Bigger distinction: Kids with computers vs. kids with “smart” devices.
I feel that is the difference we’re seeing though. Younger kids who generally live on smart devices have lower tech literacy.
And apple phones are “smart devices”
Why insert the qualifier there?
Because my phone isnt a smart device. Its a dumb device that does nothing by itself and everything i tell it to do. It allows me to remove things i dont like without self destructing and locking me out. It works offline without complaining. It doesnt spy on me.
That doesn’t really answer my question. I’m going to conclude that you just have some personal issue with Apple.
I wouldn’t blame them. It’s really difficult to do anything Apple hasen’t planned for on their tablets.
She must have had a Mac. Only Windows teaches both the knowledge and the fury to convince children to switch to Linux.
I don’t know. I think Mac gets a lot of hate simply because it’s a Unix that was sold to the devil and comes with a satanic concierge service.
Like, I’m not saying that selling your soul to the devil is possible but if I had to pick a handful of people that on the whole I would say probably did I would pick Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Elon musk, Jeffrey bezos, Larry Page, Vladimir Putin, and probably every Hollywood social elite and musician that sells a platinum record, every Republican senator, congress person, and every president after Jimmy Carter, and every CEO whose company is worth more than 10 million dollars who didn’t inherit the company from their parents.
Don’t forget Robert Jordan
Switching from apple is like breaking out of prison.
Coming from windows it’s a breath of fresh air
With iPhones yeah, but MacOS is not very locked down at all. You can run all the unsigned code you want.
Although you could argue the new Apple Silicon Macs are kind of locked down, since Apple only allows kernel extensions on the older Intel Macs
god, running unsigned apps was a pain though.
Real question, what things on Apple were so restrictive that you think it’s a prison?
My only apple device was an iPod and it was the most cumbersome thing ever. Trying to put music on it on my own laptop was impossible as iTunes wouldn’t install. So I’d need to use someone else’s computer which would default to synchronizing their library with my device. So all my loser video game soundtracks will be on someone else’s device or their american sex music will be on mine. And those 33 pin or whatever Proprietary Cables broke if you breathed on it. Adding music was the closest thing to pulling teeth without actually pulling teeth.
Getting an Android phone instead of an iPhone was literally like breaking free. I can manage my own files directly on the device. I can download apps from anywhere. I can download music without proprietary software and expensive fragile cables. Oh, right, and I can charge it with the same cable my old brick phone used, the one that came with my portable charger, and one that powered my USB fan. A Standard Cable. Ffs.
American sex music
Lmao
So absolutely nothing to do with Mac at all. And you’re referencing a cable that hasn’t been used in literally over a decade and comparing it to a a cable that you’re using now? You do realize Android phones in 2010 used proprietary cables too, right?
I got my first android (Samsung Galaxy S3) in 2014, before I had a LG Rumor Touch. Both used micro USB.
I was turned off from Apple anything after having an iPod as a gift and discreetly hating it. I was further turned off when I saw that an iPad is just an elongated iPod Touch rather than a Microsoft Surface which is literally a PC.
So micro usb, the literal worst standardized usb connector in existence, is what you are claiming is better than an iPhone’s omnidirectional lighting connector.
And you know how I can tell you haven’t ever touched an iPad? 🤦♂️ “an elongated iPod touch” smdh.
An iPad is a fisher price toy for the price of a Surface. It’s nothing. I used the ones in school and when I was an election day employee. They’re scams
Mini is worse than micro, which is better than all the proprietary connectors it obsoleted
I - carefully - maintained a music library. Got an ipod. Loved the device. Though sync via itunes was cumbersome.
Wanted to sync my tracks back to another device. Nope. Not supported. Everz track was rewritten into some garbage, including its tags.
Locked in a prison without knowing.
My elderly parents got iphones. They started sharing pictures via their message app. Required multiple times showing them that we - android users - receive aweful pictures. Prison.
Apple watch is only syncing with iphones. Prison.
Used to be an app developer. Releasing something as open source for ios is not feasible. You have to anually pay 120 USD to publish. Prison. Therefore you release the app in a paid manner. They tell you which price to raise. And tax 30%. Prison.
