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Apple dumbing down apps pre- vs post- MacOS Mojave?

ToTo Man

the band not the dog
In preparation for the arrival of a 2012 i7 Mac Mini I’ve been investigating which OS would be most appropriate for my usage. I remained on Snow Leopard for years on my 2012 C2D Mini, mainly out of laziness, because all of the software I used ran great on it, but I eventually upgraded to El Capitan and that is where I’ve stayed.

By chance I came across a post on Apple Discussions that the DVD Player app had been done away with in Mojave. This turned out not to be the case, it has been instead been moved out of the Applications folder into a hidden folder along with several other apps that have apparently fallen out of favour.

The app has, however, had a ‘makeover’. The GUI is different, and it no longer reads DVD rips that have had the VIDEO_TS folder put inside a .dvdmedia container (this was previously the only way to get the app to play DVD rips). You now have to instead load the enclosed VIDEO_TS folder from within the app, which is a bit of an annoyance.

The worst thing however, is there is no longer an EQ facility in the DVD Player app. This is a deal-breaker for me and I’m extremely angry that it has been removed.

VLC provides an EQ, but it isn’t as useful as the one in the DVD Player app. Elmedia Player’s EQ is even better than the one in the DVD Player app but this app doesn’t handle .VOB files nicely (it only plays the particular .VOB file that’s loaded so your viewing/listening experience is interrupted every few minutes when that .VOB file ends and you need to manually load the next .VOB file!).

Before someone states the obvious, yes, I could avoid this hassle by using Handbrake to convert all 400+ of my DVD rips to mkv files and having a wider choice of playback software, but the point is I wouldn’t have to do this is if Apple had just left the damn DVD Player app alone as it was fine as it was!

Are there any other instances of apps being dumbed down in Mojave that I should be aware of?

And, is there any way to get the version of the DVD Player app that’s installed on ElCap/Sierra/HighSierra to work on Mojave, or is that a no go?

By the looks of it I'll probably make my new Mini a dual-boot machine with El Capitan and Mojave and will likely spend the majority of my time on the El Cap partition…
 
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That’s interesting, I’d not noticed as I’ve never played a DVD on my MBP (I’ve got a hardware Blu-Ray in the TV system). I guess it went a few years after Apple (highly annoyingly) stopped building optical devices into current Macs.

I’d be very surprised if you can get an older version to work, though there will be tons of third-party players available.

I find the whole consumer IT trajectory really annoying, but to be honest I’m way, way more concerned/annoyed by the cynical built-in obsolescence of soldered-in SSDs and RAM which make modern Macs impossible to upgrade and exceptionally hard to fix. They are horrible from a Right To Repair perspective, but where Apple leads everyone else follows and a lot of competing laptops are even worse.

PS My 2012 MBP is on Mohave and is very solid and stable, it is a good OSX. I tried Catalina and reversed-out as it was crap at the point I tried it, and I can’t go to Big Sur on this machine.
 
I ditched buying new apple stuff when they dropped toslink out and analogue in from their least wallet punishing laptops.
 
That’s interesting, I’d not noticed as I’ve never played a DVD on my MBP (I’ve got a hardware Blu-Ray in the TV system). I guess it went a few years after Apple (highly annoyingly) stopped building optical devices into current Macs.

I’d be very surprised if you can get an older version to work, though there will be tons of third-party players available.

I find the whole consumer IT trajectory really annoying, but to be honest I’m way, way more concerned/annoyed by the cynical built-in obsolescence of soldered-in SSDs and RAM which make modern Macs impossible to upgrade and exceptionally hard to fix. They are horrible from a Right To Repair perspective, but where Apple leads everyone else follows and a lot of competing laptops are even worse.

PS My 2012 MBP is on Mohave and is very solid and stable, it is a good OSX. I tried Catalina and reversed-out as it was crap at the point I tried it, and I can’t go to Big Sur on this machine.

Big Sur will run in a VM on a 2012 Mac. I have it running on my 2012 Mini. So if it was really needed for a particular app it is feasible.

Cheers,

DV
 
Apple in this case as with optical out have just read the room, no one plays DVDs anymore, very very few people use optical out.

Ideally of course all the things we ever had should remain, but Mac OS is clunky enough as it is.

I am more angry that Big Sur seems to be a total dog turd on both our 2020 macbook pro and 2016 macbook pro, its almost as if they wanted us to buy something else.
 
