To me this seems so far down the list of reasons more people don’t use it that I’m wondering whether you really believe that.

Guess I have some experimenting to do.

There’s lots of stuff not to like about macOS, but there’s something about it that makes it click much more for average people.

For my partner in particular I noticed that they use way more features than they ever did with windows. Boring stuff like spotlight search to find files, space bar to preview documents, airdrop to send stuff to an iPhone, etc.

With windows I got called over constantly for questions like “how do I find x, I forgot where I put it”, “can you help me get this on my phone, I want to send it to ”.

It’s not like good solutions for this don’t exist elsewhere, but something about MacBooks make people better at discovering those features.

I have secret pet theory that part of it is actually just that people know about Apple stuff that it’s supposed to be intuitive and so they have more confidence in trying to figure it out, which makes them have more success at it and that turns into a positive cycle.

That part honestly worked out pretty great. The first few days were excruciatingly boring, but I quickly adjusted and learned to spend more time with my thoughts.

I ended up reinstalling a browser because there were too many establishments that expected me to have a phone with a browser.

With mdm you can really control the phone top to bottom. Whitelist domains, global http proxy, allowed Wi-Fi connections, fully disable cameras, airdrop, the list goes on. Most of it isn’t super interesting to manage doomscrolling habits.

What drew me to it is that you can’t change the setup without connecting to the Mac, a solution I find much more comfortable than having a friend type in a pin, as well as easily restricting domains and apps including system apps.

For example something I still do is disabling all mail clients including the system one. I don’t need email on my phone. It’s an inherently asynchronous communication medium and it can definitely wait until I’m home.

I use it to straight up disallow a bunch of apps and websites (tiktok, Reddit, YouTube, etc.)

For a while I even uninstalled safari which you can just do with this. Not having a browser at all on your phone is a neat experiment and really changed how I interact with tech on the go.

I did eventually install safari back, but overall I prefer the Apple Configurator setup a lot over any of these kinds of apps.

The high impact findings have almost all been bang on for me. I was especially surprised by the high-quality documentation it produces as well as how narrow the proposed fixes are.

I’m used to codex producing quite a but more code than it needs to, but the security model proposed fixes that are frequently <10 loc, targeting exactly the correct place.

It’s really quite good. I’m assuming it’ll be pretty expensive once out of beta, but as a business I’d be jumping on this.

Other people apparently don't have this feeling at all. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised by this, but I've definitely been caught off guard by it.

You put in all your bookmarks (also pdfs or epubs) and it puts them in a queue and tracks your progress. Read for as long as you want to and if you get bored with an article you just move on to the next one. Supports highlights and annotations as well as creating spaced repetition cards out of those annotations.

Really reduces the friction for me to start reading and it has made a noticeable difference to my media consumption throughout last year.

Started out as an exploration into the incremental reading concept, but it's become my primary interface for reading and I use it every day.

I haven't really talked about this to anyone yet, but it's getting to a point where it's polished enough for others to use.

It's currently completely free and you can try it without entering your email.

https://www.increader.com/

I guess it's not talked about as much because a lot fewer people have access to it, but after spending a bunch of time with gemini 3 and opus 4.5 I don't feel that openai has lost the lead at all. The benchmarks tell a different story, but for my real world use cases codex and gpt pro are still ahead. Better at sticking to my intent and fewer mistakes overall. It's slow, yes. But I can't write requirements as quickly as opus can misunderstand them anyway.

What happened at meta is ludicrous, but labs are clearly willing to pay top-dollar for actual research talent, presumably because they feel like it's still a bottleneck.

I guess I don't actually have an issue with this research paper existing, but I do have an issue with its clickbait-y title that gets it a bunch of attention, even though the actual research is really not that interesting.

Maybe I'm just super out of touch on how people use their cars, but my cars infotainment system has not made its manufacturer any additional money as far as I can tell.