But you're in Apple's ecosystem, you're supposed to use Apple products, happily.

The obvious fix for that "bug" is to start using Apple Music.

In this particularly case though, I think you're missing the point. Apple takes an opinionated "we are right" approach to design, and it's typically an all-or-nothing thing. If Apple decides to allow choice, then you get choice. If they don't, then you don't. It's one whole, beautiful, integrated system (as they would say). There's a lot of (intentional) friction[1] in place to make keeping a toe in or out very uncomfortable.

[1]: Don't think this needs a citation, but if you disagree take a look at the "buy your mom an iphone" stories and the internal emails about making iMessage work on Android (Apple/Android families and all that)

How does this differ from any other company?

But also, this comes off a bit like a "if you don't like it, move to another country" type of response. It's not very reasonable, and it's not very helpful for the majority of people.

I'm relived to hear that this isn't a problem which goes away if I buy Airpods.

I ended up uninstalling Apple Music. At least they let you do that.

This has been broken since the very first iPhone.

They just need to add a stack of 2 entries to fix this for 99% of usages.

(I also have to have downloaded music... thankfully I got that U2 album ages ago, ha.)

I actually bought this 10 minute long silent song on iTunes at the time, so my phone wouldn’t automatically play Weezer’s “Across the Sea” every time I connected my phone to the car: https://music.apple.com/us/album/a-a-a-a-a-very-good-song-si...

Now I recommend Plex. I use Prism player on my iPhone and I download my whole library from my MBP host. It's perfect.

The play button defaulting to Apple Music even when another sound source has been used more recently is one of the few things I dislike about iPhones.

At least I could still buy "A a a a a a very good song" in iTunes Music Store still so it won't alphabetically run Anno Mundi (or for my wife whatever is the lexiographically first track of that U2 record they pushed on everyone)

I can't remember ever being annoyed by the "play" button opening Apple Music - the worst it might do is start playing the YouTube video in an open browser tab when I wanted it to play Spotify (it depends on which app i most recently alt-tabbed from), but that's only a minor annoyance.

Am I the weird one? My system rarely starts up because I rarely turn it off; why bother? (`uptime` reports that the last time I restarted the computer was 79 days ago.) And I pretty much always have Spotify or YouTube (the two main places I open in the background, so Macos doesn't need to open a new app to start playing.

What am I doing right?

Unfortunately that option only disables the display of the currently playing track title, not the entire section labelled "Music".

There is no avoiding it in the first instance (the OS update process), as it is required for updates if you have boot security enabled, and there is no UI to disable APNS.

Global repair with capped low price just by giving your computer and no questions asked. I just personally saved about 3000 dollars.

I moved to macOS exclusively because I had had extremely bad luck with Asus hardware [1] and I wanted to guarantee that my next laptop had minimally-decent build quality, and I was working for Apple at the time so I had a considerable discount on Macbooks.

I still really like my laptop (it's about four years old and the hardware is still ship-shape), but I've grown really frustrated with macOS. It's not horrible, it's still Unix so I still have a decent command line and access to good dev tools, but I feel like I'm constantly trying to work around the direction that Apple is pushing. I can't tell you how many times I've accidentally launched Apple Music, and as apps like this show, I'm clearly not alone.

Part of the issue isn't even that it's the default behavior exactly, it's that it includes all this crap I don't want. I don't want Apple Maps and Apple Music and all the other tiny little apps that depend on Apple services pre-installed. I wish there were a "minimal" macOS, that gave you a desktop and a terminal and a few other basic utilities [2], and that's basically it. It can't launch Apple Music if Apple Music isn't installed.

Once the community fixes up the Linux support on the T2 Macbooks, I'm moving over to NixOS minimal full time.

[1] I swore a blood oath to never buy an Asus product again; the laptop literally started to fall apart after only about a year of usage, and it was almost never transported anywhere (it lives right next to my bed). The plastic holding things together started to delaminate and I had to do a ton of surgery on it in the form of Gorilla Glue and clamps. Never again.

