I don't buy Macs anymore
jasonsaidwhat.substack.comI'll never get those five minutes back. Author is too busy dunking on low-T hipsters (no need to call me names) and imagined pin-dicked Apple employees while blathering on about skill issues.
Woah, walled-garden company doesn't have a convenient way for you to exit?
>NoteStore.sqlite
Yeah, was gonna comment on the Notes format myself. It uses SQLite (as most Apple apps do) and individual note data is saved as gzipped binary blobs. Not the most arcane storage scheme out there by a long shot.
There’s ways to automate note exporting with AppleScript, too. The Notes app surfaces notes content in both plain text and HTML forms. Here’s an AppleScript and Automator workflow I found that does exactly that: https://github.com/johansan/AppleNotesExport
Not that export couldn’t be better, but post author clearly didn’t go far in researching any of this. All assumption no problem solving.
OP lost me when he said the edges of his Mac were “painfully sharp”…
Why? I agree. I could send you pictures of indentations in my skin, right below my wrists, that are present on my arms right now. It's a bit better with the newest, thinner, generation, but last generation was uncomfortable enough that I would use wrist support, or drape a mousepad on the edge. An 8 hours shift of typing would get uncomfortable, with questions of "wtf happened to your wrists?". Not to mention the ever present indentation in my hand, like this [1]. I'm probably "holding it wrong".
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/mac/comments/1k07yqj/sharp_edges/
Exactly. I have carried my 27-inch retina iMac multiple times. It's only slightly sharper than the typical monitor given its thinness. But "painfully sharp" really? OP probably just has soft hands.
Low-T hipsters is when I closed the tab. Just.. what?
Don’t forget “soft urban yupsters who don’t know adversity” and “pin-dick contrarians”.
Over-the-top machismo from a Karen crying about an incident ten years ago when his computer was too pointy and now he’ll never shop here again and he’ll make sure none of his friends shop here, either.
This article is a pretty lame rant.
I'm no engineer, but I know I need to back up my Mac, just like every other PC. I run Arq and back it up to cloud storage, and I also have a sync program set up to back up my most critical files to secondary locations.
Yes, Notes is proprietary. But why is that a surprise? It basically says it on the tin. That's exactly why I have never used it. I used Notational Velocity, nvAlt, some others, and ultimately Obsidian. All my notes are text files that have followed me for 1.5 decades, through multiple Macs.
As he tells it, Apple support put in the effort to figure out how to restore his Apple notes on his old computer, including walking him through an OS upgrade to do it. And that's supposed to be a bad thing? It sounds like a pretty amazing support experience, honestly.
He says he can't export Notes individually. I don't use Notes at all. But I popped open Apple's Script Editor just now, pulled up the Notes dictionary, and I see AppleScript commands for opening notes and for saving them in particular formats. You can also read the "HTML content of each note." It should be pretty simple to set something up to pull each note and save them in plain text format as he originally thought. I bet this is better than most notetaking apps with proprietary formats.
This whole article basically boils down to "I didn't back up my stuff, Apple bent over backwards to help me recover it, but I don't like the Notes PDF export format or the sharp edges on the hardware so I think Macs suck."
Sorry, just to recap what you are saying:
- Apple ships with the OS a notes app that is proprietary and not open enough for you;
- You do prefer to save your notes in different formats than notes does because of portability;
- The OS app lacks basic functionality to export notes;
- You need to write code to actually export your damn notes.
How is this not a disappointing UX experience for a 3 trillion company that is celebrated for its UX escapes me.
I bought a computer with an OS. I don't need or want a note taking app from the OS vendor, or a document editing app, or a photo editing app. Their note taking app is just irrelevant to me - I want a computer and an OS from them. For a note taking app and many other programs, I'd rather use one of the various great (and sometimes open source) options.
I'm not expecting Apple to write a notes app that tops Obsidian, a photo management app that beats Lightroom, or a news reader that beats NetNewsWire, etc etc.
The point about writing code to export from Notes was to show that, if a person nonetheless chooses for whatever reason to use the free note taking app they ship with the OS, then they can still export things.
The claim that Apple don’t deserve to be praised for their UX because Apple is a hardware company, so therefore are not constrained by the realities affecting software businesses, and are thus able to pursue an uncompromised user experience… is rather given the lie by the fact that every other hardware vendor is universally and uniformly terrible at UX.
It can be looked at from a different angle: Apple always had a more restricted ecosystem (even now, when arguably it's at peak popularity), driven by a "our way or the highway" mentality that helps keep the experience within a happy path while forcing other needs outside of the platform.
