Post #437,805
12/17/20 6:36:32 PM
12/17/20 6:36:32 PM
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M1/Big Sur: very brief first impressions
Sweet machine, but a lot of OS functionality has been withdrawn or at least concealed since last I looked three iterations ago. Certain useful UI conventions are no longer in evidence. I hope that they’ve been buried merely and not cremated.
bewilderedly,
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Post #437,826
12/18/20 4:59:33 PM
12/18/20 4:59:33 PM
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further impression
It’s true what the reviewers have said about the M1’s power consumption: the thing sips juice. After six hours on and off of putting it through its paces, the battery level is at 94%. The predecessor MBP would have gone tits-up well before noon.
cordially,
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Post #437,839
12/18/20 9:26:21 PM
12/18/20 9:26:21 PM
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That's impressive!
But, give Apple some time and they'll screw that up for at least a while.
My Apple Watch, series 4, would have roughly 75% battery charge when I took it off at night and put it on the magnetic charger. Then the Watch IOS got updated to version 7.0 and the battery charge state went to 10% at the same time of day. Fortunately, after a while, they upgraded the IOS again and things went back to normal.
Apple really sucks when it comes to proper testing before an IOS upgrade is released. They are now working at low testing standards like Microsoft. Alex
"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
-- Isaac Asimov
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Post #437,849
12/19/20 12:06:31 PM
12/19/20 12:06:31 PM
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the Night Watch
Apple really sucks when it comes to proper testing before an IOS upgrade is released. We used to say the same thing about Volkswagen, back before people started saying much worse things about them. The purchaser of a Beetle was the product tester. The spousette was having a similar problem with power drain on her Series 2. We unpaired/paired anew (an irritating and time-consuming process), which appears to have fixed it. My Series 3 claimed it didn’t have the capacity for the last system update, and here again I did the unpair thing, which apparently removed a lot of invisible cruft. I was perfectly happy with my old Timex, but the A-Watch was a gift from SWMBO a couple of years ago. I’ve come to rely on, or at least appreciate many of its functions, including the activity tracker, but I wish the thing would just give me the numbers and not try to be a goddamn life coach: “You crushed it yesterday, Rand! What’s in store today?” And of course, I’ve “closed my rings” for five hundred consecutive days and change, and dread the eventual day when, inevitably, I break the sequence. “You loser!” the watch will snarl. “You weak, contemptible loser! I don’t know why I even bother tracking you.” cordially,
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Post #437,852
12/19/20 4:40:40 PM
12/19/20 4:40:40 PM
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Thanks. THIS is succinctly why..
I've eschewd-in-advance ANY Talking /Listening-24/7 (and spreading-around the data) to $$$-mongers worldwide (without Paying Me, even)
Including WiFi--no networks here--though if a friend's laptop is handy ..maybe indulge some coffee-house WiFi just for shits & giggles.
(It's not. as. if. we hadn't been Warned ..via every dystopian screed extant, even in our childhood)
Carrion ..it's the opposite of Silence is Golden, writ-Large.
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Post #437,904
12/22/20 3:12:33 PM
12/22/20 3:12:33 PM
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a pleasant surprise
The ability for the DVD Player app to handle the VIDEO_TS convention—a functionality that appeared to have been withdrawn in “Catalina”—looks to have been restored in “Big Sur,” although without a couple of facets I appreciated in the former versions. In other news, the Finder “quick look” feature has been attenuated: where formerly I could, with the touch of a spacebar, summon up a full preview of, for example, a “Pages” word processing document, the attempt now yields up only a thumbnail of the first page. In “TextEdit,” by contrast, the entire document* is available for review. Clearly I’m going to need to get deeper into the weeds.
cordially,
*Quick look has always had its limitations. Here on Big Cheese (High Sierra) the Finder/spacebar will work its magic on Photoshop (.psd) and Illustrator (.ai) files, but not on InDesign (.indd).
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Post #437,949
12/24/20 11:03:04 PM
12/24/20 11:03:04 PM
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and an irritant
This proves to be peculiar not to the M1 series alone, but to the notebooks Apple has manufactured ever since it voted USB 2 off the island: I purchased a little accessory that affixes limpet-like to the two Thunderbolt/USB 4.0 ports on the left side of the computer, and, on the other side, yields up a Thunderbolt port, three USB 2.0-compatible ports and two card reader. Works like a charm except…it kills the WiFi. Since the internet connection had behaved flawlessly until the first time I mounted the device, and since I took the trouble to ascertain that my dodgy service had not gone down, as it is prone to, mere minutes were required to isolate the problem, which subsequent online inquiries indicate to be a “known issue,” and one which Apple, with its lofty disregard for these things (Bah! Why are you people even bothering with these deprecated technologies?), leaves perplexed users to discuss in the company’s forums, not deigning to weigh in.
Not a dealbreaker but, as I say, a minor irritant.
cordially,
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Post #437,952
12/25/20 10:13:42 AM
12/25/20 10:13:42 AM
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Apple never seems to respond to anything on their user pages.
They're not alone there, unsurprisingly. (Our local NPR station has fancy web pages, but want people to respond via T or FB or IG and ignore web comments on their own site!)
They'll probably fix it sometime, but you'll be wondering if that's true or not...
Good luck!
Cheers,
Scott.
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