4y ago
osxfuse is not a reasonable answer. The author says “without unsupported 3rd party tools”. I have severe problems with osxfuse on M1: janky behaviour and system crashes. This stuff should be native.

bfgoodrich 4y ago

ROFL. Yes, "as a toy". Things that 99.9% of Hacker News (and 99.999999% of the general public) has literally never had a need to do, their absence surely just invalidates it. Hot takes like yours are what make HN a hilarious joke to the rest of the world. Embarrassing.

smarmgoblin 4y ago

> As a toy yes, or as a specialised tool for video or audio rendering I think this is a useful framing. Apple markets an appliance like a microwave or a refrigerator — both of those are computers in a sense but function only in a specific narrow capacity. You can warm a potato (if it’s in one location and the door is closed), but you can’t move arbitrary bytes around regardless of the capacity of the underlying hardware. On your Mac you have a way to watch movies, play music, even browse the web. General purpose computing I think is just not the overall goal of these devices.

mikro2nd 4y ago
I'm willing to accept your argument that a Mac is not a general purpose computer. It then begs the question of why these devices are so popular for software development...?
- marlowe221 4y ago
  According to the Stackoverflow 2021 survey, it's not as popular as we might be led to believe. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-most-popular-technologies https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2021#technology-mo... MacOS comes in at 25.19%. Even Linux is higher at 25.32%. Meanwhile, Windows is 45.33% (over 48% if you include WSL, which was counted separately). 82,719 responses on the operating system question too...
- scubbo 4y ago
  Software Development is also a specific purpose. One that has a much broader range of requirements than (e.g.) a microwave, but still. It is entirely possible that Macbooks fulfill those requirements while lacking some other properties required of a general purpose computer. (I'm not claiming that that's true - simply that your implication that "it is necessary to have a general purpose computer in order to develop software" is untrue)
  - mikro2nd 4y ago
    Yep. My notion isn't so much that you need a general purpose computer to do software development, but more that people who are interested in doing development are more likely than most to be interested in general-purpose computers.

skepticalwaves 4y ago

What's a computer? https://youtu.be/3S5BLs51yDQ https://youtu.be/3S5BLs51yDQ

msh 4y ago

Why are specific protocol support needed to be a general purpose computer and not a toy/specialized tool? Nothing prevents people from writing programs to support this on the Mac, so it's a general purpose computer. Its like saying linux is bad because it does not build in X that I personally use on a daily basis.

ubermonkey 4y ago

This reads like "my use case defines what a computer is," which is absolutely as tiresome an argument as any fanboy debate. I imagine iOS can't do those things, either, and yet an iPad is the computing platform of choice for an awful lot of people because it meets their computing needs. Examine your biases here.

nine_k 4y ago
(1) Good hardware with good software support goes a long way. I'd say that iOS is much more of a polished OS than macOS. No wonder, considering that it's the iOS devices that fuel Apple's profits, not Macbooks. (2) For a lot of people, an iPad is more of a consumption device, or a device to run 2-3 specialized apps (e.g. for drawing or music). Maybe they would be glad if iOS offered wider universal computing capabilities, but their choice of a powerful and mobile device is pretty limited.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  (1) It depends, as ever, on one's needs. iOS is limited by design in order to deliver the things it's intended to do more smoothly. There's a lesson there. (2) Many people really only use any computer as a consumption device, but the general ding of iOS as "read only" has always rung hollow to me. A large number of people work primarily with text -- emails, posts, documents, spreadsheets, presentations. An iPad with a keyboard is a GREAT tool for them, and that's not a "read only" use case. As an aside, when I last updated my camera kit I added an iPad Pro to use for photo processing and culling when traveling instead of a laptop. It's actually GREAT for that, too, but this level of power is relatively new to the platform.
- Damogran6 4y ago
  Your #1 is not a valid statement. OS, be it Mac, iOS, WatchOS, TVOS has a huge shared codebase. It's all OS, tweaked to the particular need of the hardware.

yokoprime 4y ago

I daily drive a mac, it earns me my living doing everything from development to writing specs. There's a bunch of compromises, weird decisions etc, but none of them are holding me back from doing my job. I vastly prefer this setup over windows and wsl. I do find it interesting how strong the Apple anti-fanboy sentiment is though. Rarely do I hear people rabidly defending Apple around me. It's a tool, like a DeWalt drill or Milwaukee saw. It gets the job done, and of the tools I have to choose amongs I prefer this particular one.

xtracto 4y ago

Use 'nc' provided by OSX and linux. Fully compatible. There, you can easily move bytes between computers