I was recently trying to figure out whether the microphone is usable when using my notebook in clamshell-mode. Turns out Apple added a privacy/safety feature to all Apple silicon-based Mac notebooks and Intel-based Mac notebooks with the Apple T2 Security Chip. It will hardware disconnect the microphone when the lid is closed, based on the lid sensors.
Pretty cool safety feature!! Even though I'm sad I can't use my mic in clamshell mode
In case you or anyone else needs to disable the MacBook screen and still use the mic, camera, keyboard, trackpad etc. I added a feature called BlackOut in my Lunar app that can do that (https://lunar.fyi/#blackout).
This allows "clamshell mode" without closing the lid. (although some people might want to close the lid for desk aesthetics, this feature is not for them)
On Apple Silicon with macOS Ventura the feature can really disconnect the screen by Command-clicking the power button: https://shots.panaitiu.com/x52NJxpR
The microphone is located inside the left speaker grille anyways, so it would be terribly muffled in clamshell mode anyways.
Note this is in contrast to previous models where the microphone had a tiny hole on the left edge (next to USB-C ports) and it could be used in clamshell mode.
Which at first I thought felt like a downgrade... but the reality is that your laptop isn't usually in a good position for mic pickup when it's closed anyways -- people often keep it off to the side or something, under a monitor riser, etc. While the speaker grille location, being front-facing rather than side-facing, is far better for picking up voice when using the laptop normally. And that anybody using a mic in clamshell mode usually already has one in their webcam or AirPods or headset or a dedicated mic anyways.
The 2015 pro model i have is an absolute nightmare for the fan as the mic was picking up the noise of the fan and so the CPU was working overtime to cancel the noise leading to cascading fan and heat noise.
Ended up just disabling it completely permanently. Was a particularly bad design i think.
I recently got an M2 Macbook Pro to replace my 2017 Macbook Pro (with that awful keyboard and the touch bar), and my biggest take away is that I'm glad Jony Ive left. The new one is less "elegant", but it approaches and in some case exceeds "functional". It's crazy the number he did on the hardware designs at the end.
> The microphone is located inside the left speaker grille anyways, so it would be terribly muffled in clamshell mode anyways
I don't think the hardware disable is meant as a UX convenience ("let's always disable it in clamshell mode because it sounds terrible"), as that could have just been done in software. It's meant for people privacy-conscious people who want to see a closed laptop and be able to assume it's not recording.
Meanwhile, I'm looking at this throwaway aside in the article:
> (The camera isn’t disconnected in hardware, because its field of view is completely obstructed with the lid closed.)
and thinking to myself that somebody is going to figure out how to record audio given just the "completely obstructed" view of the camera.
There's a long history of attackers reliably detecting logging keys with audio using just inter-keystroke latency and some histograms, or easily figuring out PINs tapped out on a phone screen because the OS doesn't bother putting access to accelerometers or gyroscopes behind an app permission. Attackers get very creative, especially when they're told that something is "impossible".
Recording sound from a video-only device that has been covered, with no hardware modifications would be a really really neat trick! Using Van Eck phreaking against all sorts of hardware is fascinating to me. FM radio broadcast from how RAM gets accessed and things like that. Maybe noise in the camera sensor can be used to pick up noise from the microphone on the motherboard (which is where the microphone is on Apple Silicon devices). I'm not going to say it's impossible, but it seems highly unlikely given everything else in play.
> There's a long history of attackers reliably detecting logging keys with audio using just inter-keystroke latency and some histograms
I wrote some fiction about this. The cosmic microwave background is hiding an audio signal. It's the sound of a keyswitch. Humanity uses the radio astronomy equivalent of these techniques to discover which keystroke caused the big bang.
What does "silicon-based" - mean? What other computer is not 'silicon-based'?
--
Is there a way to mechanize the HW detachment of microphone connections at will while using the machine open?
That would be great - if you had a physical switch on the side of machine, which physicall moves the mic wire a mm away from the contact.
---
Weird thing - I put tape over my webcam at all times, unless in use, obv.
After some time I received a pop-up alert on windows 11 and it lasted briefly, and went away - but freaked me out: "You should unblock your webcam" or something to that effect, I dont have the exact wording - but it was an alert telling me to unblock visibility of my webcam - I think it may have mentioned something about UX reasons - but it happened so quick I missed all the wording.
Yeah - tape over your cams.
----
It would be cool to have a phone case where is the case screen-facing-flap is closed, it pulls the wool over the eyes of the front-facing cams, so even in 'sleep' mode when the case is closed, the phones cams are all covered... but the mic is a different creature.
------
Remember when NSA was intercepting cisco equipment to install HW back doors in devices shipped to 'enemy' states.
We have known forever about NSA HW backdoors...
but a case that can manipulate the HW MIC switchoff mechanism of a phone with such capability would be cool.
Else ; we need 100% trustworthy ability to disable our Spy-Pilots.
And how are we supposed to trust Apple that this is in fact what's happening?
With a Framework laptop I have a hardware physical switch and I can actually open it up and see the PCB trace and verify that it disconnects the microphone.
At the point that you're opening up the laptop and chasing traces, you can do the same thing with Apple devices (with a bit more difficulty). It's not like they're made with rainbows and moonbeams. If you're at that level of paranoia (no judgement if it's justified or not) and have the skill to, just open up the Apple device and chase PCB traces. If you go down that route, iFixit's a good resource with lots of helpful pictures. (But still sometimes not enough.)
If it's in-chip, it won't be with PCB traces, it would be solid state inside the chip and you wouldn't be able to verify without inspecting the wafer, which is way outside my area of expertise. It doesn't sound like there's a mechanical relay that they are using for this.
There's also that if it's inside the chip, there is a risk that malicious software or buggy firmware can still enable it against your permission.
With a Framework laptop you can peel back the bezel and it's right there in plain sight. If the switch is in the off position it's a hard physical break to the microphone circuit. There is no possible software that can enable the microphone.
Nothing can beat a physical switch but even if it's solid state, unless it's in the CPU itself (it isn't) there still need to be traces in/on the PCB to bring the data from the microphone to the rest of the system, so just probe those traces when the lid is open vs closed. Or learn how to decap chips. There are some really awesome videos out there about that on YouTube!
More importantly though, Apple learned their lesson with the iSight which had a software-based activation LED. They assumed a random script kiddie wouldn't have the smarts to be able to hack the kext kernel module to turn the camera on without also turning the LED on. Unfortunately they learned about the Internet shortly thereafter where random script kiddies were able to get instructions on how to modify that kext, leading to some embarrassing moments, for some (possibly naked) high school teens, and for Apple.
Thats why the linked article is very careful to specifically mention that even having root and being able to manipulate kexts is not enough to silently use the microphone while closed.
I did just peel back the bezel on my Framework here. It looks like those hardware disconnects use some sort of blade that interrupts what I'm assuming to be an optical switch of some sort, one for the mic and one for the camera.
I would really like to know why this comment was down voted. It is a perfectly valid question with a rational explanation. Indeed, I was surprised to have needed to scroll down so far to find it, as it was the very first question that popped into my head as well.
A lot of my comments get downvoted these days. Sometimes the mods even side with the downvoters and ask me to stop. If they ban me, oh well, their loss.
Agreed. But Framework does seem to prove there is _some_ interest. Regardless. I find it strange that people flock to Apple products when Microsoft clearly embraces open source in more ways than Apple.
Hardware physical switches are a gimmick feature - if you can’t trust your OS to that degree, then you surely have bigger problems than your microphone.
Of course I can never trust a closed source OS like MacOS.
Linux is a little better. But it's not just the OS. I might be in a Google Meet call where I have given microphone access, but can I trust the mute button? I'd rather have a physical mute.
Just use a headset or external mic. If you're in clamshell you're probably at your desk/home office so that's quite reasonable.
Also nice - if I'm WFH and one of my family walks in with some drama, I close the lid, go clamshell mode, and I am quite sure any corporate spyware isn't listening in.
I wish there were good quality webcams without microphones. My external microphone has a mute switch but my Streamcam mic is still available to any corporate spyware.
This might seem like I am an Apple fanboy but I am not, I have plenty issues with Apple products but when it comes to Privacy Apple is the only company amongst the big tech we can trust.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook are all anti-privacy and just about using dar patterns to steal users info. It’s disgusting.
It is still the correct solution. A sensible default doesn't conflict here, but hardware switched are the only solution where you can be entirely sure.
How would a microphone work with the lid closed anyways? It’d be muffled. If you’re docking your laptop closed, you’ve got an external webcam / mic if you need those inputs.
The same way it used to work, by putting the input on the external facing portion of the case. Or even better, have both so that it can optimize for the current clamshell mode.
The position of the mic on the newer laptops is unmuffled. It's actually a very high-quality signal that can't be muffled. The only way to quiet it is to "kill" it; disconnect it.
