Kids, if you’re wondering what grandma and grandpa could do with an Apple II in the '70s and '80s that made it worth thousands of dollars, the answer is: Nothing
It was an expensive toy
a Rubik’s Cube for the price of a car
I’m glad you have a smoother experience. I volunteered to update my friend’s laptop w Win10 factory installed which I figured it’s fully supported & from a reputable vendor, HP. She hardly installed anything so I figured this should be straight-forward.
Nope. The May 2020 Update broke. I reset the computer to factory and let update run & still broken - seriously? As a QA manager in a past life, naked, baseline upgrades should be the most basic configuration to get working.
I searched the net for the specific error code and nobody could tell me what the machine is trying to communicate.
I decided I’d be patient and let Microsoft patch things up in June and it was a circus over again and discovered plenty of others in the same boat. Microsoft publishing a table of error codes on the net so people can fix their own computers is not rocket science.
I’ve been able to troubleshoot macOS issues for 16 years just by digging in /System & /var looking at log files & asking lots of questions in Apple Discussions and StackExchange for the most part.
Same goes for Linux. I eventually gave up on Windows and installed Ubuntu for her and told her not to look back!
I really wish I could say I had the rock solid experience I had with WinXP and Win2k (I honestly did) with Win10 and I can’t.
I hope Microsoft figures out how to make Win10 disappear into the sunset just like Apple is figuring out how to make macOS 10 fade. I don’t particularly like Catalina (10.15) & its clear Apple moved their best engineers to the iOS team to execute multiple transitions so macOS took a few punches the last few releases quality and performance-wise. Given the stability and performance of iPadOS & what it demonstrates possible, I am able to forgive Apple for macOS instabilities.
I sincerely hope Microsoft is being just as strategic & all this fragility is a similar short-term sacrifice for something amazing that put them back on the map!
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its clear Apple has observed & is thinking long and hard about the problem. They waited 5 years (2015-2020) to introduce trackpad support to the iPadPro & I’m clear (1) they weren’t going to do it half-ass and (2) they wanted developers to spend a full decade (2010-2020) envisioning & rooting themselves in what “touch first” iPad apps are & look like. Now we have a vibrant set of iOS apps not trying to be like their desktop counterparts (ok some are guilty and def not the norm)
I don’t see Apple giving up these guns. They say the MacBook and iPadOS will always be different and I believe them. Sure, it may make sense to merge hardware 5-10 years from now. I think it’s important to Apple to figure out with developers what the hell it means to bring iOS apps to macOS 11 - to an operating system that is “mouse first” and “windowed first”
I have a feeling Apple may intentionally delay bringing touch screens to Mac (believe me, I’m first in line for a touchscreen Apple Silicon mac!) just to ensure Apple and developers understand what this hybrid paradigm is & how to tweak macOS 11 to handle it.
Then, it will make sense to backport apps from macOS to iPadOS and they can’t be in a rush. again, while I am impatient for Xcode on my iPadPro, it probably will be a good 3-5 years & expect to just get a new MacBook in the meantime & not a deal breaker for me.
Meanwhile, plenty of game developers will really put the portability of apps in the Apple ecosystem to the test and we’ll get our answers as to whether Apple plays their cards right divvying up mouse vs touch (and technically the AR game) over the next decade!
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I’m not sure how useful it would be to have touch functionality on a laptop. Windows laptops have supported the feature and for the most part i never think about it, though its likely because of my expectations of not needing/wanting it.
This is one of those things where you can’t “just do it” or it isn’t useful. Touch doesn’t map at all well to mouse interfaces, despite laypeople’s intuition that it should. You need completely differently-sized hit targets, tracking behavior, UI layouts, and UX models. It’s too complex a topic to summarize in a BB post, but suffice it to say that simply enabling touch as mouse clicks (as Windows 8 did) leads to nothing particularly useful. Apple gets this, which is why I suspect there has never been a touch-screen MBP.
while this is only my own personal experience, touch in a laptop form factor is more relevant once you’ve pivoted to touch-first devices - esp if it’s iPadOS attached to an external keyboard most of the time.
going back to my laptop has me wanting to touch the screen just out of habit.
its really for convenience & supporting (rather than breaking) flow. I would never say it’s a necessity.
I can relate, my friend’s Windows laptop is touch and I’m never motivated to touch the screen because all its apps were designed to be mouse/keyboard-first - and particularly because UI elements are too small (which is why macOS 11 already looks more touch-friendly for reasons we don’t know yet!)
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I suspect, without having any real evidence, that touch is a bit more appealing, when available, than a mouse/trackpad since the mouse or trackpad imposes a heavier cognitive load on the user to accomplish a task.
I’ve seen people prefer the touchscreen when their hand was already on the mouse. I can’t think how to explain that unless it’s just easier to move the thing directly instead of having to relate mouse to screen to hand.
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