Children use smartphones way more than “PC” computers today.
So here’s a teacher’s insight:
Mac:PC:Chromebook Rich—Poor
There is a very strong correlation between the wealth of the kids on my module, and the device they have.
Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of local files without being shown. PC users, alas, snort too much SharePoint these days to be considered healthy - trying to save a word document locally these days is like climbing a mountain blindfolded. As for the Chromebook kids, they do their best with what they have, and given how little compatibility those devices have with the software I teach, I’m proud of them.
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Most of the time it’s realising the difference between local and cloud storage. A lot of students get confused when trying to upload their first coursework - usually it’s solved by just showing them the difference between local files (this is stored in a permanent local place) and cloud storage (this is stored permanently somewhere else).
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Maybe it’s to do with the number of mouse buttons.
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Mac users really struggle to understand the concept of
For me, it was trying to explain to a Mac user that she should have a separate profile on her Mac for work vs. personal
She’d convinced her employer that she could work from home using her own Mac (the office was all Macs except for the video production suite), and he said OK. Didn’t ask me, of course. Despite me saying a long time ago when someone else floated the idea, that it was poor practice from a security viewpoint.
Then three days later the call came - “I can’t access work files”. So I remote in, she’s got links to her personal iCloud Drive directories somehow mixed up with the work Google Drive.
I started to explain about using a different profile for work and just got a blank stare.
“You log off your personal profile and log into the work profile”
“How do I do that?”
I am probably the only person ever to grow up with a UNIX terminal server as my home computer. any crazy IT thing i do now pales in comparison to my dad, running ethernet cables through our heating ducts in a probable building code violation
**As someone who has ran fiber and ethernet to companies post a category 5 hurricane to get network connections back online for paychecks across 7 states including the virgin Islands… I have never seen that. And we used satellite radio dishes to send signals across areas when we rewired the emergency center (police, fire, etc) under marshall law. It’s fucking humbling to have all bridges shut down in the area to try to cut down on people pillaging and have them give you a badge to cross under any conditions no matter the danger because you are considered “needed.”. Some other poor souls could have stood on the beach watching it come in piling shit up and running home to drag my chicken coop into the garage throw 2 dogs in the car and “evacuate” only to where the hurricane actually ended up hitting harder. I was an idiot, but the office building i was working from was on the front of the Los Angeles times or w.e the next day to show the destruction. We dug crabs and sucked water for days out of pipes to get Ethernet run in moves for months… But yet I have never seen someone run them though heating ducts haha. (True story)
Edit: circa Hurricane Michael, Panama City 2018
…you dad did very well; give him a hug this december…
“Autistic children will be discluded from the study for skewing results”
“Autism involves a significant deviation from expected behaviour”
They have played us for absolute fools.
(I know autism describes a real cluster of traits, but it is only socially constructed norms that define those traits as aberrant, I am not saying it isn’t real)
Yeah, we create the rules that decide whether or not someone is autistic, and we decide what is viewed as “weird” (honestly, everyone is weird, if you were perfectly average in every way, you would actually, in a way, be weird)
Imagine paying for a blue tick on Xitter.
could’ve been before elongated muskrat bought it
It’s not unfortunately, there’s a date of 09/12/2024 under the original tweet
oh… oh… oh…
Wait, if “Linux”=autistic, what does that make us GNU/Linux users?
Keep in mind that autism is a spectrum
Linux -> GNU/Linux -> GNU/Hurd?
-> booting emacs as an OS
-> UEFI IRC client written in Rust
My commodore 64 laughs at the false dichotomy.
Yes, where we were
READYto solve problems like “is that game ported to my system” and “is it any good?”FWIW, we were also dropped immediately into a BASIC interpreter, day one. PC’s may have been priming IT professionals, but were C64 users primed to be programmers?
I dunno, maybe it depends on the age. I grew up with a G3 PowerPC and system 9, and I did spend a little time with early OSX (panther). My schools had these terrible Athlon boxes that could barely run XP without blowing up, and as I was leaving high school they were trying to get them to run Vista. That gave me the early impression that Macs were just better, until I went to a vocational school with Ivy Bridge Dell laptops running Windows 7. A friend of mine convinced me to try Linux, and I was impressed with how much easier it was to set up for development, but I ultimately stuck with Windows hosts for gaming, and Linux VMs, then Docker, then WSL for development. I’m still trying to put in the work now for moving away from Windows entirely now that AI is here and gaming on Linux is better. I think maybe it might just come down to having the resources, because if I got to try all three with at least decent hardware, I would have made that journey a lot faster.
Too bad correlation does not imply causation.