The laptop microphone will pick up whatever noise is in the room. It's easier to filter out background noise with a microphone that is closer to your mouth.
For the same reason you might have other external peripherals. A laptop, realistically, can only fit something so decent inside of it. The 2020+ MacBooks do have surprisingly OK internal mics, but that's about all they are: OK.
Maybe I'm just an extra-big baby about it all. But what I find a little annoying with the COVID-era of work-from-home and distance learning is how few people seem to care about audio. Even as a teenager on TeamSpeak, rather than getting a more expensive graphics card or whatever, I spent my money on an SM7B. Now it is more important than ever.
Maybe this isn't reasonable, but I feel like if not for yourself, to prevent "sorry, can you repeat that?" moments, you kind of owe it to the people who have to listen to you. Like as an autistic person, hearing a dozen people's overlapping background static, tinny compressed audio, etc, it really, truly slowly drives me nuts. I can't deal with that level of auditory sensory stuff all day. If someone has a bad microphone, I want out of the call ASAP.
A Shure SM58 will last you a lifetime, fit on your desk, cost <$100, and no one will ever complain about sound again.
People don't know how bad they sound. It's as simple as that I think, there is no easy monitor functionality in Teams and friends like the preview image for camera, so there is no urgency.
A cool feature on laptops would be a jumper you could physically disconnect, and a tiny window (on say, the bottom of the laptop) to verify it hasn't been reconnected.
They have this feature but closing the lid on a MacBook or even putting it to sleep allows Bluetooth devices to stay connected. Heck, a MacBook even while in sleep mode will connect to Bluetooth devices. As far as I can see, this requires a third-party app to fix. Can an application still use the microphone on a Bluetooth device that’s connected?
Similarly, whenever I'm working at my kitchen table I always "lose" my mouse as if there's another monitor connected.
I realized a couple weeks later MacOS display continuity (or "sidecar"?) was connecting to my Mac Mini located directly upstairs using it as a 2nd monitor while I'm downstairs.
My apple watch also regularly unlocks my Mac Mini when I'm downstairs (Mac Mini in a bedroom upstairs).
All of these features pose serious security issues if your physical location isn't secure/trusted.
There really should be a "Travel Mode" for MacOS that disables features like these. No one wants airport security to open a laptop and have the apple watch immediately unlock it for them while standing 20 feet away (or in another room).
Your watch really shouldn’t be able to do that. The pairing uses p2p latency as a way to determine if you are actually close enough to your Mac to want to unlock it.
I’ve used it for years now with a variety of watches and Macs and I’ve always had to be right next to the computer with a fairly clear line of sight between them. Even putting my watch on the other side of my body is normally enough to make it tell me that the WiFi signal isn’t strong enough to unlock it.
To play devil's advocate, it would very easy to create custom rooms in which a detainee is held in a room against a paper wall (with their locked device on the other side of the paper wall). The orientation of their seating arrangement could be such that it always places the detainees watch closest to the device.
To me, that's just a failure on Bluetooth spec part, period. All reasonable bluetooth devices should come with a selector which allows you to choose which device to connect to [1]. Instead, there's this crapshoot, where, if there are multiple bluetooth devices near you, you'll get paired with a random one, and will have to disable bluetooth on it to roll the dice again.
[1] For cheapest devices, a physical button that goes to the next available device would still make a world of difference.
Definitely should be an os-level feature to disable all that, similar to using panic mode on ios to disable biometrics.
I personally boot my laptops to the filevault screen and no further when going through the security checkpoints. Keeps the disk encrypted and requires my password to continue.
Doesn't look like Filevault has a duress option— otherwise it'd be pretty nice to have a separate password that boots you to a dummy partition showing a fresh desktop install with apparently nothing on it. For bonus points, you could have the dummy OS kernel-patched so that it doesn't even show the other partitions as existing, and just pretends it's occupying the whole disk with mostly empty space.
"That computer? Oh yeah, I just picked it up, officer; was going to start configuring it when when I arrive at my destination."
You should spend a few minutes in setting. Continuity allows a mouse and keyboard to run multiple macs and iPads. You move the cursor all the way over to the end of the screen. It stops but if you push more it will switch to the neighboring Mac. Easy to disable in settings. You can unlock your other Mac this way (I think), and Apple Watch will unlock if you are close by. All changeable in settings.
I don’t really trust it. The sports bands (which I find most comfortable) are especially vulnerable to being “scooped” off the wrist with two fingers in a single motion without interrupting the presence detection.
Do you have any more info on that? I've been able to find videos of people taking the sports band off, but it didn't look like any of the techniques were attempting to avoid interrupting the wrist presence detection
Two fingers under the watch (far enough to cover the heartbeat sensor) and a swift upwards yank will pop the strap underneath and it’ll lift right off.
The thing is, if someone has your unlocked watch, what can they really do? This is a question I’ve never really known the answer to and doubt you ever would know clearly.
Certainly banking apps don’t seem to have a lot of functionality on watchOS, but I’m unsure to what extent being signed in on an unlocked watch is the same as being signed in on an unlocked phone. Can i authorise a new phone just from the watch? I can certainly get 2FA codes to the watch, so the answer I guess is maybe.
Well I'll be damned, so you can. With a watch alone they'd have limited access, but if you steal somebody's watch without the watch realising it's been removed & also steal their phone you can almost certainly unlock the phone with the watch (my partner + I use that all the time when driving... they pick up my phone, show it only their eyes, and the phone assumes it must be me wearing a mask and so it uses my unlocked watch on my wrist to unlock the phone).
The good news, however, is that you don't appear to be able to use the Apple Watch mask unlock feature to pass further Face ID checks deeper in the system once unlocked, so your banking apps & password manager is safe... but your messages & e-mails are not...
OK, but most people don't use burner laptops /phones and are often subjected to unreasonable searches at the border by federal agents during entry at international airports, etc.
I think you got this backwards. The 5th amendment means that the state can not force you to share information you have in your head, e.g. you can not be forced to give a password. But the state can force you to give a physical key, harware token, or a biometric read.
Oh yeah, for some reason my brain reversed the logic, thanks! :D
Though certain EU courts can “make you give up” your password, as far as I know. Nonetheless, security is only good when it is used — widely-used biometrics with a potentially stronger password (due to not having to enter it all the times) is statistically safer for the population over everyone having “password1” as a secret. Especially with a good fallback like emergency mode on iphone/apple watch. Afterwards only the password can unlock the device, and it is a single long press of two hardware buttons.
You are right about the EU. There are many free democracies that do not consider passwords to be protected under their "no self-incrimination" version of the US 5th amendment.
Can they force you to give up the post-it on which you wrote down your password? If yes, are there any real limits to how much pressure they can apply before they give up? If no, what's stopping them from giving you a pencil and a stack of post-its, and letting you know they'll keep applying pressure until you produce a post-it with the password on it, which they "know" you have "somewhere"?
Point being, I feel this is getting into xkcd://538 territory.
Depends. If you have the resources to hire a lawyer, then what you describe is governmental overreach borderline on torture that will lead to the government paying out to you when you sue them and plenty of government employees being reprimanded or fired. If you do not have these resources and end up before unscrupulous law enforcement, you might very well have your rights abused until a journalist or the ACLU or some other equivalent decides to fight for you.
Given overwhelmingly evidence and an overworked public defenders office, you’re not going to take a chance on going to court where you will probably lose.
> There really should be a "Travel Mode" for MacOS that disables features like these.
Sadly that is not the Apple way. We'll have to wait years for them to come up with a "solution" that doesn't involve a disable button. If they even decide to work on it.
macOS Lockdown Mode is not intended to be used by casual travelers to prevent unintended macOS unlocks.
Per Apple, “Lockdown Mode is an optional, extreme protection that's designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats. Most people are never targeted by attacks of this nature.”
Which is why you shouldn’t have a 4 digit PIN. By default Apple devices have wanted a 6 digit PIN for a while now. I have an 8 digit one on my watch, but use a passphrase on my iPhone.
Amusingly simple, practical solution. What's the wake time difference from power off vs sleep for a modern Mac Book? I don't have one. Oh, I suppose the power off time would be longer than simply shutting the lid, too.
Can you configure it to power off when the lid shuts?
Overwhelmingly, it does "just work" as Apple intended.
However, it's often quite opinionated. So Apple's intended functionality may or may not jive with your preferences. This is neither a defense nor criticism of Apple, and it's not a defense or criticism of your preferences either.
I will point out that anecdotally, I don't hear too many people wanting their mouse's scrolling to work in the opposite direction as their trackpad. I think Apple's probably got well over 99% of the userbase covered with the defaults and opinions here. From a software/QA/UX perspective things get wild pretty quickly if you cover every < 1% use case.
That setting is particularly terrible because they mirror it in both "mouse" and "trackpad" settings or at least that's how they used to do it. So it SEEMS like you can have independent settings for a mouse and trackpad but they control the same thing (which is equally weird, does any other setting do that?).