It's not a ding against Apple, if you're running a select shop people expect a curated experience, but you can't look at it the same way as a home center or hardware shop.
That rant was long.
My take after having been in the Apple ecosystem for a while: it's perfect if you can throw money at any issues.
The author's issue with notes not exporting goes away if he had multiple Mac's and never cared to move away from the walled garden.
People pissed about gaming on the mac are IMHO in the same boat, the real answer is usually "buy a console or gaming PC", or in other words "throw money at it".
People wanting cellular on the mac solved the issue with money (either an iPhone or portable WiFi). People wanting the iPad to do more solved it with money (permanent server connection and/or Mac screen sharing).
For people who don't have money to throw around, that ecosystem will just be pain at all turns IMHO. (It might be well worth it, but you need to be willing to commit that money in the first place)
I find similarly annoying issues with Mac software and hardware. Exporting all your keychain settings can't be done as a bulk export last time I tried; it kept prompting my password for every entry using the `security` cli tool. I had a fusion drive iMac at my workplace and it was a horrid experience, and similarly I've had butterfly keyboard Macbooks were pretty unusable (I gave up on work laptops and just use my 2015 Macbook Pro) etc.
But I find the competitors in shambles. The hardware for virtually all PC laptops is pretty horrible. Software and UX have their own issues etc.
What keeps me on the Mac is Apple dedication to accessible technologies and having a *nix base, and for the most part they've been pretty consistent with that offering.
> But I find the competitors in shambles.
That's the really sad part. Apple only has to be better than Windows :)
My M2 Air is my last Mac. I'm so fed with gatekeeper breaking Nix packages randomly that I decided to buy a Framework laptop.
Not surprised. I've heard Nix support on macOS is significantly worse than Linux.
Why didn't he just use dtrace to find his notes, or make a bunch of changes to a note and do a find command, leading him to the sqlite file he needed?
Idk it seems to me like I just read something written by someone who considers himself a computer expert because he built a computer, but doesn't actually know anything.
What makes someone write so many words just to tell the world they don’t like a brand?
Computers are so integrated into our daily lives, OS, hardware are worthy of any critique. I also feel those choices are getting smaller.
Years of pent-up frustration that were spleen-dumped into the post, as far as I can tell.
Could also be the bias that longer text is better.
Apple notes were stored in SQL format if I remember correctly. So you gotta find that hidden database file in the computer.
Hell hath no fury like a scorned Appleboi
Awful rant of an article, but I will say… Apple had a really frustrating period for laptops for a while. It was so bad that, while I loved OSX, I bought a different laptop.
- the early butterfly keyboards were fragile, difficult to type with, and stuff got stuck in them
- USB-C only transition made me have to use adapters everywhere
- the touch bar (and software escape key) was atrocious
- the glass screens were too thin and could break easily
They’ve fixed most of those issues since, but man, for a few years they were awful machines.
> the early butterfly keyboards were fragile
... and the last butterfly keyboards. I bought one after they added extra insulation under the keys (or whatever they pretended to do) and it broke in a couple months just like the early ones.
"As such, they are not intended to encounter circumstances that don’t track to the lifestyle of the average Apple employee."
This one is right. For the wrong reasons.
Reminds me of the day I found an iPod mini on the ground, brought it home, had to download an entire damn software to put songs into it, and when I accessed it as a storage I discovered all the song names had become UUIDs. Fucking LOL.
Have you considered that it was actually a whole bunch of records whose song names HAPPENED to be UUIDs??
Damn! Now that I think of it, it was indeed an album by my favourite band, b93cf126-32b5-4806-90bd-7abdea4bee34!
I skimmed through the post, and it seems all his complaints predate Apple Silicon.
His issue is with his one iMac’s drive failure, and Notes.
He didn’t enable iCloud backups properly and apparently Notes does not have a way to bulk export.
I read the full article and it wasn’t about the architecture, so Apple Silicon doesn’t change it. Their rant still applies, although I think much of it is out of their own ignorance.
what has that got to do with anything in TFA?
Apple Silicon outweighs "company cultural values blah blah blah" ?
> Not only does the computer have no grab handles, but every single edge is painfully sharp. The iMac’s physical housing was designed to be “art” rather than a functional tool.
How many people are moving their computers like this?
I have a Dell Laptop and Monitor on my desk now. I move the laptop, never the monitor. It has lots of dust on it to prove it.
Not sure of the Author’s point