I can’t do the most basic of tasks on Apple Music on my Windows PC - I literally can’t play music!
I’ve tried:
- redownloading the app
- deleting all local state in the Music folder
- logging out of my account, and logging back in
- deauthorising my PC, then reauthorising it
It just never starts playback, no matter what I do!
Cider works fine. The Music apps on my phone and Mac work fine. Very weird.
edit: plus, they have a lot of problems with music artists getting mixed together - if an artist has a common name, say “Ray”, you’ll see music from other artists with the same name mixed in. Apple’s support totally disclaim responsibility and said I should contact the record label to get them to correct it. This is absolutely ridiculous, and the record label predictably doesn’t care. It ruins recommendations :/
I wish Ian Hislop would drop his opposition to doing a sensible online version - I'd happily subscribe for access to the same content posted online, but when I get it posted through my door I find I don't read it.
eg:
cocoaui: fix images being incorrectly aligned on high dpi displays
We were calculating the position of the image in logical pixels, but not converting that to actual display pixels for rendering.
I think it's a really nice style that makes commit messages really easy to scan in a short log, and lets you ignore commits easily that don't touch the area you're interested in
Laptops have advantages though - for a remote team, they're often a lot more convenient. A lot of people don't have space for a full permanent desk setup for a work desktop on top of their personal use - UK houses aren't huge!
Desktops work if you have an office, but our dev team is entirely remote. But you can't take a desktop into a meeting, or take a desktop on the train to our office for in-person meetings/events.
These are fair points, and definitely a rough spot.
Eg at work we use M1/M2 macs and dev on those using docker - so that’s a Linux VM essentially with some nice tooling wrapped around it.
We certainly see differences - mostly around permissions (as docker for Mac doesn’t really enforce any access checks on files on the host), but we also mostly deploy to ARM Linux on AWS.
We went Mac only from a mix of Linux, Windows and Mac as we found the least overall friction there for our developers - Windows, even with WSL, had lots of problems, including performance issues. Linux we had issues finding nice laptops, and more support issues (developers are often not *nix experts!). Mac was a nice middle ground in the end.
Being Mac only can be an advantage - I’ve been on both sides of trying to maintain & use non-trivial dev environments and the more OSes you bring in for people to work on, the harder it gets.
Bringing in Windows or Linux has a set up cost and a maintenance cost that may exclude it from even being considered.
Edit: plus, Macs are ARM, other options are inevitably x86. So it’s also two CPU architectures to maintain support for, on top of OS specific quirks - and even if you use eg Docker, you still have a lot of OS specific quirks in play :/
I have a 35W AMD 5750GE (zen 3, 8c16t), along with M1, M1 Max and M2 Pro devices - the AMD processor and M1/M2 chips trade blows depending on workload.
It’s absolutely possible to get x86_64 to the same power/performance envelope as apple’s M series chips :)
I deleted my Reddit account because I don't want to support Reddit any longer, so I lose access to anything I used "Sign in with Reddit" for - it's subtle lock in that tends to only hit issues months later.
It's why I never use social media logins for anything that gives me the choice not to.
I remember getting this jump accidentally - I bought a M1 Mac Mini for porting stuff too and for testing, and building on it was twice as fast as my 2018 15" i7. And it was silent doing it. Pity it was only the 8GB base spec, because it would have made an amazing main machine!
The huge list of projects from that era of Apple really shows how aimless they were.
I remember at the time how more and more irrelevant they seemed compared to the Wintel behemoth, and that really didn’t start to turn around until the G3 iMac, and later the iPod.
At work, the m1/m2 airs are exactly what we buy for most employees. The base spec is absolutely fine for most of our staff, and they’ll get 3+ years out of them.
Edit: devs get 32G pros though, and we loathe the extra RAM pricing on those. Cheap compared to the cost of a developer, though!
I’ve tried:
- redownloading the app
- deleting all local state in the Music folder
- logging out of my account, and logging back in
- deauthorising my PC, then reauthorising it
It just never starts playback, no matter what I do!
Cider works fine. The Music apps on my phone and Mac work fine. Very weird.
edit: plus, they have a lot of problems with music artists getting mixed together - if an artist has a common name, say “Ray”, you’ll see music from other artists with the same name mixed in. Apple’s support totally disclaim responsibility and said I should contact the record label to get them to correct it. This is absolutely ridiculous, and the record label predictably doesn’t care. It ruins recommendations :/