FWIW, I think the phrase "just works" implies that you, the user, should expect it to work without any tweaks or workarounds. So, the user's preferences are implied. Saying that it just works in many cases, or that it just works for Apple is not what is implied by that marketing. It's a strong promise that was chosen for a reason, and in many cases they do not live up to it.
you, the user, should expect it to work without any tweaks or workarounds
I think that, for any reasonable definition of "it just works", it would clearly refer to essential functionality and not the extremely long tail of niche tweaks that at least one user out of millions might want to perform.
For example on Apple devices I've often wanted a feature that would let me skip PIN/FaceID authentication when connected to my home network. No such feature exists. But I'd say there's a clear distinction between a missing feature and "not just working."
Of course, "it just works" is a vague marketing phrase that they haven't used in a long time, perhaps a decade or more? So, whatever. You have the power to decide it means whatever you want it to mean, and then decide if Apple meets your made-up standard or not. I freely admit that's what I'm doing.
> I think that, for any reasonable definition of "it just works", it would clearly refer to essential functionality
Really? I always heard it as something more like "we've thought of everything, all the details, and you don't have to fiddle with our products like with Windows." I think essential functionality is always implied, with any product, but with Apple, it seemed like their promise was for a higher level of user experience than that.
Acknowledged that this is an old marketing statement (I believe it was a Jobs-ism, which dates it), but please look at the context of the thread.
it seemed like their promise was for a higher
level of user experience than that.
I think they've clearly pursued a more polished level of out-of-the-box integration and functionality for their products, not the most endlessly tweakable experience. (Whether they hit the mark or not is up to the individual to decide, but it's clearly what they shoot for)
Whether this is your cup of tea or your worst nightmare, I don't think this is particularly controversial!
Additionally, I think it's also uncontroversial that they're able to pursue/achieve a higher level of polish specifically thanks to the fact that they choose not to pursue the infinitely long tail of hardware combinations and software configurability. After all, as engineers we know that N possible feature toggles and knobs quickly can quickly approach 2^N or even N! combinations that need to be thought about and tested.
In short, I think it's sort of baffling to think that the omission of some pet niche feature equates to a piece of software "not working."
In contrast, if that omission makes you think the software stinks or simply isn't for you, that would make total sense to me.
Do they still use that line? While some of their newer stuff does meet that standard, a lot more “just works if you already know what it does“ (eg. AirPods need to be in the case to pair… why?) and still more seems kinda random (fk you iOS keyboard.)
I don't think they do, but I was responding to a comment about the applicability of the phrase to current Apple products. Maybe "it just works" is like Google's "do the right thing": both make sense if you append "(for us)" to the end.
> I will point out that anecdotally, I don't hear too many people wanting their mouse's scrolling to work in the opposite direction as their trackpad. I think Apple's probably got well over 99% of the userbase covered with the defaults and opinions here.
OK, this is my biggest pain point after switching to MacOS for work, so let me go on a rant. Not only can't I imagine this particular scenario covering 99% of the userbase - I can't imagine anyone wanting this behavior with a regular mouse that has a scroll wheel (as opposed to buying Apple's Magic crap, which Apple wants you to do). Literally every other system is set up so that scrolling the wheel down would scroll the page down. And pretty much every laptop I've used had natural scrolling on a touchpad either by default, or as an option (a separate option from the mouse setting).
I could maybe see it sort of working if your mouse wheel has an infinite scroll feature, but even then it's super unintuitive.
But OK, let's buy into "think different" approach (AKA "we will break every convention ever set by man 'cause we're quirky like that") and assume that this is somehow more convenient if you haven't been contaminated by using other systems. What's the harm in providing a setting for other people? Like you said - it's a preference and a very simple one and a very common one, clearly not a 1% use case. How is this not a part of the system? The only answer I can find is: "we want you to buy Apple Magic Mouse, it feels natural there". The way the Apple pushes you into their shitty ecosystem is so anti-consumer that it boggles my mind that there's not that much pushback for it.
So far my experience after switching to MacOS had a very clear pattern:
How do I enable "feature x"? -> Wait, I can't, seriously? This is basic OS functionality, how in the world is this not a default feature? -> (dig through dozens of "you're using it wrong" comments) -> OK, let's download yet another third party app then, I'm sure it will never serve as a vector for a supply-chain attack.
> I can't imagine anyone wanting this behavior with a regular mouse that has a scroll wheel (as opposed to buying Apple's Magic crap, which Apple wants you to do).
I had to edit some values in Windows Registry to get my gaming machine with Windows and a scroll wheel to scroll the same way my Mac does (which I prefer). Now you can imagine.
>I think Apple's probably got well over 99% of the userbase covered with the defaults and opinions here.
The vast amount of MacOS apps built by the community to undo Apple's terrible and backwards UX choices, and the amounts of sales those apps get, disproves your theory that over 99% of people are fine with the defaults Apple forces on its users.
The existence of such programs merely says there are enough users willing to install such programs that it's worth making them available (and that macs have the affordances -- APIs -- to make these kinds of changes, which ios does not have). There are so many macs in use that a tiny percentage is enough.
I suspect the same is true in the general case in the ios app store: that there is a long tail of apps used by a tiny %age of users, but with an enormous user base that's enough to make a free or even paid app.
And after about 35 years of mousing and about four years of iphoning I expected to want to revert apple's change to mouse-gesture-scrolling with Lion, but after only a few seconds I was sold. YMMV, of course, but I agree with the "99%" hypothesis.
The more settings you have, the more inevitable this becomes...
Assume for a moment that any given default you set, works well for 99% of your userbase. Then, the number of users satisfied with every last default breaks down as follows:
1 setting -> 99% of users satisfied
2 settings -> 98% of users satisfied
20 settings -> 81% of users satisfied
200 settings -> 13% of users satisfied
Apple has a lot of settings. Even if their defaults in general work for greater than 99% of their users, it becomes unrealistic at scale that every single default will satisfy any particular user, let alone all of them. Thus, those third-party apps that you see become popular in aggregate. That doesn't necessarily mean that Apple's defaults are wrong. They could be absolutely killing it on the defaults, and you would still expect to see these results -- in which case you would expect them to devote their attention to the common case, and to let the third-parties pick up the edge cases.
> Overwhelmingly, it does "just work" as Apple intended.
that's a creative re-wording of "you're holding it the wrong way."
Not all Apple fans have been on board with the slow morph from general purpose computer to walled-garden console -- although admittedly that audience is probably mostly gone, anyway.
The "if you hold your iPhone 4 in a particularly contrived way, reception suffers" thing was a total farce.
Apparently you had to use your iPhone 4 without a case and press a finger horizontally over the antenna line. I wasn't even able to trigger it in that pathological way. It was about as realistic as complaining your laptop doesn't work while being roasted in a microwave oven.
There are countless reasons to dislike Apple, including many factual reasons and of course personal taste. Not the biggest fan myself.
But when I see that iPhone 4 antenna issue mentioned, I know there's a particular sort of sentiment behind it.
The zoom scroll is disconnected from the scroll direction as well. I'm not sure if they fixed it by now or if I just got used to it, but it was super disorienting when I noticed it.
you can just use hammerspoon to get the same effect, turning off the bluetooth/wifi right after entering sleep mode and turning them back on when the Mac is unlocked.
I've long desired form my AirPods to operate in a "play any sound from any of my devices" mode. This seems like a no-brainer and such phantom connections would as a result have no user-visible impact and you could do things like listen to music coming from your phone while hearing sounds from your MacBook.
Unsure if I would love or hate that, but it might be more natural than the iphone/airpods/mac "incoming call" fiasco I face regularly.
Airpods/MacOS - listening to background music. Phone call comes in... VERY LOUD facetime 'ring' announces on mac that I'm getting a phone call.
Pick up phone to answer it... holy tamole - it's minimum 8 seconds between clicking 'answer' and... eventually airpods switching over to phone - most of the time. To the calling party, I've 'answered', but they can't hear me - or... can sort of hear me, but I can't hear them. The speed at which the 'switch' takes place, and the visual delay (air pod icons turning on, then off, then on again, then a floating top notification saying "airpods connected"...)... this is always minimum 8 seconds. Usually 10-11.
I just say "hang on, i'm switching my earpiece over..." and wait. Annoying. Given that this is all in their ecosystem, I expect this to get better, not worse. I'd rather this sort of experience get fixed vs more emojis, or 'sidecar' or whatnot.
I usually want to walk away from the computer. I sit at the computer enough already. If a call comes in, I want - sometimes need - to be able to walk away.
The long/short of it is, both devices 'know' about the airpods. Call comes in to phone, during an answer, having airpods switch to the phone quickly - like, under 2 seconds - is what I'm expecting. I'm not sure that's an unreasonable expectation (maybe it is?). At some point, I would think, given all the neural-core-AI stuff in the phones and ecosystem, it should know that I always switch airpods to phone to talk... maybe do it automatically at some point?
