Neo and Air are quite simple when looking at it from the bottom up. Air is the "nice" Neo for basically $500 more. Backlit keyboard, MagSafe, Thunderbolt 4, M5, way faster SSD speeds, double the RAM, larger display, Force Touch trackpad.
In addition to your research categories - is the fan going to sound like a jet engine when just opening slack? Is the case going to wobble and creak after a few weeks? Is it going to tank performance when unplugged? And if not - is battery life going to be a concern?
In low price brackets those awful barrel jack charger ports that get loose at record speeds still appear too, which isn’t something people necessarily think about but will end up dragging down the user experience.
Yeah - the sleep/wake one is crazy to me. I have had numerous mac's and windows machines over the last 20 years as well and Sleep/Wake has been perfectly consistent on the mac. In 2026 on year old hardware from Microsoft (Surface Pro) I have regular issues with waking from sleep, or more commonly, the battery will just be completely dead in the morning when it had a full charge the night before.
The python complaint I get, but it is because they ship an old python version with the OS and you have to work around that to install a different version.
Security settings can be set via the Settings app and don't require the terminal like the author stated. They can be changed via the terminal, but the golden path is just tapping a button in settings to allow the unauthorized app and typing in your password. Granted - it isn't obvious, and I only know this because over the years as notarization was added the dialogs became slowly less helpful in guiding you to the right spot, I think now in Tahoe they don't even make a mention of where you should go to allow it.
I’ve been experimenting with a 13” iPad Pro and Mac mini, setup with Tailscale. I love it, minus the general issues you run into with Remote Desktop. That plus not being able to deploy apps unless I’m on the same wifi (as an iOS developer.)
A dual boot iPad would be killer. I would go out and by the maxed out M5 if it was possible. MacOS for workdays, and iPadOS for everything else. That or just finish the last mile of iPadOS (Add terminal access, long running processes, lower level file system access, actual developer tooling.)
Remote Desktop is another nerfed thing. Windows is sending around window positions and UI primitives, while Mac still streams terribly compressed and lagging video of desktop, unable to even adapt resolution to client.
Fwiw, Modern Windows is mostly DWM, and doesn't get the benefit of using GDI primatives for any serious work, so it's also "just" sending compressed video streams. These days it's basically all H.264/5 thanks to GPUs taking over.
Same. Plus with multi-user, I would own multiple size iPads since they instantly become more useful as shared family devices, rather than only being tied to one persons iCloud/messages/email. And more importantly for our old boy Tim - they would be larger storage sizes because they would be logged into multiple users.
Perhaps someone who's more versed in Apple tech can weigh in, but my limited understanding is that tvOS' users are mostly an illusion - the current user is just a flag exposed to running apps, and each app decides on its own what (if anything) they do with that information. There's no system-level separation of data or permissions for different users.
(In my experience, most non-Apple apps just seem to ignore user profiles on the Apple TV, and either behave as single-user apps, or have their own totally unrelated user profiles.)
Yeah, I think that's a assumption Apple made that most AppleTV devices would be in the same household where people can simply use the streaming app's ability to switch profiles. That sucks if you have roommates that pay for their own streaming subscriptions or the AppleTV device is in a common area such a dormitory. I suppose they could solve this by allowing ad-hoc profiles if AppleTV and user's IOS device is on the same network.
The user profile stuff as far as I can tell literally just determines the recently watched data in the Apple TV app. It doesn't even use your iCloud account when you select your account - I attempted to show some photos from my photo library on an Apple TV set up by someone else the other day and it just wanted to pop up their photos instead.
You must be a school or business with DUNS number and rigorous, manual verification through Apple to set up shared iPads with managed Apple IDs in the School or Business Manager Portal.
- Daylight Goals ( https://daylightgoals.com ) - I’m releasing a major update later this month, it is an app built around pushing you to spend more time outdoors in the sun, using automatic time in daylight tracking via the Apple Watch & Apple Health. The update reorganizes the app and adds a lot more dynamic notifications.
- HourStream ( https://hourstream.com ) - A project based time tracking & invoicing app I built for myself, as I’ve moved to consulting work and I’ve disliked basically every invoice tracking app I’ve tried. Still have a lot of things I want to add, but it is getting there.
Hmm, you could probably setup ad hoc builds and send them off to Firebase App Distribution or a similar service and get them a bit faster. Still pretty cumbersome but it skips the slow signing/slow uploads/slow processing that Test Flight provides for users.
In this case you are spot on, the landing page is AI generated, just because I've never enjoyed doing front-end web development myself. That plus this app is very deeply rooted in Apple's platforms (Essentially requiring an Apple Watch to be effective), the majority of users are coming from app store search directly, rather than through the landing page.
Thanks! I'm looking into Vitamin D estimation for a future version, the main issue is there are a ton of factors that need to be considered, the main one is simply how much skin you have exposed when you are outdoors. A simple question but it requires a dedicated user to update the app with their wardrobe every day.
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