u/rumorconsumerr

First I want to say I am a big fan. This is not a teardown criticism. I am simply noticing that in the last month or two the app just feels a bit more lumbering. I dont know enough about programming to say why I think this is. I have zero transcripts loaded - I just delete them all after I do them. But the app is a bit pokey to navigate.

I have a theory about why some of the buggiest parts of macOS 27 seem to cluster around Finder, Spaces, drag-and-drop, and cross-app interaction.

My guess is that Apple is in the middle of rebuilding parts of the interaction/window-management stack to support a future touchscreen Mac, and we’re seeing some of the rough edges while that work is still settling.

A lot of the regressions I’ve personally hit are in exactly those areas:

• drag-and-drop behavior across Spaces
• Finder spring-loaded navigation
• app-to-Finder copy/paste
• apps forgetting assigned Spaces
• dragging while simultaneously scrolling a Finder window
• odd behavior when an app or dialog is in another Space

What makes me wonder about touch specifically is that Spaces, gestures, and direct manipulation all seem like areas Apple would have to rethink if three-finger trackpad-style gestures are eventually going to coexist with direct gestures on a display.

Some of these bugs are already being fixed in the 27.2 betas, which also makes it feel more like active subsystem work than intentional behavior changes.

Obviously this is speculation. I don’t have any evidence that these specific bugs are caused by touchscreen work. But the pattern feels interesting enough that I’m curious whether anyone else has noticed the same clustering, or has a better theory for why these particular interaction systems seem unusually rough in macOS 27.

Has anyone looked closely at Signal’s battery usage on iOS?
I use Signal fairly regularly, and I’ve noticed that it seems to have a relatively high power draw compared with other apps I use. Since moving from iOS 26 to iOS 27, it actually seems noticeably higher than it was before.
I’m curious whether anyone here knows much about Signal’s iOS development and how much attention has gone into battery optimization. Is there still meaningful room for optimization in the app, or is the power usage mostly inherent to how Signal operates?
Would especially be interested to hear from anyone familiar with the iOS app’s internals or who has compared its battery usage across iOS 26 and 27.

Heres to hoping

Interested in being able to walk around city streets with a headset on of some kind where someone I’m talking to won’t be able to hear outside noise. AirPods Pro 3 are pretty great, but I’m wondering if there are other options that people rely on and feel strongly about. I have an iPhone so I can do USB-C or Bluetooth easily, but I would put an emphasis on call quality. Not super worried about battery life. Semi worried about looking like an idiot.

I bought an RX100 VA about a year ago, and while I sometimes love what comes out, I knew the RAW files had more in them than I knew how to extract. Lightroom felt like taking up a second hobby, the free RAW apps required the same commitment, and Apple Photos was not enough. So I asked Claude Cowork to build me something.

Twenty-five minutes later, I had RAWvolution.

I drop RAW files into a folder, and it sorts them into rolls by shooting date, like coming back from a walk with a roll of film. It then develops every frame automatically.

It handles demosaicing, floating-point tone and color work, Sony lens corrections, early chroma denoising, white balance, exposure, highlight and shadow recovery, tone curves, contrast, vibrance, local contrast, vignette, sharpening, and final sRGB conversion. In practical terms, shadows lift cleanly, wide-angle distortion gets corrected, high-ISO shots stay clearer, highlights recover more naturally, and saturated colors keep their depth.

I did not know how to do any of this, and frankly did not want to learn it.

Each photo is then shown in six treatments selected for that image from a set of about twelve: moody, warm, punchy, and several black-and-white options.

The whole thing runs in a browser. Arrow keys move through the roll, number keys switch treatments, and holding one key shows the plain version for comparison. I can heart the good ones, choose a treatment, or reject the duds. Rejected files move to the trash rather than being permanently deleted.

My selections stay attached to the photos even if I rename a roll or move files around. Finished images export full-size in a format Apple Photos reads natively, so they look right on both the Mac and phone.

Forty-two photos through it so far, each finished the way I chose.

This is my first developed shoot from an early drive around New York City using the full Claude Cowork pipeline. I’m happy to share the config file with anyone who wants to build it themselves.

Setting up a system for my parents and I'd like a sanity check from people running LS50 W2 day to day.

The governing constraint is that they touch as close to nothing as possible. One remote, volume only, and even that sparingly. My father's habit when sound doesn't appear immediately is to start pressing buttons on whatever is nearest, which is how his desktop KEF Eggs turned into a recurring support call for me. Any design where he has to select an input is a design that will break.

