Apple has just about always offered iOS apps on the App Store, separate from what apps come bundled on its devices from the factory.
Sometimes, these apps get promoted to being part of the iOS image, like Podcasts and iBooks have. Once stuck hanging out on the App Store, they now ship on the iPhone and iPad by default.
A lot of other apps weren’t luck enough to get that lifeline, and have since been removed from the App Store. Let’s take a look at a few examples.
Casey Johnston, writing about the newest MacBook Pro, which as a set of silicone membranes designed to keep dust and debris from killing the keyboard:
Every time I described the 2017 MacBook Pro I sold because I couldn’t stand its non-functional keyboard and asked an Apple store employee if the new one would screw me over the same way, each assured me that Apple had changed the keyboards so that that would never happen again. I described my issues with “dust” to one shop associate at the Apple Store at the World Trade Center and asked if the new computers were any better. “Yeah, yeah, they fixed that problem… it was a BIG problem,” she told me. “So it doesn’t happen at all?” I asked. “No, it shouldn’t happen,” she said. Maybe the bad days were finally over.
But checking around online, it appears the new keyboards have the same old issues. They may be delayed, but they happen nonetheless. The MacRumors forum has a long thread about the the “gen 3 butterfly keyboard” where users have been sharing their experiences since Apple updated the design. “How is everyone lse’s keyboard doing? I rplaced th first one because ‘E’ and ‘O’ gave double output. The replacment ither eats “E”, “O”, “I” and “T”, or doubles them,” wrote one poster. “I didn’t correct the typos above on purpose.”
My 2018 machine’s space bar got weird for a little while but has since cleared up. I am nervous, however, that this issue isn’t really gone.
The standard macOS interface has quite a few semi-transparent elements, which like frosted glass provide a glimpse of what’s beneath them. At Apple events, execs go giddy about how pretty this is. In use, these elements vary from being distracting to outright dangerous. For example, if you have a motion-sickness issue and an animating web page is sitting behind a semi-transparent element, it can take a while before you realise it’s affecting you, by which time it’s too late and you’re already dizzy.
“Fine”, says Apple, grumpily, “so just turn on Reduce transparency”. Only it’s not that simple. Because when you do, Apple designers get in a strop and hurl logic out of the window. What you’d expect to happen is for macOS to remove the semi-transparent bits. So instead of Finder sidebars or the macOS app switcher showing what’s beneath them, they’d just have a neutral solid background. Nope. Instead, in its infinite wisdom, Apple’s decided those components should instead be coloured by your Desktop background.
You can see what he means by clicking through this gallery I made showing just how much the desktop background sets the tone for UI elements, even with reduced transparency enabled.
If you use a photograph as your background, macOS samples the colors present to tint its UI elements. It can lead to some pretty awful-looking windows:
I haven’t done anything in the Hackintosh scene since I installed Mac OS X Leopard on a Dell Mini 9 nine years ago, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t kept up with that world. This video recently caught my eye:
In it, Quinn Nelson walks through a $1,400 machine that gives my $5,000 iMac Pro a run for its money, despite having a worse GPU and an i7 CPU.
Nelson points out that these numbers may come down to cooling. The tower in his video, complete with a liquid CPU cooler, can run its components much harder than the iMac Pro, as it has the thermal headroom to do so.
No, I’m not going to use this video to justify building a Hackintosh. While it does seem easier than ever, and they run services like iMessage and iCloud without much hassle at all, I like knowing that the machine I run my business on is going to be as solid as possible.
However, this video does have my wanting to see what Apple does with the Mac Pro next year. I’m sure we won’t see this machine hit the low price points it used to, but I wish it would. I would love iMac Pro performance in a tower that costs half of what the Space Gray machine on my desk cost me.
53% of devices introduced in the last four years are using iOS 12. As measured by the App Store on October 10, 2018 based on devices introduced since September 2014.
iOS 12 adoption has outpaced iOS 11 adoption rates at the same time last year. In early October of 2017, iOS 11 was only installed on approximately 38.5 percent of devices. It took until early November for iOS 11 adoption to hit 50 percent, based on Apple’s official numbers.
iOS 12 adoption rates are in line with iOS 10 adoption rates in 2016. On October 11, 2016, iOS 10 was installed on 54 percent of active devices.