When I was 13 I installed Linux in Virtualbox on a Mac because for some reason thought dual booting would be harder, we did not have any non-apple devices in the house, I do not recommend, the performance was terrible (I probably had something set up wrong because it was really way worse than you would expect)
I have ended up on Windows with a Linux laptop for traveling, but will probably switch to Linux as soon as either:
- I get a new VR headset
- Monado gets decent controller tracking support
- It’s 2026 and Windows with WMR support has stopped getting security updates
Then I will have crossed the whole mac->windows->linux pipeline.
I feel attacked !
Or seen. same difference.
Seems like one of those bell curve memes with macOS on the left and right and windows in the center
Clowns to the left of me
Jokers to the right
Here I am, stuck in the middle with you
Bigger distinction: Kids with computers vs. kids with “smart” devices.
I feel that is the difference we’re seeing though. Younger kids who generally live on smart devices have lower tech literacy.
And apple phones are “smart devices”
Why insert the qualifier there?
Because my phone isnt a smart device. Its a dumb device that does nothing by itself and everything i tell it to do. It allows me to remove things i dont like without self destructing and locking me out. It works offline without complaining. It doesnt spy on me.
That doesn’t really answer my question. I’m going to conclude that you just have some personal issue with Apple.
I wouldn’t blame them. It’s really difficult to do anything Apple hasen’t planned for on their tablets.
She must have had a Mac. Only Windows teaches both the knowledge and the fury to convince children to switch to Linux.
Switching from apple is like breaking out of prison.
Coming from windows it’s a breath of fresh air
For me as a user it always looked like Microsoft looks at how Apple does it and is eagerly employs the worst practices of not allowing the user to do anything ‘forbidden’ and not giving the user control in general.
Google is doing pretty much the same with Android for a long time, too.
Real question, what things on Apple were so restrictive that you think it’s a prison?
My only apple device was an iPod and it was the most cumbersome thing ever. Trying to put music on it on my own laptop was impossible as iTunes wouldn’t install. So I’d need to use someone else’s computer which would default to synchronizing their library with my device. So all my loser video game soundtracks will be on someone else’s device or their american sex music will be on mine. And those 33 pin or whatever Proprietary Cables broke if you breathed on it. Adding music was the closest thing to pulling teeth without actually pulling teeth.
Getting an Android phone instead of an iPhone was literally like breaking free. I can manage my own files directly on the device. I can download apps from anywhere. I can download music without proprietary software and expensive fragile cables. Oh, right, and I can charge it with the same cable my old brick phone used, the one that came with my portable charger, and one that powered my USB fan. A Standard Cable. Ffs.
American sex music
Lmao
I had a very similar experience with the ipod and avoid everything apple ever since.
ITunes did install on my windows laptop (wondering why i had to do that tho, why couldn’t i just drag my mp3’s to the device folder??), but it was still an instant locked-in experience. Whatever went into iTunes/ipod seemed near impossible to get back out. Mp3 in, gibberish out. Encoded to some apple © tm format, lost into the void. Coming from a normal mp3-player that was very unexpected and unpleasant.
The only thing I liked about it was the (hardware) wheel.
So absolutely nothing to do with Mac at all. And you’re referencing a cable that hasn’t been used in literally over a decade and comparing it to a a cable that you’re using now? You do realize Android phones in 2010 used proprietary cables too, right?
Lightning is still a problem on devices more than about 1.5 years old (everything “smart” that I own) and I’ve never had an Android phone that didn’t use USB, though some had additional proprietary connectors for a dock.
I got my first android (Samsung Galaxy S3) in 2014, before I had a LG Rumor Touch. Both used micro USB.
I was turned off from Apple anything after having an iPod as a gift and discreetly hating it. I was further turned off when I saw that an iPad is just an elongated iPod Touch rather than a Microsoft Surface which is literally a PC.
So micro usb, the literal worst standardized usb connector in existence, is what you are claiming is better than an iPhone’s omnidirectional lighting connector.
And you know how I can tell you haven’t ever touched an iPad? 🤦♂️ “an elongated iPod touch” smdh.
An iPad is a fisher price toy for the price of a Surface. It’s nothing. I used the ones in school and when I was an election day employee. They’re scams
Mini is worse than micro, which is better than all the proprietary connectors it obsoleted
Lightning connector (2012) would be equal to USB-C (initially designed in 2012).
Micro USB would be equal to the 30 pin connector (and overlapping with mini USB.)
I - carefully - maintained a music library. Got an ipod. Loved the device. Though sync via itunes was cumbersome.
Wanted to sync my tracks back to another device. Nope. Not supported. Everz track was rewritten into some garbage, including its tags.
Locked in a prison without knowing.
My elderly parents got iphones. They started sharing pictures via their message app. Required multiple times showing them that we - android users - receive aweful pictures. Prison.
Apple watch is only syncing with iphones. Prison.
Used to be an app developer. Releasing something as open source for ios is not feasible. You have to anually pay 120 USD to publish. Prison. Therefore you release the app in a paid manner. They tell you which price to raise. And tax 30%. Prison.
