In Praise of iMac

It’s available on my 12 Pro, just not turned on by default:

Not an option on my 12 mini. Perhaps it’s only on the pro? Either way, it’s just dumb to leave off that one feature.

Looks like you’re fucked. Maybe this has something to do with the pixel density of these phones’ screens, or something. Otherwise it seems like a silly limitation.

iPhone XR, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 mini, and iPhone 13 mini don’t display battery percentage in the status bar.

Just looked a bit, and yes, it’s not available on the mini…for now. Apparently iOS 16.1 (scheduled for October release) will have that feature for minis. Still doesn’t explain why it’s not available now.

I just set it on my iPhone 7 and it works fine.
Yes, I still have an iPhone 7.
I don’t care.

iPhone 7/8/SE don’t have the Face ID notch, so they have enough space to show the meter and the percentage if desired.

This is the hell of it. Older iPhones always had that feature, so I don’t buy the crap about screen resolution.

But yours doesn’t show both. It takes up the same screen real estate as previously, just doesn’t show the percentage.

Mine didn’t have it until this latest upgrade, in fact, I just learned of it in this thread, but yea. Why they removed it in the first place is a mystery.

All of my previous phones did. It was an iOS thing, not a phone thing.

My recollection is that the non-notch iPhones have always had the option of showing the meter and the percentage (or just showed both), while the notch iPhones have always only shown the meter until iOS 16. The non-notch iPhones show the percentage off to the side of the meter, but there isn’t enough room to do that on the notch iPhones (maybe they could on the 13 and 14 with their smaller notches). They could’ve immediately just moved the percentage inside the meter, but they didn’t, because Apple.

Dear HH,

You don’t need that feature.

Sincerely,
Your Benevolent Applecorps Overlords

I don’t mind being told I don’t need it, I object to them lying to telling me it’s not possible. Like my headphone jack.

So here’s a new one, at least for me: I was trying to bounce between the Astros game and the football game last night, which was ridiculously difficult even though I was watching both through Apple TV, when at some point I tried to adjust the volume through the Apple remote rather than the TV remote as I usually do. Well, that damn thing went into infinite repeat mode and kept sending “volume up” commands to the TV, which nearly destroyed the device and my house. I finally got it muted, and then started fiddling around, and discovered that if I hit the “volume down” button once (or any number of times), it went down infinitely, and if I hit the “volume up” command, it went up infinitely (I could watch the little LED on the TV blink incessantly as it received the commands). I left it in “volume down” mode and fiddled some more and confirmed that if I put the Apple remote behind some IR-opaque object, the TV would stop receiving commands and my TV remote would work as expected. If I pulled the Apple remote out the volume descend to silence until I hid it again and hit any volume command on the TV remote. I finally game up and just hid the Apple remote. When the games were over I turned everything off, pulled out the Apple remote, and the little TV LED started blinking like mad again. So I just hid the Apple remote overnight. I just checked a few minutes ago and when I pull it out of its hiding place, it is no longer pinging the TV, so I suspect that it has run its battery down completely, which I’m hoping will reset its behavior.

If anybody has heard of this before and knows how to fix it, I’d sure appreciate learning the secret. Btw, this is one of the new Apple TV remotes, not one of the cursed originals. (Well, this one may be cursed, too, but in a different way.)

I wish I knew even a fraction of the keyboard shortcuts that my cat does.

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My wife came home yesterday and told me she bought a new iMac so that’s pretty exciting. The old one is now mine to turn into a music recording station.

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Depending on the age/model of the old iMac, if it has an HDD only, you can get a massive boost in performance by adding an SSD and creating a fusion drive. First time I did this to an iMac, it was like getting a whole new machine. It’s the best bang-for-buck upgrade IMHO.

The advantage is that you get the speed of the SSD for the OS and apps, but the capacity of the HDD for your media. The OS manages the whole thing, constantly adjusting what is on the SSD and the HDD based on file type and frequency of access. You just see a single drive so you can file and forget.

You are required to name this drive the Rocinante

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As long as they don’t make you pee in a cup.

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Screw that. 2TB SSDs are under $200 nowadays. Unless you need many, many terabytes, rip out the hard drive and replace with a single SSD. It would suck to go to the trouble of opening up an iMac and upgrading some of the internals, only to have a years-old HDD shit the bed later on.

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