A friend wrote a thesis with some apple-writer thingy. Asked me for some help saving in the required file format. Couldn’t manage to. Prison.
“Vendor lock-in” is the backbone philosophy for the entire company and literally every single product and service it has ever created.
Except wifi
What about WiFi? Apple didn’t invent WiFi, Australian public funded research institute CSIRO did.
They didn’t invent it, but when they made wifi products they didn’t limit them to just apples.
I saw a documentary once about the engineers working to make wifi a thing with Apple devices. I can’t find it, but you can see how the crowd reacts seeing it for the first time https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HFngngjy4fk
This isn’t right at all… Mac’s are awful if you want to do things like play most video games. Linux is much the same.
That’s right. I said it. Come downvote me, fanboys, I don’t mind. I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
Most video games work perfectly in Linux now…
Hey! 🙋 I’m an autistic person (diagnosed at age 3). I grew up using Mac computers mostly, because my father preferred them for his work. Although I would encounter Windows a lot when I was at school as well. However, I didn’t really know how to use Windows until I started seeing videos on YouTube about it (such as this one). This was when I was around 10. So I started experimenting with different editions of it (Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows XP, etc.) via a pirated copy of Parallels Desktop. I also found out about Linux, and toyed with Ubuntu with a bit via Parallels. I found it fun, and thus considered the idea of installing Linux properly onto my Macbook. Unfortunately, the trackpad support wasn’t there. So for my 11th birthday, I asked for a “Windows laptop”, and immediately after getting it, I set up some dual-boot with Windows 10 and some fork of Ubuntu called “Pinguy OS”. (I spent way too much time looking at DistroWatch.) Then, I distro-hopped for a bit until I finally settled on Void Linux when I was 13. I’m now 18 and am running Void full-time on my current laptop, it doesn’t even have a Windows partition. :)
Yooo, another autistic geek 2006er!
I was diagnosed at age 4 and i started with Flash games on a Windows 7 family desktop. The first PC i could keep in my bedroom was an old netbook with XP and Lubuntu gifted to me by my mom(i only used the linux part tho). Then, later, another XP-era laptop with Linux Mint, before the current win10 laptop i have today(used it with Windows so far cuz i’m lazy and i used to need windows software but i plan to Linuxize this as soon as win10 is discontinued)
When i take the jump i’m prolly gonna settle for KDE Neon or any other Debian-based that can run KDE and then try to theme it to get something as close to Frutiger Aero as possible.
Ayy! 🤝
I’m also thinking of trying KDE the next time I install Linux. I’ve been using GNOME for the vast majority of my time on Linux, though I’ve also dabbled with Xfce and Antergos’ built-in OpenBox configuration for a short while.
Awesome! What made you pick void?
Apologies for the late reply, my internet went down for a day. Anyway, before I was using a distro called Antergos (basically Arch with an easy installer and a few custom packages). When it was discontinued, some people waited for what is basically its spiritual successor, EndeavourOS. Others switched to using vanilla Arch. But I decided to use Void after some research, as to me it was Arch but with a few advantages to my favour:
- At the time, Void had an installation wizard while Arch didn’t (you manually installed it by following the wiki, basically). Now,
archinstallexists, I guess. - It’s still rolling-release, so you can update whenever you want easily, but at the same time not bleeding-edge, so packages don’t break as easily.
- Unlike most Linux distros, it uses runit as the init system instead of systemd. I’m no rabid systemd hater, but you gotta admit that runit is just easier to learn how to use.
- And finally, by adopting a non-major distro, I just wanted to promote Linux apps being compatible with as many distros as possible, and not just either Debian, Fedora, or Arch (or whatever derivatives exist thereof).
(Also, happy cake day! I didn’t know Lemmy had cake days until now hehe :)
- At the time, Void had an installation wizard while Arch didn’t (you manually installed it by following the wiki, basically). Now,
I’m genuinely curious; is her hypothesis that macOS users are less tech literate? Because I definitely know much more computer science people that use macOS than Windows (of course most use Linux, but Windows is on third place).
Could be, could also be she is generally actually curious about it. I would actually think its the opposite since your problem solving skills are exercised more on a windows than a mac. Computer science people will engineer a solution from the ground up while the rest of us will problem solve and be happy with something held together with duct tape.
