I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
I'll go and look at this new box, drool a little, and realize that I'd get more personal utility from donating $3k (or whatever the trade in delta is) to a charity than upgrading my computer.
(We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.)
I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.
iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.
But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.
However, OneDrive doesn't seem to even know how to handle source files (it doesn't even attempt to honor the gitignore), so rebuilding a project in folders covered by OneDrive results in flurries of temporary files being uploaded/updated to the cloud, hogging the bandwidth, with a bonus of locking files, crashing builds, or even reverting changes silently.
One would think backup tools, even if primarily for normal users are still literally made by programmers, at least consider the use case of programmers instead of just ignoring them entirely.
file sync is backup against the things most people have to deal with (hardware breaking, theft, house fire, residential lightning strike)
I would say accidentally deleting a file is more common than a house fire, so NO, file-sync is not a backup nor is RAID (block-sync) or clustering (data/state-sync).
A backup is/should be a non-modifiable snapshot of data/files maybe even a state.
I give you an example:
You have a password-safe (as a file). Your computer blows up, but you are safe, because your password-safe is synced on Dropbox....but oh my god what was the password to Dropbox??? Your restore is gone because you forgot to "backup" your password-safe.
However you are not a Loser, being a Admin is a ~lost art and a really good paid one (again).... ;)
It goes to your trash can/recycle bin for a while. That's literally what it's for: to guard against accidental deletes. Very few people accidentally delete files from their computer's drive anymore. The only time people do this in 2026 is accidentally formatting an SD card that had their camera's pictures on it or something.
I also do a bunch of video work with Da Vinci Resolve, and those project files are in the same folder. I don't keep the clips there, those are on an external disc, but that's just because I haven't gone from the two terabyte iCloud plan to the six terabyte plan.
There is iCloud Drive sync, but that only syncs your Documents and Desktop folders, but any other files are not synced.
Really this should be devices full stop. Also, "backed up" should include no fewer than two backups on different media and in different physical locations e.g. Time Machine to an external SSD _plus_ continuous cloud backup.
Your backup is worthless if you haven’t actually tested to confirm that it actually works. And you have to periodically, re-test, as well.
2/ This is like complaining that climate activists were harping too much 30 years ago, and that's why nobody listened
this is a serious issue though.
if you harp too much about something, it becomes background noise. people get desensitized.
if you harp about too many things, it fatigues people as well (ever heard of "alert fatigue"?).
so yeah, harping too much, too loudly about too many things is a serious and the society should really start looking into this
(edit: i am aware of the irony of harping about harping)
Or is the only way to do that successfully, doing it subconsciously/covertly like the state actors are swaying public opinion? :-/
No pain no gain also goes the other way, many times people don't learn until they get slapped in the face.
That'll be fun when half the world is migrating due to extreme climate events.
2. You mean the climate activists who used to risk their lives back in the 80s on open oceans instead of gluing themselves to streets? Yeah, the times have changed.
I suppose I didn’t specify exactly what I would recommend to someone who thinks it’s too hard, so here is that:
1. Install Backblaze. This is basically fire and forget. 2. (1) is enough for most people, but if interested (and on a Mac, which is what I’m familiar with), plug in an external SSD once a week or so for Time Machine. Setup involves clicking on the drive in the setup wizard and specifying an encryption password.
I don’t know about “ultra” robust, but this gives you protection from accidental deletions, natural disasters happening to your computer, hardware failures, and corruption from software bugs. The ongoing maintenance is plugging in a hard drive once a week.
If that is too much effort, just (1) provides natural disaster and hardware failure protection. It helps somewhat with the others but Backblaze only saves versions for 60 days and that’s a tight window to notice subtle corruption of e.g. your photos.
how many good things have 'average people' (and the avaricious wanterpreneurs chasing their dollars) ruined? Nearly everything!
If you’re not adequately backing up your data, then that is entirely on you. After thirty-plus years of this best practice guidance, there is no excuse for that kind of incompetence.
