Here is a fun thing that happens if you keep your laptop on to play some music or maybe run a light server with the lid closed.

The backlight of the LCD turns off, but the LCD does not turn off.

This causes screen burn in. There is no way to turn the screen off when you shut certain model mac laptops.

So on one hand, we have a company offering neat privacy gimmicks and on the other, deploying anti-consumer practices at every corner of their product.

Privacy is the bait that will trap you into their money sucking ecosystem. Manage it yourself or companies will always find a way to use it to exploit you. Even when they are not busy actively violating your privacy.

I wrote some fiction about this. The cosmic microwave background is hiding an audio signal. It's the sound of a keyswitch. Humanity uses the radio astronomy equivalent of these techniques to discover which keystroke caused the big bang.

What Apple came up with works perfect as it adds some privacy while affecting the user in no way. This is also combined with permission dialogs for mic access and an indicator light showing the mic is in use.

Others have replied to the specifics here, but I'd like to add that "every chip can be hacked" is just categorically false (unless you also allow for physical access for "hacked", but then that would apply to the physical switch as well).

"Chips" are neither magical devices, nor are they necessarily running something akin to software, or controlling everything purely through software even if they do.

As a simple example, you can be very confident that a (real) ROM is a ROM, and that its contents cannot be changed by software.

Linux is a little better. But it's not just the OS. I might be in a Google Meet call where I have given microphone access, but can I trust the mute button? I'd rather have a physical mute.

I use a USB/bluetooth headphone DAC/amp. Most of the time, I plug it into my work laptop and listen to videos/music while I work. Sometimes, if a video ends or if I pause playback, my iPhone (which INSISTS on connecting to the amp) will take over and start playing music.

I really wish you could turn off auto-connect to bluetooth devices.

However, if a Macbook is sleeping and closed with no peripherals attached, I can’t see any use case for waking from bluetooth. It doesn’t make sense.

A few comments down:

> @asveikau: I think you should be able to play music while the lid is closed. That seems like a reasonable use case.

Also, wouldn't having a different behaviour, based on specific classes of devices, create more confusion for users?

Oh, and, all together now: Bluetooth sucks!

But maybe that’s beside the point, I’m interested why you see this as a bad thing?

I think users with wireless peripherals would find it irritating if every time they sat down at their desk they had to open the lid to wake their laptop.

Besides, MacOS is cherished by many as a UX/UI masterpiece, yet there are many annoyances that need to be fixed by the user. For example window management is a big one, I simply haven’t been able to achieve the comfort of i3 on my work Mac. (tmux comes close, but I can’t run Firefox in there)

Home button went non-mechanical the year before Face ID was introduced FWIW.

On one hand, its kind of nice for my trip from my home office into the main office. Opening up my laptop at the other location its already properly connected to the WiFi, applications are already "warming up" and syncing their statuses to the things that changed, bluetooth keyboard and mouse can actually wake the device from "sleep", etc. It gives a far more seamless experience moving from one place to the other.

But I also get the pain of this too. Pulling out my laptop on the airplane and seeing it already at like 93% battery since I left earlier that morning isn't great.

I remember back in the late 90s and early 2000's the dream of having some kind of low power notification screen on the lid or edge of the laptop. I always wanted that: being able to quickly see some of the info without fully booting up or accessing music from the computer while on the go. Of course, smartphones became a thing and have mostly eliminated needing the laptop to do those tasks.

You are able to use an external monitor with your laptop closed, it's not an edge case to want to use the computer's mic in that case.

There's also that if it's inside the chip, there is a risk that malicious software or buggy firmware can still enable it against your permission.

With a Framework laptop you can peel back the bezel and it's right there in plain sight. If the switch is in the off position it's a hard physical break to the microphone circuit. There is no possible software that can enable the microphone.

Yet when my Macbook is asleep in my bag with no peripherals attached, my headphones will connect and wake the Mac.

The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. It literally makes no sense.

this is in hardware and cannot be tampered with. apple also doesn't make backdoors, haven't you heard of what happened with the FBI?

You plug your laptop into your dock and close it, and suddenly your AirPods stop working, even though the rest of the computer works fine?

I think part of the problem here is that defining "in use" is actually very difficult, and it's literally something where two different users (or even the same user at different times) could have different expectations for the same circumstance as defined in code.

This might seem like I am an Apple fanboy but I am not, I have plenty issues with Apple products but when it comes to Privacy Apple is the only company amongst the big tech we can trust.

Microsoft, Google, Facebook are all anti-privacy and just about using dar patterns to steal users info. It’s disgusting.

I have my phone, my laptop, my iPad, and two iPads for my kids, all on my account. I literally am unable to make my kid’s iPads forget my AirPods, because it is tied to the apple account. If I have the iPads forget them, it forgets them on all my devices. It is annoying as hell, I have to leave Bluetooth off on my kids iPads.

[edit] just following up, it was UnnaturalScrollWheels, which have been notarized: https://github.com/ther0n/UnnaturalScrollWheels/releases/tag...

Not always, my monitor goes to sleep and turns off. At this point, macOS should turn Bluetooth off? How would I wake the computer then? I would have to open it.