I think that’s the gist of it. Apple is so hell bent on proprietary everything and keeping their hardware locked that there isn’t all that much you can tinker with when using a Mac. Aside from the high price of apple products, the customizability of PCs (and the access to games) are what kept me on windows.
What stuff do you think you can’t tinker with on a Mac?
I don’t understand the correlation with technical people on Mac. Like I DONT GET IT 😭
how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want? I tried to use a cracked iPhone before deciding just to buy a new android because I just bout exploded with the corporate shenanigans apple has.Edit: It would appear that Mac is very different from IOS. Ive never tried it other than 15 minutes of fiddling with a friends once, nice to know it’s not as locked down as IOS is.
Many thanks, but I hardly understand this conversation lolFor tech people, OS X is basically a BSD with a pretty UI that comes preinstalled on nice hardware (which is important mainly because corporate IT procurement is only gonna give you a choice between a Mac or a [Dell|HP|Lenovo] business-line machine running Windows (and with corporate policy that prohibits installing Linux). The Mac is a much nicer choice in that situation.
Also remember that, although they’ve backed away from it now, there was a time back in the 2000s when Apple was leaning into the UNIX hackability of the OS – they were coming out with stuff like XServe and Automator and went out of their way to design their machines for toolless upgrades of things like RAM. Some of the popularity of Macs among technical people stems from that era, and memories of it.
iOS, by the way, has always been an entirely different story. Your experience with a cracked iPhone isn’t even slightly representative of the experience using an OS X Mac.
Macs have a decent terminal + CLI interface built in, and decent hardware. Also, for many years apple offered huge discounts for students through their university, so many CS students got a macbook for super cheap and just never stepped out of the ecosystem.
The CLI interface is literally just GNU BASH, people need to understand Apple steals everything slaps a fresh coat of paint on it and boasts how innovative they are.
~full disclosure; I’m super jealous andhave always wanted a Mac Pro or Macbook Pro~
Actually its zsh but yeah nothing special.
Unfun fact: it switched from bash to zsh because Apple was butthurt and paranoid about GPL v3. Fuckin’ cowards.
It’s better than power shell or whatever crap is on windows. Even WSL had issues the last time a used it a few years ago. Mac is Unix which Windows will never be.
PowerShell is like the 1 good product Microsoft has made the las 10 years
That is a dangerous opinion. In my mind, Microsoft has made zero good products.
how can you just be ok with not being able to do stuff you want?
Huh? What do you mean?
There are a lot of things that Apple just straight up tells you you can’t do – I don’t use a Mac often enough to make a list, but I can tell you that running apps made by people who aren’t giving Apple $99/yr for code signing was recently added to it – and using MacOS means being okay with that.
You don’t need code signing though. Just hold option when you open the app the first time and you’re never bothered about it again. Like the other person said, give us a list of things you can’t do on Mac, that you can on Linux.
As of MacOS 15.1 Sequoia, that is no longer possible.
In answer to your question, though, off the top of my head:
- Use a different desktop environment
- Uninstall OS components that I don’t need for a lighter weight system
- Be absolutely certain that Apple isn’t spying on me instead of just stopping Facebook from tracking me and then doing it themselves instead
- Run 32-bit apps after Apple ended support for them
- Play video games (the MacOS version of Steam is a joke and everyone knows it)
- Take my laptop or desktop to a repair service that isn’t sanctioned by Apple, or (horror of horrors!) replace the components inside it myself
As of MacOS 15.1 Sequoia, that is no longer possible.
Did you read the page you linked to? You can still run unsigned code. You have to review it in the system settings, but you’re not blocked from doing it. I’m doing it right now on the latest version of Sequoia…
- Use a different desktop environment
- Uninstall OS components that I don’t need for a lighter weight system
Valid, but these are things the vast (and I mean >98% VAST) amount of general computer users are not capable of understanding and should not attempt regardless.
- Be absolutely certain that Apple isn’t spying on me instead of just stopping Facebook from tracking me and then doing it themselves instead
If you care about privacy on any OS, you should be using a local firewall—something you can do on macOS. I use Little Snitch, which absolutely can block traffic to Apple’s domains.
