My work laptop is M3 and it needs to be because the security crapware makes some things literally 10x slower. Meanwhile my personal M1 is more than adequate for normal work.
Interesting reasoning that I never thought of, though it doesn’t change the fact that this kind of stuff deters my non-technical family members from updating
Every update for them is like an exercise in anxiety and fear.
It's called the Action icon, a generalisation of its original Share meaning. It's used throughout the Apple ecosystem so knowing that's where actions live is not a big expectation.
You've mangled the steps. You only press one Action icon in this sequence, then you select Print, then you need to select the printer and any other options, then you tap Print. Which of these steps do you think 'abstruse'?
Are you suggesting they should use a little icon of a printer, peripheral that takes many wildly different forms, instead of the word Print?
I may have got the steps wrong but I do recall that the Action icon was again to the left of the Print text that performed the actual print.
Again, why does the UI switch from icons to text arbitrarily? If Action is Action then label it Action and not an icon of a broken rectangle with an up arrow. That means nothing and is abstruse.
I'm an IT consultant and my step mum is not. Neither of us had any idea what the Action icon means. I do now (it's now filed along with burger menu and other UI wankery).
An icon of a printer is at least relatable. That Action thingie isn't.
There's a printer icon in windows and *nix. Many icons represent things that have wildly different forms. People and cars look different, but road signs manage to portray these things.
Honestly, as a user of the mouse, I think the main reason people talk about the mouse is bike shedding. Charging isn't a problem in actual use, but everyone sure has an opinion on it.
There are plenty of contenders for 'worst ideas they ever had' and this just isn't up there.
That's a quote from Steve Jobs about how basically all of their competition (except Google) had made the mistake of trying to ship desktop software on phones. The problem with the stylus is that it's a hardware workaround for a software problem: the sort of cost-reduced engineering you get when a company wants to "have a mobile strategy" without actually putting in the time and effort to make something good.
The Magic Mouse is the exact same kind of "we couldn't care less" cost-reduction. The charging port is on the bottom because that's the only place you can put a charging port with the existing all-glass design. Because they re-used an existing design intended for removable batteries. This is such an uncharacteristically un-Apple move, and one so obviously detrimental to the design of the device, that people (including myself) actually psyopped themselves into thinking Apple had deliberately designed the mouse to enforce wireless usage.
And, to be clear, Apple has never done that.
All their other peripherals with rechargeable batteries in them will let you use them fully wired if you plug them in. In fact, if you somehow engineered a way to move the charging port somewhere less stupid, the Magic Mouse probably would work plugged-in, too.
If you see a charging port on the bottom, they blew it.
I agree, I always found the charging port location to be a total non-issue. The battery life is long, charging is fast, and you get warned that the battery level is low long before the mouse dies.
I personally like the status quo that PNGs don't encode orientation. I can dump PNGs when I'm debugging and I know I'm looking at the bits the same way up as the code is!
PNG now does - and they've been as vague as they could be in the spec about whether any exif data should affect the image display or not. The spec says:
"It is recommended that unless a decoder has independent knowledge of the validity of the Exif data, the data should be considered to be of historical value only."
Instead of either saying: "yes you must rotate it" or "no you shall not rotate it" to make everyone do the same thing. And if it were yes, they should also have made this a mandatory chunk since now they made it optional to read.
That’s pretty typical in technical standards. It’s so that existing software isn’t forced to choose between the Scylla of not being able to claim conformance to the updated standard and the Charybdis of breaking backwards compatibility.
> Home and End are mapped to C-a and C-e literally everywhere in Cocoa.
Even in iOS, if you have a hardware keyboard attached! But Ctrl-a/e have come in with BSD, the more common Mac shortcuts are Cmd-left/right, which go to the beginning/end of the current line, whereas Ctrl-a/e follow wrapped text.
When I see someone calling the keyboard things like 'inane' I read 'not what I'm used to'.
Personally I found the keyboard a breath of fresh air when I switched from Windows/Linux. The whole text editing experience is gloriously consistent and logical, though marred by a growing number of cross-platform apps that don't behave correctly.
What I think of as inane is Linux's having a slightly different key combo for copy depending on what context you're in. Or all the mad extended keyboard keys I used to use that were in a different place on every laptop.
[the keyboard experience is much less well thought out on non-English keyboards though, as another comment points out, come on Apple sort it out]
That's a fair argument to be made. But in my case, I grew up on Mac OS 9 which had mostly the same key sequences. I transitioned to Windows, and that was definitely "not what I'm used to". But then moving into Linux, almost everything can be configured and the user experience across apps is consistent. Except for the terminal that needs control-shift-c instead of control-c, but that's because terminals inherit control-c for tty control.
On macOS/X? Nope, I've made up my mind: macOS has inane keyboard layouts, reduced key availability, and many things can't be reached at all by just by tabbing around a few times.
I wish it was slightly easier to type a #. But OTOH it's /way/ easier to type accented characters (in either the fast way for regular use or the slow way that's much more discoverable) or different types of punctuation. Without memorising numerical codes, which is what I remember from Windows.
I certainly don't miss all the extra navigation keys, when I have the meta-keys and cursors right under my fingers, exactly the same on any Mac I use.
I'm struggling to remember more than minor differences from a PC keyboard. N.B. I'm in the UK so that might make a difference.
> No keypad, no pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete (I use all of them very frequently), arrow keys are misplaced and tiny (also use them a lot), no F1-F12 keys, no screenshot button, funky command key instead of using control key like any sane OS, and the command key is where the option key belongs, blah blah.
I had all of those keys when I was using Mac OS 9, 25 years ago.
Well, I won't cover all the same things the replies do there!
I can empathise, as I always used a full size keyboard on Windows/Linux, and I chose Thinkpads and decent Dells where the extended key layout wasn't completely bastardised.
I insisted on a full size Mac keyboard for nearly a decade afterwards. Then I realised that, barring the niceness of full height cursor keys, it was a useless appendix that meant I had to move my hand ~8 inches more every single time I needed the mouse/trackpad.
And they have F1-12, though you need Fn to use them unless you invert their function in settings. And they have a numerical keypad, as well as pageup/pagedown/home/end/delete - on a full size keyboard. And you can type all those things easily using the meta keys and cursors on the bottom row anyway. And why would screenshot need its own meta key in 2025, with so many ways to screenshot or record. But I digress.
What drive me crazy when using Windows for work is the abysmal copy/paste support.
Just 2 minutes ago I started an email, was composing a numbered list of steps, saw that a co-worker sent another email to the same thread, so I copied the text I was working on and replied to the latest mail.
The numbered list of steps was no longer a numbered list that I could continue auto-incrementing, but just plain text.
And that's just from one Microsoft program to itself. Copying text between two different Microsoft apps rarely preserves the formatting I want. Copying text between Microsoft and a 3rd party application is guaranteed to be an exercise in frustration.
On the other hand I cannot stand it when copy/paste preserves formatting. The last thing I want when I paste some text somewhere else is fonts, colors, hyperlinks, and numbered lists coming along with it. 90% (or more) of the time I just want the plain text.
Same. But there are a few rare instances I do want formatting preserved.
I've resorted to using PowerToys on Windows for this, it has a little utility called Advanced Paste. Win+Shift+V brings up a little modal and you can choose to paste as plain text, markdown, json, and a bunch of other functions, or you can give it your OpenAI API key and have ChatGPT format clipboard contents for you.
We had dozens of 2013 MBP with discrete GPU mux where I worked. I bought one afterwards and used it until the M1 laptops came out, for pretty much everything you can use a laptop for. Never had or saw this problem in any of them, FWIW!
