Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

Has anyone experience of a universal remote control app. Apple Store seems to have a few and the idea of using my iPhone as a remote appeals to me.

What are you gonna control? The telly?

I'm using the remote app for our Apple TV occasionally but I think it's hopeless compared to the physical remote as it's not tactile

Normal tv, Sky Q, Netflix and Amazon Fire Stick.

The iPhone doesn't have any infrared hardware, so you're really shopping for some sort of hardware doodad rather than an app?

I have a Harmony hub
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/125736956971
which allows control of IR, Bluetooth and smart devices through either a phone app or a physical remote control.

Using my phone is rubbish. There's the inconvenience of having to unlock and launch the app but then, as kboy says, the lack of tactile buttons makes it awkward to use as you've no idea where you're pressing.

Thanks for the input. I’ll avoid this plan.

I use an aqara M2 hub, it works with various sensors but i use it to turn off the aircon/heater in the outbuilding when the door is open and also when the lights go out after sunset.

Thanks all. I will manage with the normal remotes.

Is CarPlay basically broken in iOS 16? Has been fine for years until I updated before Christmas. Now it hardly ever connects. Sometimes works on second or third try, quite a lot of the time not at all, occasionally works first time.

It’s not like the phone isn’t connecting to the head unit, because hands free and manually playing music still works every time but not CarPlay.

i had lots of problems with ios16 in the beta, but since general release its been fine for me for months

I just updated to 16.3 in case there had been a fix but still no joy. Connected on second attempt last night and not at all this morning. Bah.

Just had our car updated to include CarPlay, and have no issues with iOS 16.3

Through some quirk of fate *, I ended up with a new MBP M1 Pro last week, but am about to get an identical one for a new job. Is there a super easy way to clone my setup from one to the other?

* Got layed off and laptops were part of the severance; mine was delivered a week before the layoffs.

I've not done it before so I may well be speaking out my arse, but are you able to backup the old one to an external drive using time machine and restore the new one from that backup?

Edit: Looks like there's a built-in migration assistant that can do it also (which you can do either from a time machine backup, or another machine): https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204350

Anyone getting cripplingly slow Thunderbolt SSD speeds on Ventura, especially ones formatted in exFAT?

I’ve got several identical Mac Studios, two still on Monterey, both getting ~2.7GB/s speeds from various NVME drives connected via Thunderbolt. The same drives on the machines running Ventura get wildly slower speeds, with massive fluctuations (under 1GB/s, with periodic slows to a crawl).

This totally breaks my use case…

Easy.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204350

Christ. Excel on a Mac is ludicrously shit. Any tips to make it less so?

Run Windows on your Mac via Parallels? 🙃

Yes, or buy a windows laptop?

Right click on a row, delete, the delete takes ~10seconds to complete

Must be something up with the installation? Never had that kind of slow performance, even with fairly complex sheets

Yeah, I think I owe Apple an apology.

My error, I had autocalc on and although I thought it was a basic xls it actually had a load of lookups.

Right, what’s the most efficient way to transfer (share) music from ipad air to new phone? Thanks

Only a guess but upload to iCloud and download to phone?

That might be my only option, but that’d mean I have to pay…
Could try adding songs to my wife’s laptop from the ipad, then to the phone?

what’s the most efficient way to transfer (share) music from ipad air to new phone

..you mean your music library? You'd just sync that with your mac / with your iPhone?