- Run 32-bit apps after Apple ended support for them
This is the single most annoying thing about macOS. I’ll give you that. However, that being said, I haven’t actually run into an issue with it in the last two years.
- Play video games (the MacOS version of Steam is a joke and everyone knows it)
Similar to others have said, I daily drive my MacBook for basically everything except playing games. I do still play Minecraft, or any (usually smaller) games that I can install on my MacBook natively, but I play most games on my desktop PC—in fact that’s about all I use it for these days. Funny enough, that hasn’t changed since years ago when I used Linux Mint on my laptop and Windows on my PC.
- Take my laptop or desktop to a repair service that isn’t sanctioned by Apple, or (horror of horrors!) replace the components inside it myself
I work at a small, locally owned, computer shop. We order Mac parts and install them all the time. I’m literally doing a MacBook Air screen replacement tomorrow morning, and we’re not AASP. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
these are things the vast (and I mean >98% VAST) amount of general computer users are not capable of understanding and should not attempt regardless.
That’s the problem, isn’t it? It’s actually fine that you can’t do this, because the average user is too stupid to be able to do it safely. That’s the Apple ethos. That’s their justification for disallowing sideloading on iOS, however flimsy it may be. I don’t care that my grandma doesn’t know what doing this would mean. I’m not my grandma, dammit. I own the computer, let me do whatever I want with it!
I use Little Snitch, which absolutely can block traffic to Apple’s domains.
That’s another thing I should’ve added to my list: find basic system utilities, like a drive cleaner, firewall, or alternative terminal emulator, that aren’t paid products.
I work at a small, locally owned, computer shop. We order Mac parts and install them all the time. I’m literally doing a MacBook Air screen replacement tomorrow morning, and we’re not AASP. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Has Apple finally pulled their head out of their ass and removed parts pairing? This is great news!
Option click is still possible, it just works slightly differently. I literally did it yesterday on my Sequoia work system.
use a different desktop environment
Fair, I think this is one of the worst parts of the Linux “ecosystem”, as it completely fucks anyone that doesn’t know to use whatever the “current hotness” is, but I understand a lot of people like it.
uninstall OS components…
Like what? You mean like running without a login screen or do you mean uninstalling something like systemd?
be absolutely certain…
You can do that with plenty of network scanning apps, and you shouldn’t be doing that on device anyway. Not sure how Linux would stop that when you could install a bad package, or run apt update on something that has had a supply chain vulnerability.
run 32 bit apps
Fair. I haven’t needed this since about two months after Apple made the change, because Apple sure does a good job of getting developers to update their code, but I’m sure there are still some apps people wish worked that never updated.
play video games
Yeah video games on Mac are terrible, no argument there. Literally the only reason I still have a windows computer. Soon as they force 11, I’m switching back to a Linux desktop, but honestly I’m not looking forward to it.
take my laptop
You can do that now and you could before, Apple just didn’t like it and they made it as hard as possible. I agree it’s a shit policy, but I’m mostly asking about the operating system here. For example you could be running a hackintosh.
uninstall OS components…
Like what?
Like whenever you connected Bluetooth headphones to the MacBook, they started Music app. The
officialsolution to stop this was to reboot in safe mode and rename Music app, because it was baked in so hard, or install third party software to prevent Music from starting. That’s not to mention that I don’t need Music app at all and would uninstall it but it will get restored back.It looks like this behaviour changed somewhere in 14, as I no longer see Music starting, but it worked that way for longer than it should, really.
Upd: can’t find the support thread where they offered this solution, so it must’ve been not the official one. Officially you didn’t even need a solution because it’s not a problem.
OS X and iOS are completely different beasts, iOS is a closed off nightmare whereas OSX is basically just stable pretty Linux missing a few packages and costing more
The fact I had to use iTunes to put music on my phone and the lack of access to the filesystem were extreme deal breakers for me. There is also the impossible hoops you had to jump through to change ownership of a phone. I gave my mother my old iPhone when I changed to Android and it was impossible to scrub my account from it, even with a factory reset.