[2] Disk manager, for example.

Definitely take a look at Framework laptops (https://frame.work). Unless they lose their way, I don't plan to buy anything else. I've also had great luck with Lenovo T* line (my T580 was one of my favorites of all time). Dell makes some gorgeous stuff as well (though I go with the business line of XPS, I forget what they're called at the moment, maybe Precision?). If you're going with Dell, Ubuntu or a derivative works a little better. I've had friction in the past with Fedora and Arch on Dell because it takes 6 to 9 months for all the drivers to make it upstream to the kernel, so if the model is new within 6 to 9 months you're stuck relying on Dell's build.

I started getting weird boot issues recently, and after doing some heavy diagnosis, they are sending me a replacement mainboard, I'll replace it, and send my broken one back.

Granted it is within warranty, and it was a week of back and forth with their support.

But it is miles above dell consumer support, that I had to send my laptop off multiple times (going without for months) and then they don't even fix it.

I sort of refuse to use any Linux other than NixOS at this point, so I might have to wait a little longer to get everything, but I think I'm ok with that.

I know this is tangential but I've had to swear off high end laptops in general because of stuff like this, and I've seen it with many different brands - they'll jam a bunch of high end hardware into the literal cheapest, most badly designed case ever, and inevitably that is what causes the issues, not the actual hardware (with the exception of MSI boards, which always seem to have some inherent hardware issue).

Never again.

My 14 year old Kia Soul isn't in the shop nearly as often as any of the much younger midrange and high-end cars my friends typically drive. My $75 bottom-of-the-line Seiko 5 wristwatch doesn't need nearly as much maintenance as my old boss's Rolex or my dad's Breitling. (And a $5 quartz watch would require still less maintenance and keep better time too.) Our fancy Breville toaster oven seems to be reflowing the solder in its own circuit boards, and my parents' fancy Bosch laundry machines need to be replaced every 5 years, while our cheapo unit works fine and is older than some of my colleagues at work.

I'm guessing it's just that trying to pack more fancy features into a product means there's more to break. Or, e.g., if you've got a higher-end laptop then it might have higher-performance parts that generate more heat and degrade the plastic more quickly. Or they might have tried to distinguish themselves by using materials that aren't typically used for a reason. Stainless steel cars, anyone?

There are more-or-less objectively correct ways to do a lot of things reliably, to a point where they’re kind of boring. Since they are somewhat objective, most companies use them as the default and the prices can get lower and lower because they’re making more and more.

When a company purposefully tries the differentiate themselves, that inherently means that they cannot benefit from the same economies of scale, which in turn means higher prices have to be baked in. Sometimes that’s fine, I think Apple generally makes solid products for example, but a lot of the time this differentiation is just “different for the sake of being different”.

I had this idea that I was going to have "one computer to rule them all", so something I could edit video on and play games and all that fun stuff. Since then I've come to realize that I would much rather just have some dedicated hardware (e.g. a dedicated mini desktop with a decent GPU) for intensive stuff and keep my laptop a bit more utilitarian, and primarily focus on something with decent battery life and solid Linux driver support.

I'm a little disappointed at how bad the 2019-era Macbooks are with Linux, and it's a little frustrating that the Macbook Linux for the M[1|2|3] is substantially nicer and easier to set up than something with an Intel CPU and an AMD GPU. As it stands, I managed to get NixOS installed on my Macbook and it's almost fine, but suspend doesn't work at all, and the audio quality from the speakers is awful, which is a dealbreaker for me right now.

I'm hoping that once Apple stops providing updates to Intel Macs, there will be a huge push to fix the kernel on the T2 hardware.

I started using one as a home theater PC about a week ago, and even the internal GPU has been pretty solid. I was able to do 4k video editing with Lightworks Pro with no trouble; I had trouble getting Stable Diffusion working but that was more of a software-support-on-NixOS thing than "crappy hardware" thing.

I don't play a ton of new games but I did PS3 and Xbox 360 emulation on there and for the most part the frame rate was pretty stable, and I've read that a lot of people are having decent luck with even relatively modern games like Elden Ring.