A friend wrote a thesis with some apple-writer thingy. Asked me for some help saving in the required file format. Couldn’t manage to. Prison.
Every app on the App Store is so bad because of that fee too. There just basically isn’t anything open source. Its 90% of the reason why I switched to Android.
“Vendor lock-in” is the backbone philosophy for the entire company and literally every single product and service it has ever created.
Except wifi
What about WiFi? Apple didn’t invent WiFi, Australian public funded research institute CSIRO did.
They didn’t invent it, but when they made wifi products they didn’t limit them to just apples.
I saw a documentary once about the engineers working to make wifi a thing with Apple devices. I can’t find it, but you can see how the crowd reacts seeing it for the first time https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HFngngjy4fk
Out of all of these only your last point is valid and even that is being changed as they get hit by ant-monopoly stuff, I don’t care if the apple watch only works with the iphone or that the ipods are best used with an iphone, i have used my fair share of bluetooth headphones on android and I have a generic smartwatch from Huawei and they fuck off, they have terrible UX.
For most of the shit I do, I just want something that works, for the niche shit I have Linux/windows on my desktop PC.
With iPhones yeah, but MacOS is not very locked down at all. You can run all the unsigned code you want.
Although you could argue the new Apple Silicon Macs are kind of locked down, since Apple only allows kernel extensions on the older Intel Macs
god, running unsigned apps was a pain though.
it’s always puzzled me why Apple themselves call installing non approved software “jailbreaking”, they’re straight up stating that their os is a jail
They weren’t the ones to come up with the name, so they have to follow what everyone else calls it.
apple usually renames existing concepts to make them sound better though
I don’t know. I think Mac gets a lot of hate simply because it’s a Unix that was sold to the devil and comes with a satanic concierge service.
Like, I’m not saying that selling your soul to the devil is possible but if I had to pick a handful of people that on the whole I would say probably did I would pick Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Elon musk, Jeffrey bezos, Larry Page, Vladimir Putin, and probably every Hollywood social elite and musician that sells a platinum record, every Republican senator, congress person, and every president after Jimmy Carter, and every CEO whose company is worth more than 10 million dollars who didn’t inherit the company from their parents.
Don’t forget Robert Jordan
The ambassador or the guy that wrote The wheel of Time series?
My mistake, Robert Johnson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Johnson
growing up my family had a mac desktop that i had access to while really young. eventually realized mac is a little terrible, so i tried bootcamp to get some proper use out of the computer. i successfully installed windows, but somehow fucked up and formatted the mac partition. all for windows to also suck
What did your parents do?
my parents were understandably pissed because i had deleted at least a few hundred gigabytes of photos and videos from the last decade. iirc i was banned from touching the computer for at least a year, which was funny because i was literally the only one who used it
Even as an adult I don’t trust myself not to fuck up so whenever I do installing or partitionning, I always disconnect my drive that contains the personal files.
Eh, I grew up with Macs, but I couldn’t afford a Mac for my first computer, or even a windows license. I got a computer from a family friend that was broken which I fixed up and installed Linux on.
This isn’t right at all… Mac’s are awful if you want to do things like play most video games. Linux is much the same.
That’s right. I said it. Come downvote me, fanboys, I don’t mind. I’ve seen what makes you cheer.
Proton is way better than whatever thing Apple has going on (didn’t they say they were working on their own proton-like thing? did they just forget about it? I remember seeing a video with some sort of dev preview a while ago…)
Most video games work perfectly in Linux now…
When I was 12 I installed Linux… and now I have autism. And I’m gay!
That’s like half the fediverse here
We get it, you use Arch.
Gaytism
There’s truly not individual unique experiences.
Well there’s a simple explanation right? When you’re growing up grappling with issues like homosexuality, disability or just feeling like an outsider - spending more time at a computer provided an escape from a judgemental and unwelcoming world. This is the same reason so many of us are night owls well into adulthood, cause we grew up feeling safer when the adults were asleep and we could maintain our personal boundaries.
I’m autistic and gay but I also have a secret third thing that stopped me from figuring out linux. The “AD” in ADHD (there needs to be a better way to distinguish between having attention deficit, hyperactivity, or hybrid). I have tried like four times now to figure out linux and my brain just doesn’t get the dopamine it needs from that activity and I just can’t focus 🫠
There is a shoet way to say it: Inattentive type (type I), Hyperactive type (type H), and Combination type (type C)
I routinely describe myself as ADHD type C
C
There is a way to distinguish them ! There is Innatentive type, Hyperactive-impulsive type and Combined type
It looks like Linux got much friendlier as of lately, and requires much less figuring out, but ymmv and you can of course run into issues, unfortunately.
Nowadays we usually have the benefit of being connected to the internet from something other than the computer we’re fiddling with, it was quite hard to troubleshoot modem issues when you need that modem to work for the internet connection.
Weird flex, but ogay.