The environment felt way too sterile for my liking. It treated me, a legitimate tech savvy user, like a malicious imbecile.
It treated me, a legitimate tech savvy user, like a malicious imbecile.
So it’s doing security correctly.
That’s like saying martial law is doing security correctly.
Lack of access to the file system? What are you talking about?
“Autistic children will be discluded from the study for skewing results”
“Autism involves a significant deviation from expected behaviour”
They have played us for absolute fools.
(I know autism describes a real cluster of traits, but it is only socially constructed norms that define those traits as aberrant, I am not saying it isn’t real)
When I was 12 I installed Linux… and now I have autism. And I’m gay!
That’s like half the fediverse here
We get it, you use Arch.
Gaytism
There’s truly not individual unique experiences.
Well there’s a simple explanation right? When you’re growing up grappling with issues like homosexuality, disability or just feeling like an outsider - spending more time at a computer provided an escape from a judgemental and unwelcoming world. This is the same reason so many of us are night owls well into adulthood, cause we grew up feeling safer when the adults were asleep and we could maintain our personal boundaries.
I’m autistic and gay but I also have a secret third thing that stopped me from figuring out linux. The “AD” in ADHD (there needs to be a better way to distinguish between having attention deficit, hyperactivity, or hybrid). I have tried like four times now to figure out linux and my brain just doesn’t get the dopamine it needs from that activity and I just can’t focus 🫠
So here’s a teacher’s insight:
Mac:PC:Chromebook Rich—Poor
There is a very strong correlation between the wealth of the kids on my module, and the device they have.
Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of local files without being shown. PC users, alas, snort too much SharePoint these days to be considered healthy - trying to save a word document locally these days is like climbing a mountain blindfolded. As for the Chromebook kids, they do their best with what they have, and given how little compatibility those devices have with the software I teach, I’m proud of them.
Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of
For me, it was trying to explain to a Mac user that she should have a separate profile on her Mac for work vs. personal
She’d convinced her employer that she could work from home using her own Mac (the office was all Macs except for the video production suite), and he said OK. Didn’t ask me, of course. Despite me saying a long time ago when someone else floated the idea, that it was poor practice from a security viewpoint.
Then three days later the call came - “I can’t access work files”. So I remote in, she’s got links to her personal iCloud Drive directories somehow mixed up with the work Google Drive.
I started to explain about using a different profile for work and just got a blank stare.
“You log off your personal profile and log into the work profile”
“How do I do that?”
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Most of the time it’s realising the difference between local and cloud storage. A lot of students get confused when trying to upload their first coursework - usually it’s solved by just showing them the difference between local files (this is stored in a permanent local place) and cloud storage (this is stored permanently somewhere else).
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Maybe it’s to do with the number of mouse buttons.
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At risk of going off topic, I don’t like Twitter posts like this:
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Both users ‘verified,’ essentially paying for more engagement, but with no actual “verification” like community mods tagging users.
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In your face engagement metrics all over the posts, as if that’s all that matters. Not even a user “poll” like Lemmy/Reddit or Mastadon/Facebook.
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Hiding most replies other than the most algorithmically engaging ones.
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Posted as a screenshot, unfortunately necessary as they essentially broke Nitter and it’s nigh unusable unless logged in.
I don’t like that the Twitter format is kinda the center of the social media universe, and seemingly staying that way now that we basically voted to back it with the US govt.
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I am probably the only person ever to grow up with a UNIX terminal server as my home computer. any crazy IT thing i do now pales in comparison to my dad, running ethernet cables through our heating ducts in a probable building code violation
**As someone who has ran fiber and ethernet to companies post a category 5 hurricane to get network connections back online for paychecks across 7 states including the virgin Islands… I have never seen that. And we used satellite radio dishes to send signals across areas when we rewired the emergency center (police, fire, etc) under marshall law. It’s fucking humbling to have all bridges shut down in the area to try to cut down on people pillaging and have them give you a badge to cross under any conditions no matter the danger because you are considered “needed.”. Some other poor souls could have stood on the beach watching it come in piling shit up and running home to drag my chicken coop into the garage throw 2 dogs in the car and “evacuate” only to where the hurricane actually ended up hitting harder. I was an idiot, but the office building i was working from was on the front of the Los Angeles times or w.e the next day to show the destruction. We dug crabs and sucked water for days out of pipes to get Ethernet run in moves for months… But yet I have never seen someone run them though heating ducts haha. (True story)
Edit: circa Hurricane Michael, Panama City 2018
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Children use smartphones way more than “PC” computers today.
