Audio.
The guy that made THX works for Apple.
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Unfortunately THX never meant much in the home space, the certification process was just not easily reproducable at home. So in the end it was largely just a marketing scam term.
And the same is somewhat happening to Atmos… but that’s not a discussion fir this thread.
Also, I guess the guy was hired later by Apple and didn’t make it when he was there right?
Also kind of interested, what makes audio on Mac so special?
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I can’t speak to the technical side, but if you set up say, Ableton Live on Mac, and on PC (I’ve run it on both, the license is cross-platform, if you own it you can run on either platform), the mac is a million times easier.
on the PC version of the application, you need to basically tweak the buffer sizes, etc. as a trade-off of latency vs. response vs. not skipping.
mac? you do nothing. it works out of the box. its been a while, but i don’t think the configuration boxes within the application even exist. you certainly aren’t pushed to configure them during application setup. i believe/suspect it is all handled transparently by the mac’s audio API(s).
now sure, this is an application… but i suspect the root cause of the difference is difference in platform API support.
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Hardware wise (at least until the 2015 MacBook Pro) you can use almost any pair of cans on the integrated headphone jack without any issues and it sounds damn good. All other laptops I’ve ever tried sounded way worse.
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Every DAW I’ve tried has its own config settings menu, but it’s usually as simple as selecting a device for IO and its hardware buffer. Core audio is super nice. Apple’s excellent UX really shines with audio routing.
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Oh yeah i forgot about that. Mostly because i ditched PC laptops years ago, but i do occasionally have to deal with them at work.
Many/most (DELL/HP at least) PC laptops are full of coil whine and other noise out the headphone jack. The macbooks are not.
So, i hate checking email. I get a huge amount of crap in it. Not spam, just noise.
So, today i made two applescripts
exhibit A (script to run and tell me if i have messages to follow up):
tell application “Microsoft Outlook”
set myInbox to folder “Inbox” of default account
set flaggedCount to 0
set theFlaggedMessages to every message of myInbox whose start date comes before ( current date )
set flaggedCount to the count of theFlaggedMessages
say “You have " & flaggedCount & " messages to follow up before the end of today”
end tell
exhibit B:
say “Checking for unread email from VIPs”
tell application “Microsoft Outlook”
set myInbox to folder “Inbox” of default account
set theMessages to messages of inbox
set countMessages to 0
set importantCount to 0
set theSender to null
repeat with theMessage in theMessages
try
#rules
set countMessages to countMessages + 1
set theSender to sender of theMessage
if address of theSender is “[email protected]” then
if is read of theMessage is false then
set importantCount to importantCount + 1
end if
end if
on error errorMsg
say "Error: " & errorMsg
end try
end repeat
if importantCount > 0 then
say “You have " & importantCount & " unread messages from xxxxxxx”
else
say “No unread email from VIPs found.”
end if
end tell
plonk into script editor, export as application, then in (apple) calendar, run an application as an alert action like so:
What happens?
when the appointment time comes up, it launches my script(s) that run in the background and open outlook to check for and announce via speech that i have either email messages from my Boss that are unread, or i have flagged items due today.
edit:
aware the second script could use some clean up, this is my first hour with applescript, so it’s a bit hacky and has some unused, leftover variables from other ideas i was trying in it.
ALSO: i could of course launch the (non compiled as application) scripts via cron and osascript. but this is the mac, and the above is an example of the user-friendly way of scheduling things…
Also… looks like it might be a bit buggy due to my shitty code (its a work in progress and had about 1 hour between both scripts). but you get the idea 
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Also… siri shortcuts on the iphone and ipad are neat.
You can run ssh scripts on remote machines with them, and they sync across devices.
So yeah, i can tell siri to reboot my home database server by just saying “hey siri reboot my database” (from my phone, ipad, maybe watch)
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I don’t like Apple stuff and I never bought Apple product in my life. However I admit the cloning feature on iPhones is super useful.
Although it would be even more impressive if they could do it without the iCloud component. And just transfer everything over Bluetooth or NFC.
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Palm devices had infrared device-to-device transfer in the 90s.
Better app and UI support for tablets. I hear a lot of apps on tablet are just blown up phone versions.
Also they were willing to take the risks with high refresh screens with the iPad Pro. Louis Rossmann put it best when talking about how Apple is willing to take risks (including switching away from TN panels and mechanical hard drives) to improve usability.
Now if only they kept the headphone jack…
Mac OS is the perfect OS. It gives me almost all the apps available on Windows, with all of Unix-ness Windows doesn’t have. With regards to WSL, it’s good, but it’s just not the same. I’m not hating on Linux, I used linux for a while and intend to use it once I get to building a PC, but a lot of the apps I need to use aren’t available for it.
I think perfect is a strong word - all operating system sucks in different ways.
macOS just sucks a lot less. for my use case.
Was exaggerating a little bit, but you get my point.
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