A rant of minor implications

 I've been spending a lot of time On my new MacBook Pro, and I was really hoping it would rekindle my interest in Apple. I went through some shit last year and was spending a lot of time playing video games and chasing other means of escape. You can't really play games on a Mac. You can, but it is really limited. I have had enormous difficulties with Steam, and I can't really get behind console gaming. It's alright for a bit, but I get bored with it, especially when I know there's something better, like PC gaming. All of this is to say I was on a Windows 10 machine a lot, and you just kind of get used to it after a while. It's also terribly Mac-like in it's behavior, so I don't mind it. I can't say it gets me inspired, but it's a tool to start games and watch videos.

So, in any case...I have been trying to figure out the way that I want too set up my home network server. A really good friend gifted me an Apple Xserve running Snow Leopard, and I had tried to set that up a few times. Each time getting a little bit closer to running a server, but never quite getting right. Kerberos is a little above my pay grade, apparently. I wanted to order a few upgrades for the XServe. I bought a USB 3 card (and had it delivered to the wrong address), a new internal drive (which was sold offline to someone else) and was planning on upgrading it to Mountain Lion to turn it into a big-ole file server. I have a small army of external hard drives and I figured I could plug them all in. Then I could set up a media server from that. Seemed like a good idea at the time.

BUT, I didn't get the upgrades and I started playing around with moving files on the network. During which I realized that I get file copying problems as much as I get 30k's in Star Citizen. I can excuse Lightroom as it really isn't meant to do network file copying; At least that's my understanding. But The Finder?!? What the hell?? This thing has gotten buggy as crap when using network stuff. I won’t even discuss Music and the travesty that has become. I mean I guess it works if you use Apple Music subscription streaming. But try to use your own media and it is constantly reminding me that I am not paying Apple to stream SOME of my media, because my music collection keeps disappearing when the artists can no longer afford because of money or morals to pay Apple their 30% cut. Podcasts has managed to become as bloated as iTunes, News is just a reminder that you’re paying Apple for its News service. There’s no way to watch your movies reliably unless you stream them, and maybe you didn’t learn the lesson about media disappearing from Music? The App Store is only useful if you know what you were going to get before opening it. Discovery is just god awful. Everything feels like an ad to get you to buy the same apps that they’ve been pushing since it was introduced (the store or the individual app, you decide)

So, my question is, What the hell, Apple? When they become so astoundingly bland? Space grey is the new beige. The laptops aren’t beautiful anymore, they’re utilitarian.  The OS Looks like it was designed by a very blissed out second year design student. The whole thing is just...meh. Apple as a whole has become meh, at best. There is so much power in these machines, but you can’t access it anymore unless you go command line ninja. Everything is decided in machine learning. The new settings app is wildly confusing. You could make it look like iOS and still have it grouped logically. I can’t find anything in settings. I wanted to use an external monitor with my MBP, but they took away the overscan controls, so I can’t use the one I wanted to.

I played the few games that I have because I really wanted to flex the GPUs and screen. They do look freaking amazing. Just gorgeous with hi FPS rates...BUuuuuuuut, steam won’t run on this machine. Well, it will, but not after you launch it the first time. Every time after the first launch crashes. I have no idea what that is about. I looked for fixes, but I couldn’t find any. So every time I close it, I have to erase completely and reinstall, which seems a bit much to me. Plus, I got a small hard drive to keep the cost from being INSANE, thinking I could just add externals...and you can, sort of. They can’t really hold anything but data. With the size of today’s games and my collection, I would fill up my hard drive with games. I already had to decide between a music or video set up. Having Final Cut Pro, Motion and Logic all on this machine would eat up two thirds of the hard drive , all told. So...yeah. The unified chip memory thing they got going is really great, except tyou’re stuck with it for the life of the machine. No upgrades to hard drive, memory or chip. That blows. But it is insanely fast. I can rip an entire movie in about an hour, the slow point is definitely the DVD drive, once it’s open the machine, it zips through it. I rendered a 4k image I designed in Daz3d in an insanely short period of time the other night. That was nice. So you ca do things with this machine. The developers are making really cool stuff, they are just clearly hamstringed by Apple. The OS just feels like it gets in the way more than it should. Not as bad as iPadOS, but I keep running into things I know can be done in the command line, but the GUI for it seems to be gone now. 

I think I just got use to Snow Leopard very quickly. I really felt like Apple was enticing me to push everything just a little bit further. To learn just a little bit more so I could find out what that button does. Why it’s there, why don’t I know what it is? Now it feels like Apple is saying “don’t worry, you don’t need to do that unless you know the commands in terminal already. So just get back in your lane where you belong consumer.”

Android seems to have just the opposite problem. EVERYTHING has an option from a 3rd party that will fix that. There are so many random useless free apps that just want your cookies. And all the data, give it all. It’s not creepy at all how much they track you. I don’t find it weird at all that my phone only sends millions of messages when I am right next to it or having just made a call. It’s like it’s listening so it only will make noise when I can ignore it. I don’t know, I might be paranoid on that one.