I've connected my apple magic keyboard to my phone before, mostly just to see if it worked. It's a small compact thin and light keyboard. I'd imagine most keyboards with bluetooth these days probably connect, just depends on what kind of form factor you're looking for
I bought one of these in 2018 on ebay for my dad, and had it shipped from japan.
Living in the US I had to jump through the hoop of making a fake japanese icloud account just to be able to access the app on the app store, which is how you control the device.
Ultimately it seemed like a really cool device but at least at the time wasn't very effective or practical for cooling down, at least in my and his experience. This was mostly just being outside, doing yard work etc in the hot summer.
I think buying one of the <$50 portable neck coolers on amazon are probably just as if not more effective
Ditto. I have a self-built PC that has an install of Win11 Pro on it and it's full of adware and crapware like in the bad old Dell days - except this thing coming directly from Microsoft!
It's absurd how badly the Windows customer experience has degraded in the name of bundling shitty Bejeweled clones - how much money could MSFT be possibly making on this kind of deal that makes the trade worthwhile?!
Not to mention some of the less egregious but nonetheless annoying things - when I had my Win10 install the default Docs directory pointed at the cloud-synced container which then proceeded to pester me about upgrading to a paid plan. Not just once or twice and not in an unobtrusive way - literally on every single boot in the task bar.
I know this isn't the most constructive comment ever, but I just want to vent.
Windows is a piece of shit. It's honestly one of the worst pieces of software I have to use on a daily basis. I've always been some kind of a linux enthusiast, but I've always had to use windows as my daily driver due to either CAD software, ableton live, a certain game not playing nice with linux, etc.
I've been using windows for 2 decades now, and I just can't believe it keeps getting worse and worse. It's slow, it's riddled with ads, it's constantly changing everything around for no good reason. I'm so sick of it, and I'm STILL stuck with it. If I could move autodesk inventor and ableton live over, I'd finally be free, but I've had no luck. I'm just really appalled by the garbage microsoft has pushed out
Same boat. I went the VFIO route: my desktop runs headless Fedora, and I run desktop Linux, windows, and macOS in VMs. I bought an extra GPU so I can run two VMs at a time. 99% of the time I’m on desktop linux, but if I want to play a game I just switch my monitor input and hit my USB switch and I’m good to go. If I want to run ableton, I shut down windows, fire up macOS and bam.
This lets me completely isolate windows and only use it for games. And ableton runs just fine in a vm, so I don’t have to have a separate Mac. Plus it makes it really easy to try out the new Linux flavor of the month!
It was a bit of work to get it figured out but it’s been running smoothly like this for a few years now. I refuse to install windows as a first-class citizen on any computer I own, because as you said, it’s fucking garbage.
> windows feels more and more like adware these days
Which edition of Windows 11 is less/least/not ad-y? Is Pro in any ways better than Home?
Is there an Enterprise edition that I, as a 'normal person' / non-corporate entity, can purchase and use on my personal system (or VM running under Linux/macOS)? I would think that corporations would not want ads on their employer-provided systems, and so they aren't present in the {Pro?, Enterprise?} releases.
>Which edition of Windows 11 is less/least/not ad-y? Is Pro in any ways better than Home?
Pro is better than home as it supports domain join so it will "allow" local accounts (hidden in the OOBE UI under "domain join instead").
As it can domain join it should respect every setting you could set through GPO and allow you to configure a bunch of things the home version won't. But if you're not a windows admin that knows this stuff already do you really want to invest your time in wrangling a increasingly hostile OS?
Enterprise is not really for sale to most people. Technically i suppose you could buy a M365 E3 subscription and use that to activate pro to enterprise, but again do you really want to?
> But if you're not a windows admin that knows this stuff already do you really want to invest your time in wrangling a increasingly hostile OS?
Sometimes it's needed for certain applications, so one has to at least run it in a VM perhaps.
I do Linux sysadmin stuff, but we have to deal with Windows clients, and so I many need it a (home) lab to play with things. I can do domain-y stuff with Samba 4 at least.
I recently installed windows 11 and explorerpatcher on a desktop and it doesn't feel like adware at all.
Aside from yet another revamp of the settings menus it feels more or less like windows. The gripes about the start bar and start menu are valid but fixable.
Only thing is closing down some widgits the first time that I never saw again and uninstalling a few applications.
Counter data point: I maintain a windows 11 PC for gaming, and there are ads everywhere. Most of the ads point back to Microsoft products, but not all.
Launcher ads. Live desktop ads. News ads. Weather ads. Settings page ads. Game bar ads. Lock screen ads.
I turn them off as I run across them, but I can never seem to catch them all.
I have a Windows 11 Pro machine and the only intrusive thing I've ever seen was the small weather box on the taskbar, which I immediately turned off. I've never seen any of the others you mention.
If its relevant I use Firedox and Kagi rather than Edge and Bing/Google.
The fact you have to install a separate patcher from a third party company to fix all the glaring issues with windows is telling. Don't have to do that with a Mac. I use both at work and Mac is less cumbersome and easier to work with than Windows, hands down. Windows is a fractured user experience; they're trying too hard to shove the whole "tiles" thing from W8 into everything else and having ads baked into the OS is appalling. Mac doesn't do that out of the box and I don't need to install anything to make it an enjoyable user experience.