The phone now knows my daily routine, giving me traffic updates 10 minutes before I normally leave to hit the gym. Yet... the 'fill in your email' prompts on the phone suggest 'my' email address is something I have not actively used in 11 years. I don't understand the 'why' behind some of these things. If the device is going to learn... when will it learn I don't use that email address any longer? Obviously separate issue, but... as has gone on for decades - we get loads of new features, but often little attention paid to clean up and refine last year's new features.
This "why" has been growing since Steve passed. I have been an Apple user for 20+ years. The experience has been slowly going downhill for the last 5 years. I think they survived on Steve's vision for the first couple of years after his passing. The brains behind Apple are still there, clearly, M1, M2... the vision is missing. The why's you mention seem to be those unpolished pieces Steve would never have allowed the release of.
This is why I (and many others) I think still have some fond memories of Snow Leopard, marketed as 'bug fix' release. That feels like the last time there was a united push to polish up existing stuff without throwing in 'new' things.
This is one of those lessons that we as a software dev community seem unable to absorb. Polish is universally better received than flaky new features, and the releases we view most fondly are the ones that are fast and reliable, and yet we never seem capable of holding off on the new features to fix existing pain points.
> Polish is universally better received than flaky new features, and the releases we view most fondly are the ones that are fast and reliable
It's far from universal. Most users never expect to understand their software in the first place, and so put a lot more value on new features. If anything I'd say developers put too much effort into polish, since we're the very small demographic that actually appreciates it.
"settings" was vague. I looked in system settings - nothing there. Apparently, it's a 'facetime' setting? Will this make switching 'audio from mac via airpods' to 'audio from iphone via airpods' any faster?
“Immediately” is not the word. As the phone is answered, it’s trying to automatically switch. Pressing that key while it’s in the process of auto switch just confuses it, and typically stops the switch process altogether. Then you have to do it again.
Fwiw, this seemed to work smoothly two years ago. And then… updates. AirPod firmware updates. iPhone updates. macOS updates. Nothing works the same as it did 2 years ago for maybe … 2 months or so. And there’s no going back. :(
This was one of the first things I disabled with Continuity. As for why, it's not that complicated.
1) It's a distraction. I am also one of those people who turned on "Silence unknown callers" to send everyone I don't know to voicemail. If it's important, you'll get a message there. My phone either lives in my pocket or is on the desk next to me, so it's very unlikely I'd miss something.
2) At least with AirPods, although I have "connect automatically" turned on, I will never intentionally connect them to more than one source at a time.
I disabled that as it has some very confusing and undesired behaviour. For example if you're listening to Spotify on your Mac, then get a call on your iPhone you hit pause on your keyboard media keys so you can pick up the call - and it hangs up.
What you’re requesting seem pretty complex, or at least resource intensive to me.
It means the airPods keep X active connections with any device that says it could emit sound at any time, while also harmonizing sound levels as the devices don’t have the same settings, and mixing it all at the end.
That feels like a lot to ask for tiny devices with limited battery. Now that could be a nice idea for a separate device that keeps all these bluetooth connection alive and deals with all the mess to deliver a single stream to your earbuds (albeit with double the latency)
Connect the devices all together with wifi direct to share and mix audio. Then have whichever device is connected to the earbuds send the mixed stream. The extra bandwidth of 802.11 would also allow for additional latency on the order of milliseconds.
The more I think about it, the more complex it sounds to me ....
Let's say you're listening to a Youtube MV on your computer while cleaning the dishes. A Skype call comes on your phone, and you take it.
- Do you still hear the youtube sound in the background ?
- What does the play/pause button do on your earbuds ? Or the volume button ? Which source does it act on ?
- An alarm starts on your iPad somewhere in the house, how do you stop it ? Do you keep getting the sound until you physically find the device and act on it ?
And that's just 2 min of thinking about it. Not saying it can't be done, just that you'd need to deal with all the edge cases as well. Auto switching sources is annoying (I personally disabled it when I had airpods, and don't use it on any headset), but I think having all sources active at all time could be as annoying, or worse. If Apple couldn't solve auto-switching, I wouldn't be holding my breath for them to solve the all-devices at the same times edge cases.
Oh, definitely! Even on a single device, some of these are issues. Does ‘play’ play winamp, or that YouTube tab, or VLC? Hopefully not all three! Now consider what volume each of these needs to be, especially if one is an online meeting and one’s a noisy voice call.
I had the same, switching to Airpods “fixed” this problem. I doubt Apple will ever do something about this, bt audio works fine as long as you use iPhone, Macbook and Apple pods
I have AirPods, but the experience still sucks with multiple devices.
I have my phone, my laptop, my iPad, and two iPads for my kids, all on my account. I literally am unable to make my kid’s iPads forget my AirPods, because it is tied to the apple account. If I have the iPads forget them, it forgets them on all my devices. It is annoying as hell, I have to leave Bluetooth off on my kids iPads.
Creating AppleIDs for your kids through Family Sharing and using those AppleIDs on those devices would solve this. You as organizer can view and manage all devices; all purchases are paid through your account (but are tied to the purchaser), and you can set restrictions and require permissions for many activities (including in-app purchases). Plus, all the bluetooth devices remain per-user. And it keeps your stuff out of their stuff and vice versa (though selected items can be shared).
I should do this for my kids, yes, but it is still annoying just for my own devices. I don’t want to use my AirPods on all my devices, just one… why can’t I do that?
On the device you do not want them to connect to automatically go to Bluetooth settings, find your AirPods, click on (i) and change "Connect to this iPhone" from "Automatically" to "When Last Connected to This iPhone".
Not sure if you have kids, but the devices didn’t start out as being theirs. It was my iPad, they started using it more as they got older, and eventually I got a new one for me. I should set it up properly, but it happened gradually and I have not gotten around to changing it… and now all the apps and accounts and settings are tied to my Apple ID.
The more important question is how old are yours? Toddlers can't read so much, so it's easier to understand not making them their own accounts it a priority. On the other hand, if they're teenagers, seeing private texts between their parents could be deleterious to their mental health. Still, they're not getting younger. The only way out involves some level of pain, but the sooner they get their own accounts, the less pain there will be.
“Ummm” aside, this is not at all obvious. I have an iPad from before I had kids. When setting it up, I was asked to enter my Apple ID, so I did. Then came kids and a new use for this iPad, and a second iPad, which obviously needed the same apps, and a third. No, it never occurred to me to set up appleids specifically for toddlers. It did eventually prompt me to set up a new “iPads” appleid when I switched from android to iPhone and suddenly discovered that all my text messages were being delivered to my children. But the ipads are family devices, not per-child, and if apple thinks I’m going to give each kid an appleid, they aren’t paying attention to how people actually want to use their devices.
"Umm aside" not-aside, I'm sorry for triggering you. it's too late for me to edit my comment and take that out but I would if I could. So this may not be obvious to you, but what's obvious to someone isn't necessarily obvious to other people, and vice versa. In any case, I can see why creating a separate account if you only have toddlers seems too onerous. Don't worry though, they'll become teenagers who want (and deserve) the autonomy and agency of having their own account before you know it, even if sharing your photos to their idevice wasn't enough to motivate you. Separate accounts seems the most reasonably way do implement a shared but-not-system to preserve privacy, a favorite reason Apple cites as their reason for doing things. I'm not sure how else Apple could do a shared system for teens.
I think there's a hack involving getting a cheap phone number for each toddler, adding that to iCloud, then disabling message delivery to that number but I haven't tested it.
I'm in agreement that Apple does not know how ipads are actually used in many families. There is nothing personal or private on our shared ipads, either, and it makes no sense to tightly bind each physical device to a single person's appleid. They are basically roaming web browsers and game screens. Nobody reads their email on them, for example. And this doesn't even get into the question of whether a small child should need to remember usernames and passwords and consent to EULAs. The devices should have settings which respect that while some individual's appleid (e.g. mine) is ultimately responsible for the device, that in no way reflects who the typical user of the device is or what they should have access to in the corresponding apple account. A checkbox during setup that says "this is a shared device that should not have access to my personal data" would be perfectly fine.
Emphasis on should here. In the "real world" with real family pressures a lot of the time good account hygene goes out the window. In my experience account sharing is rife on "kid" iPads, especially as many of them are often hand-me-down devices that people don't want to have to go through the pain of reinstalling everything again for a new user.
The ideal solution is iOS on iPad gets multiple user account support (like general purpose Macs and PCs have had for decades....), and you could just quickly throw on a new kid account, but Apple clearly like forcing you to buy one iPad per user account and reinstall everything every time it gets a new user - shared devices aren't as great for the company bottom line.