Apple makes this pretty easy with iCloud and Time Machine, but they are far from the only company trying to make this as easy as possible for their customers.
> We replaced it with a Framework... with removable storage.
Cool. How are you backing it up?
So, afterwards you effectively have a new iPhone with upgraded storage. Which you then have to restore somehow.
That is, unless you can find someone who can de-lid the SOC, remove the tiny RAM and/or SDD storage chips, and replace them with new ones. But then you’d have the same problem that the data was on the old chips, and encrypted. And so you can’t just copy that data over to the new chips, you have to decrypt all the data using the key stored on the Secure Enclave and copy it out in unencrypted format, then once the old chips are removed from the SOC and replaced, you then have to copy back all that data onto those new chips and have it re-encrypted from the Secure Enclave.
Anyone who can do that could just give you a new iPhone with more storage.
So, you can’t copy that key over to a different Secure Enclave. If you could, then it would no longer be a Secure Enclave.
How would you restore the backup if your secure hardware device is lost/stolen/damaged?
No point in encrypting those family photos burned to disc.
My macbook updates my documents etc to my NAS, and the NAS syncs to crucial folders to the cloud (not everything for cost reasons)
You should always assume your device can be stolen, you can spill fluids on it (or a guest), a cat can pee on it, an electric shock may kill it... No matter how great care you take of it, shit happens, data needs to be safe.
The SSD dying standalone vs the system dying doesn't change at all for data security. It's not a different risk factor
I wouldn't choose to buy a car I use every day that's 100x less reliable than a normal car.
If your looking for arguments against soldered storage the facts ssds are wear items and will eventually need replacement is a much better one.
If given a choice, I prefer a system where a HDD/RAM/GPU/CPU/PSU/Screen/Port/Battery/Keyboard failure is barely if at all disruptive to one where all of these effectively brick the system.
... single point of failure. /s
The point is it shouldn’t matter if the cpu or ssd dies because you have backed up everything already and are prepared for anything to fail or happen to the device rather then “oh the ssd is removable so in these select few situations I can recover my data”
Obviously if you used the same encryption scheme on a removable drive you'd hit the same issue - but most people don't do that, because storing the encryption keys in the Secure Enclave makes your drive effectively no longer removable.
So, if the machine dies, you can’t just take the SSD and solder it onto another board somewhere. Even if you could, the SSD is part of the SOC that includes the CPU, and the Secure Enclave is part of the logic board that it was soldered onto.
Recovering data from an Apple device is intentionally hard to do. Apple wants to protect that device as much as possible from anyone who might try to steal your data by simply unsoldering chips and soldering them back on somewhere else.
If you use LUKS or BitLocker (w/o MS backup) you do not have this risk avenue (or recovery - it's your fault).
What are you doing to them?
I still have MBPs from 2015 and 2018 that have not 'died'.
2012 MacBook Pro
2015 MacBook Pro
2019 MacBook Air
2020 M1 MacBook Pro
The longevity is incredible.I almost wish one of them would konk out so I can get an M series, but then I wouldn’t be on a 5k iMac anymore, which would suck. Love these machines.
I get that this is hn and we're paranoid about everything, but come on, what CVE is a threat to joe sixpack here where he should drop $2K on a new machine to protect against it?
Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.
The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore, but as long as it's plugged in, it keeps chugging along.
You gotta be kidding me. The old M1 Air had the "bendgate" where several people, me included, saw their screen die overnight for no reason. Tens and tens of pages of people complaining about it only to be with "you're holding it wrong" answers. Insanity.
I think Apple fixed that mess with the gen after that one.
I, for one, prefer Apple products because they sweat the small stuff more than the other options, and when they have put in effort to make things worse it's kind of infuriating.
I do a bit of desktop Linux work too, and it's OK, but hard to complain when it's all open source volunteer work! Windows is so terrible that I wouldn't even know where to start. What's the point? There's nobody at Microsoft that even gives a damn.