I installed the patcher to restore the windows 10 style start menu and start bar. Microsoft's decisions on the "new" UI for 11 were super dumb.
But after a month of running windows 11 with explorerpatcher for gaming, hobby programming, and music production (daw, vsts etc) everything is pretty flawless.
Most people will not install explorerpatcher. If it's installation is necessary to have a good experience with Win11, then most people will not have a good experience.
"Windows doesn't feel like adware if you run fairly-scary third-party tools on it first" probably isn't the best sell to non-techy people. (Which I figure is who we have to be talking about, since we're responding to a market-trends article.)
Unlike the start menu, I've yet to see advertising when I open the Launchpad or Spotlight. Also, I can complete setup on my Mac without having to create an Apple ID, and if I opt out the system respects that and is quite usable.
Finally, I can easily put the dock (which W11 imitates, badly) on the left hand side of my screen if I wish. But I suppose Macs are less customisable?
Yeah that's true. I get nagged to backup stuff to iCloud or to sign up for apple music but windows has more stuff.
I do see the windows stuff as more upselling to other microsoft apps like onedrive which to me doesn't seem so different form the icloud integration. I use both an haven't noticed much in win11 though.
As a Mac and iOS user, I don't know what you're talking about.
I can't remember ever seeing anything about TV+ or Music, and the only time I'm told about iCloud storage is when my drive or backups are almost out of space, which makes sense.
There might be invitations to TV/Music when you install it or first use the OS or something (I can't remember), but there absolutely isn't anything "all the time".
> when my drive or backups are almost out of space, which makes sense.
This only makes sense to iCloud users. I've never intentionally put anything in iCloud and I get a constant parade of alerts about it being full. On macOS it doesn't matter where you click on the alert widget, it takes you to the page where you can pay for iCloud regardless. It is very spammy.
Yes, phone backups are automatically (or opt-in?) made to iCloud's free storage tier. This is a feature, not a bug, since phones are easily lost/stolen and your average consumer will be happy they didn't lose all their photos and messages. If your free-tier backup space is full, then you need to manage your backups to disable/delete them or reduce your backup size -- those alerts are there for a good reason.
Also, the Mac notification has a prominent "Close" button and doesn't even mention iCloud until you click through to see available options:
Whenever I hit the play button it's like 50/50 if Spotify will continue or if apple will open up the music app inviting me to sign up for music.
I did get pestered about joining icloud pretty regularly in the past but haven't seen those in a bit. I prefer onedrive and Google photos since it works on my non apple machines too.
Echoing the sibling comment, I also have never seen this. I have gotten marketing emails from Apple regarding their bundle package for their services, but after unsubscribing to that I have never seen anything further. I certainly have never seen anything in the OS proper, for any device that I own.
Once you've either subscribed or not to an Apple service, you don't get random popups about it. They offered Fitness+ free for 3-months because I bought a new device; I didn't subscribe and never heard about it again.
That's not my experience with Windows, where I get random popups in the UI of the operating system about different offers. Not cool.
I don't have ads being pushed to me about apples products as I type this from my M1 macbook air. Apple is far from perfect, but in this specific case they are much better than microsoft.
As someone who is accustomed to free software operating systems, macOS is much closer to Windows than it is to what I'm used to.
Just the other day, my M1 Mac at work slowed to such a crawl that mouse movement badly lagged due to runaway 'triald' (ML learning on user inputs) and Siri processes. They relaunched every time I killed them, and they were running even though Siri was explicitly disabled. Turns out there's no way to actually disable Siri without disabling SIP, which I cannot do on my work computer.
So on macOS I'm still plagued with cloud-connected crap I cannot control (or sometimes even expect) that at worst can make my computer completely unusable.
Is it different from Windows bullshit in interesting ways worth talking about? Definitely. Can the two things be compared? Definitely!
It's about comparability of the two operating systems with respect to similarity to 'adware' which is characterized by
- nagging
- online accounts
- tracking user behavior
- 'free' cloud services (the user is the product, blah blah blah)
- having an adversarial relationship with your own tools; having to go to extraordinary lengths to disable user-hostile behavior
which are all very much implicated in products like Siri and in being unable to actually disable it.
When you think seriously about what adware is like and what actually makes it so odious, it's clear that parts of macOS are characterized by many of the same traits and behaviors, even though Apple isn't selling third-party ads in macOS the way Microsoft is doing with Windows.
It's not that heavy handed but if I hit the play button on my headphones/keyboard there's a pretty good chance it opens up the apple music app instead of just playing the open spotify app. Since I'm not a music member, front and center it wants me to sign up.
I definitely remember seeing a tv+ signup with I first got my M2. After setting up the device.
If you're not signed into icloud, well you still have all the apps that want you to sign in. Same goes with the tv app.
I use the music app on iOS with mp3s and 3 of the 4 main app tabs are screens trying to sign me up for apple music.
I wouldn't characterize RDP as particularly fast or efficient.
If you're interested in a turnkey alternative, consider NoMachine.
If you are willing to play around with finicky stuff, Xpra and FreeNX easily outperformed RDP the last time I played with all this stuff (many years ago).
For Linux to Linux X Forwarding-based solutions give you a much better, local-like experience with Linux than you can get without paying many thousands of dollars for Terminal Services on Windows.