Planned chain:

• CD player into a WiiM (Pro or Pro Plus depending on whether the CD player has a digital out)
• WiiM out via optical TOSLINK into the LS50 W2
• AirPlay lands on the WiiM and takes the same optical path
• Kube 8b off the LS50's sub output
• L/R interspeaker link wireless

The LS50s sit permanently on Optical and never change source. All the switching happens inside the WiiM using its auto-sensing, which flips to line-in or optical-in when it detects signal, with the caveat that the previous source has to have been idle about 17 seconds first. That delay is genuinely fine for how these two behave. The KEF remote does volume and nothing else.

I'm deliberately keeping the speakers off the network even though the W2 does AirPlay 2 natively. Two reasons. I don't want two similarly-named AirPlay targets in one room for them to pick wrong and then call me about. And I'd rather the streaming platform live in a cheap box I can swap than inside the speakers. These are a used pair and I'd like them to still be good speakers in fifteen years, well after whatever streaming standard we're on now has moved.

Questions:

1. Wireless L/R link, how has it held up for you over the long run? I've seen reports of the pairing dropping and reconnecting two or three times at the start of a listening session before it settles. That specific behavior would be fatal here, because it's exactly the gap my father fills by pressing buttons. The room has a mesh AP running on a wireless 5GHz backhaul, so there's competing airtime, and the mesh system gives me no manual channel control to deconflict them. Running the cable is cosmetically awkward in that room, which is why I'm asking rather than just wiring it.

2. Do they reliably wake from standby on an incoming optical signal, or does somebody have to press power first?

3. Do they hold Optical as the selected source across a power cycle?

4. Anyone running them off the network entirely, as a plain optical-in powered speaker? Once crossover and EQ are configured, is there anything I'd lose beyond app control?

Thanks in advance.

I’m looking for a free writing app for Mac with a clean, beautiful writing surface, ideally something in the Ulysses / iA Writer lane.

Markdown is totally fine, even preferred. What I care about most is that the text renders nicely while writing, with a minimal interface and not too much visual clutter. I’d also like to be able to keep a library of text files that I can organize, but it doesn’t need to be anything too elaborate or involved. Not interested in the layout where there's a coding window on one side and a render on the other. Just a main text entry window, a side bar, and the ability to save and have a library of what Im working on. Thats about it.

I’ve looked at things like MarkText, MarkEdit, Bear, Zettlr, Obsidian, etc., and many are way too complicated. I’m curious what people actually like using day to day for prose writing rather than coding notes. With the recent spark in AI software somebody must have made this recently and I just can't figure out where it is.

Any recommendations for free or genuinely usable free-tier apps?

In the last 48 hours I started getting these notifications that my Mac with NordVPN installed is port scanning an IP owned by Packethub SA, a company that apparently hosts for NordVPN per Google search. Ignore? What the dealio?

My music library goes back to the Napster days. Decades of ripping tools, sketchy downloads, iTunes purchases, live bootlegs, format changes, half-finished reorganizations. ~17,000 tracks across 500+ artists, and an bit of a mess: duplicate albums, MP3s sitting next to lossless copies of the same song, files that looked lossless but were secretly AAC, corrupt files, spoken-word lectures filed as if they were music, and a giant "Unknown Artist" junk drawer because half the stuff had no tags. I know for a fact over the years that a lot of these changes were things I asked the app to do that apparently never did. Or it did it and left all these remnants on disk.

I spent a long stretch working through it with Claude and we documented every step into a skill anyone can use to do the same thing to their own library.

What it actually does:

• De-duplicates intelligently, it tells the difference between a true duplicate and a different mastering or a live version, using track durations, so you don't delete something you actually wanted
• Fixes the tag chaos that fragments one artist into five folders (curly vs straight apostrophes, "The," "&" vs "and," accents, typos)
• Pulls spoken-word/lectures/podcasts/personal recordings out of your music library
• Sorts the "Unknown Artist" junk drawer by reading the filenames
• Separates real music videos from audio that's just trapped in a video wrapper
• Logs every decision so it's recoverable and resumable

Who it's for:

Anyone with a big, old, personal music library that's been through many phases and is now kind of a swamp. Data hoarders, audiophiles, people migrating off iTunes/Music (I am staying), anyone who's been collecting since the 2000s. It's as much about your taste drifting over the years as it is about the technical mess, a real part of the process is deciding what you still genuinely care about keeping on disk vs. what you want on hand but not mixed into the actual music you care about and can instead live on Spotify in playlists vs. what you can let go of entirely.

