Be friends first. Those are the best relationships anyway.

I just downloaded MKBHD’s iPhone Air review, and it played perfectly. 1920p whatever that means (somewhere north of 1440p but not quite 2160p… or 2160p/4K but slightly letterboxed). AV1 (Ay-Vee-Wun, not Ay-Vee-Eye), 30fps… looks and sounds great.

Glad to see the community fixed it fast.

I use jdownloader2 which probably uses yt-dl on the back end. But it also downloads from a metric fuckton of other sites, too. It’s like the Swiss Army knife of downloaders. And it’s Java, so it runs just as well on my Mac as it did on Windows back when I used that. (Wish they had an official dark theme that was easy to set up though. I know how to do it manually but can’t be arsed.)

I envy those who have never met you

Good go to

Might watch Inglorious Basterds. I think that’s the one that says the thing.

I meant a desktop, obviously. I use an iPhone and I’m fully aware it runs macOS with a different desktop environment. All Apple devices run macOS, but the interface will be adapted to fit the hardware. It’s all macOS underneath though, which is UNIX.

It’s easier to explain Android, especially to anyone who knows Linux. So Linux isn’t an OS, it’s a kernel. The OS (or distribution, or “distro”) is a collection of software bundled with the kernel that operates a computer. Android is a Linux distro for phones. Plug one into a TV and see what happens (ideally a Samsung). Apple could do this too, have your iPhone or iPad go full macOS if you put it on a big screen, especially if you also connect a keyboard and mouse. It’s just a matter of including that desktop environment… and maybe a couple other things. But Android already does it. And it’s awesome. So yes, they’re computers.

I host with Plex. It doesn’t pay attention to my carefully crafted tags, it uses its own. I still do the work with Mp3Tag. But I do m4a. Better quality than mp3 and better licensing. My files are a little bigger than 320k mp3 and sound almost lossless.

And yet, you posted two comments to me, on two different communities, on two different instances, completely hostile in both of them.

You should get help. I can only imagine what you’re like in real life. Either you’re very meek when you’re not behind a keyboard, people walk all over you so you bully people online, or you’re exactly the same in real life and you hurt people around you. Maybe that’s not the kind of person you want to be, either way. If I’m wrong and it is, nothing I say will convince you otherwise. But on the off chance there’s any decency in you, take your own advice and talk to somebody.

Can’t you get a terminal on Android? I did once upon a time. It’s a rather clunky way of doing things, but it’s essentially Linux so this shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

I’m a Mac/iPhone guy, but it’s the same shit. I use jdownloader2 (a Java downloader that uses yt-dl and others, it’s basically the Swiss Army knife of downloaders) to pull the video down on the computer, then send it over the air to my phone. It would work exactly the same way if the computer was running Windows, and/or if the phone was running Android. I can also get files wirelessly between Android and iOS going both ways. Both the top video players (Outplayer on iOS and VLC on Android) can be turned into web servers, so I just put both phones on the same network, open a web server on one and connect to it with the other, send stuff right across. Android is, of course, a bit better with its file picker, but iOS is better at the server stuff, being basically UNIX, I guess. Either way, it’s not a challenge to move stuff between them. But the actual downloading? I do that on a computer. And as you might guess from the name, Jdownloader2 uses Java, so it’s the same app on both Mac and Windows and presumably Linux as well.

I’ll just refer you to what I said to the other guy. So if you see this, you should be able to click through to the thread, see what I said to the other guy, and read my reasoning there. No need to split the argument/debate into two threads.

That’s a good point. But the issue is, it’s always going to be a moving target. Every year I could reassess the streaming services and quit the one I’m on and go with the one that best meets my needs each year. And each year it could be a different one. Ethically, that would be the superior option. But, I’m not perfect, I’m barely ideal, and I use a family plan to help justify my cost. Sure, I pay more, but I also get my wife and a couple other family members the gift of perpetual music as well.

So if every year, or every, however often, I were to reassess, and drop one service, and start another one and ask them to dump the app and get a new app and let me add them on that, all of us are losing our entire library every time we switch across. It’s a lot of work. Sure, there are tools to convert your stuff over, but it’s still a bit of work.