Apple in this case as with optical out have just read the room, no one plays DVDs anymore, very very few people use optical out.

Ideally of course all the things we ever had should remain, but Mac OS is clunky enough as it is.

I am more angry that Big Sur seems to be a total dog turd on both our 2020 macbook pro and 2016 macbook pro, its almost as if they wanted us to buy something else.
But surely removing the EQ from the DVD Player app would have involved consciously re-writing the app? Leaving the app as it was would've been less work, or do Apple employees feel the need to justify their existence to management by continually re-designing stuff when it isn't required?

The lack of optical input is what stopped me buying an M1 Mini as I often record audio from my TV's optical output (that and the fact that the 16GB model is too expensive!).
 
Your use case is going to be infinitesimally small, you must understand that? I cannot honestly say I have ever heard of anyone recording the digital audio output on their TV, I am not saying its not a thing, but equally optical out was part of the headphone jack which they removed and didn't really need to, except, its additional cost and that 'it was a feature no longer required by its target audience'.

I am not justifying it, incidentally, I think they could have left optical in, the BOM difference is probably like 4p. But they have metrics on all this stuff, all of it. They probably have metrics that show only 12 people use the DVD player app, and of those only 2 ever opened EQ.


A quick look at google suggests there are a number of software alternatives, not sure if any of them have an eq. Also there might be some options in terms of audio output such as sound source? soundsource
 
I mourn the gradual demise of the iLife suite of apps - used them a lot during their heyday but one by one demolished to make way for the hyperspace bypass Apple warned us about...

I am in the process of reserving the best one of my MM 2012s to use as a time capsule, retaining my favourite (and essential) audio, video and photo apps and related in/outputs. Will most likely roll it back (if I can manage it) to High Sierra and use it independently of the web for security ...

For internet type stuff I have a 2014 model and this I should be able to keep live for a good few years yet with whatever future OS Apple allows it to handle.

I am a bit long in the tooth now so it will most likely outlive me anyway :D
 
Your use case is going to be infinitesimally small, you must understand that? I cannot honestly say I have ever heard of anyone recording the digital audio output on their TV, I am not saying its not a thing, but equally optical out was part of the headphone jack which they removed and didn't really need to, except, its additional cost and that 'it was a feature no longer required by its target audience'.

I use both optical out and optical in regularly ...

I'm also pretty sure there are still a lot of tinkerers in audio and video out there who use those outputs daily (and even Firewire - god bless it) to keep their other gadgets and gizmos going as long as poss.

Also, in my experience, a lot of those tinkerers in audio and video are very possibly exactly the people who kept Apple going back in the dark days when talks of insolvency and disaster were a daily thing and shares were at an all time low ... and also exactly the people who put up with the derision and scorn heaped on them on computer forums (accessed of course through dial up modems) for staying loyal to Apple.

Ho hum ....
 
A usb to SPDIF gadget is a tenner, in the grand scheme of things its not the end of the world :)
 
Am I the only one who doesn't understand a word of this?


don't beat yourself up, it genuinely doesn't matter.

Just an infinitly small number of Apple fanbois moaning about their beloved removing features no one uses from their toys.
 
I consider myself fortunate (and wise ;)) that I have never bought anything from Apple.

I inherited an iPad from my deceased father. It needed a password - which I guessed. I took to my house with the intention of giving it to my mum in her care home for Facetiming. After it had changed location, Apple locked it so that it needed the Apple ID. I could not guess it. I spoke with Apple several times and they said I needed either the ID or the original proof of purchase. I had netiher and the iPad is now as good as landfill.

Beware: with Apple you are guilty until proven innocent!!
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:
 
Face it: Today, Apple makes luxury consumer goods, not tools. Their users don't need anything from their computers except the satisfaction of having bought on-brand to match their iPhone. Those who were Apple customers before iPod and iPhone radically changed what the company does are too few in number, and generally too rational in their purchasing, to matter.

My first job was at a Mac-using corporate back in the mid-1990s, then I worked five years at Apple, but I gave up on Apple hardware about ten years ago and bought my first ever Windows laptop in 2011. Turns out it was fine - not worse, just the same amount of stupidity distributed in different places, but with the advantage that any piece of software I needed would be available, and any piece of hardware I bought would just work. These days, I'm doing more software work involving embedded microcontrollers, and being on Mac would have made my life really difficult: when Apple killed 32-bit software, the few tools for using these chips that you can get on Macs were old 32-bit applications.
 
