I realise that it's hearsay, but as you think that opinion here is worth posting here I take it that it is one you give credence to. I'm just saying that, if so, a Mac is possibly not for you. Horses for courses.

(I use Macs, Windows machines, and various Linux setups - they each have their strengths and weaknesses. There's no one computer that is perfect for everyone. If I could only have one I'd probably go for Linux because of the wealth of software available and the open nature of the OS. My main problem with Mac OS, and Windows, is that they are getting more closed as years go by. I realize that it's a security thing, but I prefer to be able to choose.)

In reply to a post by Pheasant:

Not sure how's she's going to reconcile those two facets then as a Mac Studio will now ship with Ventura (or Monterey if its a pre-existing stock unit). Perhaps she will love and hate it at the same time!

I said that, her answer was I will have to get used it. She realises that the trashcan is now out of date, and she has done well with it to be honest, but she wants something with a bit more power, but uses less energy
she will keep the monitor as that cost her a lot of money, not Apple, but a Benq. the one thing she was worried about is drivers for her Graphics pad, but Wacom seems to have updated them.

If she waits a month or two, then it's possible it will be fitted with an M2-based Max or Ultra processor. There are strong rumours circulating the Mini will also get an M2 heart transplant come November so that could be alternative if she doesn't need all those cores.

She is not rushing, just like me really, I am waiting to see what happens with the mini. I doubt she will bother until after Christmas anyway, she has a couple of projects on the go and changing computers may not be the best idea at the moment.
Me, if Apple comes out with a more powerful Mac mini and the price is not stupid, then I may get it this year, I have the money saved to do it

In reply to a post by zyborg47:

I suppose it is something you get used to.

Or not. The standard window management is still there, along with their other various past half hearted attempts to "solve" the windowing problem.

I'll be sticking with BetterSnapTool, it makes more sense to me than any of Apple's attempts at window management.

I think windows management is certainly something that Microsoft have better solutions for than Apple. My initial reaction to Stage Manager is that is is a not very useful gimmick - especially on an iPad.

In reply to a post by TinyMongomery:

Windows Storage Spaces provides this ability. No third-party tools needed.

Can it ? Microsoft's description of it sounds like something very different and RAID-like:

"Storage Spaces helps protect your data from drive failures and extend storage over time as you add drives to your PC. You can use Storage Spaces to group two or more drives together in a storage pool and then use capacity from that pool to create virtual drives called storage spaces. These storage spaces typically store two copies of your data so if one of your drives fails, you still have an intact copy of your data. If you run low on capacity, just add more drives to the storage pool."

Can it, from a standard install of Windows:

- add a new "partition", on the same drive as the existing OS
- install a new OS to that partition
- boot from either OS install

?

On the Mac doing this is two steps:

- create new APFS volume in Disk Utility, takes 30 seconds
- run the installer for the new OS

I'm off to investigate Storage Spaces some more 😉

Yeah, I've just double checked on my Windows 11 machine. Storage Spaces doesn't do what we're talking about here.

Yeah, my setup is basically mimicking Window's approach to window management. I've got keystrokes for:

"put the window on the left half of the current screen"
"put it on the right half"
"move it to fullscreen on the next screen"
"put it fullscreen (but not the awful Mac FullScreen thing)"
"move the current window to the centre the screen, but leave the size alone"

And also an option that makes double clicking the title bar actually fill the screen rather than the default weird Mac behaviour.

For me this sort of window management is the only* thing Windows does better for day to day stuff. Thankfully it is easily fixed on the Mac with a wide choice of third party apps that give you Window like management.

* and games, and running VS.Net and related Microsfoft dev stuff. Which is why I have a PC next to my Mac

Storage Spaces is more akin to ZFS than simple RAID (although they also provide very efficient combining of multiple physical disks). Both allow you to over provision storage (define drives whose total size adds up to more than the available disk space).

In theory you can boot from a Storage Spaces drive (some surface machines do that), but in practice it depends upon your computer; it's something the UEFI has to know about.

Edited by TinyMongomery (Wed 26-Oct-22 11:39:50)

Understood, but it also doesn't address the use case that we were talking about here.

It is probably one area were Windows is ahead of the Mac. Apple seem very uninterested in the software RAID functionality that is hidden away in the OS and it is very vanilla RAID 0/1/5.

Which make sense I guess, given they only have a single model that can support multiple internal drives.

I'll bet there are about as many end users using Windows Storage Spaces as there are Mac users using Apple's software RAID 😉

In reply to a post by andynormancx:

Understood, but it also doesn't address the use case that we were talking about here.

If your computer can boot from a Storage Spaces drive (see the edit to my previous post) then it does address that case; you just create a new volume (as long as you haven't used up all the space on your drive - I mean really used rather than allocated) - thin provisioning. Basically, exactly the same as on a Mac or a ZFS equipped machine.