At this point it’s not about who’s the actual absolute best at the things that matter the most, at this point it’s just which one’s good enough for our needs. Also Apple is one of the few streaming services that doesn’t give a hoot if your family all lives with you. We had Spotify before and at that point — this was years ago — you had to retype the address every month, and if, say, my niece mistyped it, she’d lose access to her premium benefits for a month. At one point I just sent her an email with the exact text to copy and it was fine, but like if she accidentally left a space at the end or something, if the text didn’t match 100%, it was this whole thing — and of course I wasn’t compensated for a family member being denied their benefit for the month. Apple does not care. You add the person and they get the benefit without ever having to physically be at that address. I just hope that doesn’t change.

(Also, I think Napster pays artists the most now, ironically?)

Okay, so aside from the fact that you’re stalking me across communities for whatever reason — if I write a loophole in your employer’s code, like a patch, that keeps them from having to pay you, and they like not having to pay you, I haven’t done anything egregious or unethical? Or it’s only egregious or unethical because it’s happening to a company you don’t like?

If the law doesn’t apply without prejudice blindly and equally for all, what good is it? And who decides who is deserving? Some pathetic Internet stalker? So given your lack of ethics, would you then agree it would be fair to take your wages as well? Or do you draw the line between companies and people, or how much someone makes? Because we might find some common ground there. But on the surface, it appears you are the one throwing dog shit from that which is covering you.

Yeah, they write smaller checks than Spotify. Spotify has more subscribers. But Apple pays more per stream.

Spotify sponsors Joe Rogan, and Apple’s CEO sucks up to Trump. There are no winners here with regards to politics.

Some say you can’t separate music from politicians, and I suppose that’s fair. I still pay for music, and if my same ten bucks a month or whatever it is now is gonna go in some small part to some bad fuckers, if more goes to the artists with one than the other, I can consider that the lesser of two evils.

Though you’re not gonna hurt Apple and their Trump boot licking by not paying for their music streaming. Nah, you do that by only buying the phone you need, when you need it, not a new one every year like some people like to do. You can only hurt Spotify by not buying Spotify Premium. I like my iPhone okay, but it wasn’t as big of an upgrade as the last one, and my next smartphone probably won’t be an iPhone at all. Though I won’t need to make that decision for another five or six years.

I wouldn’t expect Spotify to just let people use premium services for free. Fuck Spotify, right there with y’all on that, but this isn’t egregious or unethical behavior for them.

Use Spotify since it has a free tier, for music discovery if you like, but get FLACs and self host. I like Plex for that and it works with what I use.

Music is actually one thing I will always pay for. I use Apple Music because they pay artists more and they offer better quality. And they don’t care, if you’re on a family plan, if not all your family lives with you. I also self host because backups are nice and I can’t access Apple Music at work. I can, however, access Plex. (It’s not that Apple is blocked. It’s that Apple requires 2FA and I can’t bring my iPhone into work.) But, point is either way, self host and stream everywhere. Sucks that Plex went up; I got Lifetime for $80 years ago. (Now it’s $250.)

Are you aware that Post It has an app? IIRC it’s totally free on phones. I don’t know about Windows sync but it’s worth looking into for phones.

So my question is, do we want ISPs to be liable? If they are, they will be more likely to cut alleged pirates off. If they aren’t, then a legal door is open for the rights holders to go after individuals directly.

“Agrees” and “forced under duress” are not the same thing. An agreement before both, I think.

They were sued. Nintendo won. The people don’t have a chance against corporations.

That’s my point, for most people the performance gains of one 2024 or 2025 flagship over another don’t mean much.

I can transfer stuff over WiFi to my iPhone in seconds. Like 2-3GB movies, 100MB-1GB video clips, etc. Seconds.

microSD sucks and I think anyone familiar with the tech knows it. The issue is speed. microSD is fine for like 16GB, maybe 32GB. Once you get bigger, you wanna put bigger files up there, more files, but they move. so. slow. It’s painful to watch. Then you get a bigger one and it’s such a headache to transfer stuff between them. I think a couple companies tried to make faster microSD cards/readers but they never took off. So I talked about NVMe and UFS. Slower than UFS, on garbage Android phones that aren’t good enough for UFS, is EMMC, and EMMC is faster than microSD. microSD is good for Jack and shit, and Jack left town. Apple may have blessed the industry by never including it. It’s trash and Jobs knew it, and he didn’t put trash in his products. Lots of people know microSD is trash and that, not Apple, is why most Android phones don’t include them now either. One, because yeah, they wanna sell you the faster internal storage and/or cloud storage. But two, because it’s just so slow.

