My background is computer tech support.
I started with DOS, wordstar, Word Perfect, Lotus 123 all the way to Modern Windows. I’m not a programmer or developer, I’m just a guy who sits between the end user and the product. And I often write illustrated guides for some of my friends.
When I was first exposed to the Macintosh operating system as a product librarian from micro Warehouse, , I thought it was great. Just pictures instead of looking at strings of text and batch files.
But, I could do everything on it that I could do with the PC. It was just was easier.
So now I have an iPad. It looks nice, it’s thin but I can’t even download PDFs from the browser. I can’t connect to our home that works shared drive where I keep our movies, music and teaching materials.
The iPad is not in my name so I’m not using my credit card to buy any paid software. It’s a loaner.
One of my students has an iPhone. It doesn’t even have an SD card.
I want to transfer some copyright free audio books directly to him or share some
old public domain movies that are on my cards or even my shared drive.
What gives? Who wants to buy a computer that won’t let you share with others and play nice with others? What is the reason people are buying the iOS?
Maybe as a DOS Windows user I just can’t feel it.
I may buy the iPad from my friend if I can get a decent priced lightning to USB adapter that will allow me to use the mouse. Since I own Microsoft office out right I have privileges of using the Apple version which I must say is kind of superior. But I need the mouse.
Apple wants $1,000 Plus for their so-called camera USB adapter which can access the mouse. That seems like a lot of money. Does anybody have any experience with a cheaper OTG devices available from third parties?
Wait you guys are Apple fans you like to pay full price.
I have an iPhone, and have for many years. It was just easier since google is blocked in China and I couldn’t read chinese. I have been thinking about changing back to android for some time now, and I actually am waiting for a new android phone in the mail now.
I’m done with iOS. My complaints are: WebKit, App Store restrictions, not being allowed to side load apps, Apple not giving me the option to do more with the base OS, very very closed source, (until recently) safari was the default browser, swear words are ducking changed on me even though I’m an adult, etc. I’m sure I can come up with more. That’s all I can think of now.
I do love my MacBook. It’s great. Very well built and the OS runs smoothly. With homebrew I can install other stuff for programming or whatever I want. I do feel like macOS is getting a bit bloated though. It’s going the same way as windows, but nowhere near that bad yet.
I think most people don’t care because all they want to do is use apps, browse the internet, watch videos, be a blue chat bubble, and take selfies. iOS is great at those things. Plus, Apple convinced everyone they’re really cool, and not having one makes you a cheap/poor loser.
Apple has fantastic marketing and few shits given towards customers or manufacturing. they are essentially a cult, i dont think there is really much else to consider about when pondering why they do what they do. I really cant stand their constrained trickery to screw people out of more money. I also cant understand why people are so brainwashed into thinking so much of it is worth the pain.
Apple is the scientology of tech, however people still like them for some strange reason.
i have to use 3 different systems for work (macOS, Windows, Linux) i’m an end user and have been for 30 years. in the beginning each had their own part to play.
AutoCAD and Office stuff was on Windows, Image manipulation and layout was on Apple, rendering/rasterization and industrial machinery ran on linux,
Servers and backend storage was a mix of windows/linux.
Nowadays they can all do the same stuff just a case of learning a different way of working, apple is more expensive for the initial outlay but in my opinion seams to work a lot longer.
I’m typing this on a 9 year old MacBook that still runs the latest version of Photoshop etc, my iPhone is about 5 years old i changed the battery last year but all still works fine.
I have windows and linux machines at home also but they sometimes take a bit of tinkering especially after updates (always back up before an update).
As for your problems of sending files on iOS, its just the same as android download free apps from the app store, just set up a free account my 8 year old iPad still connect to my windows based server/storage and i don’t like paying for apps if there is a free option out there.
Homebrew? Homebrew Mac. Interesting…
If you can suggest some articles please do.
Back to IOS. Use apps for what. I want to download a PDF of a study guide of a book I’m teaching. I’m in a Google Chrome and I push where the download button should be and I get an upload button.
I can upload the PDF into my Google drive.
But even in Google drive I cannot download the PDF to my iPad so I could open it in my word processor to copy and edit the charts I need.
There’s nothing more basic than being able to download edit and then upload documents. It’s so frustrating.
And again I have a vast variety of public domain movies that are not available easily on the web on my server. I want to watch them on the nice screen the iPad has.
But I can’t seem to find the file manager that will allow me to access my shared drives.
Super Frustrating.
Please link or private message me the file manager or other app that is guaranteed to allow me to connect to my shared drives and upload and download files from web pages.
I have bad luck selecting the correct packages.
Homebrew is basically just like a Linux package manager, i.e. apt, for MacOS. Here’s their home page. It’s not very fancy or anything. It saves stuff to /opt/homebrew/, and you just add /opt/homebrew/bin to your sources to run stuff from the terminal. Also, Homebrew can help you replace MacOS crap libraries with other versions. For example, I needed the OpenSSL library for something a while back. MacOS has OpenSSL, but it’s not usable somehow, so I installed OpenSSL using Homebrew.
I’ve used it to install ffmpeg, MySQL libraries (to link to from something I was writing), OpenSSL, Wine, and others, like I’m pretty sure you can install stuff like Apache or Nginx and really any database as a backend.
My point for mentioning Homebrew is just to contrast iOS and MacOS. iOS sucks because it restricts its users too much. MacOS doesn’t as much.
As for the pdf thing, no idea. I usually use my computer to do that kind of thing. Maybe open in Chrome or another browser then use the share thing? I’ve found that to be helpful in the past when faced with this kind of problem. Maybe like Share > open in Google Drive > then share it from there?