Face it: Today, Apple makes luxury consumer goods, not tools. Their users don't need anything from their computers except the satisfaction of having bought on-brand to match their iPhone. Those who were Apple customers before iPod and iPhone radically changed what the company does are too few in number, and generally too rational in their purchasing, to matter.

I suspect that is the view of someone who has never used Apple kit, let alone in the fields they traditionally dominate (music creation, deign, photography etc). There is a lot that hugely annoys me about the current products from a Right To Repair perspective, but they are a very good computer range running superb software and providing a level of systems integration that doesn’t exist without faff on other platforms. I’ll also be very interested to see how Intel, AMD etc respond to the M1 and beyond, a chip architecture that looks to have moved Apple years ahead of their competitors. My guess is we are going to see some extraordinarily powerful Macs and Macbooks this year with an efficiency that needs ridiculous water cooling etc to match with Intel architecture. I just wish they’d stop with the soldered-in BS when it comes to SSDs and RAM. I understand the performance edge such construction brings, but computers do need to be long-term serviceable IMO. In fairness I’d counter that to a degree as my 2012 MBP is still working perfectly (I upgraded SSD and RAM), as is my 4 or 5 year old iPhone (a 6S).

FWIW my main ‘tool’ is an iPad Pro. That is what I use for 98% of my job. I only fire the MBP up for accounting and some server maintenance stuff.
 
Face it: Today, Apple makes luxury consumer goods, not tools. Their users don't need anything from their computers except the satisfaction of having bought on-brand to match their iPhone. Those who were Apple customers before iPod and iPhone radically changed what the company does are too few in number, and generally too rational in their purchasing, to matter.

My first job was at a Mac-using corporate back in the mid-1990s, then I worked five years at Apple, but I gave up on Apple hardware about ten years ago and bought my first ever Windows laptop in 2011. Turns out it was fine - not worse, just the same amount of stupidity distributed in different places, but with the advantage that any piece of software I needed would be available, and any piece of hardware I bought would just work. These days, I'm doing more software work involving embedded microcontrollers, and being on Mac would have made my life really difficult: when Apple killed 32-bit software, the few tools for using these chips that you can get on Macs were old 32-bit applications.

I suspect that is the view of someone who has never used Apple kit, let alone in the fields they traditionally dominate (music creation, deign, photography etc). There is a lot that hugely annoys me about the current products from a Right To Repair perspective, but they are a very good computer range running superb software and providing a level of systems integration that doesn’t exist without faff on other platforms. I’ll also be very interested to see how Intel, AMD etc respond to the M1 and beyond, a chip architecture that looks to have moved Apple years ahead of their competitors. My guess is we are going to see some extraordinarily powerful Macs and Macbooks this year with an efficiency that needs ridiculous water cooling etc to match with Intel architecture. I just wish they’d stop with the soldered-in BS when it comes to SSDs and RAM. I understand the performance edge such construction brings, but computers do need to be long-term serviceable IMO. In fairness I’d counter that to a degree as my 2012 MBP is still working perfectly (I upgraded SSD and RAM), as is my 4 or 5 year old iPhone (a 6S).

FWIW my main ‘tool’ is an iPad Pro. That is what I use for 98% of my job. I only fire the MBP up for accounting and some server maintenance stuff.

I think that it is unlikely that someone who spent five years working for Apple didn't use their products. I could be wrong though..
 
don't beat yourself up, it genuinely doesn't matter.

Just an infinitly small number of Apple fanbois moaning about their beloved removing features no one uses from their toys.


Post #12 already ...that took a while :D
 
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I consider myself fortunate (and wise ;)) that I have never bought anything from Apple.

I inherited an iPad from my deceased father. It needed a password - which I guessed. I took to my house with the intention of giving it to my mum in her care home for Facetiming. After it had changed location, Apple locked it so that it needed the Apple ID. I could not guess it. I spoke with Apple several times and they said I needed either the ID or the original proof of purchase. I had netiher and the iPad is now as good as landfill.

Beware: with Apple you are guilty until proven innocent!!
:mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad::mad:

Just reset it through DFU, you'll loose any data on it, but its not landfill
 


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