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Comment by tootie | Hacker News Reader

I can't convince anyone to not use Facetime.

Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile. If free software, vendor lock in, excluding those without Apple products, etc. etc. aren't sticking points for you, Facetime is awesome for a family/group of friends with iDevices.

My circles are all on zoom due to superior audio and video quality in zoom than FaceTime for groups. 1 on 1 still FaceTime

It's a shame FaceTime was never made open. I heard that this was Apple's original intention, but there were issues with patents (not held by Apple).

I'm not sure it was actually Apple's original intention. Rumour has it the decision was made on stage[0]

[0] - https://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/05/11/facetime-standa...

What an absolute legend, that guy, making product decisions on stage hahaha. I absolutely love it.

I try to avoid Apple products. They're not worth the high price.

Depends on how you are defining "worth" here. They are the only devices "worth" their price as evidenced by how well they hold their value and how much consumers are willing to pay for them. They are not "worth" the high price if you are valuing the internals (what GPU, processor, memory, HD you get).

I've ended up with multiple iPads over the years despite my best efforts. They definitely do stop working after a while. I've also noticed MacBooks get burning hot doing a video conference for more than 15 minutes. And I'm not a hardcore gamer, but my kids play Minecraft and it's fine by glitchy.

Compared to the Acer I bough for $700 with a basic Nvidia card and upgradeable memory that can handle everything I throw at it. My last Acer ran fine for almost 6 years but I dropped it one too many times.

Now do me this favor: take your experience and opinion, and compare it to others. How many people share this with you? If the Acer was just that substantially better in terms of value and build quality, why isn't Acer the #1 laptop in the US? Why do so many companies, organizations, and developers not share this take with you? What may you be missing?

hackintosh's aren't all that hard to build

Hackintosh are hard to build, by any reasonable definition, even for an average HN users. It's possible some people find that easy, but surely it is much harder than following an even medium difficulty tutorial.

Have you tried building one before? I built mine for the first time in February with 0 prior experience with such things and followed this guide: https://hackintosh.gitbook.io/-r-hackintosh-vanilla-desktop-... If you're doing a config with a motherboard that's well used you can generally find the right configs to use. If you're using something not often used, you'll have trouble with the initial setup but once you get over that initial setup trouble in my experience everything will work and stay fine.

There are also lots of helpful people in the /r/hackintosh subreddit and discord if you run into troubles.

I was debating between building a hackintosh and buying the new MacBook pro and I can say 100% it was worth it.

I'm now first time using Mac due to my project. It works fine, but I do prefer Linux for development. Hackintosh probably makes sense if you're stuck on some Mac software though.

Ironically I'm using Mac over Linux because I want to use parallels to run a windows application that I must use. I tried using VMware for a while but it drove me insane that everytime I switched workspaces it would exit fullscreen.

> Facetime has the best audio/video quality of any conferencing software I've used by a mile.

Out of curiosity: can you compare it to Google Duo? Because it has the best quality and stability of any 1:1 product I've ever tried (never tried Facetime)

WTH is Google Duo? They have a third video conferencing solution besides Hangouts and Meet?

Madness.

So they do :-D

It's getting long in the tooth by Google standards I suppose. Who knows when they'll axe it.

I think it's strictly 1:1 (which, I gather, Facetime isn't?). It has good video quality, but what I like most about it is that it's nicely resilient on dodgy connections.

I've often used it wandering around my garden, at the fringe of Wifi range, and it does the right thing: tries to stay on Wifi, but switches over to 4G if the connection becomes too dodgy, then back to Wifi once that's stable again. All of that with pretty minimal artefacts.

FaceTime has the best UX of all the solutions I've seen so far.

Seamless integration in the OS as long as you're in the Apple ecosystem and lightweight native clients (it seems to use hardware encoding/decoding does not make my fans spin like Zoom or any browser-based solution). No accounts or meeting/room IDs to remember or join, it just works with Apple IDs (which you're already logged into) or phone numbers for iOS devices (which work even if you somehow don't use an Apple ID).

For my parents maintaining an Apple account is a bridge too far. Not even with their IOS devices. They use Duo a lot though.

How do they deal with their friends or relatives that do not use iPhones?

If everyone on the call is in the Apple ecosystem, it’s a good solution

I feel bad for you. None of my friends use Apple products.

But I imagine if your friends aren't nerds this is a real problem. My wife has to deal with it.

Many of my "nerdy" friends have iPhones. I am a nerd, but I don't have this problem.

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