Apple was actually last to the party on that. Linux had virtual desktops for years at that point, and Windows had them as well through Microsoft PowerToys. I’m pretty sure I was running it on Windows 2000.
In the end you’ll spend a significant amount of your time trying to “get back” to where you just where (that alt-tab, a possible savior for this in all other OSs, doesn’t work at all on Mac just adds to the UX mess)
In the end though I just feel like it's extra cognitive load to have to think about two different shortcuts to do what is in many ways the same thing.
Say, I've got two browser windows open and a code editor open. I'm wanting to flip through the browser windows to check on things while I work in the code editor. In reality I'm just wanting to juggle the three windows, but depending on if I'm wanting to go from browser to browser it's a different shortcut than if I'm wanting to go from editor to browser. And there's a good chance I'll then need to swap from editor to browser, then issue a different shortcut to go from that browser to the other. When I could have just hit the same shortcut twice.
I've just never really encountered a situation where I've felt like it added something, but I'm constantly having cases where its more annoying.
The 40-year-deep-history Mac answer to workflows like that with a small working set with frequent cross-app-one-to-other-switching IMO is mouse-based navigation + spatial partially-overlapping windows, but this seems to be an extremely foreign concept to Windows/*nix users that grew up on full-screen-maximize or tiling. So I don't think is particularly likely to be adopted by anyone who doesn't already have it burned into their brains at this point. :) There's a lot of these old Mac bones still baked into the OS (e.g. if you have a folder on your desktop, and double click it, and move it, then close it, it'll open to the location you moved it to next time. And that memory is separate from that for another folder on your desktop. Though some of the follow-on behaviors have changed (opening folders in already-open windows used to behave similarly, opening new windows by default).
The 20-year-history version is my own personal lord and savior: Exposé hot corners.
Spaces and no-mouse navigation are still in many ways comparative afterthoughts to mouse-based/spatial workflows. Though as someone with 30+ year of Mac muscle memories in my head, the switching-windows-vs-switching-app concept and awareness of "where" I am relative to it is pretty embedded.
The whole window arranging so you can click on them doesn't help you when you have multiple desktops, close some terminal, and jump to some other terminal three desktops away. Like, arranging windows so you see some part of it always, just so you can click on it to switch back and forth between windows feels like a horrible workaround for broken alt-tab behavior. But there's additional levels of weirdnesses that just make using Apple frustrating and scary, like it's constantly throwing random curve balls. It just reeks disorganization. Which is really unfortunate - 10 years ago or so (when witcher task switcher still worked) I really enjoyed working mac. Back then I was mostly coding in the same windows I guess. Nowadays it's business work, and it's just a pain.
I get that that behaviour shouldn’t just be changed but I would appreciate it if there were another key combination that would allow cycling through all windows of an app.
Expose + Cmd-tab/Cmd-backtick being separated == a gap that Linux/Windows have somehow never managed to close in 20+ years now.
The quantity of requests for how to disable Liquid Glass on Apple Discussions is staggering. [2]
[1]https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/09/macos-golden-gate-liqui...
This eventually becomes awkwardly precise complaints about information density and general change; but the underlying issue is I want to go fast and the system says no
On the Mac side, it’s a toss up between the platinum interface of Mac OS 8/9 and Mac OS X Tiger. With that said, I have a work-issued MacBook Pro running Golden Gate as my daily driver, and Liquid Glass is alright. It’s not what I’d prefer if I had a choice, but it’s not a dramatic departure from previous versions of macOS. A Cheetah or Puma Mac OS X user should be able to navigate Golden Gate with ease, mostly.
I've been on the lookout for a good condition G3 beige desktop, that was my first ever computer that was "mine" and I really want one just for the sentimental value.
Like GP, I despise the new design. I'll say the old design was pretty peak design. Windows looked like windows. Buttons like buttons. With accessibility tweaks (for transparency and borders) I could make it very, very usable.
This new thing is a crime against UI. Every icon now sits in a circle, and takes up % more room as a result. Because … it's pretty? It isn't pretty.