But yeah, I’d say get a big-ish phone (storage wise, like 256GB or more) and keep stuff on the internal UFS or NVMe. Optionally get a Samsung T7 or T9 portable SSD, 2TB for around $100, on Black Friday (I mean, that’s about what I paid for my T7, like $110 tops) and keep stuff on that. Yes, iPhones can read/write from/to flash drives and portable drives. Same as Android, you open the file manager, browse to the drive, copy stuff over. Apple’s built in Files does it. On Android I’m old school, I’d only mess with either Solid Explorer (my personal choice) or FX File Explorer (2nd choice). I know Android has a file manager now (Samsung had one longer) but I trust those.

Well, I have the best one. I have the 16 Pro Max, 512GB. I like the big screen, and I like a lot of things about it. And how well it works with my watch, my AirPods, and my Macs — for example, being able to copy something on one and paste it on the other. “The Ecosystem” isn’t as great as some say, but it does have its advantages.

Some apps cost money. I refuse to do subscriptions. I’ll pay for an app if I like it but I won’t pay monthly unless it’s a service (like say Apple Music). There are free apps on both platforms. There are paid/subscription apps on both platforms. Both platforms take 30% so they’re both incentivised to promote subscriptions and paid apps over free ones. The free ones still exist. Only on Android, you also have F-Droid which is all free/open source apps.

Nothing is more powerful than an iPhone in all conditions. Okay so the Galaxy S25 is faster right now, but when it gets hot, its thermal protections reduce power by like 50-60% to cool it faster. iPhone only loses 20-30%, so under no load, the S25 is gonna be faster, and the iPhone is gonna be faster under load. Talking about playing the top games. So most of the time you’re under no load. Also, on paper nothing has faster storage than an iPhone because iPhones use more expensive NVMe SSDs. Your top Android phones use UFS 4.0, or even 3.x, which is slower… on paper. The benchmarks speak for themselves. But power on an iPhone 16 Pro and a Galaxy S25 Ultra and open and close apps, you’re not going to see a big enough difference to say “I’m selling the phone in my left hand to buy the phone in my right,” whichever way you wanna go. Android has more RAM. Android has better AI. iPhone has never had a good keyboard — Gboard sucks on iOS but it’s amazing on Android. Android has Firefox with uBlock Origin. iPhone has better video cameras. Still cameras? iPhone over-sharpens, Samsung over-softens, and Pixel uses AI hallucinations to fill in what it can’t see. They can all show you lab-created conditions where their phone comes out on top. MKBHD has shown people time and time again that in blind image contests, most of his viewers/subscribers prefer pictures taken by cheap Android phones, not flagships from anyone.

So the truth is, there really is no best smartphone platform. For a Mac guy, iPhones have a slight advantage, but their disadvantages are notable, too. And honestly I’d love to have a better Android phone than my 2019 Galaxy S10, but the fact that I like my S10 better than my 16PM for a few things speaks volumes.

I think what I’m gonna do is, in a few years, buy a Galaxy phone that’s a couple generations out that is better than my S10 (it should be — by a lot) and then after a few more years, replace the iPhone… probably with a base model, because honestly I don’t play top end games and even the top iPhone can’t get something as basic as typing.

macOS is “certified UNIX,” whatever that means. And I think Linux is a spinoff/knockoff of UNIX? I’m not clear on the history. I could find out if I were too concerned. But with as closely related as they are (Windows is the odd one out here, pretty much everything else out there is *nix), there’s a lot of stuff one does that the other doesn’t. Like Proton on Linux for running Windows games.

But yeah, the Jellyfin server works fine on macOS, but the apps are kinda hard to get working. Like it doesn’t auto detect your server and it’s not immediately clear what you need to put in to connect them. And the server app doesn’t just volunteer this information freely. So it’s not the kind of thing you can help people set up and share with them. Plex… is. Like seriously, I can say “just register for Plex and give me your account name or email.” I add you to my shared users. Bam, you got all my content. It’s that easy, and moving forward, anything put up as an alternative to Plex should be at least that easy.

Try? Had the record, the tape, and the CD three times (kept breaking it). Love that song.