Important warnings:

• Back up your library first and work only on a copy. This thing moves, renames, retags, and deletes in bulk. Never run it on your only copy.
• You should be reasonably competent with files, folders, and music libraries, you'll be making the keep/delete/version calls, the skill just does the heavy lifting and surfaces the decisions.

Happy to answer questions. Here's the SKILL file for Claude Cowork. Hilariously, I googled a place to just upload a file for free and anonymously and it gave me Limewire. Enjoy.

https://limewire.com/d/q4Rjg#UlXaYzPGLK

I’m in the process of picking up a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB and I’m enclosure shopping for use on my MacBook Pro M1 Max now, and likely another MacBook Pro later on when the Ultra hits in 2027.

What’s confusing me is the Thunderbolt vs USB4 labeling. A lot of enclosures claim things like:

• “Thunderbolt 3/4 compatible”
• “USB4 40Gbps”
• “Works with Mac”
• “Compatible with Thunderbolt ports”

…but that doesn’t seem to mean the enclosure is actually Thunderbolt-certified. It feels like a lot of products are just USB4 enclosures that happen to work over Thunderbolt ports, which is not quite the same thing.

I’d prefer to buy something that is genuinely certified if I’m paying premium money for a high-end SSD. I’d also love to wait for true 80Gbps options if that’s where the market is headed, but not if the current crop is just a bastardized half-step. I’d rather be conservative now, get something solid, and migrate later if true native enclosures become available.

So I guess my questions are:

1. How do you actually verify that an enclosure is Thunderbolt-certified these days?
2. Is there a public certification list or logo I should be checking for?
3. Are enclosures like the TerraMaster D1 SSD Plus and UGREEN 40Gbps basically just USB4 solutions that work fine on Mac, but aren’t truly Thunderbolt-certified?
4. Is there any real-world reason to care, or is “Thunderbolt-compatible” close enough for a Samsung 990 Pro?

My main use case is fast Time Machine backups and general Mac storage, so I want something fast, reliable, and ideally future-proof without buying into marketing nonsense.

Hey all. I’ve got around 600GB of music I’ve been collecting since the late ‘90s and early 2000s, back when Napster, Hotline, Carracho, Limewire (lamewire) was the thing. A lot of the singles and one offs are random tracks I grabbed as a teenager, plenty of it stuff I’d never know to track down again. And I don’t want to lose any of it.

The thing is, my listening has changed. These days I’m mostly doing full albums in lossless, and I keep my main library curated for that kind of serious listening. All these old one-off tracks dilute it. But I still love them and want them on call when the mood hits. So it’s all mixed together-the singles and weird tracks and the albums.

I was thinking about what to do. It would be nice to have a kind of two tier system. I’ve considered dumping the single material into a Spotify playlist or something similar so they’re separate but still reachable. Has anybody else dealt with this, or is there a smarter way to handle a big personal archive like this? Curious how people keep a “serious” library and a nostalgia stash without the two bleeding into each other.

Using MacWhisper to transcribe teachings from a Tibetan Buddhist teacher who speaks primarily in English but uses Tibetan terms throughout. Every model I've tried drops the Tibetan completely.

Ideally I'd want the model to attempt a phonetic transliteration of anything it can't recognize as English, even if imperfect, so I at least have a timestamp anchor and something to work from. Right now I'm going back through the audio manually to fill in every Tibetan term, which defeats a lot of the purpose.

Has anyone found a model or setting in MacWhisper (or anything else) that handles code-switching like this, or a workflow that gets closer to what I'm describing? Open to solutions outside MacWhisper too if something genuinely handles this better.

I used to work at an ARS Genius Bar. My trackpad just failed. Machine is under APP. Will this be a "go get a coffee" repair or will they need it for a few days? Will the depot it? It's a super simple repair. In New York, Upper East Side store. Thanks.

Hey all. I am wondering what the big TTB fans like in terms of like top 5-10 live shows? I am personally into The Black Crowes so I like it heavy but I also really love a good Dylan cover if it's done right. I love Revelator most of all the TTB albums. I love when Derek cuts loose like that Ohio jam from The Beacon Theatre March 21 of this year. I dont love the long noodle-y jams. Would love your thoughts. Happy to buy from Nugs.com
I am not really into audience recordings. Gotta be actual soundboard or FM.

Thanks all