I'm not sure I can recommend eGPU's for gamedev for this reason (among, many others).

The only thing I do that gives serious use to the GPU is hobbyist video editing, and I don't do that terribly often anymore. I do sometimes run Stable Diffusion, but that's mostly as a goof to generate funny pictures of Keanu Reeves. For that stuff, I think even a relatively cheap GPU does the job well enough.

Apple, Inc owns an operating system and a music app, and leverages its control of the OS to secure an unearned advantage for its music app over its rivals.

Apple is not the only perp here, every single large tech company abuses platform power for competitive advantage in unrelated industries.

But the software wasn't polished either: You can't use it in closed ("clamshell") mode, because it shuts down and you can't configure it. You need a 3rd party software to keep it on.

But you also can't keep it closed because then you can't reach the fingerprint sensor. You see: iPhones can't use fingerprint recognition because they don't have fingerprint sensors, iPhones use facial recognition. But Macs do have fingerprint sensors, but can not use facial recognition (for example using an IR camera like Windows Hello)

It's amazing how MacOS lacks features that everyone knows Windows has supported since XP days. ("When you close the lid > Power down / Keep running")

There are three alternatives for the fingerprint sensor issue:

- Apple Watch can replace most uses for it

- One of Apple’s external keyboards has a fingerprint sensor

- You can always just use your password

- I had two screens fail,

- The battery swelled.

- It did not sit flat on my desk.

- It warped a pine desk that I used during the pandemic.

- At any time after a few months of using it, no fewer than 6 keys would drop or duplicate keystrokes.

- It got under 2 hours battery life, when new.

- under heavy use, it got about 4 while plugged into the provided charger.

- If you charged it using a port on the left side, it’d throttle the CPU to 10% normal speed.

- Kernel panics on resume.

- They had random monitor incompatibility issues with the LG monitors Apple sold at the time.

- My colleagues also had the exact same model, and mine was better than average.

- no escape key

- the touchbar was over sensitive, so pressing backspace would send a ghost keystroke that launched siri a few times a day.

However, you could run them in clamshell mode with the monitor plugged in. It worked out of the box.

(Edit: I might have the model year wrong. I used it for a long time before the pandemic. It was the last one before they brought the escape key back.)

I am still using my 2018 15" MacBook Pro, and it works great. About six months ago I brought it in to Apple because the keyboard backlight quit working. Turns out the battery swelled and damaged things. So they replaced everything, top case (with keyboard and trackpad), logic board, LCD display, and battery. I still have AppleCare so this was all done free of charge. Prior to that I had zero issues with the laptop in the 6 years I owned it.

Now my M1 Air has had a logic board failure, and the LCD cracked all within two years.

In general though, I have had a terrible experience with Apple's QA as well. I've had 4 Macbooks over the years and they all had multiple (usually different) things that really sucked and drove me insane.

Also, my sample size is dozens of these laptops. My experience was typical.

I, too, downloaded the 3rd party app ("Amphetamine"?) to allow it to stay on when closed and unplugged. As far as I can tell, it doesn't work at all.

Same reason ads remain in inconvenient places that are highly prone to accidental clicks even though it would be better for everyone involved if accidental clicks were reduced.

Not under a PPC model

Edit: I'm saying that there is incentive to do this under a PPC model. Its just just "bumping false engagement"

Apple believes they own every device, and feel wronged whenever users spend money without Apple taking a cut.

You don't need to infer anything, really. You just need to observe that every corporation will engage in rent-seeking behavior whenever they're in a position to get away with it.

Apple is far from the first mobile device maker to try to make it difficult or impossible to install software through alternative channels. That practice has been in place since before the invention of the smartphone. Google likely would have done the same thing with Android, had it not been far more profitable for them to take a different tactic. Heck, in the USA, back in the analog landline phone era, the Bell system famously did functionally the same thing until regulators stepped in.