Imagine paying for a blue tick on Xitter.
could’ve been before elongated muskrat bought it
It’s not unfortunately, there’s a date of 09/12/2024 under the original tweet
oh… oh… oh…
Personally, I guess that you learn more the more issues you have. MacOS is a more closed down ecosystem compared to Windows, malware is less popular and as hardware comes usually bundled with the OS, you shouldn’t encounter as many driver or hardware issues in general.
As a kid I had so much trouble with incompatible software, viruses, adware, drivers, broken hardware etc. And as I had noone to ask, it tought me a lot about the fundamentals of IT and how to research such issues myself.
Counterpoint, I grew up at a time when Mac’s still couldn’t do much outside of what apple specifically developed for them, so I learned a ton about emulation and virtual machines and such to play games or use Photoshop. I guess that supports your hypothesis, I can rock Unix command line stuff and containers like a pro, but hate figuring out drivers
Where’re all the DOS kids at?! 5 hours and 66 comments, but not a single mention yet.
Never mind solving problems with Windows; shit gets real when the thing boots to a
C:\>prompt and you need to know things like the difference between CGA/EGA/VGA/Hercules graphics modes and WTF an IRQ is just to install your games in the first place.Kids these days don’t know the pain of trying to get enough free conventional memory to run something.
I was talking to a friend just the other day about that. I remember some application we used to reconfigure autoexec.bat to optimize it for one type of memory or the other, but I can’t remember the name of the application (I think it came with the OS), and I can’t remember what the different memory types were called either.
IIRC the application was just “edit.com”, as in “edit autoexec.bat”. The different kinds of memory were expanded memory, extended memory, and the high memory area; high memory was useful regardless which of the other two you were using, and those two were for the most part kind of interchangeable. You also typically had to mess with config.sys, which handled some things like the mouse driver. It was really common to have specific floppy disks that had only those two files on them (well, and were set to be bootable), so that if you needed a particular configuration for some game–maybe you didn’t load the CD-ROM driver, since that took up a lot of precious low-memory kilobytes–you could leave your normal setup alone and just stick your custom boot disk in for that program. Some programs were really tricky to make enough room for, even if you had a ton of RAM, because that privileged low ram area was so hard to manage.
I figured it out - it was memmaker. It automatically edited autoexec.bat (and possibly also config.sys, I’m not sure).
Ah, yeah, I think that may actually have been a paid program. It was something folks were willing to pay not to have to do, because, as I say, it was surprisingly tricky to manage the memory below 640K.
Well, at least in our case, it wasn’t something that we bought. I’m pretty sure it came with our MS-DOS.
Oh, you’re right, it’s right there in the link you shared–it was built in to MS-DOS, but only from version 6 on. I must have misremembered it as paid because it was something we didn’t have, and then later we did.
memmaker?
That was it, yes.
If I was pressed, I could probably still write a config.sys to reallocate enough system memory to play Test Drive
Pop quiz: which graphics mode is that screenshot?
The RadioShack Tandy 1000TX played it with CGA Graphics :)
I’ve learned C++ when I was 10. Should I have myself checked?
No point, c++ already contaminated you. Better than getting java in you early, but both have their own expression of mental illness. I think both are better than C, which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn’t exist.
which reduces all words to 1-3 characters as if intellisense doesn’t exist.
That’s assembley
The weird thing is that the UNIX core of MacOS would lend itself really well to tinkering. It’s a shame that Apple lobotomizes all the hardware they sell with locked down firmware…
It’s why I much prefer MacOS over Windows. The command line makes sense. The file and folder structure makes sense. The defaults can be a little bit weird but a little configuration can help me feel right at home.
Ironically, I found macOS to be a lot more technical than Windows. It’s how I got my start with Linux. At least changing the default browser changes the default browser. I’ll be using macOS and Linux side by side.
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