The sad thing is this support is largely there in the OS already built; its just locked to schools/businesses and is a PITA to setup for private owners:
Honestly, the lack of multiple user accounts is borderline criminal in my opinion, especially on the high spec expensive M1 iPad models that cost as much as a multi-user laptop.
I agree; it's really a shame that they don't have multi-user support unlocked for iPads with Family Sharing, especially for those with kids! It's right there and probably wouldn't take too many engineering resources..
I'd be worried that little Timmy would accidentally turn on photo sync or something for the adult's account and see... certain pictures he should not be seeing kinda-thing. Or iMessage and send something to someone. Though; if you're strict about the restrictions feature or guided access you should be safe?
For the average person, they (Apple) probably feel like Family Sharing is the right mechanism to address these issues. Education and Business customers have Shared iPad because of the different environments they operate in where the use case is clear.
In a world where (generally speaking) people are expensive and hardware is cheap, Apple probably thinks each person having their own device is easier than trying to shuffle around - potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.
We're getting closer, but storage and networks need to get even better before the majority of regular people can do this and will tolerate it, not just the power users.
There is nothing cheap about iPads, especially the models that have the same M1 processors and similar pricepoints as a MacBook. It's laughable they don't have multiple user support today, and is solely to protect sales of the devices.
I'm genuinely surprised someone would defend this behaviour. Imagine you bought any other computer for north of 1000 dollars and you could only log one person in at a time - its unheard of, and was solved decades ago.
Again, iOS is already a multi-user OS - Apple just choose to artificially restrict how you can use it.
> potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.
This is just being silly - people log families and many users into drives far smaller than this all the time.
> There is nothing cheap about iPads, especially the models that have the same M1 processors and similar pricepoints as a MacBook. It's laughable they don't have multiple user support today, and is solely to protect sales of the devices.
Compared to the days when people had 1 machine (e.g, mainframes) and connected to it with comparatively dumb terminal devices, yes, hardware is cheap.
For a more recent example, I'll point out that the first computer I was reasonably involved with getting into our house was a Dell 4100 in the late 90's. At the time, it cost ~$1400, a not insignificant portion of that price attributable to a CD-RW.
In short, you probably couldn't really get anything below $1000 - given that baseline, I don't know how you could say things aren't cheap when we now have Chromebooks in Edu/Business which are at best $250-300.
At least publicly, Apple doesn't break out P&L for each product/division, although they do give sales numbers, so it's difficult to say if missing features which let them hit a price point have an impact.
> I'm genuinely surprised someone would defend this behaviour. Imagine you bought any other computer for north of 1000 dollars and you could only log one person in at a time - its unheard of, and was solved decades ago.
iOS/iPadOS still has UNIX underneath, so multiuser is definitely possible, even if it's not exposed in the GUI in all situations. Give it time.
> This is just being silly - people log families and many users into drives far smaller than this all the time.
My point about the size of home directories is colored by my own experience - for example, I don't use streaming music services and am a bit of a video hoarder - ask people with kids how big their photo libraries are and I think you'll be surprised how much the average person is carrying around with them.
I'm sorry but I still find this hilarious. You can spend over 2k on an iPad that already has a cutting edge M2 CPU, the same CPU family that supports multiple users on every other non-iPad device, we are not waiting on anything here. Everything needed exists and has done so for decades.
Time is not required. A change to how Apple runs its iPad business is needed. This hasn't been a technical choice for a long time.
> yes, hardware is cheap.
You can buy an iPad in configurations up to 2500 dollars. For a single user computer. These are not cheap computers by any reasonable definition, given the amount of compute power you can buy for 1000 dollars elsewhere (including from Apple!).
> potentially - 1 TB home directories for each person.
> ask people with kids how big their photo libraries are and I think you'll be surprised how much the average person is carrying around with them.
Almost no kids have 1 TB iPads in my experience - they are far too expensive for children! Almost no adults have 1tb iPads given their cost as well really - it turns an iPad into a 4 figure device. But perhaps you think 1500 dollars + taxes is "cheap" for a single user computer with 1tb of storage too?
My final point - almost all of their competitors can do this today, often on much lower specification hardware too. Windows 11, Android and ChromeOS tablets all can have multiple user accounts, just like almost any other plain ole computer made in the last 20+ years.
'audio' mostly does, unless that audio involved answering a call (posted about this in a separate thread). The experience of listening to music on a mac with airpods, then trying to answer an incoming call on the phone, and using the airpods, is abysmally slow, in my experience.
This comment section is a sheer delight to anyone who’s ever said they prefer wired headphones because of the flakiness of Bluetooth and had a chorus of people respond that they must be doing something wrong because Bluetooth “just works.”
There used to be a option to disable bluetooth devices waking a Mac. It was removed a couple years ago. I can kind of understand because this would also prevent a keyboard/mouse waking the Mac, which isn’t ideal. I assume a lot of people were turning this setting off then complaining their Mac won’t wake.
However, if a Macbook is sleeping and closed with no peripherals attached, I can’t see any use case for waking from bluetooth. It doesn’t make sense.
Sleeping but plugged into a monitor, while closed, would be one. For other cases, I suspect it's more about making sure the device(s) can be used almost instantly after waking.
Does seem like it'd be nice if the behavior were something you could toggle, though.
I don't understand why the bluetooth-stealing happens so often. I'll literally be in the middle of a podcast on my phone, and my iPad in the next room (on which my kids have been watching something) will take over my headphones. There's no change in state on either device (not stopping/starting), and I haven't moved close to the iPad (and the iPhone is much closer, in my pocket). I just have to turn off bluetooth entirely on the iPad to avoid this.
I use a USB/bluetooth headphone DAC/amp. Most of the time, I plug it into my work laptop and listen to videos/music while I work. Sometimes, if a video ends or if I pause playback, my iPhone (which INSISTS on connecting to the amp) will take over and start playing music.
I really wish you could turn off auto-connect to bluetooth devices.
Bluetooth is basically the devil though. My Bose speaker cant handle the fact that I always want my Android phone, and keeps insisting that I really want my child's IPad.
Most annoying thing is actually how bad bluetooth driver is. On multiple macbooks I had (2011-2022) the bluetooth will just not connect to things, randomly disconnect from them, unresponsive devices when thy are connected (also not responding to disconnect), problems connecting any keyboard but Apple™ Magic Keyboard, and of course, aggressive takeover of every device with a strong competition towards othre macbooks and iphone devices.
The number of issues like this that I hear about regularly from people who otherwise love their Apple hardware continually make me glad I’ve been a wired peripheral luddite, even as wired things with decent quality are increasingly hard to even find.
I don’t think I’d recommend the preference to anyone who doesn’t already/still share it. But it’s a blissful quiet.
Such a big thread of people complaining that their bluetooth headphones connect to the wrong device or not at all and how you could use third-party software to (maybe) fix it.
And then there's me who still uses headphones with cables. I plug the cable into the device, it plays from this device, never fails. I also never need to charge my headphone. I still don't understand why anyone would voluntarily replace cables with wireless when it's such a worse use experience.
Bluetooth is terrible (unreliable, slow to connect, extreme latency, bad sound quality), but wireless is great. Currently they are one and the same mediocre user experience, so I’m hoping UWB or something else can fix these problems sometime soon?
Apples clamshell mode support is super confusing IMHO. This is once thing Windows does better at least by default. Perhaps Macs can be configured to what I expect but I personally have struggled with getting it to work in a way that satisfies me.
Sure, so I primarily use Macbook Pro's that companies provide me. I work from home and use USB-C docks to connect the Macs to external displays, keyboards, and networking.
In general, Windows 10 computers work on boot in clamshell mode. Drivers load, external USB devices are useful, displays work.
On Apple devices, corporations *must* enable FileVault, a full disk encryption utility, to meet some compliance standards. The problem is that Apple really locked this down, even to USB-C docks. My docks use the Display Link driver to load the screens, so as a result I need to physically open the laptop every day, use the laptop keyboard to enter my password, wait for the login process to complete, then close the laptop and connect the dock.
It would be very nice if they could allow some drivers to be whitelisted, or even make an "official" apple dock with full FileVault support.
I suppose I could use a Mac Studio or Mini, but corporations seem dead set on providing laptops to employees.
Other than that I would say Windows generally handles scaling better, but this is an area that the latest OS (Ventura) really improved. Macs today are much better at scaling and switching displays than in the past.
Thanks for responding. Even if you don't deal with PII datasets, I sure hope your windows laptop is also encrypted at rest.
Just fyi, at least on my M1 MacBook,
a regular, non-Displaylink (ie HDMI or Display Port connection) doesny require opening the laptop to login, even using an Bluetooth keyboard. I'm sure there's a usb-c hub that's your preferred form factor if you don't like the dongle-style breakout boxes.
I have 2 MacBook Pros, both with FileVault enabled, one managed by my employer and the other personal. My USB-C dock also uses DisplayLink and I primarily use the machines in clamshell mode.