On that note, I'm annoyed that Apple does it, but I'm even more annoyed that, in the USA, we are absolutely toothless about regulation because we can't shake the pollyannaish belief that we should be able to expect corporations to play nice purely out of the goodness of their nonexistent hearts.

I don't think that's fair. You have to consider the culture at Google and pre-Google Android. It might be the case, but at the time it felt like a very natural way for them to go.

> On that note, I'm annoyed that Apple does it, but I'm even more annoyed that, in the USA, we are absolutely toothless about regulation because we can't shake the pollyannaish belief that we should be able to expect corporations to play nice purely out of the goodness of their nonexistent hearts.

Agreed, though I think this is a cultural problem more than a regulatory problem. We humans are suckers for good marketing, as Apple has masterfully demonstrated over the years. Some of their real life PR/marketing lines are indistinguishable from parody, yet people's faith and trust in Apple is at or near a religious level of devotion. They love the products and they desperately want to believe in the goodness of the creator.

Unless/until we figure out how to pull the curtain back so people see through the spin, they will stay powerful. Once we do that, the regulation will follow naturally.

However, years have passed, and Apple has been systematically giving preferential treatment to their apps and services, while dragging their feet on APIs for 3rd parties.

They keep using genuinely useful aspects of the App Store as a shield for anti-competitive abuse and petty rules (only in Apple's imagination allowing apps to mention other platforms is the same thing as allowing malware).

They've been spreading FUD and presenting false dichotomies that it's either exactly Apple's way, or chaos and malware. Instead of creating safe and efficient APIs for 3rd party browser engines, they chose not to have competition for Safari instead. Instead of creating APIs for easy centralized subscription management, they conveniently kept it exclusive to their own subscriptions, with pricing that can only be sustained in a duopoly.

Apple had plenty of time, and lots of chances to ease off their worst anti-competitive behaviors to keep regulators away, but instead they've doubled down on owning the platform and their users, and are now throwing tamper tantrums and malicious compliance.

If it was so simply one-sided, there wouldn't be such lively debate.

I don't think we need to rehash those thousands of comments to agree that the debate can't be settled in a single blanket statement?

This linked comment (which I randomly found on HN's search) summarises what I've seen here:

"The way these discussions usually go is that a bunch of Apple users complain about the restrictions, a bunch of Apple users say they like them, and a few Android users like myself remind the complainers that there are, in fact, other options that don't involve forcing Apple to take away the rules that most iOS users appreciate having."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39574040

I do recall a few users opposing allowing alternative app stores (which is the debate that is freshest in my mind) because they prefer to stick to Apple's, and the common rejoinder from the community that nothing is being taken away from those who prefer to stick to Apple's store but that other users who want something different have more choice.

I'm still curious about what additional nuance you have in mind, since I honestly can't remember seeing it.

Even so, your quote and further commentary proves there is more nuance to be had -- some Apple users are complaining, some Apple users are defending, others are suggesting compromise! The nuance can be found when you examine how those separate groups of people came to their opposing opinions. To say there is no nuance, yet give an example of a more nuanced argument is almost funny.

While I have absolutely no interest in debating it, the example that first came to my mind regarding the "Apple thinks they own every device" comment was the nuanced debate around security, especially in relation to the target market of the devices.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39132453

[2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24146987

I was trying to point to the opinion of the majority that I've seen and what I have seen from most of the community when security is mentioned is that Apple needs stronger security from a technical standpoint rather than controlling what and what is allowed on users' devices. I think both opinions hold validity, and you may be right that there is more nuance.

How to keep a Mac Mini from going to deep sleep so it can be used as a little server? Answer: install Linux.

Honestly, in some ways, a clean windows install feels like it less junk on it than a fresh Mac install. Maybe soon people will be building custom MacOS install media like folks did in the XP days, to trim the fat and make the default settings non-insane.

