Thanks Beej been using your guides for a long time. Appreciate your hard work!

Recession is becoming a reality and that equates to companies laying off their employees. Don't count your eggs before they hatch.

Heavy Metal also inspired the 5th element

A choice of weapons - Gordon Parks

Before using a Mac I was told how glorious it was and a feat of engineering. Reality is that the Mac and associated products are not as perfect as Apple fans make it out to be. The window manager on Mac makes me want to scream. Navigating the file system in Finder is not intuitive and don't get me started on the Magic Mouse and it's charging port...

I work on a Macbook, play games on a Windows machine, carry around a Chromebook, and use Linux in various places (web hosting, WSL, etc.). I agree that the Mac is a nice machine but not everything is intuitive.

When I had a PowerMac, every time I needed to burn a CD/DVD I had to look up the steps. Dragging a window from one monitor to the other often doesn't display the window, and if a window is full-screen, Option-Tab won't bring any other windows on top of it.

The hardware is nice, and generally high quality, but my battery started to bulge and the repair (replace keyboard and new batter) was over $500.

I like it, but I wouldn't turn up my nose at alternatives. Since most of my job is typing, and web browsing, almost anything short of a Commodore VIC-20 would be fine.

Some more that I find rather annoying:

- Login screen sometimes has US keyboard layout even when the language selector shows otherwise.

- "Installing apps" where you drag them on the applications folder and you get no progress for that copy operation anywhere.

- Permission changes, for example for camera and microphone access, require application restarts.

- Photos application unable to handle even a small amount of pictures copied from my phone, crashes or freezes your machine.

- Thumbnail size in file selection dialogs and even directly in Finder is completely useless.

'"Installing apps" where you drag them on the applications folder and you get no progress for that copy operation anywhere.'

What apps do you install that take so long that a progress bar would be useful?

"- Photos application unable to handle even a small amount of pictures copied from my phone, crashes or freezes your machine."

I have thousands of pictures in Photos, and it has never once frozen or crashed. Are you doing something unusual?

"- Thumbnail size in file selection dialogs and even directly in Finder is completely useless."

This is adjustable.

Trying to configure a keyboard that isn't US ANSI is terrible, I can pick UK in the keyboard preferences and the flag changes but it remains as ANSI.

I can use control+left/right to switch desktops, but can use shift+control+left/right to move a window left or right.

What do you find non-intuitive about the Finder? This is a serious question, not a troll or anything.

IMO it hides less about the disk layout than Windows Explorer does, but "it's better than Windows Explorer" is a low bar indeed.

"don't get me started on the Magic Mouse and it's charging port"

I use that mouse every day and I've literally NEVER needed to use it while charging. It warns me with ample time and charges insanely quickly. I get a warning? I'll plug it in when I get a coffee or over lunch. End of.

The other thing that nobody seems to pay any attention to is this: The current Magic Mouse is pretty much EXACTLY the same as the prior AAA-powered version except for the battery and charging. I'd bet folding money that one reason they went the way they did was that it allowed them to make zero design changes outside the area that USED to hold AAA batters, and now holds the rechargeable battery and port.

This means they could do a rechargeable version without a major redesign -- which would've been required. The whole upper shell of the mouse moves down when you click, which means putting a port on the front wasn't going to work.

But, again: it's 100% a non-issue for me. I don't actually know anyone in real life who has trouble with this.

My mainboard on my MBP died twice; replaced the first time but it's too expensive to replace again.

The touchpad started to drift and the clicking mechanism started to go wonky.

In short, I think the MBP is pretty solid, but if you get a lemon build version, you're stuck with it.

I am not afraid of doing an exit interview and putting everything on display, specially if leadership is toxic. It's important for HR to understand problems within the company so that they can be addressed. I have done this with no issues arising from it even though I have referenced that same employer in my resume.

It is rarely, if ever, HR's job to fix toxic leadership.

Potentially toxic middle management on the other hand...

I've actually carefully avoided saying stuff that was substantially true about managers precisely because I knew that (i) it'd match what other leavers had said and (ii) I'd been there a lot longer, and knew the real issues were structural, but if the company decided there was an issue with staff turnover it wasn't the big picture stuff they'd go for.

I have suffered from imposter syndrome in the past and it stemmed from a previous job where the leadership intended to make you feel useless and incompetent. I have overcome it recently and have more confidence in myself these days. I am not aware why people would use imposter syndrome as a way to brag but for myself I genuinely didn't feel comfortable about myself.

An unlocked mobile device cannot be locked to a carrier because the SIM lock mechanism is disabled, which basically tells me he got a phone that he thought was unlocked but was actually locked to T-Mobile.

Keep in mind that Apple’s modern SIM lock implementation is built into the OS and has nothing to do with the modem being locked, so all assumptions about modem locks no longer apply.

Apple’s SIM lock “feature” checks in with Apple over the internet (including over the disallowed SIM, since the modem itself is always unlocked) and refuses to let you proceed if the current SIM doesn’t match the policy returned by the backend.

Obviously the policy can be changed at any time. This is also how this “flex carrier lock” is implemented.

> An unlocked mobile device cannot be locked to a carrier because the SIM lock mechanism is disabled

If it's a Best Buy "unlocked" iPhone it can! It was unlocked when he bought it, but locked onto the first network it was activated (Fi is T-Mobile[1] MVNO)

1. and AT&T too for fully supported Fi phones - you can get seamlessly handed over between T-Mobile, AT&T and wifi. However, iPhone are not fully supported, so they exclusively use T-Mobile.

Yes, usenet was huge for me back in the early 90s when I had questions on C programming. I would ask them on comp.programming.c and had some of the best programmers providing guidance. Of course they were strict with questions/discussions being specific to ANSI C.