> Find My would not be able to find and more importantly report a location.

That might be another reason why Bluetooth stays on. On a laptop, I'd rather have Find My working in clamshell mode (given the theft risk).

But yeah, MacOS is a little like Gnome Shell. It requires a few basic apps to make it usable, but after that it's pretty excellent.

Installing random packages to fix OS stuff that should work out of the box was fun for a while :-)

Kind of unrelated but it sucks that Macs don't do multiple displays over a single cable because Apple refuses to support it in their GPU via the built-in MST hub (that otherwise is put to use for driving the Pro Display XDR).

I disagree about making it thicker. The newest MacBook Pros are already extremely thick and heavy. I don't want to be carrying around a brick just because some people don't wash their hands or clean their keyboards every once in a while.

Airpods/MacOS - listening to background music. Phone call comes in... VERY LOUD facetime 'ring' announces on mac that I'm getting a phone call.

Pick up phone to answer it... holy tamole - it's minimum 8 seconds between clicking 'answer' and... eventually airpods switching over to phone - most of the time. To the calling party, I've 'answered', but they can't hear me - or... can sort of hear me, but I can't hear them. The speed at which the 'switch' takes place, and the visual delay (air pod icons turning on, then off, then on again, then a floating top notification saying "airpods connected"...)... this is always minimum 8 seconds. Usually 10-11.

I just say "hang on, i'm switching my earpiece over..." and wait. Annoying. Given that this is all in their ecosystem, I expect this to get better, not worse. I'd rather this sort of experience get fixed vs more emojis, or 'sidecar' or whatnot.

It means the airPods keep X active connections with any device that says it could emit sound at any time, while also harmonizing sound levels as the devices don’t have the same settings, and mixing it all at the end.

That feels like a lot to ask for tiny devices with limited battery. Now that could be a nice idea for a separate device that keeps all these bluetooth connection alive and deals with all the mess to deliver a single stream to your earbuds (albeit with double the latency)

I think there's a hack involving getting a cheap phone number for each toddler, adding that to iCloud, then disabling message delivery to that number but I haven't tested it.

[0] https://mos.caldis.me/

You're holding it wrong

It doesn't bother me since other manufacturers fill this gap, but I'd like to see more options regardless.

Maybe I'm just an extra-big baby about it all. But what I find a little annoying with the COVID-era of work-from-home and distance learning is how few people seem to care about audio. Even as a teenager on TeamSpeak, rather than getting a more expensive graphics card or whatever, I spent my money on an SM7B. Now it is more important than ever.

Maybe this isn't reasonable, but I feel like if not for yourself, to prevent "sorry, can you repeat that?" moments, you kind of owe it to the people who have to listen to you. Like as an autistic person, hearing a dozen people's overlapping background static, tinny compressed audio, etc, it really, truly slowly drives me nuts. I can't deal with that level of auditory sensory stuff all day. If someone has a bad microphone, I want out of the call ASAP.

A Shure SM58 will last you a lifetime, fit on your desk, cost <$100, and no one will ever complain about sound again.

I'd be worried that little Timmy would accidentally turn on photo sync or something for the adult's account and see... certain pictures he should not be seeing kinda-thing. Or iMessage and send something to someone. Though; if you're strict about the restrictions feature or guided access you should be safe?

In a world where (generally speaking) people are expensive and hardware is cheap, Apple probably thinks each person having their own device is easier than trying to shuffle around - potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.

We're getting closer, but storage and networks need to get even better before the majority of regular people can do this and will tolerate it, not just the power users.

Allow me to present the sexiest-ever evidence to the contrary: The G3 "Wallstreet" Powerbook. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerBook_G3

Apple has made excellent portable dev workstations in the past. After the release of the Unibody Macbook Pro though, the focus of their hardware and software focues far, far away from developers. The new 14"/16" lineup is a good return to form, but in the context of how developer-unfriendly modern MacOS is it feels pyrrhic.

If you don't relate to someone's opinion, you don't have to justify Apple's stance against it.

I'm sorry but I still find this hilarious. You can spend over 2k on an iPad that already has a cutting edge M2 CPU, the same CPU family that supports multiple users on every other non-iPad device, we are not waiting on anything here. Everything needed exists and has done so for decades.

Time is not required. A change to how Apple runs its iPad business is needed. This hasn't been a technical choice for a long time.

> yes, hardware is cheap.

You can buy an iPad in configurations up to 2500 dollars. For a single user computer. These are not cheap computers by any reasonable definition, given the amount of compute power you can buy for 1000 dollars elsewhere (including from Apple!).

> potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.

> ask people with kids how big their photo libraries are and I think you'll be surprised how much the average person is carrying around with them.

Almost no kids have 1 TB iPads in my experience - they are far too expensive for children! Almost no adults have 1tb iPads given their cost as well really - it turns an iPad into a 4 figure device. But perhaps you think 1500 dollars + taxes is "cheap" for a single user computer with 1tb of storage too?

My final point - almost all of their competitors can do this today, often on much lower specification hardware too. Windows 11, Android and ChromeOS tablets all can have multiple user accounts, just like almost any other plain ole computer made in the last 20+ years.