Another example of this is Pages, which INSISTS on being the default CSV viewer, no matter how much I check the "use this application in the future box." My only alternative is to uninstall it completely.

the windows experience of 2024 is very similar to the experience of buying a gateway 2000 in the 90s to me. there's tons of bloatware, ads all over the OS, you're constantly being prompted to buy Onedrive and Office (what the hell?) a lot of the Things i've gotten used to on macOS that windows doesn't have, I miss a lot (consistent shortcut keys across apps fro all vendors, the speed and reliability of spotlight as an app launcher/switcher, the ease of previewing files in the OS without launching separate applications, the fact that for all intents and purposes you're in a *nixlike environment and have basically the full suite of tools available to you first class.) every time I go back to my windows 11 desktop after an upgrade I'm baffled by some other weird addition to the OS that I didn't ask for and don't want. In a way, I kind of appreciate that macOS tends to evolve slowly and doesn't do a lot of experimentation. When there's multiple valid ways of solving a problem, they'll leave it to utilities to provide those options. I kinda am okay with that. I used to think apple was extremely opinionated but it seems more and more like their philosophy with macOS is "leave it to the users to solve this problem." i'd also argue there's a ton of windows features missing, which extremely confusingly i have to add manually by installing powertoys (which means microsoft actively builds the solutions to these problems and then just chooses to distribute them in this bizarre, out-of-band way? it makes no sense.)

I won't deny there's a bunch of obvious stuff that i cannot understand - window snapping being a key thing, they've gone all in on their weird full-screen approach, which I don't vibe with. The fact that I need to buy an app (bartender) to hide icons in my menu bar in the year 2024 is pretty bonkers to me, and I cannot understand what motivates the complete lack of management tools for this, especially given how out of control it can get on a company-managed machine. finder is in need of a lot of love across the board. i'm also baffled by some of the stuff they choose to include - mission control is one of the single most confusing features they've ever added to the OS and i still have zero understanding of what the intent behind it was.

i guess all this to say i feel like having a lot of experience with macOS, i much prefer opening a clean mac to opening a clean windows machine (linux obviously is its own can of worms where it can't really be evaluated by these standards) and i can't at all agree that UX-wise it's a letdown.

...even when we're in a thread, discussing the lack of toggle-setting for an annoying default?

MacOS deserves some credit; Apple hasn't whittled away it's features too far yet, and the UI is still fairly nice from an outward-facing perspective. They focus well on keyboard-shortcuts and do a generally good job focusing on getting the basic windowing and desktop presentation right.

Really though, if you give me the choice between a Windows machine and a Mac I'm rapidly approaching the point I'd only take the Windows machine. Using MacOS, for development purposes in 2024, is a nightmare. Docker doesn't work; Homebrew is hanging on by a thread and acts different on different architectures; the Mac default coreutils play musical-chairs when they're outdated; basic APIs and cross-platform frameworks (eg. OpenGL) were forcibly removed in favor of insular non-replacements. Unless you're an absolute apologist for proprietary software solutions it's just so hard to say MacOS is a particularly great user experience today. For christsake, you type git into the terminal and get a modal asking you to download the 5gb developer toolkit - it's absurd.

Part of the problem with setting good defaults is that you're also expected to provide meaningful alternatives. That's the thing about "default" options - they implicitly suggest the existence of another possible option. Apple seems to ignore this, and the only interpretation I take away looking at their devices today is that Apple is chronically afraid of their users discovering that they don't need Apple or Apple services to enjoy their Apple hardware.

I use docker daily in development - I have little to no issue with it, it's basically transparent and I have zero complaints about its performance or behavior. Perhaps I'm not doing things as complex or unique as you are? I don't really know. I have had no problems with Docker whatsoever, bar the initial migration onto the M-series chips that was clunky and awkward for several months (I was pretty much exclusively on linux, personally, until deep in this process.) Since then it's been A-OK for me. Homebrew, similarly, has just been transparent for me - I had a clunky initial 12-months-or-so and at this point I simply don't notice that I'm on a different architecture any longer. I had a lot of complaints early in the migration to apple silicon, at this point problems at least for my use case are solved.