I don't have the issue you're referring to unless I completely shut off either machine, which I almost never do. Do you completely power off your machine at the end of each day? When the machine is just locked my external displays power up and display the login screen just fine.
The rule is that it must be powered, have a keyboard connected, and have an external display plugged in. It is very confusing especially since everything cuts out if your power source turns off, but this does allow some monitors to provide power+USB+one display over a single C cord to enable clamshell mode.
Kind of unrelated but it sucks that Macs don't do multiple displays over a single cable because Apple refuses to support it in their GPU via the built-in MST hub (that otherwise is put to use for driving the Pro Display XDR).
>Trying to get Windows laptops to keep outputting to an external display with the lid closed has always been a hassle for me
Can't concur with this. My windows laptop is has its lid closed and is outputting to a display. Only thing I do is uncheck the default behavior of putting the laptop to sleep when the lid is closed. This should be enough. Did you do this?
"Clamshell mode" is more than just not going to sleep when lid is closed: it still goes into sleep when you close the lid and have no monitor attached, which also means it goes to sleep if you unplug the monitor and lid is already closed, and out of sleep when lid is closed and you plug a monitor. (TBH I don't know if Windows does that or not)
There may be conditions around having input devices as well, can't recall exactly.
There also used to be a setting to disable wake up from bluetooth devices but it seems to have disappeared. (I was using that setting to prevent a DualShock 4 gamepad - which powers on all too easily - connected via bluetooth to wake the computer)
It would be great if certain types of bluetooth devices could remain connected. Physical input devices only would likely be a good default. There is little reason, IMO, for speaker connections to be active.
In clamshell mode, I would expect all bluetooth connections to be active, but while suspended, please drop nonessential connections.
Being able to override the default disconnect rules per device would be ideal.
The opposite is also true. You can’t officially use a Macbook in clamshell mode (eg, as a headless media server) even when connected to power. When you close the lid without a connected display, the official MacOS behaviour is to put the computer to sleep. You need a third-party tool to prevent it from sleeping.
Yet when my Macbook is asleep in my bag with no peripherals attached, my headphones will connect and wake the Mac.
The left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. It literally makes no sense.
I think we're agreeing - my point is that it doesn't make sense to allow bluetooth when they won't even allow a display (no power, laptop closed). What are you going to use the bluetooth for, moving a mouse you can't even see?
...and they could make it so it stays on only of there's an external display connected, but then communication could be disabled by the person who stole your laptop. So Find My would not be able to find and more importantly report a location.
> ...and they could make it so it stays on only of there's an external display connected
Not always, my monitor goes to sleep and turns off. At this point, macOS should turn Bluetooth off? How would I wake the computer then? I would have to open it.
> Find My would not be able to find and more importantly report a location.
That might be another reason why Bluetooth stays on. On a laptop, I'd rather have Find My working in clamshell mode (given the theft risk).
> Not always, my monitor goes to sleep and turns off. At this point, macOS should turn Bluetooth off? How would I wake the computer then? I would have to open it.
So I’m not sure about turning off bluetooth entirely, but waking via bluetooth should be turned off when the laptop is closed without a display attached. There is no use case for waking via bluetooth without a display.
There are a ton, computers are incredibly useful devices.
If I close the screen I can play music out of those speakers for a pretty long time. And if I can sleep/wake from a Bluetooth keyboard when I’m not using it, I can stretch that into a long weekend.
…or at least I can on Windows where this is possible.
I exclusively use it with the lid closed. However, I use wired everything. I use external speakers, monitor, keyboard, mouse, wacom, and dslr camera for webcam. The only thing wireless is my wifi connection.
I think you should be able to play music while the lid is closed. That seems like a reasonable use case.
Set computer up on a table, pair Bluetooth speaker, put on your favorite streaming service, close the lid and walk away, the music filling the room. Totally reasonable.
That’s a different topic really. There are tools that can prevent going to sleep when the lid is closed with no peripherals attached. When not used, most users would expect for the laptop to go to sleep, even if it’s playing something at the time.
What this is about is engaging Bluetooth devices while asleep, which doesn’t make any practical sense.
> When not used, most users would expect for the laptop to go to sleep
I think part of the problem here is that defining "in use" is actually very difficult, and it's literally something where two different users (or even the same user at different times) could have different expectations for the same circumstance as defined in code.
The best part is that closing the lid seems to put it into a "supershitty Bluetooth" state: I can be listening to music/podcast/audiobook from my phone, which is in my pocket, close the laptop and suddenly start getting "Connection <long pause> Lost" every 20-30 seconds until I go back to my laptop and turn off bluetooth.
The problem here is that people that use external keyboards and mice over BT expect to be able to wake their MacBooks connected to external displays even with the lid closed.
I'm totally fine with it keeping BT audio active when it's connected to anything else (even the charger I guess). The annoying thing, for me at least, is when it decides it absolutely has to take over my Bose Headphones while closed in my backpack, not playing any audio, and I'm out traveling with it and my iPhone.
I can understand that if I’m just closing the lid but my MacBook shouldn’t be connecting to BT devices when it’s in sleep mode. My Windows laptop won’t do that when it’s in sleep mode. This feels counterintuitive to me. There should at least be a setting where I can disable that without having to install a third-party app, y’know? ‘Cause I can understand for the need to keep a device connected if I’m just closing the lid, but the laptop isn’t going into sleep mode.
It’s also really funny how fast all my Apple devices “steal” a BT connection. Both my mb air and my tablet beat all my windows machines at taking over a BT device no matter what I try. I should try to race my tablet and the Air to see which one wins.
The default behavior for most laptops go to sleep after a period of inactivity even when docked and in clamshell mode.
I think users with wireless peripherals would find it irritating if every time they sat down at their desk they had to open the lid to wake their laptop.
Well if you have the Find My Device functionality enabled, not being able to turn off Bluetooth (and WiFi) is a good thing, since a thief cannot disable location deriving and reporting features by turning them off.
I don’t think those are connected…or at least it would be silly for that to be the case. Say your laptop was stolen when your BT was off for some random reason - does that mean you won’t be able to find it?
Yes but does it matter if your BT is turned off _visually_? The device can still send data.
Besides, receiving consumes more power than sending, theoretically Apple can just shut off the receiving part and send intermittently (every 2 sec or so) and achieve very minimal power usage.
Again, this is just speculation, I’m genuinely interested in the details.
Whether other OSs do by default is irrelevant. Are you saying that I just be content with the ability to turn off WiFi?
Besides, MacOS is cherished by many as a UX/UI masterpiece, yet there are many annoyances that need to be fixed by the user. For example window management is a big one, I simply haven’t been able to achieve the comfort of i3 on my work Mac. (tmux comes close, but I can’t run Firefox in there)
And the MacBook is so "greedy" that it will always connect to my Bluetooth devices before anything else can, forcing me to take out the MacBook, open the lid, sign in and disable Bluetooth.
If you need something more selective, BetterTouchTool (which you might already have) has a sleep trigger that allows you to disconnect specific devices.
Agreed, why can't the user override the rules for mice/keyboard vs microphone/speaker or overall? I never use my MacBook in clamshell mode. I would prefer that closing it cancels ALL Bluetooth connections and prevents reconnect as well.
I despise articles like this that have zero technical information. Wasted 5 minutes confirming that I can see my macbook's BLE advertisements using the TI sensortag app on iOS, but it disappears as soon as I close the lid. Another nothingburger.
Yeah, even Windows/Linux laptops have started moving away from this... if the startup time isn't too bad, I've gotten in the habit of just completely shutting down when traveling. Nothing worse than a dead battery when you open your laptop because of some background BS trying to run.
On one hand, its kind of nice for my trip from my home office into the main office. Opening up my laptop at the other location its already properly connected to the WiFi, applications are already "warming up" and syncing their statuses to the things that changed, bluetooth keyboard and mouse can actually wake the device from "sleep", etc. It gives a far more seamless experience moving from one place to the other.
But I also get the pain of this too. Pulling out my laptop on the airplane and seeing it already at like 93% battery since I left earlier that morning isn't great.
I remember back in the late 90s and early 2000's the dream of having some kind of low power notification screen on the lid or edge of the laptop. I always wanted that: being able to quickly see some of the info without fully booting up or accessing music from the computer while on the go. Of course, smartphones became a thing and have mostly eliminated needing the laptop to do those tasks.
Laptops will even play tricks on you with full shutdown. I had a Thinkpad that, despite being "shut down" kept popping up on my desktop as "available for streaming" on Steam.
This is (most probably) the Power Nap feature that periodically checks for email, update calendar events etc.
You can disable Power Nap from the Settings > Battery.
I like how sleep works on my MacBook in that I can close my screen and open it back up to work in less than a second. On windows this doesn’t work. Half the time my dell or Lenovo freeze up and the other half it hangs for seconds.
