The Apple App Stores have a subscription problem

Both Apple’s app stores for iOS and Mac have a huge problem, and that is subscriptions.

When the store started, it was all purchases, so you bought the app you owned it, but then they enabled in app purchases and subscriptions. Both are used to enable all features in apps, in fact some apps barely function or don’t function at without the additional purchase. And the subscription prices have been going up. It has gotten so bad, that there should be a way to filter out subscription apps, but that would cut into Apple’s profits too.

Apple acts like they are all noble, wanting privacy for their users, but then they hide subscription prices and in app purchase prices in the store.

The price is not shown in the first page, then hidden in a drop in the app info page itself. This info should be displayed on the main page, not hidden. And for subscriptions you should be able to not only filter them out, but set limits on subscriptions when you pay. An example being that you could say yes I subscribe but for only 1 month, and automatically cancel unless I re-subscribe. To have to know how to unsubscribe in the settings app is not putting the customer first, but instead Apple’s paycheck.

The app stores are getting so much pressure from regulators, but for the developer cut to apple and opening up devices, and not for things like subscriptions. The problem with 3rd party apps is already apparent on Android, with a plethora of malware, and how easily it can be installed, to steal your data. And with a phone acting as your digital wallet with ID and Bank Cards as well as your location, 3rd party apps could endanger so much in your life, but then it is not like Apple hasn’t allowed in scam apps that are still available in the app store! And even worse most congress people don’t understand technology enough to properly regulate it, other than who is paying them that is. I have no hope of US regulators making things better, but the EU is pretty consumer oriented, so maybe they will force changes.

App stores need to get better, and the companies are only worried about their bottom lines, not their customers (who become the actual product making the companies money in many ways), and regulators focus on the wrong things. Being worried about Apple’s cut, instead of how companies prey on people with subscriptions. And honestly they are Apple Devices, and an Apple built and maintained store, how can you say they don’t deserve a cut to allow access to their store.

And we have too many subscriptions in our lives. Before i could buy software and could wait on upgrades that weren’t absolutely necessary, now I have to pay or I lose use of the software. And I pay enough for Adobe Creative Cloud and Maxon’s Red Giant Plug-Ins (which have changed their licensing from 2 installs 1 in use to 1 install) and all the streaming services, plus phone bill, cable, rent/mortgage, that I can’t afford subscriptions for all my apps! At least Adobe Creative Cloud gets tons of upgrades, many subscription apps don’t get constant new features so why pay constantly?

AnandTech on the recently announced Apple Silicon M2 Chip

Ryan Smith has a must read article on the recently announced Apple M2 Apple Silicon chip that is in the new Air and low end MacBook Pro.

Basically while it can be more energy efficient, it can also run more power and be more powerful. And it is larger than the previous generation, and it also includes ProRes acceleration instead of just H264 acceleration in the chip. Also it has more memory capacity, 24 vs 16 and at 100GB/sec vs 68GB/sec in the previous M1,

And the larger chip will have Max and Ultra versions and I am betting the quad version that will be in the next Mac Pro, which makes me happy that they didn’t yet release the MacPro as if it is based on this it will beat out the current Mac Studio, though will certainly be quite expensive.

Been having the weirdest crash, where I can’t shutdown my iMac Pro, on shutdown, it crashes and restarts

So my iMac Pro has been crashing on shutdown. I shutdown and the computer seems to fully shut down, but then restarts and shows a crash. The crash kept showing com.apple.iokit.IOStorageFamily as the crash, so I realized it was hard drive related.

Now I have a lot of hard drives hooked up to my computer, not only for work, but for personal use as well, and I currently have 2 OWC Thunderbays hooked up to my mac, one Thunderbolt 3 which is mine and a Thunderbolt 2 that is works, and about 3 work hard drives, plus 4 external hard drives for storage in one 4 bay from OWC as well as s couple other storage and backup drives, and an external SSD as a media cache and about 4 work hard drives, and the internal on my iMac Pro. So a metric shit ton of hard drives.

Now I started disconnecting drives and trying things and got various results, with the problem occurring with different drives, but then finally it came down to the second OWC Thunderbay, the Thunderbolt 2 one. And if I turn that off the problem stopped happening. So I started wondering if it was the 2 different drives, and I wrote to OWC / Softraid as they are both OWC drives with softraid.

I gave them the crash report, and they told me something I didn’t know.

This is a kernel bug in MacOS. To avoid this, unmount and disconnect the USB drives before shutdown. (or your thunder bay). Its a known bug that 12 drives will cause a Mac to crash at shutdown.

Well how long has Apple had this damn issue. I know most people don’t get close to that, but I have surpassed it and ran the fuck into it.

Sure I can shut drives down first, but that is certainly a pain in the ass. And sometimes I have to shutdown the drives, then restart and then I can shutdown.

Color me frustrated, but OWC was fast and helpful.

9To5 Mac reports no M1 mac supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 at 10 GB speed

Ben Lovejoy has the slightly confusing report.

It seems M1 macs don’t support 10gb USB 3.1 Gen 2 and only 10gb for USB 3.2 which should reach 20gb, so don’t officially support usb 4 which would have to include both of those.

So it basically supports the 5gb of Usb 3.1 Gen 1, and 3.2 is dual, so 2 5gb, but full thunderbolt 4 40gb.

Intel macs supported USB 3.1 Gen 2 at 10GB, but also only supported USB 3.2 at 10gb.

I don’t know if this is licensing, saving money or just bad implementation on their own chip design. This is a huge mistake and one I wish Apple would deal with in the future (i bet it is hardware and not software).

Apple has responded to “Final Cut Pro in TV and Film” Open Letter

This one is from FCP.Co and Peter Wiggins, and Apple has responded to the open letter from industry professionals about FCP.

And here is the Petition to Apple from a few weeks ago.

Nice that they are launching Certifications, though I find them mostly meaningless, but nice that there will be an official way to get certified I guess.

The big things are really an official way to make this program have collaborative editing features and be able to share media. A public beta like Adobe is doing would be nice as well.

I am fully versed in Final Cut Pro, but I am still not as sold on it as others, for some of their reasons, but a big list of of others I have previously posted about. I know some of these have been fixed, but a great many have not.

PVC on Apple Motion being every editor’s secret weapon

I\ain Anderson of Pro Video Coalition on Apple Motion being every editors secret weapon.

It is an interesting article, and it is true it is such an inexpensive program, that everyone should use it. I have personally used it extensively while doing an edit job on Final Cut and found it essential for using Final Cut Pro with some features that are much easier to use than After Effects with more power, but others I thought far inferior, harder and with huge bugs. And I was not at all impressed by it’s Motion Blur which After Effects does so much better.

Much like Final Cut I find it i a powerful program but with huge caveats. And while I do have it, I don’t find it as useful as other similar programs.

Apple Cheated on it’s graph comparison between M1 Ultra GPU and the NVIDIA RTX 3090

I have been seeing this in video reviews of the Mac Studio and here at 9to5 Mac by Ben Lovejoy. Basically this is true for these power levels, but the NVIDIA card they are comparing too can go much higher on wattage, and thus is much more powerful, and the new 2090 Ti can up to 450 watts of power, so Apple has cut the top of this graph, so it is really only showing till the top of the M1 Performance, but the other video card goes much higher.

I had seen a few videos fix the graph, and found this post from iPhone Hacks that has a fixed version of the graph from MKBHD.

This adds the power curve of the NVIDIA 3900 and the Ti should go further than this.

So yes the Mac Studio may use less power, but it gets whipped by the top of the line NVIDIA card.

It may be the most powerful Mac Graphics card, but not the most powerful graphics card that is for sure.