As for the system-level APIs, yeah - I can't speak to that. I do web development primarily professionally, and then I spend a substantial amount less time mucking around locally, mostly on stuff that runs in the terminal or as a service. I do not have experience with (nor do I use) OpenGL or other whatever other basic APIs that you're referring to - I haven't really had an issue with that (other than Apple's extremely half-hearted migration into SwiftUI which feels hacky and half-finished.)

I absolutely agree that every time I type git for the first time I'm startled by remembering that I have to download the command line dev utils to get rolling with that, I wouldn't necessarily say that I agree this is indicative of a larger problem? The machine doesn't ship with git by default but you absolutely can install git outside the command line utils path if you want to (to the best of my understanding,) that's just the default behavior to unblock you in the event you just want to Get It Done.

My personal experience right now really doesn't reflect yours, and transparently I'm not sure why. I've never felt like apple's pushed any of its specific services on me aggressively, but I've also not used a machine where I didn't have some small subscription to iCloud on my account (I use it for some backups, moving stuff between my phone and laptops) and so it's entirely possible I've just never seen that portion of the experience - I may just be blind there. I just genuinely haven't felt that railroaded by the OS. I've never been using chrome and had a popup at the OS level ask me if I want to try safari, for example. I've never opened my laptop and found that suddenly there's some weird LLM-powered assistant on my taskbar that I cannot remove without a registry change. I've never installed a system update and been taken through an onboarding flow that tried to upsell me into an iWork (or whatever it's called these days) subscription and buying more space in iCloud. The stuff I really rely on (like spotlight) consistently works, and works well. I just don't find the experience as miserable as you're describing. Maybe I just am a person who is perfectly comfortable with apple's defaults and that is my blind spot, not sure.

This is likely the answer, if you don’t pay for office365 but do pay for iCloud you’re never gonna see the iCloud ads. I pay for both so I don’t see ads for either but there are enough reports by others (on both platforms) that I believe they exist.

Regardless, I’m curious what you mean by bloatwear when comparing macOS to windows.

Both ship with apps I don’t want or use, both push me to buy their proprietary cloud services using intrusive notification ads. Both try to lock me into using their homegrown browser vs one of my own choosing.

But the Cmd+Tab behavior is also incapable of switching between multiple open windows of the same program. So if you have two Firefox Windows open, you can't switch between them with Cmd+Tab.

Cmd+Tab also has the annoying behavior of listing programs that are "running" but do not have any open windows. I still can't for the life of me figure out how this would be useful to someone.

Linux barely has functioning wifi, bluetooth, audio, and video, and Windows also has countless utilities to decrapify the OS. It's not specific to Mac just a different flavor.

After ClassicStartMenu and a number of other important utilities being flagged by Windows Defender or simply not working anymore and after start bar advertisements and un-overrideable keyboard shortcuts to open the Windows Store I didn't see what Windows had left to offer besides legacy compatibility

Believe it or not Apple, some people use multiple machines for different purposes and automatically passing my clipboard between them is an annoyance at best. I'm happy with it just being shared while I explicitly remote from one machine to another.

I just want to turn off the clipboard.

  launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.rcd.plist

Another clear sign Apple doesn't really care about it's users, it really cares about the bottom line, and getting people to sign up for their services.

macOS IO is broken in other ways for me though. It doesn‘t wake up my external monitor after waking from sleep (lid closed, powered, external keyboard).

When I plug it into the car, it automatically starts playing the same song on Apple Music

I want it to start playing Spotify instead, but that can’t be configured

Either I turn off CarPlay altogether, or I let it do what it wants

Well behaved radios don’t send that signal immediately, and instead wait for you to hit play on your device, or on your cars radio/stalk.

My car (maybe most?) helpfully sends a "play" command when my phone connects via Bluetooth. iOS devices play what was last playing, or pass the event to your music app if you've played something else in the meantime.

The fix in my case was a Shorcuts automation that gets triggered when the phone connects to your car. I set the volume to max and tell my favorite podcasts app to "Play".

If I just wanted an app to always be considered the "last played" app, I'd do something like add a one second delay and then pause. If I used Spotify, I'd also delete Apple Music.