However, I notice that it sleep mode it will have tons of network traffic and I wish there was a setting to make it really turn off when the lid is closed and not do anything.
Happens to me as well. when I'm turning on my wireless headphones and trying to match with my phone, the closed macbook is connecting to it first. this is annoying and requires me either to:
1. pair from scratch
2. go to the macbook, open it, turn off bluetooth.
Title was updated, but for context, prior to editing by HN mods, HN’s title for the post read, “Closing your MacBook hardware disconnects microphone, safety/privacy feature” — was confusing edit made by OP; current title now mirrors title on Apple.
Everything has a cost. Physical switches that are frequently used are among the first to fail. This is partly why iPhones got rid of the home button in lieu of Face ID. Now, macbooks automatically start up when the lid is opened - this saves an extra button press to the power button. Over the lifespan of the device this reduces wear and tear on common buttons significantly.
What would be nice is physical switches that are easily replaceable - but this also impacts a device's water-proofness and thinness. And the market prefers those two factors over switches, generally.
I see what you are saying. But a switch to turn off/on the microphone would not be used as frequently as a home button. This is why Apple still has the ring/silent switch on the iPhone. This was introduced with the first iPhone and still exists today.
There is a physical switch. It's the lid. It's not even a soft switch, the article clearly specifies that it's done in non-reprogrammable hardware logic, which is immune to tampering even by Apple who has bootloader signing keys.
That's a pretty poorly designed switch, if your intention is to turn off the microphone while otherwise using the system.
It's better than not having any way to disconnect the microphone, but strictly inferior to any system where you can toggle the desired state at any time.
This is one of my favourite features on my Framework laptop. I use it primarily for video conferencing when working from home. It is no nice that I can flip the switches and then don't have to worry about Google trying to automatically turn my camera or mic on.
That creates a worse product for the user. It adds an extra switch to the design which complicates it, and it leads to situations where the mic isn’t on but the user doesn’t know why.
What Apple came up with works perfect as it adds some privacy while affecting the user in no way. This is also combined with permission dialogs for mic access and an indicator light showing the mic is in use.
> It adds an extra switch to the design which complicates it, and it leads to situations where the mic isn’t on but the user doesn’t know why.
This could be solved with a simple dialog box telling the use to check the switch.
> What Apple came up with works perfect as it adds some privacy while affecting the user in no way.
Far from perfect. Anything except physical disconnect switches can be overridden with software, and companies like Apple can be compelled to cooperate with creating back-doors. Which opens up those same back-doors to bad actors figuring out how to use them.
You misread, I was replying to him saying "This is also combined with permission dialogs for mic access and an indicator light showing the mic is in use."
> situations where the mic isn’t on but the user doesn’t know why.
When I disable the Mic/Camera on my Librem 5, I have a notification on the screen that shows they are disabled. Same with my laptop. When I disable wifi, if I go to the notification area, it says "Disabled by hardware switch". So....there are ways to do this.
Anyone have an explanation of how Apple actually decides what merits security and what does not?
(For example, it’s my understanding that turning turn off a iPhone, it’s bluetooth, etc — does not actually completely turn them off. Also appears hardware/OS specs vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction; for example, it is my understanding China limits a number of iPhone’s hardware/OS specs for domestic iPhones.)
When you bring up the option to turn off your phone, there's a toggle to let you turn off "Find my iPhone", with a decent description:
"iPhone Findable After Power Off >"
> iPhone Remains Findable After Power Off
> Find My helps you locate this iPhone when it is lost or stolen, even in power reserve mode or after power off.
>
> The location is visible in Find My on your other devices, and to people in Family Sharing you share location with.
>
> You can temporarily turn off Find My network and it will resume when this iPhone is powered on again.
>
> OK
> Temporarily Turn Off Finding
If you click Temporarily Turn Off Finding, you need to enter your passcode. This is to prevent phone thieves from just turning off your phone to make it untraceable.
My expectation is that if you Temporarily Turn Off Finding, the bluetooth radio is fully off.
Understand your point, though doesn’t match my experiences turning a iPhone off fully charged before sleeping (including configuration you mentioned) — and then leaving it off for the night only to find the battery drained significantly in the morning upon turning it on. Beyond that, unlike the OP article that’s subject of this thread, not aware of any Apple support article that clearly states off is off if XYZ is done. Obvious solution would be a switch that physically disconnects the battery, drains capacitors, etc. — though it would likely require redesign of how the system clock pulls power, though might be wrong:
I wish Apple would think about MacBook screens when the lid is closed. Too many times I've had to wipe clean the display after opening because the keys leave shapes on the monitor.
I've gone back to using a thin waxed paper (like the ones you find in shoe boxes) between the keyboard and the screen when closing the lid.
It's a bit annoying, but I'm sick of getting delamination after 1 year. I got this M1 Max with the thought that it will be relevant for app development for at least 5 years, and I still want to be able to work outside in the sun until then.
YMMV, but in my experience this happens mainly when the MacBook has been sitting under something else or packed tightly in a bag. I never see it if the laptop has been closed with nothing applying pressure on the lid.
Not that this isn’t a design oversight, but it might be mitigable until Apple makes design tweaks to fix it.
It's been a thing for 10+ years, I don't think Apple has any interest in design tweaks. I have seen the marks on my new MBA M2 after just closing the laptop and carrying it in my hand for 2 minutes. I wasn't gripping it tightly or anything, just carrying it like a normal human would carry it.
Interesting. I wonder if maybe the smaller models (Air, 13" and maybe 14" Pro) are more prone to this? I've had very little trouble with it on 15" models from 2015 onward or with the 16" M1 Pro.
I got the marks all the time on my 2016 13" MacBook Pro, too. I even had the keyboard (and by extension battery) replaced in that machine, and Apple "professionally cleaned" the screen. There were still some permanent keyboard marks on the screen after the cleaning. It's not just oil, but permanent abrasion marks after a while.
I don't think there is anything to tweak. It's probably designed to have less than 1mm when closed normally and the pressure of being in a book bag will easily flex the aluminum that much, if not bend it. As other said leave the original packing cloth in it and use a hard shell carrying case that won't put pressure on the laptop.
I found this with my first MacBook Air. Ever since, I keep the little paper insert that comes with a new MacBook. It stays in my laptop case, solves this issue perfectly.
I'm curious, what do you propose here? The keys leave imprints because the screen flexes from pressure applied presumably in your bag or similar. MacBooks already have some of the most rigid screens on the market. This is pure physics at play and the imprints come from your oily fingers. What's your suggestion?
Too many compromises were made to make macbook thin (unreliable keyboard, cooling, power delivery, battery, ports, non removable SSD...). Apple should make a model that is a bit thicker without those compromises!
And my Asus does not have key fingerprints on screen...
Does your Asus have a glass screen? Do you carry it in a backpack where there is pressure on the screen? Mind you, this isn't a well known issue. I've had it happen to me once in a decade of owning and frequently traveling with these and my backpack was stuffed to the point that it might damage the screen.
I disagree about making it thicker. The newest MacBook Pros are already extremely thick and heavy. I don't want to be carrying around a brick just because some people don't wash their hands or clean their keyboards every once in a while.
Screen on my Zenbook has touch layer, that makes glass a bit thicker I guess. And yes I keep it in stuffed in backpack and sometimes drop it. It is a tool, not museum exponate!
I had other laptops that left fingerprints. But Macbook Air had glass so thin it would randomly pop from temperature difference (well known issue)!
Nobody is forcing you to carry brick around. But some people like to carry brick and Apple should make a new model just for them (MacBrick). Is "wash your hands before use" mentioned in macbook manual?
And how do you even clean keyboard on Macbooks? That thing falls apart with a bad look, and it costs like $800 to replace. I can not imagine removing key caps just to clean it up!
Apple has made excellent portable dev workstations in the past. After the release of the Unibody Macbook Pro though, the focus of their hardware and software focues far, far away from developers. The new 14"/16" lineup is a good return to form, but in the context of how developer-unfriendly modern MacOS is it feels pyrrhic.
If you don't relate to someone's opinion, you don't have to justify Apple's stance against it.
This is where you lose me. Go to any tech company with pockets deep enough to afford whatever hardware its employees want and the vast majority will have MacBook Pros running macOS.
Sure, and I've seen it. I've also been responsible for writing the Mac-specific workarounds, and it's not very fun sourcing the correct version of bash from the incorrect install location, or fighting Homebrew consistency across different arches.
MacOS is simply shit for development. Even garbage proprietary Unix like Oracle Linux come with uniform packaging and up-to-date coreutils. MacOS had it's chance to be a developer platform (Xserve) and it just highlighted the most greedy, dysfunctional parts of Apple. It needs tough love to improve, because as-is it feels like Apple is ignoring the industry.
I do agree with you that pretty linux is the only sane developer environment, but it’s not exactly rocket science to make proper linux available for OSX, while still benefiting from the all-around apple ecosystem.