I upgraded my laptop thinking I was going to develop an app and that I'd need to be on the latest design. I ended up developing a TUI so I needn't have bothered. Every time I see my partner's laptop, still on Sequoia, I shed a little tear.
Depends on how accurate you need to be. How fast/confident you can be at hitting with a finger can easily drop off a cliff.
This is likely true for casual users, but for veterans this is a skill issue. My touchpad accuracy/speed more than matches most folks touchscreen accuracy/speed.
Skilled users can make the reach and the motion one. You don't need to stabilize your palm on the rest to use the trackpad. Same way I don't need to use F and J for the keyboard (and kinda wish I could remove those annoying bumps)
I am moving my finger on my touchpad to move the pointer to more or less match what I am reading. I am always close to a Reply button or a vote one. There is no point reaching for the screen with my hand and touching those links. Furthermore they are way too small to be pressed with a finger. They are probably too small for a pointer too, but that's another issue.
Hoever, when I open an empty tab, type new in the URL bar and FF completes it to the URL of this site, and I press return, I usually end up with a Login link in the top right. If I reload the page (ctrl-r) I am logged in. For some reason either FF is not sending the session cookie or HN is not doing what it should on a cold session. This is also another issue (sorry) but let's say that I want to login. My pointer is far away from the login link. My fingers are not on the touchpad. Is it faster to move my right hand towards myself, touch the touchpad, slide the pointer to the link or moving that very same index finger to the link and touch it? My laptop does not have a touchscreen but when I used a tablet with a mouse and a keyboard I reached for the screen many times. Of course a mouse is less efficient than a touchpad, except for games, but I also miss the touchscreen sometimes.
And I would use if to press the reply button below this line I am typing. Let's see where the pointer ended up while I was typing... At the top right corner. Moving it to Reply and clicking is slower than touching the screen.
I do that too. I tend to "park" my cursor near where I am looking, or near where I anticipate clicking next.
> let's say that I want to login. My pointer is far away from the login link. My fingers are not on the touchpad. Is it faster to move my right hand towards myself, touch the touchpad, slide the pointer to the link or moving that very same index finger to the link and touch it?
Entirely depends on your relative proficiencies and preferences, I suppose.
When I had a touchscreen, I used it with a trackpad and a trackball. All three input devices had utility to me, so why not? These days I sometimes use a laser mouse rather than trackball, but same story (though my MacBook doesn't have touch now). I always prefer trackpad to scroll wheel for scrolling, for hopefully obvious reasons (range of motion and precision are both way better). I do know I got use out of the touchscreen even though I can't think of a hard rule for it. It's probably just nice to have on a case-by-case basis.
Personally I would not use the touchscreen very often, but I would use it sometimes to press buttons and maybe even to scroll. Maybe the resize handle in the bottom right corner of the text area I am writing now is a large enough target for a finger. On a laptop: raise a finger, drag and go back to the keys? Probably. With a desktop computer with a keyboard far away from the screen? Well, the mouse is also far away from the hands so who knows.
I never have a real use case for a mouse but sometimes I follow a link from HN to a game in which a mouse would be better than a touchpad: move move move click click move click is great with a mouse and terrible with touchpad of all kinds. My mouse is in a drawer somewhere.
I am a fan of touchpads with physical buttons. I think that only HP is selling them anymore, on very few ZBook models (maybe a 16 Fury?) and Lenovo still has them in laptops with their stick in the middle of the keyboard. However the Lenovo buttons are at the top of the touchpad, where the thumb rests if the index finger operates the stick. The thumb rests below the touchpad when operating the touchpad.
Thinkpad fans will tell me that those buttons are close to the space bar, were thumbs rest all the time and they are right. Their little stick is very conveniently placed but I never manager to operate it as efficiently as a touchpad, which required zero training. My old ZBook has both the stick and the touchpad and two rows of 3 buttons, and I've never learned to move the pointer with the stick, both Windows and Linux.
Apple with their SoC really changed a lot of people's minds about hardware.