I even trained siri to use tidal by saying “play artist on tidal” a few times. (Siri is completely useless for this use case, but it does not open apple music.)

Not trying to argue that Apple shouldn’t provide a way to stop this - just curious about why it happens at all.

I went through and did whatever it is that's supposed to stop this...but, it doesn't work. So, I sit there listening to 4 seconds of Beck while cursing each and every day.

I did manage to stop this by making a shortcut that pauses media after a Bluetooth or CarPlay connection to my car. Sometimes get a second or two of whatever’s playing, but other than that it works.

They’re using “default to” as an effective nudge mechanism towards their moat.

- I was connected to a video call with Bluetooth headphones.

- It turns out the headphones were also connected to my phone at the same time, because it started ringing via the headphones and I couldn't hear anything on the video call.

- I rejected the call.

- The headphones attempted to resume what I was doing by sending the Play command to the Macbook.

- iTunes then opened covering up my video call window.

- I tried to close with CMD+W, iTunes didn't let me because I wasn't logged in and apparently the login window isn't allowed to be closed by itself.

- I manage to close the iTunes window and try to remember what I was saying on the call.

This was all due to terrible decisions by both Apple and Sennheiser imo.

I am an Apple Music user and I have Sennheiser headset that connects both to my iPhone and Mac. Great, no problem up to here.

However, when I, say, browse Instagram on my phone, after closing it on my phone, Apple Music opens and starts playing.

Every. Single. Time.

I don't want a software that prevents Apple Music launch, I don't want to delete Apple Music (even if it was possible) as I sometimes DO use Apple Music on my Mac, I just don't want to to open and start playing the topmost song in my library on my Mac every single time after any inline media on Instagram stops playing on my iPhone.

This bug has been present for many macOS and iOS versions for many years, and Apple does nothing about it.

After reading it again, I think "beyond stupid" is an understatement.

Unbelievable.

I felt so infantilized because something that is just a userspace thing is locked to the OS.

To their credit, Apple did eventually enable WebP for those mac’s but I hate being dependent like that and having to develop software for people who are likewise dependent.

Edit: Just tried connecting my 3M Worktunes, and they didn't launch anything either.

I installed tailscale for remote support, but haven't had cause to use it.

In general it's working fantastically.

The only issue is that the USB WiFi adapter drops out rather frequently. So my one hardware concession will be to replace it with one known to be more reliable under Linux. [0]

[0] I know sometimes this can be fixed by choosing a more appropriate driver and/or Bluetooth device settings, but it's not something on which I want to spend a lot of time or headspace.

* My macbook will leave bluetooth on while it's closed and asleep.

* My BT headphones will connect to my phone and laptop if they're both on me. (It supports 2 simultanous connections)

* If I play music or podcasts I can pause through the headphones

* If I try to play it again it the "Play" action goes the macbook. (Which is effectively off so nothing happens)

* I now cant play anything on my phone. Hitting play on the app will fail.

* If I open the macbook now it will open Apple Music

* Otherwise I can hit the play/pause on my headphones then hit play on my phone it will work again.

What a bizarre useless behaviour. Why not just turn bluetooth OFF when my laptop is asleep. (It will also remain connected to wifi hotspot prevent my phone from auto-disabling wifi hotspot which has caught me a few times)

Apple's foundational ethos is that they pick a single implementation and run with it, only making it configurable if held at gunpoint.

It's when the way they obviously want you to do things is flakey and doesn't work that it becomes super annoying.

Unfortunately (or thankfully, depends on standpoint) the benefits outweigh nuisances.

Fortunately, Apple's hardware almost always 2X+ outlasts its software support, so I won't have to make an actual buying decision for many years.

I find myself constantly shuffling windows around on my setup.

Have you seen how these people work? They drive up, stop next to a car, tap the window with a window breaker, pull the chair down to look in the boot, grab anything they find, then drive off.

In and out within a minute. No time to be dicking around with Bluetooth scanners to see if there are MacBooks around.