God I'd hope not. For programming, I cannot think of a single reason you'd want a glass display over a matte one. Maybe if you program in direct sunlight? Even still...
I'll go ahead and agree with the other commenter. Part of why I no longer buy Apple hardware is because of these compromises that they assume I want. Trying to bridge the gap between a "creator-class" laptop and a programming machine hasn't worked out hardware-wise (see: Touch Bar). Paying $500 extra for nano-textured glass that shatters the same from a waist-height fall isn't a solution, either.
I program and I prefer glass displays. It's more uniform, easier to clean, colors are more vibrant, and is easier on the eyes. I opt to not use an external display because most reasonably-priced ones are matte/non-glass and have awful color uniformity.
I find the glare and reflectivity of glass displays to be more difficult on the eyes and less uniform. Also, since I don't do much color-sensitive work, I've never really run into calibration issues. If anything, it makes the device much harder to use in low-brightness scenarios.
It doesn't bother me since other manufacturers fill this gap, but I'd like to see more options regardless.
On the topic of closing and opening your MacBook, has anyone else had an issue where with an M1 any time they open it from sleep the cursor moves at like 20hz until you close it and open it again?
It’s been driving me mad and I can’t find anything about it online.
I had an issue that drove me mad where if the battery went to 0% (and macOS went into hibernate), I would then plug it back in and the mouse cursor would be quite... jittery. Almost to the point of unusable at the worst of it.
macOS 13.1? appears to have solved this problem. Better late than never.
I had an infuriating variant of this across two M1 machines where they'd kernel panic while trying to hibernate at 0% battery.
And even plugging in a charger before it actually died wouldn't save it: It'd try to turn stay on but the pending hibernation would kick in and it'd die.
The "fix" for me was to turn off deep sleep. Technically now they'll drain more during sleep, but that's preferrable than being broken during sleep.
The whole experience was disappointingly Linux though. Having to read through the Console to figure out it was a kernel panic and not a power issue, having to read through Darwin sources to track down where exactly in the hibernation it was failing, not the kind of stuff I expect to deal with from Apple hardware.
I have the same exact issue on my M1 MacBook Air. You can find plenty of others online with the same issue if you search 'cursor lag' - however I haven't found a working solution. If you figure it out please let me know!
My M1 often wakes from sleep only to beachball and 20hz-screen-refresh for 120-150 seconds. I think it's a thing with the memory-management. I have to restart the machine to fix it or it will happen every time I close the lid.
Oh, and the machine forgets its audio settings when this happens, too. Always tries to revert to built-in speakers while it's closed despite having a CalTech hub with speakers I've selected dozens of times.
I don't understand why laptops continue to have such weird power-management problems. I thought we fixed this stuff ages ago.
I wonder whether one would be able to do passive sound reconstruction using the laptops camera, sice it isn't being deactivated. I guess you would only be able to extract sounds lower than ~30Hz if the camera records at 60Hz, but that should be enough to detect steps for example. Not that this has real privacy implications, but I think that would be a fun way of disproving that no sound can be recorded.
I had no idea about the iPad microphone disconnect. That's cool enough to justify getting a new case. I wish they'd address some of their other products. Optionally enable hardware microphone disconnect on phones when placing upside down with their lockdown mode. No idea how the watch microphone could be disabled.
> No idea how the watch microphone could be disabled.
Not everything has to be a futuristic gesture you know, could just have a hardware switch like on the librem phones. Also more reliable than the sensors, and that's something I would like for a privacy feature. Knowing that it's disconnected and can't be tampered with.
Not only HW disconnect of the mic, but the speakers as well. I want a switch on the side that does the equivalent of taping over the camera. No software can use them when they're off, period.
What privacy is lost by someone using your front-facing camera when you don't want them to?
The microphone is far more important.
Pictures of your face are simple and easy to acquire; you give them up willingly every time you walk into a convenience store, airport, bank, or use an ATM. They're not secret and their compromise does not harm you.
If I'm reading correctly, this also removes one of the 20 potential issues with clamshell mode. Unfortunatley there are still plenty of other issues with clamshell mode :/
I know some of the reasoning, but I find it really obnoxious the way it kills the wifi when switching users. I often am bouncing back and forth, I get the reasoning, but it would be nice if there was a setting to stop that.
Remember when iSight firewire external laptop cameras had a physical iris opaque shutter?
I can't think of a reason not involving TLA conspiracy that has everyone so allergic to a physical switch that disables microphones and a shutter that the camera cannot see through. Cheap, easy, reliable, desirable. Pick any four yet nobody, absoutely nobody does it and if they do they drop it almost immediately.
Lenovo T series have a physical switch that moves the camera in the lid to turn it off, whole camera slides sidways a little but doesn't cover the lens.
First, Apple does open source the core OS as Darwin. I appreciate your perspective, but I am curious why anyone would think that open sourcing the rest of it is even a remote possibility?
As far as closed source being safe, I don't think open source is safe either. We have seen some horrendous exploitable bugs which lived in open source code for years. Just because something can be thoroughly audited, doesn't mean it is.
I've personally been around a lot of years, and I'm just no longer convinced that a handful of sincere and enthusiastic volunteers can be better at security than a highly motivated, well paid, staff of competent engineers. These systems are just too complex nowadays. I get the concept of open source and having the ability to review the code, etc., but in practice stuff happens anyway in either case. Sorry for the rambling, but I guess I'm just not so convinced any more about the absolutist arguments concerning the relative merits. Maybe I'm just getting too cynical...
Please, just add a physical switch to disconnect the microphone and camera and even battery! Why the hell do we need special chips to do this? Every chip can be hacked... internet hackers can't turn on physical switches...
It doesn't sound like a special chip, it sounds like an optical relay hooked up to a Hall effect sensor. If magnetic connection is available, the optical relay will disconnect the microphone entirely. They just started doing this with T2+ models.
I appreciate the request because I tend to agree, though I wouldn't say "every chip can be hacked," but rather I would point to Apple's wavering commitment to privacy (with their recent tracking debacle [1] and previous privacy "mistakes" [2]).
Please, Apple, instead of engineering a better kill switch which requires me to trust you, just install an actual kill switch that I can see for myself does what I want.
> Every chip can be hacked... internet hackers can't turn on physical switches...
Others have replied to the specifics here, but I'd like to add that "every chip can be hacked" is just categorically false (unless you also allow for physical access for "hacked", but then that would apply to the physical switch as well).
"Chips" are neither magical devices, nor are they necessarily running something akin to software, or controlling everything purely through software even if they do.
As a simple example, you can be very confident that a (real) ROM is a ROM, and that its contents cannot be changed by software.
Is closing the lid the only way to do this? I never use my camera or mic. I'd be happy opening my laptop and switching a dip switch. Does one exist? Does anyone know?
Another annoying mic feature was older macbooks (before T2 I think) didn't have any built-in way to plug in the 3.5mm jack for a mic, and the usual sound output still be the internal speakers. Or an easy way to set the mic to monitor mode like in Windows.
Anyone claiming that is just not familiar with the processing requirements that would entail.
Especially that you leave more than enough data for advertisers by simply using facebook/messenger and interacting with other people, or just searching google, it simply wouldn’t make economic sense to create such a software/hardware which would drain batteries like no tomorrow, and open them up to serious backlash.
So nice of them to give more privacy features when closing the laptop.
Here is a fun thing that happens if you keep your laptop on to play some music or maybe run a light server with the lid closed.
The backlight of the LCD turns off, but the LCD does not turn off.
This causes screen burn in. There is no way to turn the screen off when you shut certain model mac laptops.
So on one hand, we have a company offering neat privacy gimmicks and on the other, deploying anti-consumer practices at every corner of their product.
Privacy is the bait that will trap you into their money sucking ecosystem. Manage it yourself or companies will always find a way to use it to exploit you. Even when they are not busy actively violating your privacy.
im gonna disagree with this take. I've seen thousands of MacBooks come and go from early 2016 all the way through current models and screen burn in is just not something I've ever seen. hardware/firmware bugs, bloated batteries, keyboard keys rubbed onto the screen, etc sure, but display defects from normal usage? not once.
I may not have been clear and you may have misunderstood. If you use the laptop as apple intends, there is no issue usually. But the problem is what apple intends is very rigid and there is no room for edge cases at all.
So, to replicate you only need to ensure the laptop stays on while the lid is closed. In my case I was using the laptop as a white noise machine for months.
A few weeks in I opened the lid and noticed burn in. I tried to find ways to manually turn the LCD off but I could find no verifiable way to do this. The only solution I ended up with was running that screen saver with the wavy colors.
The LCD screen does NOT turn off when the lid is closed. Only the backlight, which will NOT prevent burn in.
Pretty cool safety feature!! Even though I'm sad I can't use my mic in clamshell mode