I had to reread my own sentence to make sure I wasn't being a complete moron.

NOTE TO SELF: COFFEE COFFEE COFFEE

Also: I don’t get a lot of calls anyway. But when I do, I tend to wander around as well. So it makes complete sense.

Fwiw, this seemed to work smoothly two years ago. And then… updates. AirPod firmware updates. iPhone updates. macOS updates. Nothing works the same as it did 2 years ago for maybe … 2 months or so. And there’s no going back. :(

It's far from universal. Most users never expect to understand their software in the first place, and so put a lot more value on new features. If anything I'd say developers put too much effort into polish, since we're the very small demographic that actually appreciates it.

OK, this is my biggest pain point after switching to MacOS for work, so let me go on a rant. Not only can't I imagine this particular scenario covering 99% of the userbase - I can't imagine anyone wanting this behavior with a regular mouse that has a scroll wheel (as opposed to buying Apple's Magic crap, which Apple wants you to do). Literally every other system is set up so that scrolling the wheel down would scroll the page down. And pretty much every laptop I've used had natural scrolling on a touchpad either by default, or as an option (a separate option from the mouse setting).

I could maybe see it sort of working if your mouse wheel has an infinite scroll feature, but even then it's super unintuitive.

But OK, let's buy into "think different" approach (AKA "we will break every convention ever set by man 'cause we're quirky like that") and assume that this is somehow more convenient if you haven't been contaminated by using other systems. What's the harm in providing a setting for other people? Like you said - it's a preference and a very simple one and a very common one, clearly not a 1% use case. How is this not a part of the system? The only answer I can find is: "we want you to buy Apple Magic Mouse, it feels natural there". The way the Apple pushes you into their shitty ecosystem is so anti-consumer that it boggles my mind that there's not that much pushback for it.

So far my experience after switching to MacOS had a very clear pattern: How do I enable "feature x"? -> Wait, I can't, seriously? This is basic OS functionality, how in the world is this not a default feature? -> (dig through dozens of "you're using it wrong" comments) -> OK, let's download yet another third party app then, I'm sure it will never serve as a vector for a supply-chain attack.

The vast amount of MacOS apps built by the community to undo Apple's terrible and backwards UX choices, and the amounts of sales those apps get, disproves your theory that over 99% of people are fine with the defaults Apple forces on its users.

that's a creative re-wording of "you're holding it the wrong way."

Not all Apple fans have been on board with the slow morph from general purpose computer to walled-garden console -- although admittedly that audience is probably mostly gone, anyway.

I’ve used it for years now with a variety of watches and Macs and I’ve always had to be right next to the computer with a fairly clear line of sight between them. Even putting my watch on the other side of my body is normally enough to make it tell me that the WiFi signal isn’t strong enough to unlock it.

[1] For cheapest devices, a physical button that goes to the next available device would still make a world of difference.

I personally boot my laptops to the filevault screen and no further when going through the security checkpoints. Keeps the disk encrypted and requires my password to continue.

It was neat for a couple of days until I was walking out of the room and my mac unlocked itself.

Sadly that is not the Apple way. We'll have to wait years for them to come up with a "solution" that doesn't involve a disable button. If they even decide to work on it.

Have you tried macOS Lockdown Mode?

The more settings you have, the more inevitable this becomes... Assume for a moment that any given default you set, works well for 99% of your userbase. Then, the number of users satisfied with every last default breaks down as follows:

1 setting -> 99% of users satisfied 2 settings -> 98% of users satisfied 20 settings -> 81% of users satisfied 200 settings -> 13% of users satisfied

Apple has a lot of settings. Even if their defaults in general work for greater than 99% of their users, it becomes unrealistic at scale that every single default will satisfy any particular user, let alone all of them. Thus, those third-party apps that you see become popular in aggregate. That doesn't necessarily mean that Apple's defaults are wrong. They could be absolutely killing it on the defaults, and you would still expect to see these results -- in which case you would expect them to devote their attention to the common case, and to let the third-parties pick up the edge cases.

    it seemed like their promise was for a higher 
    level of user experience than that.

Whether this is your cup of tea or your worst nightmare, I don't think this is particularly controversial!

Additionally, I think it's also uncontroversial that they're able to pursue/achieve a higher level of polish specifically thanks to the fact that they choose not to pursue the infinitely long tail of hardware combinations and software configurability. After all, as engineers we know that N possible feature toggles and knobs quickly can quickly approach 2^N or even N! combinations that need to be thought about and tested.

In short, I think it's sort of baffling to think that the omission of some pet niche feature equates to a piece of software "not working."

In contrast, if that omission makes you think the software stinks or simply isn't for you, that would make total sense to me.

1: it depends on the person what that is, but it should be believable, "in character" so to speak.

https://support.apple.com/guide/mac-help/change-guest-user-s...

That can get you into trouble with customs when the device looks new.

My Apple Watch 7 regularily "forgets" that I am still wearing it. I have to enter my code roughly 2 times a day.

So to me, it feels like presence detection actually fires way to often in situations where the watch is still on the wrist.